William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH

Epigraph: “I could have been unvanquished…”— Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ivan Supicic, chief ed., Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (vol. 2 of Croatia and Europe ) (London and Zagreb: Philip Wilson Publishers and Školska Knjiga, 2008), p. 122 (part of grave inscription).

Most descriptions of Trieste in this cluster of stories are based on visits in 1981, 2010 and 2012. Some descriptions of the old city are indebted to illustrations in Trieste Dall’Emporio al Futuro/vom Emporium in die Zukunft, Dalla Collezione di Stelio e Tity Davia alle foto del nuovo millenio per la rappresentazione della città in un viaggio ideale (Trieste: La Mongolfiera Libri, 2009).

Names of Serbian settlers in Trieste, events relating to the two Churches of San Spiridione, descriptions of those churches, the Triestine doings of Casanova (which actually occurred in 1772–74), the Triestine Serbs under the Napoleonic occupations, etcetera— After text and illustrations in Giorgio Milossevich, Trieste: The Church of/Die Kirche des San Spiridione (Trieste: Bruno Fachin Editore, 1999). I have altered history rather freely. The real Jovo Cirtovich (or Curtovich) did not arrive in Trieste in 1718 but was born then, in Trebinje, Herzegovina. He first visited Trieste in 1737. According to Milossevich, p. 34, he “was certainly not a refined person. He was a practical man aiming at essential things and full of new ideas and initiatives.” Apparently he began his career as a porter. This historical Curtovich would have lived in his warehouse (built in 1777), not on the hill. The Orthodox Church, or, more accurately, the first Church of San Spiridione, was built for both Greeks and Serbs in 1753 (thirty-five years after my Cirtovich’s arrival), visited by the Tsar in 1772, left in 1781, by the Greeks, who wished to worship in their own language, decked out with a pair of Muscovite bell towers in 1782, demolished in 1861 to forestall a potential cave-in, and rebuilt somewhat later in the form which I describe here. My invented Cirtovich married in 1754. Tanya, whom like all his children I have invented, would have been born in about 1764, so her father’s last voyage took place when she was fifteen. The names of Cirtovich’s brothers are all genuine. About his father’s death I know nothing. In 1806 Napoleon took ten rich traders hostage until Trieste paid him a vast tax; among them were the historical Jovo Cirtovich and Matteo Lazovich. Those two were incarcerated again in the third French occupation (1809). Cirtovich died that year, aged ninety-one, having outlived his children even though he had married three times. His brother Massimo closed down the family business in 1810.

Some details of Serbian dress and Orthodox tradition are indebted to Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, with the collaboration of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (Eleanor Calhoun), The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny, 2 vols., ill. (New York: Scribner’s, 1910). A few incidents of life (for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Montenegrins) under the Turkish occupation (for instance, a man’s execution by flogging in the market square) are indebted to Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice, anon. trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

Serbian attitudes toward the Ottomans, and toward the Battle of Kosovo— Here is a typical (pre-1991) assessment: “During the Turkish occupation, the Serbian Orthodox Church was the only force that kept alive the national spirit and the hope for a better future.”— Mikasinovich, Milivojevic and Mihailovich, p. 2. Djilas relates some horrible stories of opportunistic murders of their Muslim neighbors by Orthodox Montenegrins, while also relating a few Turkish atrocities. A dark view (and widely subscribed to nowadays) of Serbian historiography is summarized in Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Several Serbo-Croatian (as the language was still called in 1980) folk proverbs are taken, more or less altered for style, from Vasko Popa, comp., The Golden Apple: A Round of Stories, Songs, Spells, Proverbs and Riddles, ed. and trans. Andrew Harvey and Anne Pennington (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2010 repr. of 1980 ed.; orig. Serbo-Croatian ed. 1966), pp. 26, 32, 33, 41, 48, 65, 93.

Various obscure Roman coins, cities and provinces (Cyrrhus, Panemuteichus, Bithynia)— Some of my information comes from A.H.M. Jones, Fellow of All Souls College, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1937).

“Take counsel in wine…” — Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1187 (“Poor Richard’s Almanack,” 1733–58).

Captain Vasojevic— The proud clan of this name was famous for its raids against the Turks.

Decline of Ragusan trade in the early eighteenth century, together with its causes and effects— Information from Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London and New York: Seminar, 1972), pp. 407–14.

Some descriptions of Dalmatian medieval religious art and architecture and of Glagolitic derive from illustrations and text in that previously cited volume by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Other descriptions are based on my notes from visits to Dalmatia in 1980, 1992, 1994, 2011 and 2012.

Archimedes’s suppositions— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 11: Euclid, Archimedes, Appolonius of Perga, Nicomachus, var. trans. (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975, 20th pr. of 1952 ed.), p. 525 (Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner,” bef . 212 B.C.).

“The Sultan’s rivals dragged him down from the sky” in 1730. This ruler, Ahmad III, had regained Morea from Venice in 1718, the year that Cirtovich arrived in Trieste.

Grisogono’s Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides— From 1528. Grisogono was born in Zadar.

Description of traditional Serbian marriage customs— Based on research and translation by Tatiana Jovanovic. The source was Emma Stevanovic, Faculty of Philosophy; Tatiana says “she was a student probably in a department of Ethnology.” Much to my disappointment, Tatiana “omitted the most melodramatic and patriotic parts.”

Descriptions of the squid-entity in the dark-glass, of cephalopods generally, and of nautiluses— After photographs, diagrams and textual information in: Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid (New York: Lyons Press, 1998); Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé, Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, trans. J. F. Bernard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1973); and Peter Douglas Ward, In Search of Nautilus: Three Centuries of Scientific Adventures in the Deep Pacific to Capture a Prehistoric — Living — Fossil (New York: Simon and Schuster/A New York Academy of Sciences Book, 1988).

The fumigation of a coffin, and the rite with coins— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, vol. 1, p. 70.

Porphyry’s claim about Plotinus— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 17: Plotinus: The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. vi (introduction).

Various (but not all) descriptions of Marija Cirtovich and her attributes (affinity for doves, different-sized eyes, etc.)— After illustrations of Mother of God icons in Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, trans. Stephen Satarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, 2006; orig. Italian ed. 2004).