Ten thousand miles and an ocean between us

[sovay]

It is extremely hot and I spent the majority of my day on the phone with doctors and bureaucracies, so now seems as good a time as any to inaugurate my new icon of Jeff Hartnett from Johnny Eager (1942), characteristically pictured mid-slouch. The man occupies chairs like a human pitch drop; if left sufficiently undisturbed, one imagines, he would pour himself incrementally out of them again. I am in fact not convinced that the floor is not where Jeff is frequently discovered, unless Johnny has sent him to bed first or he's been lucky enough to pass out in the direction of a couch. For slightly different reasons, I can relate.

I realized while summarizing Le Guin's Orsinia to yhlee—"a small landlocked country in Central-to-Eastern Europe with a Balkan Romance language and a history closely paralleling its neighbors, which means it starts the twentieth century as part of Austria-Hungary and spends most of the rest of it as part of the Eastern Bloc"—that a great many of my feelings about her imaginary country seem to have crossbred with my feelings about the MCU's Sokovia, especially as it's revealed in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021) to have ceased to exist. "Cannibalized by its neighbors before the land was even cleared of rubble. Erased from the map." I thought of Emeric Pressburger, born Pressburger Imre József in Timișoara, which was Temesvár at the time:

I was a schoolboy of sixteen when World War I ended. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed like a chocolate soufflé struck by the icy wind of defeat. The Serbs took the southern part of Hungary, the Romanians got hold of the east, the Czechs the north, even the Austrians took a portion in the west. Our town lay on the shipping canal connecting the river Tisza with the Danube, slap on the new border and we were wondering whether we were going to become Romanians or Serbs, since rumour had it that the triumphant allies had promised our province to both.

If the show had been firing on all cylinders, it would have remembered that even a Baron can be stateless, nothing left of his country but maps out of date and a language he hasn't heard in five years and a monument in what isn't even the ruins of its capital, neat as a golf course, sculpted as socialist realism, you'd never know a city had fallen screaming from the sky. You called it a failed state, but it's where you go to wait for the end of your life, to be tidied away with the rest of this smashed history under the blank gaze of the stone family more whole than yours was left. Failure can still be home. The writers missed a real trick not making one of the Flag Smashers, one of the Blip DPs, Sokovian. Surely, statistically, some of them must have been. Some people call for the abolition of nations, some people wake up one morning to find theirs gone. (The keystone out of your arch.) The globe is filled with the ghosts of countries and most of them don't come back: Spiders Poland is an outlier and should not be counted. As I said to sholio at the time, "GOOD JOB ZEMO GIVING ME SOKOVIAN DIASPORA FEELS."

"Since the story 'Unlocking the Air,' written in 1990, I have had no word from Orsinia," Le Guin wrote in 2012. "I miss hearing from my people there." If she ever did hear from them again, she never published the correspondence; the cycle ends with Orsinia's Revolution of 1989, the first tentative, transitional steps beyond the page of the fairy tale into the future, where she had to let them find their own way with the rest of the changing world. It is not a bad ending, though I always wanted even just one more story from their twenty-first century. I wrote an Orsinian poem that wasn't it. Le Guin said herself, we do not ask what happened after. Perhaps that was what closed the borders. Or she didn't want to see them fracture into post-Soviet war like some of their neighbors, which nationalist politicians they would have elected in the last decade, imaginary countries were never immune from real politics. They could be splendidly stable, an A-1 liberal democracy; their historian is no longer around to receive their communications. But even if they don't write, I hope they are still on the map.

Comments

[nineweaving]

"I miss hearing from my people there."

So many of us do.

Nine

[sovay]

So many of us do.

rushthatspeaks comes to mind: "We lost your doors."

[legionseagle]

That's a lovely evocation of hiraeth.

Also, on the Austro-Hungarian front, have you come across John Biggins' series "A Sailor of Austria"? Very evocative of the era.

[sovay]

That's a lovely evocation of hiraeth.

Thank you.

Also, on the Austro-Hungarian front, have you come across John Biggins' series "A Sailor of Austria"? Very evocative of the era.

I have not! I will look for it. Most of what I know about the Austro-Hungarian Navy is either Georg von Trapp, The Spy in Black (1939)—speaking of Pressburger—or trivia like Gottfried Freiherr von Banfield, "the only flying ace who flew a flying boat to five or more victories."

[legionseagle]

Georg von Trapp is a minor character in one of Biggins' books.

[sovay]

Georg von Trapp is a minor character in one of Biggins' books.

Nice.

[nnozomi]

It is not a bad ending, though I always wanted even just one more story from their twenty-first century.
Me too. I haven't read any of the Orsinia stories in a long time, but I miss them.
Can I offer you an entirely unsolicited imaginary-Eastern-European-country rec? Varina, in Peter Dickinson's Shadow of a Hero, a novel about Varinian-British Letta, who is thirteen when 1989 happens and people begin to think little Varina, which has its own language and legends and food and poetry, might have a chance to reappear as a country from Romania and Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, which have subsumed it. It's a hard book to describe properly, but SO GOOD, and if you ever have a chance to pick up a copy I think you would enjoy it.

[sovay]

Me too. I haven't read any of the Orsinia stories in a long time, but I miss them.

I have found that they hold up when returned to, which it is probably time for me to do. It isn't the same as receiving a new postcard.

Can I offer you an entirely unsolicited imaginary-Eastern-European-country rec?

Absolutely! I like Peter Dickinson and the book sounds fascinating; also it will provide further material for my off-and-on conversation with moon_custafer about modern Ruritanias. (Latest: being reminded that Margery Allingham's Sweet Danger (1933) is technically a Ruritanian romance, being concerned with the succession of a small fictional principality on the Adriatic Sea, even if most of the narrative action takes place in Suffolk.)

[princessofgeeks]

Orsinia was so amazing. The description of the places was so vivid, I see them yet. Luminous.

[sovay]

Orsinia was so amazing. The description of the places was so vivid, I see them yet. Luminous.

"A few fountains clattered in deserted squares."

[dewline]

The Americas - so we with ties to Europe's nations, living and dead, were taught to teach others to call them - are littered with peoples who consider their own pre-Contact nations not quite dead yet, too. We've been hearing a lot from them in recent weeks, as you've read. With no small cause, but rather, a great bloody one.

And your conclusions about Sokovia, the Flag-Smashers, and so on are probably also true. I can't imagine there aren't people who still see themselves as Sokovian unto the death of their last descendants too.

[sovay]

peoples who consider their own pre-Contact nations not quite dead yet, too. We've been hearing a lot from them in recent weeks, as you've read.

I have. Territorial acknowledgements were one of the other things that went through my head in the writing of this post: it is easy—it is convenient—to think that people become ghosts when their states do.

I can't imagine there aren't people who still see themselves as Sokovian unto the death of their last descendants too.

That is certainly my experience of the diaspora(s) I was born into, although I don't wish anyone to be the endling of theirs.

[hawkwing_lb]

I read this and your description of Orsinia struck me like a poem.

[sovay]

I read this and your description of Orsinia struck me like a poem.

Thank you. I think the place struck me like one.

[minoanmiss]

*reads and contemplates*

[sovay]

*reads and contemplates*

*hugs*

[signedwapo]

De-lurking to pass along a fic rec that you may enjoy? It is a meaty character study of Zemo that very much delves into his Sokovian roots: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31026749?view_full_work=true

[sovay]

De-lurking to pass along a fic rec that you may enjoy? It is a meaty character study of Zemo that very much delves into his Sokovian roots

Thank you! Is it yours? (I may or may not read it while I am hoping to do something of my own, on grounds of not wanting to end up writing fic for someone else's fic.)

[signedwapo]

Oh lord no, I can't write worth beans! The fic is by kvikindi on AO3, a writer who is heck of good with all of their fics that I've read so far. I recced this one to Sholio at the very tail end of comments on their Zemo post, and their response was pretty darned positive if I recall correctly.

[sovay]

I recced this one to Sholio at the very tail end of comments on their Zemo post, and their response was pretty darned positive if I recall correctly.

Awesome!

(If it was yours, I wanted to explain why I might not immediately read it, so as not to be rude.)