Laszlo Krasznahorkai - Seiobo There Below

Although founded by Cyrus the Great, and expanded by Darius, the Persian Empire became truly great only through Artaxerxes Mnemon II, this — in the view of his contemporaries and later the historians — feeble, susceptible, enervated, and at first, this delicate and generous man, who was originally called Ŗtaxšaçā in his own language, and then later called Artsaces by the Greeks, and who for a long time could not get over having had to bury the eunuch Tiridates, the boy-love of his youth, before — as perhaps Herodotus has noted — he had a chance to emerge from childhood; his grief was so great that he ordered the assumption and the practicing of the deepest mourning across the entire Empire, at which his mother, in the hopes of bringing it to an end, threw all her might into the creation of a marital union auspicious for the Empire, through which she also wished to obstruct him, Artsaces, from gaining the throne, for in her heart — if in the case of Parysatis we can even speak of such a thing as a heart — she intended the throne for her second-born, but in vain, not even one of her plans came to fruition, for she had to behold as her favorite, the passionate Cyrus the Younger, created to rule, died at Cunaxa, and it was precisely the despised first-born, and then again the Babylonian slut designated for the marriage not only didn’t encumber Artaxerxes II’s ascension to the throne, but actually directly expedited it, for that accursed foreign serpent, as Parysatis called her among her closest devotees, had become so popular practically since her very first public appearance, when, in procession behind her husband, the Emperor, she was able to take part in a large festival dedicated to Ahura Mazda, that the people wanted to see her on the queen’s throne immediately, and there they saw her, because the Emperor wanted to see her there too, and the magi of the Medes placed the crown on her head, and she became the Great Queen of the powerful Empire, and she became as well the one for whom the Emperor, in one swift blow, could forget his bereavement over Tiridates, for it was enough to look at Vashti and he was bewitched; Parysatis tried everything humanly possible against her, availing herself of the wives secluded in the zenana, particularly the jealous Ionian Asparia, pushed into the gray background of the zenana because of Vashti; she used all the machinations of zenana-intrigue, she used the priests of the faith of Marduk and the priests opposed to the faith of Marduk, as well as the so-called “male societies” formed to resist the autocracy of Ahura Mazda, as well as the antipathies of the Zoroastrian priests who repudiated these “male societies,” she tried everything but without result, her first-born, and not high-born, was blinded by the Babylonian beauty, who sat upon the throne and wore the crown on her sweetly curling flaxen hair as if she had always been seated upon that throne, and as if that crown had always been meant for her; simply put, nothing could touch her, nothing in the entire God-given world, Vashti’s position grew ever more solid, in parallel with the Empire, which again only strengthened the position of the Great Queen as it grew and became ever more powerful, never had there been an Empire of this extent in all the world within the reason’s grasp, in addition the residents of the Empire relished the great peace in the wake of the great wars, which they ascribed to the personal talents of the Emperor, taking it as equal proof that the most supreme Deity of the Heavens, Ahura Mazda, was happy to see the Great King upon the throne; in short, Vashti seemed unassailable; the Queen Mother fretted in her apartments, maddened by the impotence of her fury, only able to trust now that something would happen to bring about the end — as it usually did — to this nauseating peace in the Empire and this deplorable romance in the royal palace, she watched the Great King, growing ever stouter, and she was besieged by splitting headaches, she watched the radiant Babylonian slut and she was nauseated, but for the time being there was nothing she could do, just keep watching, Parysatis said to herself in between the headaches and the nausea, one day this too will come to an end, because Ahura Mazda in the heavens wished it so, and thus it came about, and her waiting and her torment were not in vain, for the end did come, so easily, so self-evidently that she herself, Parysatis, was the most surprised of all, when she heard after the conclusion of the official celebration of the monarch’s ascension to the throne that the Great King was held by even his closest devotees to be incapable of the most trifling of decisions, and the word had began to spread as well in the subjugated provinces that the Emperor was weak; Artaxerxes would permit anything at all, but not this, so that after the rejoicing, lasting 180 days, a festival of seven days was ordered for the old and newly conquered princes, the old and newly conquered kings, to be held on the opposite bank of the river, in the Apadana, built as it were to face the palace of Darius in Susa in order to demonstrate the dignity of his right to the throne and his strength — but from this point on everything became very confused, and even Parysatis could only follow the events with difficulty, as for a while she had believed that the Great King was incapable of true wrath; the first reports of this had already arrived, the only problem being that custom did not allow her to approach the Apadana herself, to witness with her own two eyes at this so-called celebration, descended into drunken roistering, this anger, in any case the second report spoke of violent rage, the eunuchs practically flying between the zenana and the Apadana, the Emperor is foaming at the mouth, they whispered into her ear, he is jabbering and yammering and howling and bawling, and all of the guests are in shock; the celebration has fallen apart and come to an end; they reported, in the palaces of Susa, of the unexpected events; and Parysatis was happy once again, for the mere fact that the Emperor’s repulsive yet seemingly unassailable sense that there could be no problems at all between him and Vashti, for whatever foolishly squalid reasons, thrilled her, so that both her headaches and her nausea immediately disappeared; she felt wonderful, her eyes glittered, her brow unfurrowed, her back straightened, once again assuming that immovable face, so dreaded by all those around her, while Vashti herself was writhing between proud dignity and wounded humiliation, sitting in the audience hall of the Queen’s apartments convinced of the justness of her own response, and waited for him, the one of whom and from whom such appalling reports arrived, she waited for the Great King but he did not come, only more and more reports, and Vashti fell deeper and deeper into shock, and grew despondent, and she could know already what was to follow, for there was nothing else that could follow, she knew how the council — the convening of which she had been, in keeping with tradition, immediately informed — would decide, just as they were, drunken and starving for a fatal scandal, that she would have to proceed from the queen’s apartments across the desolate palace to the forbidden gate, she would have to follow the centuries-old mandate and take the first steps of exile, so that in the end she would be no more than one smothered in ashes, like a dog that had disobeyed.

They asserted everything, and then they asserted the opposite as well, it simply was unbelievable that in the case of a practically “new” masterpiece — the ensemble of panel-paintings depicting the story of Esther was altogether five hundred years old — so little was known, still, they didn’t know anything; this is not a question of the “wider public” — even though this term encompasses fewer and fewer people, this lack of knowledge going along side by side with erudition — but rather of the endless hordes of experts, who have sacrificed numerous works of scholarship to demonstrating that, of course, Sandro Botticelli painted the series of panels depicting Esther’s story, as well as others demonstrating that Sandro Botticelli did not paint them; then to prove that perhaps he only painted the essential parts, and then not even that; maybe he just created the undersketch for Lippi, to show him what he had to paint, and then that the panel entitled “La Derelitta” — one of the most mysterious artworks of the quattrocento — was of course the fourth piece, one of the side-panels, earlier believed to be lost, of the cassoni, as the forzieri — that is to say, the two large chests that were bestowed as a dowry by the bride’s family, to hold the bridal trousseau as well as preserve other valuable objects — were called; then later on someone else came along, who eliminating all doubts — hmm — hypothesized that the renowned “La Derelitta” was the work of Botticelli but it did not form, and never had formed, a part of the cassoni, of which it is not known who commissioned them, or when the order was issued by that person who commissioned them, and which were later scattered in as many directions as there were separate pieces: there is a witness to the fact that in the gallery of the Palazzo Torrigiani in the nineteenth century the six panels were still placed together, but then the individual sections turned up along the most obscure of routes, in six different museums, from Chantilly to the Horne Foundation; then came the twentieth century when — now in possession of technological possibilities previously unknown — it was possible to hope that the researchers who study these forzieri or cassoni would come up with something, well they came up with the fact that Filippino Lippi, born out of the forbidden passion of the former monk Fra Filippo Lippi and the former nun Lucrezia Buti, could have something to do with it, namely that the young child who had inherited in a truly astonishing fashion all of his father’s genius, was an apprentice — perhaps at the age of fourteen, shortly after his father’s death in 1470 or 1471 — in the workshop of Botticelli, himself previously an assistant in his father’s workshop, so that — the contemporary experts opined — it is highly likely that the adolescent Lippi worked on the series of panels depicting the story of Esther; later on, however, we found out from Edgar Wind and André Chastel that, well, not exactly; they painted the panels together, but it was impossible to say who had painted what, and presumably Botticelli did play some role in their creation, and we can read in the very latest promisingly monumental monograph published in 2004 by a certain Patrizia Zambrano who, doubtless ranking among the greatest masters of saying absolutely nothing, herself reached the conclusion that both Botticelli and Lippi could have painted the panels, perhaps the two of them working together, or in such a way that Botticelli somehow worked on the pictures, perhaps in the planning or the undersketches, and then Lippi did the painting; or conversely that Lippi worked completely alone — the elasticity, if it can be expressed like that, with which Ms. Zambrano covers all the possibilities, is unbelievable — and it can even be worthy of high praise that she was able to knead together, into one single study, all the hypotheses that have arisen in the difficult question of attribution since the time of the quattrocento until now; to put it briefly, we know nothing, as was always the case; it’s just as if in the matter there would now be a kind of consensus that “La Derelitta,” at least, was painted by Botticelli alone, which is quite obvious — inasmuch as one looks at the painting itself — and it is impossible to comprehend the presumed difficulty of separating it from Lippi’s oeuvre, or how one can establish that it in no way formed a part of the Esther panels, in other words, we can remain in the barren steppe of the last descriptive scholarly contribution, that is to say the work of Alfred Scharf, published in 1935, which awkwardly and laboriously ponders over the date of creation for the panels, but — thankfully — nothing more, as the author is compelled to demonstrate simply what can be seen in the individual paintings, and how all this is connected to other similar forzieri created by Lippi, and more generally, how these are connected to Lippi’s life work, and that’s it already, that’s enough, 1935, Alfred Scharf, and we’re done, because in the end what is the point of bothering with the deliberations of the scholars, if the bucket in which they are mixing their brew is completely empty; and so is it not sufficient, not deserving enough of awe, that in the terrifying and unknown machinations of chance and accident, these panels have actually been passed down to us? — for after all these speculations, at least it is not possible to doubt in their existence, to contradict the fact that they exist.