Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

She was overflowing with ideas, she said, of a whole new breadth and importance and yet so natural and self-evident that she couldn’t help laughing.

She was worse on Sunday. She could barely speak, but insisted on seeing Fufu in the costume that she was going to wear to a children’s party.

It was a Gypsy costume, and Fufu danced in it, around her mother’s bed.

On Monday Sophia asked Teresa Gulden to look after Fufu.

That evening she felt better, and a nurse came in to give Teresa and Ellen a rest.

In the early hours of the morning Sophia woke. Teresa and Ellen were wakened from sleep and they roused Fufu that the child might see her mother alive one more time. Sophia could speak just a little.

Teresa thought she heard her say, “Too much happiness.”

She died around four o’clock. The autopsy would show her lungs completely ravaged by pneumonia and her heart displaying trouble which went back several years. Her brain, as everybody expected, was large.

The doctor from Bornholm read of her death in the newspaper, without surprise. He had occasional presentiments, disturbing to one in his profession, and not necessarily reliable. He had thought that avoiding Copenhagen might preserve her. He wondered if she had taken the drug he had given her, and if it had brought her solace, as it did, when necessary, to him.

Sophia Kovalevsky was buried in what was then called the New Cemetery, in Stockholm, at three o’clock in the afternoon of a still cold day when the breath of mourners and onlookers hung in clouds on the frosty air.

A wreath of laurel came from Weierstrass. He had said to his sisters that he knew he would never see her again.

He lived for six more years.

Maksim came from Beaulieu, summoned by Mittag-Leffler’s telegram before her death. He arrived in time to speak at the funeral, in French, referring to Sophia rather as if she had been a professor of his acquaintance, and thanking the Swedish nation on behalf of the Russian nation for giving her a chance to earn her living (to use her knowledge in a worthy manner, he said) as a mathematician.

Maksim did not marry. He was allowed after some time to return to his homeland, to lecture in Petersburg. He founded the Party for Democratic Reform in Russia, taking a stand for constitutional monarchy. The czarists found him much too liberal. Lenin, however, denounced him as a reactionary.

Fufu practiced medicine in the Soviet Union, dying there in the mid-fifties of the twentieth century. She had no interest in mathematics, so she said.

Sophia’s name has been given to a crater on the moon.

I discovered Sophia Kovalevsky (“Too Much Happiness”) while searching for something else in the Britannica one day. The combination of novelist and mathematician immediately caught my interest, and I began to read everything about her I could find. One book enthralled me beyond all others, and so I must record my indebtedness, my immense gratitude, to the author of Little Sparrow: A Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky (Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1983), Don H. Kennedy, and his wife, Nina, a collateral descendent of Sophia’s, who provided quantities of texts translated from the Russian, including portions of Sophia’s diaries, letters and numerous other writings.

I have limited my story to the days leading up to Sophia’s death, with flashbacks to her earlier life. But I do urge anybody interested to read the Kennedys’ book, which presents such historical and mathematical riches.

June 2009

Alice Munro

Clinton, Ontario

Canada

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous collections of stories- Dance of the Happy Shades; Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You; The Beggar Maid; The Moons of Jupiter; The Progress of Love; Friend of My Youth; Open Secrets; The Love of a Good Woman; Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage; Runaway; and The View from Castle Rock -as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women , and a Selected Stories . During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada ’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England ’s W. H. Smith Book Award, and the United States ’ National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review , and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.