Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Classic by a Woman: This book was published in 1941 to universal praise. Virginia Woolf described Rebecca West as “hard as nails… a cross between a charwoman and a gipsy, but as tenacious as a terrier, with flashing eyes… immense vitality… suspicion of intellectuals, and great intelligence.”

Black Lamb Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia – Rebecca West

In 1936, novelist and critic Rebecca West travelled to Yugoslavia, because the assassination of its king in 1934 made her realize that she knew nothing about the southeast of Europe. This state of ignorance was intolerable to her, a powerful intelligence with a mighty pen. Having read a stack of books about the Byzantines and the Turk in Europe, she returned in 1937 for a more extensive journey. It took her about two years to write this book and its length – about 1200 pages – made her worry that nobody would read it.

In fact, this masterpiece has never gone out of print. It is not only a travel narrative of the highest achievement, but also a close examination of Balkan ethnography and history, and a meditation on the human condition in terms of the rise of fascism in the modern era. This, on Luigi Lucheni, the Italian anarchist and assassin of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898:

It was indeed most appropriate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth, for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such a population. Its luxury was financed by an exploited peasant class bled so white that it was ready to send its boys into the factories and the girls into service on any terms. The beggars in the streets of Vienna, which the innocent suppose were put there by the Treaty of Trianon, are descendants of an army as old as the nineteenth century. Lucheni said with his stiletto to the symbol of power, ‘Hey, what are you going to do with me?’ He made no suggestions, but cannot be blamed for it. It was the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or design actions other than the crudest and most violent. He lived many years in prison, almost until his like had found a vocabulary and a name for themselves and had astonished the world with the farce of Fascism.

Whacha gonna do about me, indeed a question still with us today.

Anyway, one writer was probably right in observing “Probably misclassified as a work of travel literature, the book has a curiosity, seriousness, and depth of insight that make it more akin to such classics of ethical reportage as Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom than to anything attempted by Bryson or Theroux.” Indeed, saying Black Lamb Grey Falcon  is a travel book is like saying Anna Karenina is “about Russia.”