Conversation between Pavel Petrovich and Bazarov, Fathers and Sons, Chapter 6:
“… There's no need to mention Russian Germans, we all know what sort of creatures they are. But even German Germans don't appeal to me. Formerly there were a few Germans here and there; well, Schiller for instance, or Goethe--my brother is particularly fond of them--but nowadays they all seem to have turned into chemists and materialists…"
"A decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," interrupted Bazarov.
I guess Pavel Petrovich was convinced. Because he moves permanently to Dresden by the end of the novel.
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From Mark Twain’s essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” published in The North American Review, February, 1901:
The following news from China appeared in The Sun, of New York, on Christmas Eve. The italics are mine:
“The Rev. Mr. Ament, of the American Board of Foreign Missions, has returned from a trip which he made for the purpose of collecting indemnities for damages done by Boxers. Everywhere he went he compelled the Chinese to pay. He says that all his native Christians are now provided for. He had 700 of them under his charge, and 300 were killed. He has collected 300 taels for each of these murders, and has compelled full payment for all the property belonging to Christians that was destroyed. He also assessed fines amounting to THIRTEEN TIMES the amount of the indemnity. This money will be used for the propagation of the Gospel.
“Mr. Ament declares that the compensation he has collected is moderate, when compared with the amount secured by the Catholics, who demand, in addition to money, head for head. They collect 500 taels for each murder of a Catholic. In the Wenchiu country, 680 Catholics were killed, and for this the European Catholics here demand 750,000 strings of cash and 680 heads.
“In the course of a conversation, Mr. Ament referred to the attitude of the missionaries toward the Chinese. He said:
“‘I deny emphatically that the missionaries are vindictive, that they generally looted, or that they have done anything since the siege that the circumstances did not demand. I criticise the Americans. The soft hand of the Americans is not as good as the mailed fist of the Germans. If you deal with the Chinese with a soft hand they will take advantage of it.’
“The statement that the French Government will return the loot taken by the French soldiers, is the source of the greatest amusement here. The French soldiers were more systematic looters than the Germans, and it is a fact that to-day Catholic Christians, carrying French flags and armed with modern guns, are looting villages in the Province of Chili.”
Annotation from me: Chili was the former romanization of the former northern Chinese province of Zhili 直隸.
Below we continue with Mark Twain:
By happy luck, we get all these glad tidings on Christmas Eve—just in time to enable us to celebrate the day with proper gaiety and enthusiasm. Our spirits soar, and we find we can even make jokes: Taels I win, Heads you lose.
Our Reverend Ament is the right man in the right place. What we want of our missionaries out there is, not that they shall merely represent in their acts and persons the grace and gentleness and charity and loving kindness of our religion, but that they shall also represent the American spirit.
…
Mr. Ament’s financial feat of squeezing a thirteen-fold indemnity out of the pauper peasants to square other people’s offenses, thus condemning them and their women and innocent little children to inevitable starvation and lingering death, in order that the blood-money so acquired might be “used for the propagation of the Gospel,” does not flutter my serenity; although the act and the words, taken together, concrete a blasphemy so hideous and so colossal that, without doubt, its mate is not findable in the history of this or of any other age.
…
…the Kaiser… lost a couple of missionaries in a riot in Shantung, and in his account he made an overcharge for them. China had to pay a hundred thousand dollars apiece for them, in money; twelve miles of territory, containing several millions of inhabitants and worth twenty million dollars; and to build a monument, and also a Christian church; whereas the people of China could have been depended upon to remember the missionaries without the help of these expensive memorials.
…
It was bad play on the Kaiser’s part. It got this property, true; but it produced the Chinese revolt, the indignant uprising of China’s traduced patriots, the Boxers. The results have been expensive to Germany, and to the other Disseminators of Progress and the Blessings of Civilization.
The Kaiser’s claim was paid, yet it was bad play, for it could not fail to have an evil effect upon Persons Sitting in Darkness in China. They would muse upon the event, and be likely to say: “Civilization is gracious and beautiful, for such is its reputation; but can we afford it? There are rich Chinamen, perhaps they could afford it; but this tax is not laid upon them, it is laid upon the peasants of Shantung; it is they that must pay this mighty sum, and their wages are but four cents a day. Is this a better civilization than ours, and holier and higher and nobler? Is not this rapacity? Is not this extortion? Would Germany charge America two hundred thousand dollars for two missionaries, and shake the mailed fist in her face, and send warships, and send soldiers, and say: ‘Seize twelve miles of territory, worth twenty millions of dollars, as additional pay for the missionaries; and make those peasants build a monument to the missionaries, and a costly Christian church to remember them by?’ And later would Germany say to her soldiers: ‘March through America and slay, giving no quarter; make the German face there, as has been our Hun-face here, a terror for a thousand years; march through the Great Republic and slay, slay, slay, carving a road for our offended religion through its heart and bowels?…’”
Annotation from me: Kaiser Wilhelm II on July 27, 1900 in Bremerhaven gave a speech to departing German troops off to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China, in which he said, “If you come before the enemy, they will be beaten! Pardon will not be given! Prisoners are not taken! Whoever falls into your hands will fall for you! Just as the Huns made a name for themselves a thousand years ago under their King Etzel, which still makes them appear powerful in tradition and fairy tales, so may the name of Germans in China be confirmed by you for 1000 years in such a way that it will never be again the Chinese dare to look disparagingly at a German!"
Below is Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speech in German:
„Kommt ihr vor den Feind, so wird derselbe geschlagen! Pardon wird nicht gegeben! Gefangene werden nicht gemacht! Wer euch in die Hände fällt, sei euch verfallen! Wie vor tausend Jahren die Hunnen unter ihrem König Etzel sich einen Namen gemacht, der sie noch jetzt in Überlieferung und Märchen gewaltig erscheinen läßt, so möge der Name Deutscher in China auf 1000 Jahre durch euch in einer Weise bestätigt werden, daß es niemals wieder ein Chinese wagt, einen Deutschen scheel anzusehen!“
Annotation from me: The last line from the Kaiser “that a Chinese never again dares to look disparagingly at a German!" uses the German word scheel, which I think can be translated depending on the context variously as disparagingly, curiously, jealously, enviously, or cross-eyedly. Perhaps he thought it was a clever pun re the shape of Chinese eyes, like mine.
The Boxer Rebellion was an uprising by villagers in northern China, fought against troops from the Eight-Nation Alliance: Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Austria-Hungary, Russia, and America. The Boxer in the name referred to the martial arts training of some of the native fighters, for Chinese martial arts was at the time called Chinese boxing.
As a child I had learned in elementary school about the invasion of the foreign Eight-Nation Alliance, and later in Beijing’s Old Summer Palace as an adult, I saw the burnt ruins left by the foreign armies. It was not the first time the Old Summer Palace had been burnt and looted. In 1860 during the Second Opium War, British and French troops had already done so.
Here is Victor Hugo writing in 1861 on the earlier sack:
… the China expedition, carried out jointly under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon…
There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace… The slow work of generations had been necessary to create it… Artists, poets and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient.
…
This wonder has disappeared.
One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned.
…
We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.
Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England.
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It’s Christmas Eve, Heiligabend, 聖誕節前夕 again. And I write this story influenced by the West and the East. The people dearest to me are both of the West and the East. The very dearest combine them. I am so glad you and I have this time of peace and harmony. As the lyrics in the song “Down by the Riverside” goes: “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside… I ain’t gonna study war no more. I’m gonna walk with that Prince of Peace, down by the riverside… I ain’t gonna study war no more.”
I’m enormously grateful to you for reading. My words cannot express how much I appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here with me on this holy evening and all the other times. And I’m going to do exactly what the marvelous writer George Saunders did, and say merry Christmas with Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, who said it so well:
Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.
“They are not torn down,” cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, “they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here—I am here—the shadows of the things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!”
His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
“I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!”
~~~
Fei Kayser, Christmas Eve, 2021