Do Porto ao Gulag (II)

Sometimes, on the coldest winter days, I like to drink this wine, mulled with a few drops of lemon. Second pause. Second gulp.

The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, War and Peace...universal works, among others, where Port wine appears as a drink highly appreciated by the tsars and aristocrats, and of which Nicholas II was a fervent follower. In the fourth chapter, José Milhazes describes the waste — if it can be called waste — of Portuguese wine to celebrate the coronation of the Tsar. However, coupled with this celebration was the horrific Khodynka Tragedy: a mob that tried to get some of the gifts that were going to be given to anyone who was to celebrate the coronation ended with more than 1,400 dead and about 20,000 injured. The human avalanche is one of the difficult human reactions to understand. If the journalist covering the event was not lying, the tsar's mother gave a thousand bottles of Madeira and Porto wine to the most seriously injured.

The author expands throughout the fifth chapter with news from the gossip magazines of the moment: Pushkin having the hots for the Velho sisters, Josefina's illness, the mother who disappears for six years, Josefina's suicide, relationship of the Russian poet with the Marchioness of Alorna, intimate relationships of the Marchioness's daughter with General Junot, birth of Idalia Polética, the demon Idalia to whom they attribute a ruse that leads to Pushkin's death... Talking bad and soon, you could avoid all this bait and reach the end of the chapter where it realizes the duel and death of the poet. What could be the true reason for the hatred that this woman showed towards this man and that she kept until the end of her days?

From chapter sixth I have been very attracted to the footnotes. Surprising is the abbreviated curriculum of Gomes Freire de Andrade or Manuel Inácio Martins Pamplona, who are still collateral characters in the book, but with fantastic lives.

My reading slowed down and I even had the pleasure of reading and reading the future of Maria Rehbinder Mansurova several times; she personifies the journey that passes from mener la vie belle until — after wandering from one place to another — arriving in France onde Maria lecciona, durante muitos anos, numa escola para crianças russas, after asking Maxim Gorky's wife to intercede for her daughter who had been sentenced two years in exile in the Urals. Maria, like a hinge, lives the two most intense moments in her country, in my opinion: Tsarist Russia and Russia of the Soviets.

From my Borstal

LDR

Do Porto ao Gulag: A Viagem Secular de Uma Familia Portuense no Império Russo/Soviético. José Milhazes e Oficina do Livro, 2019