'It Is an Examination of the Soul'

In A Factotum in the Book Trade (Biblioasis, 2022), Marius Kociejowski shares memorable examples of his favorite theme: discovering a good book he never knew existed. On Page 7 he recounts a visit to a bookshop near his home in London where he peruses the literary criticism section, “which rarely affords me pleasure.” Readers of Factotum will soon note the frequent appearance of that word, pleasure. 

The volume he discovers is King Lear, the Space of Tragedy: The Diary of a Film Director (trans. Mary Mackintosh, University of California Press, 1977) by the Russian director Grigori Kozintsev (1905-1973). His film of Shakespeare’s play came out in 1971, the same year as Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Peter Brook’s King Lear.

 

“I leafed through it,” Marius writes of the diary, “and there was barely a page that didn’t contain at least one line that immediately detached itself from the surrounding text and astonished me.”

 

Marius echoes Keats yet again: “I look upon fine phrases like a lover.” His description of the book is free of hyperbole. He has seen Kozintsev’s Lear. I haven’t but I’ve started reading the book after browsing through it.

 

“The book . . . despite its somewhat drab title, is wholly one,” Marius writes. “I am now close to the end of it, reading it slowly because of the joy it affords me. It is a treasure not only of Shakespeare criticism, which it is, or of filmmaking, which it also is, but at its most profound level it is an examination of the soul. Already it has become one of my ‘secret’ texts with the alchemical properties such books contain.”

 

Like Marius, I’m reading Kozintsev’s book slowly, and I’ve decided to buy a copy based on what I’ve read. I’ve already made a lot of notes and know I will return to the book. Kozintsev is broadly cultured and has interesting things to say about Gogol and Dostoevsky, Welles and Kurosawa (whose Ran is loosely based on Lear). He used Boris Pasternak's translation of Lear as the basis of his script. We’re never finished reading King Lear. With Shakespeare’s other tragedies, it’s the autobiography of our species. In his account to the play’s final scene, Kozintsev writes:

 

“’Be your tears wet?’ he asks his daughter whom he threw out of his house and cursed – ‘Yes, faith.’

 

“I think these are the most powerful words in the whole tragedy.”

 

On the day I borrowed Kozintsev’s book from the library, Ted Gioia posted his essay “10 Observations on Tragedy in the Digital Age”:

   

“The essence of tragedy as a narrative device is that you’ve created your own mess (perhaps without realizing it), and now you face the consequences. The digital age, with its technocratic and plutocratic optimism, is incapable of grasping this view of human frailty.”