STRAY LEAVES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20105, 11 May 1935, Page 12

STRAY LEAVES

DOINGS IN WORLD OF BOOKS Fraulein Ruth Feiner, author Of "Cat Across the Path,” is one of those who had to leave Germany when Herr Hitler came into power. Her father is an actor, producer, and playwright, and she herself has acted for films and composed songs. “The Dancer and Other Poems,” by Miss Phyllis Hartnoll, whose poems have frequently appeared in English periodicals, is announced as an addition to Messrs Macmillan’s “Contemporary Poets” series, published at one shilling. The expert who, with a staff of fourassistants, has accomplished the task of transcribing the letters of Napoleon to Marie Louise, shortly to be published by Hitchinson, is Professor M. Phillippe Lauer, custodian of the manuscripts department of the Bibllotheque. “it has been a terrific job,” said M. Lauer; “in fact, we never had one like it before. We have often been puzzled by manuscripts of the Middle Ages, practically impossible to decipher, but in the category of modem handwriting Napoleon’s is the worst. When revising our own transcriptions, we were by no means sure in many cases that we had correctly read a word or phrase. A curious feature of Napoleon's letters is his bad spelling, and he was constantly guilty of elementary faults of orthography. He would Write ‘J’e’ for ‘J’ai,* ‘pensser’ for ‘pense,’ for instance. Even more extraordinary is that he should have misspelt the names of cities he had taken and of towns whose names perpetuate his victories.”

The Moscow correspondent of the London “Observer” reports that more than 150 unpublished letters of famous British authors, including some from Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Walter Scott, and Lord Byron, have been discovered in Leningrad by Professor L. Alexeyev, of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in the course of his researches in “Anglo-Russian Literary Relations,” the subject of a series of books he is now writing. In the first volume of this work (now ready for publication), Professor Alexeyev advances the theory that contact between Russia and England began not in the sixteenth century, when Richard Chancellor reached the Court of Ivan the Terrible, but some five or six hundred years earlier. The professor points out that in the sixteenth century, following the period when British merchants were granted the right of free trade by Ivan the Terrible, and English trading posts were organised from Archangel to Moscow, there was to be found in the literature of the Elizabethan era frequent allusions to Muscovy. Shakepeare’s “A Winter Tale,” says Professor Alexeyev, is influenced by the marriage of the Moscow Grand Duke Basil to a Lettish princes, While the idea of disguising the heroes of "Love’s Labour Lost” as Muscovites was evidently suggested to the playwright by the arrival of the Russia Embassy in London. The recently-found unpublished letters of famous British authors are to be utilised by Professor Alexeyev in the second volume of his “Anglo-Russian Literary Relations,” oh Which he Is now working.