missing masterpieces (of literature)

October 23, 2005 2:55 PM

The 'missing masterpieces' (of literature).
posted by stbalbach (16 comments total)

The Works of Sappho.
Charlotte Bronte's correspondence with Mary Taylor.
Etcetera.
posted by jokeefe at 3:04 PM on October 23, 2005

Great article, thanks.
posted by hopeless romantique at 3:07 PM on October 23, 2005

Fascinating stuff...
posted by brundlefly at 3:20 PM on October 23, 2005

This Nikolai Gogol, he sounds like a fascinating fellow. Must read Dead Souls before the last vestiges of my Russian fade into oblivion.

I never did believe it was possible for a man to deliberately starve himself to death. Wonder if there is more to that story.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 3:50 PM on October 23, 2005

Great article, thanks. It is probably best Hemingway's manuscripts got stolen. Instead of the war novel he probably was not mature enough to write, we got The Sun Also Rises, and after that A Farewell to Arms. I don't know the exact figure, but he posted an ad in a paper in Paris offering a reward for the return of the suitcase. The reward was some pitifully small amount of money, like $3.00 american. He probably knew he was capable of better writing that what was in that suitcase.
posted by marxchivist at 4:18 PM on October 23, 2005

I wasn't aware Hemingway lost his first novel. It bears a striking resemblance to what happened to Ralph Ellison--he lost his first manuscript in a fire, then went on to publish Invisible Man.

Aristotle's poetics on comedy.
posted by bardic at 4:29 PM on October 23, 2005

I read a New Yorker piece from 1950 about Hemingway, a reporter met him at the airport flying up from Cuba to shop for a few days in Manhatten - he was "hugging" a briefcase containing his latest manuscript that he would not let go even at the airport bar (while getting tight). Great piece, its one of the featured articles in the New Yorker archive DVD set.
posted by stbalbach at 4:43 PM on October 23, 2005

The rest is speculation.

Actually, most of it is speculation. The Margites was attributed to Homer, but if we had it we'd probably long since have decided it wasn't by the author of the Iliad and Odyssey (if indeed those two are by the same person). If Socrates did indeed write "versifications of Aesop's Fables," there's no reason to think they were particularly good; he was a philosopher, not a poet. All those books are attributed to Confucius the way epics were to Homer (or Persian ghazals to Hafez); there's no particular reason to think he composed anything but the Analects. Hem's first novel was probably lousy; Love's Labour's Won may or may not have been a play other than the ones we know (and may or may not have been much good). Which leaves us with all those lost Greek plays and poems, about which much ink has been spilled these last few centuries, and some memoirs and letters burned by pious survivors. I guess it would be fun to read Byron's memoirs, but since I haven't gotten around to Don Juan yet, I'll sleep in peace without them.
posted by languagehat at 4:58 PM on October 23, 2005

Also, Cardenio, which William Shakespeare took from Don Quixote.
posted by ryrivard at 5:37 PM on October 23, 2005

I never did believe it was possible for a man to deliberately starve himself to death. Wonder if there is more to that story.

In Edvard Radzinsky's biography of Stalin there's a creepy story about Gogol's ultimate fate. The monastery that included the cemetery where Gogol was buried was being demolished to make way for some new building. In the course of exhumation, they discovered that his head was turned to the side, rather than in the normal resting position of a corpse. It's not impossible for this to happen to a dead body, but doubts are raised by the fact that Gogol's will specifically asked that "unmistakable signs of decomposition" be apparent before he was interred. So it may not be possible to starve yourself to death, but it may be possible to starve yourself to a point that looks like death.

My addition: Bruno Schulz's The Messiah.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 5:49 PM on October 23, 2005

Here's another missing masterpiece: the Encylopedia Maxima
posted by dhruva at 6:23 PM on October 23, 2005

The lost books and works of a host of historians: Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, Fabius Pictor, etc. The rest of the Greek tragedians (Sophocles, Euripides, and the others from whom we have nothing). Not really literature, but the Senate archives, which would most notably have records of Pontius Pilate's proconsulship, which some Church Father says has information on Jesus's trial, as well as an incredible amount of information on Roman government. The rest of Petronius's Satyricon. A great number of Greek lyric poets, including Sappho. Etc. The amount that survives from antiquity is the smallest percentage of what there actually was.
posted by dd42 at 8:42 PM on October 23, 2005

Imagine if only 100 novels survived from the 19th century, even some of the average ones (Paul Clifford "A dark and stormy night..") would be called great classics considering thats all we had. Which makes one wonder, how many existing classics from antiquity are simply by default of nothing better.
posted by stbalbach at 10:02 PM on October 23, 2005

They are located in Borges' Library of Babel actually, but the card catalog is a pain in the ass.
posted by Falconetti at 10:09 PM on October 23, 2005

but lh, where's your sense of romance? I, for one, welcome the chance to wonder about many books I probably would not have read anyway.
posted by OmieWise at 5:57 AM on October 24, 2005

Oh, me too—I just thought the linked piece was trying too hard, digging up everything that might fit into the category and thus devaluing the things that are genuinely worth agonizing over.
posted by languagehat at 7:15 AM on October 24, 2005