Tea at Trianon: Why the Soviets Were Afraid of Anne of Green Gables

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 4, 2022

Why the Soviets Were Afraid of Anne of Green Gables

From Transpositions:

It seems likely that the escapism Montgomery’s fiction offers can partly explain the popularity of Anne Shirley in occupied Poland. Having been brutally and rapidly invaded and then enduring years of Nazi and Soviet rule, the Polish population found themselves in ‘a time of unspeakable despair’.[4] Anne of Green Gables repeatedly emphasises the capacity of our imaginations to bring relief and distraction in such traumatic moments. Integral to Anne’s character is her use of daydreams to transport herself into fictive places and scenarios that are richer, more beautiful and more satisfying than her present situation. As an orphan who faced extreme hardship and mistreatment, Anne learned to use her imaginative faculties to escape from grim, bruising realities in orphanages and foster homes. And even after she is taken in by the kindly Matthew and Marilla, Anne continues to spend much of her time in dreamlands of her own devising. She may be sitting at the dining table, but her spirit will be ‘far away in some airy cloudland, borne aloft on the wings of imagination’.[5] Whilst Anne’s character encourages readers to test out the ‘wings of imagination’, the novel’s idyllic setting also lends itself to escapist fantasies. Montgomery presents Anne’s new home, Prince Edward Island, as a place of unspoilt, vibrant natural splendour: a welcoming utopia full of beauty. The island is offered to the reader as ‘a potential garden of Eden into which any good Christian may enter’.[6] Montgomery invites the reader to allow their mind to take flight and provides a suitably idyllic, enticing place for their imagination to land. So, it is not hard to understand why people beset by despair and deprivation would find solace and welcome relief in her work. Poles who found their homelands despoiled and their lives destroyed turned to Anne of Green Gables for ‘a fictive escape on a Canadian island utopia’.[7] (Read more.)