Ruritania

Perhpas a fitting subject for a book that was more contemplated than written. Joshua Cohen’s introduction to Charles Newman’s In Partial Disgrace, just out from Dalkey Archive.

It followed that Hungarian literature wasn’t just the literature Newman helped to translate from the Hungarian; it was also all literature, in every language — about Austro-Hungary, Ottoman Hungary, Antiquity’s Hungary, caravanseraing chronologically back to the clunky coining of the Hunnic runes. Newman’s tradition would provide sanctuary for the liturgies of seceded churches, the decrees of rival courts, as much as for the slick escapism of interwar pulp fiction — written in a fantastic dialect called Ruritanian: the world’s only vernacular intended more for the page than for the tongue, the jargon preferred by creaky Empires for diplomatic correspondence with breakaway Nation States, and the unofficial code of international dreamers.

Ruritania is a fictional kingdom eternally located at the infinite center — not necessarily of geographic Europe, but of European psychogeography — though British author Anthony Hope (a pseudonym of Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, 1863–1933), initially founded it somewhere, or nowhere, between Saxony and Bohemia, in his trilogy of novels — The Prisoner of Zenda, The Heart of Princess Osra, and Rupert of Hentzau — characterizing it as a German-speaking, Roman Catholic absolute monarchy. Despite it being perpetually in the midst of dissolution, that dissolution would mean only, paradoxically, more ground. Even as class, ethnic, and religious tensions threatened conflict, territory was taken at every compass point. War could not destroy it, peace could not bore it — every dark passage, be it to throne room or dungeon, met intrigue along the way. Ruritania’s annexations only acquired for it more names, as if noble honorifics: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire expanded it northeast toward Russia and called it Zembla; George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark hexalogy expanded it southeast to the Carpathians; in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Mad King, it’s located east toward the Baltics, as Lutha; in John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds, it’s a Scandinavian/Italian/Balkan mélange called Evallonia; Dashiell Hammett, in one of only two stories he ever set outside the States, had his nameless detective, the Continental Op, meddle in the royal succession of Muravia; Frances Hodgson Burnett further clarified the cardinalities by positioning her Samavia “north of Beltrazo and east of Jiardasia,” names that should be familiar to every good mercenary as demarcating the borders of “Carnolitz.” Newman called his Ruritania “Cannonia” — a toponym echoing the martial ring of “cannon,” with the authority of “canon.”

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