Who are those hooded hordes?
Eliot's Notes invite us to consider these ten lines in the context of an essay by German writer Hermann Hesse contained in his collection Blick ins Chaos (View into Chaos). Eliot cites the following lines (typically untranslated in the Notes):
Half of Europe, or at least half of Eastern Europe, is already on the road to Chaos, heading in a state of drunken holy delusion into the abyss; and there sings a drunken hymn like Dmitri Karamazov sang. The offended citizens laugh at such songs, the saint and the seer hear them with tears.
These are the final sentences of the essay The Brothers Karamazov, or the Downfall of Europe. In it, Hesse examines the novel The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: he finds the characters in the novel to be uncivilised and animalistic, and predicts that this archetypal "Russian Man" will bring about the downfall of European civilisation.
Hesse's ideas chime with Eliot's concern that the Great War and the Russian Revolution have fatally damaged Europe: the hooded hordes of atheistical and materialist communism threaten to overwhelm European values.
Eliot describes noises of war (bursts in the violet air); and maternal lamentation, which subtly connects this section to the previous lines' depiction of the aftermath of the Crucifixion.
The unpunctuated list of cities is a warning that all civilisations eventually fall: in ancient times, Judaean, Greek and Egyptian; in modern times, the Austro-Hungarian Empire; is London, the Unreal City, next?
Half of Europe, or at least half of Eastern Europe, is already on the road to Chaos, heading in a state of drunken holy delusion into the abyss; and there sings a drunken hymn like Dmitri Karamazov sang. The offended citizens laugh at such songs, the saint and the seer hear them with tears.
These are the final sentences of the essay The Brothers Karamazov, or the Downfall of Europe. In it, Hesse examines the novel The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky: he finds the characters in the novel to be uncivilised and animalistic, and predicts that this archetypal "Russian Man" will bring about the downfall of European civilisation.Hesse's ideas chime with Eliot's concern that the Great War and the Russian Revolution have fatally damaged Europe: the hooded hordes of atheistical and materialist communism threaten to overwhelm European values.
Eliot describes noises of war (bursts in the violet air); and maternal lamentation, which subtly connects this section to the previous lines' depiction of the aftermath of the Crucifixion.
The unpunctuated list of cities is a warning that all civilisations eventually fall: in ancient times, Judaean, Greek and Egyptian; in modern times, the Austro-Hungarian Empire; is London, the Unreal City, next?
Comments
Post a Comment