Communal song and prayer in Dante's Purgatory

'Cantavi tutti insieme con una voce' - 'they were all singing together with one voice'; 'Quest'ultima preghiera, segnor caro, già non si fa per noi, ché non bisogna, ma per color che dietro a noi restaro' - 'this last prayer, dear Lord, we do not make for ourselves, since there is no need, but for those who have stayed behind'. Welcome to the shared experiences of Dante's Purgatorio. The singing souls in the boat with an 'angelic pilot,' steering with wings, and the proud who hope to be redeemed but are weighed down by stones on their shoulders share a selfless communion.

As our Dante to the Virgil of Dr Alessandro Scafi  at the Warburg Institute's free course on the Divina Commedia, Professor John Took, reminded us this week, 'no one in the Inferno says "this is for them," only "this is for me" ', and the only kind of association there is in implicating others in one's own catastrophe. 'There is no creative sharing in the Inferno'.

Yet somehow we shared Dante's horrified savour of being there - all those fascinating individuals cognisant of their guilt but unable to repent. In one of many surprising parallels with a very different text I'm working on with students in this term's Opera in Depth, Dostoyevsky's From the House of the Dead (or Notes from a Dead House, as the translation I'm now reading, that of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, has it), the author who shared the fates of the most hardened criminals in Siberia puts his finger on the plight of the damned in speaking of one of the other prisoners: 'he was fully aware that he had acted wrong...but though he knew it, he seemed quite unable to understand the real nature of his guilt'.

With Dante, one can take any number of variations on that theme, so superbly realised are the figures as dramatic characters, but it's such a relief to see the light as Dante and Virgil go through the centre of the earth and find themselves on the other side, in the Antipodes, with a different starscape. Canto 1 of Purgatorio dwells so loving on the beauty and wonder of the sky, and paints a landscape with rushes at the foot of the mountain to be climbed,

but in between we meet Cato, guardian of Purgatory,

and in Canto 2, an even more 'real' personality - the composer Dante had known (and we don't, despite a 20th century namesake) whom he addresses so warmly as 'Casella mio'.

Yesterday evening produced an interesting contrast. On the one hand we had the bas-reliefs of humility on the terrace of Pride

and its stone-laden incumbents delivering Dante's version of the Lord's Prayer, which Dr. Scafi had students read in Arabic, Mandarin, French and Spanish, a tribute to the insurance magnate Marco Besso who in 1908 produced a book with the same text in multiple languages; Dante provides a gloss within the poetry on the meaning of the text.

On the other we were back to living figures, as it were: Omberto Aldobrandesco, who wants to humble his earthly pride in family but can't resist rolling out the splendid name - as Dr Scafi did, with relish - and Oderisi, a leading manuscript illuminator. This leads Dante, through Oderisi, to a disquisition on the transience of fame both in art - Cimabue has already yielded first place to Giotto -  and in literature, 'one Guido', Cavalcanti, has taken the honour of 'first poet' from another, Guinizelli.

'Forse è nato chi l'uno e l'altro caccerà dal nido' - 'perhaps he is born who will drive both of them from the nest': Dante wryly references himself - and of course he did exactly that - but within a penitential context. He knew his worth; although there's no complementary homily on 'ars longa, vita brevis', we know from Paradiso that Dante saw himself as a crusader of the pen, not there to show off his skill. 'He lived out the difficulty of authentic poetic utterance,' said Took with his usual brow-furrowing eloquence, 'and had a definite sense of the longevity of his achievement.'

The attitude to the artist's task is avoiding hubris but at the same time 'implementing the properties of selfhood'. So un-Medieval this, so modern. The artist's destiny is to be capable of carrying out what he or she is called to do. And that means embracing human nature in all its complexity. Dante is a dramatic poet, not a dry moralist; he is greater than the parameters of his age's religious thought, and that's why we still read him. I was going to wind into this the introductory Purgatorio class's selection of lines which so beautifully render the difficult question of free will, but I can see I've gone on far too long, so that's for another time.

Spring in Roulettenburg

It struck me that not much can have changed in Baden-Baden since Dostoyevsky lost a fortune at the gaming tables there and wrote about it in The Gambler with the spa town piquantly disguised as Roulettenburg. Shady and/or blingy Russians are still there in droves, many apparently buying houses and pushing prices up. Speciality brothels thrive, according to the ads in the posh free book I picked up - not that Russians are necessarily the main clients; there are a lot of sheikhs around too. And alongside that exist the well-off aged with their little diamond-collared doggies and the infirm, the parks and walks and still beautiful Black Forest hills around the town. We had the especially good luck to have got a deal at a large, not especially attractively designed but very spacious and comfortable hotel to the south of the centre, which meant walks back and forth either past elegant villas

or along the river Oos which threads through the valley. Magnolias were flourishing or incipient

and just a few trees, chiefly horse chestnuts, were leafing.

The Oos, hardly majestic but fast-flowing after torrential rains, made me think a bit of the grander scale in Inverness and its little bridges. In this case there are many more and they connect the still-elegant Lichtentaler Allee with the big hotels on the other side.

Inevitably most main paths and roads lead to the casino zone. Curiosity didn’t lead me into the casino at night to watch the hollow- or dead-eyed punters I remember so well from dining at one off the Edgware Road (courtesy of our resident Baden-Baden Ochs, Peter Rose, who used to be off in search of cheap eats), but I admired the entrance with its slabs of frieze above

from the rather beautiful foyer of the Kurhaus, which looks to me more deco than belle époque (this area and the concert hall were first developed in the betting-free early years of the First World War).

Retreating through the classically-friezed lobby

back to the main entrance

I found a Russian bride and groom being ostentatiously photographed just after a morning of rain

and I have to admit that the eight Corinthian columns, the paired-griffin frieze and the overall white-and-gold of Friedrich Weinbrenner‘s 1824 façade made a handsome backdrop. Of course the boom came slightly later than the first phase of Kurhaus building, with France’s ban on gambling prompting the enterprise of the Bénazets father and son, both intent on improving the culture and the amenities of the town with the profits from personal disasters. 

Further along the lawns and the green hill which rises behind them is the Trinkhalle, its central hall now the Tourist Information Centre – no drinking the water now – and its 90-metre colonnade frescoed with kitschy representations of local legends. A fine, cool place to rest in the summer, though.

Of course baths came before breaking the bank – the Emperor Caracalla encouraged the founding of Aquae Aureliae and there are fine remains in the basement of the still-thriving Friedrichsbad. I was hoping for a long session here moving from bath to bath, but lost my nerve on learning that the bathing is mixed and nude. The central bath with the big dome above it looked rather splendid in photographs, but I had to make do with a wander around the periphery.

The Friedrichsbad is a kind of symbolic new temple next to the Stiftskirche-Liebfrauen, dark and deserted when I visited. The spire takes you upward through history, from Romanesque square tower through Gothic to a Baroque cupola. 

The interior has little atmosphere and badly-executed 20th century glass, like most churches we visited on the trip, but there are quite a few treasures here. Nicholas Gerhaert von Leyden’s sandstone crucifix of 1467 was hidden behind its pre-Easter purple veil, but as walking around the sacristy seemed to be encouraged, I could catch it side on.

Flanking him are monuments of the Baden-Baden margraves good for a laugh. Ludwig Wilhelm, otherwise known as Türkenlouis from an obvious routing, the instruments of which are at the base with infidels (I presume) kept from his lofty presence among figures of Courage, Justice and Wisdom by Death and an eagle.

His uncle, Leopold Wilhelm, is semi-recumbent in the pose of a Roman tribune, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

In the nave and side chapels are more devout figures of the Virgin in wood and sandstone, an amazing carved tabernacle which didn’t photograph well and a late 15th century St Christopher.

For a more consistently interesting slice of ecclesiastical art, with a Russian orthodox church half way between the two, 

you have to head south to Lichtental, a mere quarter of an hour’s walk through the park from our hotel. We were lucky to hit the grounds of the old Kloster, still occupied by 30 nuns, in the middle of a Good Friday service. There were anthems and plainsong, and a reading of the Passion which sounded as if it were going to go on for a good deal longer than I wanted to stay; a tall young nun acting Pontius Pilate with nervy lack of conviction made me feel awkward for her and I headed out to the genteel cries of ‘Barabbas!’

I’d intended to walk up to a waterfall but got sidetracked by a very late lunch of pancakes and a turn in the weather, which had been glorious up until about 4. 

So I quickly nipped up to the very attractive villa where Brahms stayed between 1865 and 1874, composing his Deutsches Requiem as well as his Second and Third Symphonies here. 

 In the park by the Oos, there are busts of Brahms

and of his beloved Clara Schumann, who also lived for a while in Lichtental.

Not all profane, then, the Baden-Baden environs. The house is only open on Wednesday afternoons; I’d thought we’d be able to revisit if we came back from Weimar on the morning train, catching the similarly restricted tour of the Kloster’s Fürstenkapelle, but that didn’t happen. We did spend a last night back in Baden-Baden, in curious rooms above the Löwenbräu Biergarten, where Liszt had stayed (Gogol lodged opposite, with a sharp new Russian plaque to mark the spot). By this time spring was at last in full spate, and I got back to find the prunus over the wall of the back yard just about to flourish. Which it did last week

and then the blossoms quickly fell

and it's already over, along with the last flower of the camellia which has bloomed for precisely four months (remember the Christmas tree shot?It's at the foot of the 'Festive Oslo' entry) So now the lovely procession of wisteria and lilacs is under way. And tonight, since my Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of The Gambler has arrived – essential for knowing what’s in French in the dialogue – my soon-to-be spouse (not that I’ll use the name, or ‘husband’, for that matter) will have to put up with the first of many Dostoyevskyan bedtime readings.

Berlin 1923, Dostoyevsky-style

When did I last read a novelist who left me breathless across an epic span to know what was going to happen next, as I've just found with Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (Every Man Dies Alone) and now his Wolf Among Wolves? Probably when I was in my late teens, and devoured Dostoyevsky with such obsessiveness that my main studies at university were in danger of falling by the wayside (praise be to Russian Studies 1 and above all to Yelena Voznesenskaya, the only tutor who inspired me during those four years). I don't suppose the parallel had really occurred to me when I read Alone in Berlin, so singular and unrepeatable are the circumstances of its creation and the abysmal time it describes. Whereas Wolf Among Wolves brings us closer to the often fruitful vortices of restless 19th century Russia. The hero, Wolfgang Pagel, is a loveable but spineless young man who discovers his backbone once he leaves a chaotic inflation-ridden Berlin for a country estate which turns out to be no less full of different pitfalls. The roulette scenes in the city inevitably recalled the feverishness of Dostoyevsky's The Gambler (they're central to a first part which takes 370 densely-packed pages to describe an eventful 24 hours in Berlin). But I'd guess that the unease which spreads across the next couple of hundred pages out at Neulohe, leading up to the failed putsch - pictured below in archive footage of 1923's secret army - is a far more personal homage to the threat of something terrible in the ridiculous provincial society milieu of The Possessed. How can both Fallada and Dostoyevsky manage to be so gripping at times when, on the surface at least, not much is happening? The answer probably lies in the speed with which they wrote their tumbling prose, though Dostoyevsky's is often far less clear and makes him extremely difficult to read in Russian. Fallada knew he was risking his neck in the Berlin of 1936-7 for a novel which it was extremely risky to publish, pouring forth 123 pages a week. There is, of course, a magnificent tension both between the moral stature Pagel acquires by experience and the up-down trajectory of Fallada's fascinatingly tragic existence (I must read his biography), and in the contrast of the contented optimism at the novel's end with what we know would have been just around the corner for Pagel, his wife and their child. But this is, in any case, a book which lives in the moment, occasionally stopping to analyse and embroider. It is, above all, Fallada's incredible gift for storytelling which keeps the reader spellbound. And there is material enough here for 100 short stories: I loved the divertissement of the mad Baron who holds to hostage the staff of a Berlin hotel, and the oddly reassuring tale of the servant Elias who has started gathering high-mark notes together in the hope that they'll eventually be worth something again but ends up collecting them for their own sake, since money has lost all its value. Anyway, these books are not only astonishingly faithful testimonies to the times in which they were written, but masterpieces in their own right, no doubt at all about that. On now to Little Man, What Now? and The Drinker.