Voynich book12/28/2023 ![]() In 2011, Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li visited Cork, and requested to pay homage at the birthplace of Ethel Voynich. When Ethel died in 1960, she was mourned in Russia as a national hero. The following year, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson visited Moscow to arrange for payment of her long-overdue royalties. Ethel had been living in obscurity, and due to Soviet copyright laws, she was unaware of her legendary status in Russia. In 1955, a Soviet delegation of writers learned that the author, long presumed dead, was alive in New York – the newspaper Pravda proclaimed her resurrection, much like that of her protagonist. Voynich’s life story has a strange final twist. Gemma is perhaps Voynich’s most enduring legacy: “one of the most impressive attempts to present an emancipated woman”, wrote the critic Arnold Kettle. Voynich never acknowledged Reilly’s role, and it remains a source of controversy, although she confirmed that the character of Gemma was drawn from the life of Charlotte Wilson, mistress of the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin. She longed for his “melancholy beauty and distinction”, and until the day she married, dressed in black to “mourn the state of the world”. At the age of 15, Ethel read about the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Ethel was born in Cork to parents George Boole, an eminent mathematician, and the philosopher Mary Everest, whose uncle gave his name to the world’s highest mountain. ![]() The melodrama of Voynich’s novel is matched by the extraordinary story of her own life. When the novel was re-released in the late 1970s, after Mao’s death, it resonated with those whose faith in China’s ‘Cardinal’ had waned. Yet as the Cultural Revolution progressed, and the cult of Mao deepened, the rebellious Gadfly was suppressed, for fear it would be turned against the father figure of modern China. “Padre, come away with us! What have you to do with this dead world of priests and idols? They are full of the dust of bygone ages they are rotten they are pestilent and foul! Come out of this plague-stricken Church – come away with us into the light! Padre, it is we that are life and youth it is we that are the everlasting springtime it is we that are the future! Padre, the dawn is close upon us – will you miss your part in the sunrise?” This passage of Voynich’s novel captures why the book was so popular in the early stages of China’s Cultural Revolution, with its veneration of youth and its anti-clerical celebration of iconoclasm: It sold 39 million tickets and featured Shostakovich’s score, which became celebrated in its own right as The Gadfly Suite. Voynich’s novel was bolstered further by a 1955 Sovcolor film adaptation directed by Aleksandr Faintsimmer. Ostrovsky’s socialist realist novel features a fearless young communist who suffers dreadfully for his sacrifices, but finds perpetual sustenance in the example of The Gadfly, which he reads to his fellow comrades. In the 1930s, The Gadfly inspired another bestseller, Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered, which sold 35 million copies in the Soviet Union. Arthur, the embodiment of a Romantic tragic hero, was repeatedly voted Russia’s most popular literary figure, and cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova, the first man and woman in space, credited its influence. Yet it was in the newly-created Communist states of the Soviet Union and China that the book found its most dedicated readership. ![]() The novel gained popularity initially in Ireland with socialists and nationalists fighting for independence, and it remains the bestselling Irish novel of all time. At the Corpus Christi mass, Montanelli denounces God’s sacrifice, then dies of a broken heart. Arthur, now a Christ-like figure, commands his own execution and forgives the firing squad. Montanelli refuses and condemns his son to death. But Arthur, unforgiving and uncompromising, demands that his father renounce the church. After his capture, he is visited by Montanelli, now a cardinal, who offers him a lifeline. He returns to Italy in the guise of ‘The Gadfly’, a fearless and revered revolutionary whose true identity is masked. He then discovers his family secret, and loses all faith in the church.Īrthur feigns his suicide and escapes to South America, where he endures years of torture and degradation. But he unwittingly betrays his comrades, after his private confession is relayed to the police. In the company of his childhood sweetheart Gemma, Arthur becomes involved in the Young Italy movement fighting Austrian imperial rule. There he becomes devoted to his guardian and mentor Montanelli, who, unknown to him, is also his biological father. The protagonist is a young Englishman, Arthur Burton, who moves to a Catholic seminary after the death of his mother. ![]() The Gadfly is set in Italy during the revolutionary ferment of the 1830s and ‘40s.
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