A fairly flat fortnight

 The last two weeks have continued cold, possibly even colder than the previous two. To add to the joys we've had freezing rain and sleet on and off. 

Games have most definitely been off. Even the cats have refused to go outside and there is no point attempting any serious gardening, although our Siberian kale has sprouted. (The Tuscan kale also sprouted a few days after the Siberian kale, but grudgingly and reluctantly. Of the chard and beetroot, there's no sign, we need a few days of sun and comparative warmth.)

It's been the sort of weather where your inner child hopes for snow, if only for an hour or two, but instead we have days of depressing wet chilly greyness.

Talking of snow, apparently they did get a dusting up at Stanley, but it had all disappeared by the time I was up at the Athenaeum yesterday putting in an hour or three on the publishers list.

It was however cold, so cold that even at midday the wash hand basin in the outside public toilet was still full of ice.

Other than that I've done very little other than go down an internet rabbit hole in pursuit of some anarchists who cycled across Europe to beg a meeting with Tolstoy.

As in all of these stories there is a nugget of truth - the anarchists did meet with Tolstoy in the middle of winter, but it's unlikely in the extreme that they rode their bicycles across Europe in a freezing winter to get there.

I'm still trying to get my head around Constance Garnett and her involvement with the Russian exile community, and had been researching Louise and Aylmer Maude, who as well as competing with Garnett in the translation of Tolstoy's novels, were Tolstoyan utopianists, and had more in common with William Morris's idealistic view of a world dominated by small self governing communes of artisans, rather than the more classic form of state capitalism envisaged by the Russian revolutionaries of the 1890s.

It was while researching the Maudes that I came across the loopy tale of the bike riding anarchists - it's the sort of footnote to history one wants to be true, even if it can't be.

I also had a little triumph as regards home maintenance.

I was cooking dinner while J was in the bath, and I heard a shout. The bath tap knob had fallen off when she tried to turn it off - we have one of these multi degree of freedom taps - left right for hot cold and up down for on off.

I pushed the knob back on and that at least let us turn the tap off.

On inspection I found that if you unscrewed the adjustment lever from the tap boss there was a little otherwise inaccessible grub screw that had slackened.

The screw needed to be adjusted with an allen key.

Now I had plenty of allen keys from assembling flat pack furniture and routine bike maintenance, but they were all too big, but fortunately I found one of a fine enough gauge in a box of left over computer spares, and once I had an allen key that fitted, it took only a minute or two to disassemble the tap, remount the knob and reassemble the tap.

Job done. 

And I felt extremely pleased with myself for fixing the problem.

Now, we have the same tap in the main shower and the little guest shower in our second bathroom, so I've invested in a set of allen keys, so that if it happens again I won't need to spend half an hour furiously scratching about looking for a hex key that might fit ...

The first two weeks of winter ...

 So how's the past two weeks been?

In one sense the big news, my finishing the cataloguing of Lake View House for the National Trust was underwhelming.

I'd told them before the close off meeting that I was going to resign, having worked myself out of a job, so it was simply a matter of quickly reviewing what had been done, shaking hands, and exchanging a few pleasantries.

I was far more excited by my finally building a workbench out of recycled materials in the outside studio.

And then the weather turned cold, then cold and wet, then even colder - the last few days we've been waking up to a thick layer of ice on the cars in the morning, and the heat pump has only just been coping in the mornings, but it's unusually cold for Beechworth so hopefully it will warm up a tad to normal winter chilliness.

All this cold and wet weather has of course meant no gardening, but it has allowed me to delve into how a 1890s Russian exile support group inadvertantly led to the popularisation of nineteenth century Russian literature in England, mostly through the work of Constance Garnett.

I've been finding that this delving into anti tsarist politics has been helping me brush up my very rusty Russian language skills, which is useful - for what I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find a use for them somewhere.

Up at the Athenaeum, it's been the grind of working through the supposed publishers and creating a controlled vocabulary.

I'm finding so many errors that the whole collection probably needs to be recatalogued, but for the moment it's a pretty mechanical exercise, chasing down obscure nineteenth century publishers. It's also a problem that, Australia being a small place then - the population at around Federation was only about four million - smaller short lived Australian publishers from the nineteenth century left little or no trace.

But even so there are snippets of interest.

Besides an 1863 edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there's an 1863 edition of Huxley's Lectures to Working Men, which is essentially a defence of Darwinian evolution, and an 1869 edition of Fritz Muller's (the discoverer of Mullerian mimicry) Arguments for Darwin, suggesting that one or more of the subscribers to the Athenaeum library was taking an active interest in evolutionary theory.

It also suggests there may have been an active Natural History group in and around Stanley, and tracing them and their meetings might give an insight into life in the goldfields after the gold began to run out and Stanley became a more settled community.

And along the way I've had a minor family history triumph, recovering some missing photos of J's ancestors from a twenty five year old CD-R, which is normally considered the upper limit for standard non archival CD's.

Not that I can claim any great technical skill, it was pure chance that the scruffy machine that lives in the outside studio that I use when I need to look something up had a working CD drive that could actually read the disk.

Still, all good experience...

And Fanny?

 As I've written elsewhere Fanny, or Fanya, Stepniak is a mystery to me.

However, I used the State Library's online subscription to the Times Digital Archive to read the reports of Sergei Stepniak's death, funeral and inquest, and that sheds a little more light on the mysterious Fanny.

Close reading of the Times reports reveals that Fanny's patronymic was Markova and a suggestion that she may have been of Polish or Polish-Jewish origin. (Poles of course do not use the Russian naming convention of forename-patronymic-surname, but during the Russian occupation of Poland in the nineteenth century some upper and middle class Poles adopted it, especially when dealing with Russian officialdom.)

This lets me wave my hands in the air a bit and hypothesize that her name was not Fanny, but Franciszka, and she opted for Fanny for the same reason a friend of mine always used to introduce herself as Frankie - no one could actually spell Franciszka, and if she introduced herself using her full name, she usually ended up as Francesca.

I quite like this hypothesis as it explains why she always gave her name as Fanny and not Fanya - only Russian speaking acquaintances would have called her Fanya - and assuming that her patronymic was indeed Markov - would suggest that her father's forename was Marek - a fairly common Polish forename.

It also explains why her patronymic was not widely used and doesn't appear on official documents such as her death certificate or the probate records for her husband - it was simply something made up to keep Russian officialdom happy.

The other snippet I gleaned from the Times reports was that Sergei Stepniak had been living in Britain for roughly ten years at the time of his death.

Normally one would expect him to be in the 1891 census, especially given that he was a minor public figure which would have made dodging the census difficult for him.

However, a search of the New York Times archive shows that he was reported as giving several public lectures in New York in January 1891.

The 1891 census in the UK took place on April 5th, and while I can’t place the Stepaniaks as being in the USA on that date, my guess is that they were still overseas at the time of the census.

A little time with Constance

 

It's a long weekend and officially the start of the ski season, and right on cue we got our first soaking storm of the winter bringing snow to the mountains and cold sleety rain lower down.

Impossible to do anything outside so yesterday I spent a little bit of time trying to tease out the relationships  of the translators of Russian literature in 1890s England.

Mostly women, they clustered around Sergei Stepniak and Feliks Volkhovski who were prominent Russian exiles living in various parts of London, for example Stepniak lived on Woodstock Road in Bedford Park, and through the Russian exile community they became associated with both the Friends of Russian Freedom, a group that smuggled banned books and papers into tsarist Russia.

Unlike Ethel Voynich, who was also a member of the group, neither Constance, or her sister in law Olive, had any prior knowledge of Russian before being introduced to Stepniak and Volkhoviski, and were both taught Russian by Volkhovski.

Constance, who had previously studied Latin and Greek at Cambridge in the early 1880s, took to Russian like a duck to water, and went on to produce translations of almost all the Russian literature.

Most photographs of Constance show her as an old lady, but the one above, from her student days, show someone who was clearly a determined and attractive young woman.

Both Constance and her sister in law Olive seem to have been attracted to the charismatic Stepniak, Olive cutting off all her hair in anguish when Sergei was killed crossing a level crossing in Hampstead a few days before Christmas 1895

However there's no real hint of a sexual relationship between Stepniak and either Constance or Olive.

Stepniak appears to have been devoted to his wife, Fanya, and after his death Fanya worked with Constance on her translations.

On the other hand Volkhovski seems to have been a bit handsy and the women exchanged letters joking about how, even in his later years when he had grown fat and unattractive Volkhovski still tried it on.

Strangely, unlike the other women in the group who had spent time in Russia working as governesses while perfecting their Russian, Constance never did - perhaps her experience of working as a governess after graduation  made her reluctant as did her marriage in 1889 to Edward Garnett, a publisher's reader.

She did visit Russia twice in the years before the 1917 revolutions, but never learned to speak Russian fluently, although, perhaps in part due to her training as a classicist, she could read and parse Russian prose on the fly, no easy task (I remember these dread translation exercises where someone would read a passage from a book and you would try and write down a simultaneous translation, and the the group would critique your attempts).

In researching her life I've developed an admiration for her abilities, something even newer translators of Russian literature acknowledge ...

A recycled workbench

 About eight or nine years ago we extended our house and moved the  kitchen downstairs to give us an open plan L-shaped kitchen diner area (actually more of a Г shape) with a sitting and TV area in the bottom of the Г. 

When the guys were taking out the old kitchen I got them to save a couple of the old kitchen units.

A year or so later we renovated our bathroom and when we replaced the shower, along with everything else, I saved a sheet of the tempered glass from the shower screen with a view to using it as a work surface.

And then the pandemic came along, and I never quite got around to making a workbench out of the saved materials.

Well today I put the bits together to make a new work bench in the studio

The frame the kitchen units sat on had disappeared so I made some load bearing bars out of discarded construction pine for the units to sit on, and added some extra pine at the back of the units to help take the weight of the glass.

The bench is not quite finished, it needs to move to a different location in the studio, at which point I'll use some industrial glue to glue the glass in place, and probably the glass should move back four or five centimetres to reduce the overhang at the front to improve access to the drawers.

So far everything is recycled and the cost is going to come out around $30 - $10 for the screws and another $20 for the industrial glue.

I'm now on the lookout for a decent second hand lab chair - basically one like those you see in dentist's surgeries that are height adjustable and have a bit of back support ...

Pumpkin soup...

 Well, if we had any doubts about the arrival of winter, they're gone.

Over a weekend of wind and rain, we've been brutally slammed into winter. The leaves have been stripped from the trees and are rapidly turning into a wet soggy mass. It's time to hunker down with a good book  and eat soup.

But what sort of soup?

Pumpkin - pumpkins are cheap and plentiful at the end of autumn, and it's easy enough to make your own.

Go to the supermarket or your local organic vegetable store and get a hunk of pumpkin - we usually go for Kent pumpkin if there's a choice, but if there's not, any pumpkin will do, although butternut can be blander than the others.

Peel and roughly cube the pumpkin. 

In a decent size pot heat up a generous dribble of olive oil, add garlic, some chopped celery, diced carrot, diced red onion, a bit of leek and a finely chopped hunk of ginger and a couple of birds eye chillis - we have our own from the garden - change and vary the ingredients as you feel appropriate, but you do really need the ginger, garlic, onion, celery and carrot for flavour. If you don't have any fresh chillis to hand, tabasco or even srichacha works well. 

Once the leek and celery are a vivid green colour, throw in the pumpkin and stir the veggie mix around for a minute or so.

Add water to cover, a chicken stock cube, salt and pepper bring to a gentle boil. Add a couple of handfuls of red lentils to give it a bit of body.

Leave it to cook until the pumpkin is mashy - ie it can be coarsely mashed with a wooden spoon.

Remove from the heat and use a stick blender to turn it into a smooth glop a little reminiscent of old fashioned wall paper paste.

Decant into a container and leave to cool.

Serve with toasted crusty bread to make a filling lunch - we usually find that a standard supermarket hunk of pumpkin makes enough soup for the two of us to have it for lunch two days running.

This is very much a 'your mileage may vary' recipe, but believe me, when the wind is howling outside and there's a constant rattle of wind driven rain on the tin roof, it will warm your soul...

Winter! (perhaps)

 It's been a funny autumn so far. Dry, and while it's been getting steadily colder at nights, it's been warm and pleasant during the day.

Well, that's the way it was until a couple of days ago when not only was it markedly colder overnight, the daytime temperatures were struggling to reach double figures.

The cats, lazy heat loving things that they are, were loathe to go outside, and I actually had to put on socks inside the house for the first time since before Christmas.

The trees have turned a magnificent array of reds, yellows and oranges, but we are finally promised rain this weekend, which probably means that the garden will turn into a seasonal mix of wet soggy leaves and bare leafless branches, a bit like it decided to do when we attempted a winter walking trip a couple of years ago.

Still, we're getting there, I can take the saga of the studio reverse cycle air conditioner off my Trello list - we finally had it installed yesterday after various delays - I should have known not to order anything the week before Easter, orders being lost, and installers being booked up - who'd have thought that there would be a rush to get new heaters installed before winter proper?

Anyway, a month later than we planned, we now have heating and cooling in the outside studio, which should make the space usable the year round. I even have a plan to build myself a work table using an old shower screen and two old kitchen units, which should give me somewhere other than my rather crowded and messy desk to work.

In between times, I've been going up to the Athenaeum in Stanley to work on the heritage book collection.

Creating a controlled vocabulary for publishers for the Athenaeum Heritage Book Collection has turned into a marathon, not a sprint - it's not the big well known publishers who are a problem, its the small publishers of what I'll loosely call 'pulp fiction' 1930s crime novels and westerns, which were popular reading at the time.

Unfortunately, a lot of them were published by small local publishing houses that have disappeared without trace.

But, as one of the important aspects of the heritage book collection is that it provides a snapshot of what people actually read, as opposed to what you might think they read on the basis of book reviews of the time it's probably worth the effort tracking down what little information is available online about these small local publishers.

I've also taken advantage of my extra free time now I'm finished with Lake View House to finish off my researches into the afterlife of Katherine Scragg and Ethel Voynich, who turned out to be more interesting than I expected - I originally expected her to be a sort of nineteenth century groupie hanging round the Russian exile scene in late nineteenth century London, but no, she appears to have been involved in the early development of the Fabian Society and middle class socialism in England, as well as mixing with spies and book and newspaper smugglers.

And in my eternal quest to find a lightweight writing machine, (and partly inspired by my success using a Chromebook to research Katherine Scragg) I picked up an old Asus Chromebook that had fallen off the update list, and was hence cheap, but Google Docs runs fine on it, making it another possibility as a tool for simply getting things down to work on later ...