Dostoevsky's last relatives live in poverty

Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky's last relatives live in poverty

Literary giant's great-granddaughter suffers in penury as acute as that of the characters in his novels 

Amelia Gentleman in St Petersburg
Sun 1 Oct 2000 01.19 BST

Confined by her illness to a shabby, sparsely decorated room, the great-granddaughter of one of Russia's greatest novelists believes the poverty she faces would have shocked even her ancestor, Fyodor Dostoevsky, champion of the deprived and destitute.

Tatyana Vysokogorets-Dostoevskaya, 63, never leaves her second-floor flat, within an ageing concrete block, which was assigned to her a few years ago when she could no longer meet the rent on her old home.

She has done what she can to make the room bearable. A fraying blanket has been thrown on the floor in place of a carpet. Rows of plastic pill containers and medicine bottles are lined tidily on the shelves alongside two sepia postcards of the novelist and sickly geraniums. Orthodox icons made from paper have been placed in the corner.

The view from the window shows identical, greying apartment buildings stretching deep into this faceless suburb, far beyond the last Metro station to the north of St Petersburg. The distressing sound of a neighbour's consumptive cough comes through the walls.

Every month she receives an invalid's pension of 865 roubles (£21) from which she has to pay rent and bills, feed herself and support her unemployed son and teenage grandson. She has stopped buying meat and fruit and sometimes cannot even afford bread and milk.

Although she has not read Dostoevsky since she was a teenager, Tatyana is conscious of the painful similarities between her situation and the lives of the poverty-stricken people of nineteenth-century St Petersburg who are described by him in Crime and Punishment .

'Dostoevsky wrote beautifully about the poor, and it's obvious he really felt for them. But I think even he would have been horrified to see how his descendants are living,' she said, dropping ash from a strong Russian cigarette into an empty sardine tin.

Recently she appealed for help in an open letter to a Russian weekly newspaper which prompted public dismay and a flurry of small personal contributions from Dostoevsky-lovers - many of them equally impoverished pensioners - totalling around 2,000 roubles (£50). But there was no official response.

While moved by these gestures, Tatyana feels the Russian government - which she says has indirectly benefited from her great-grandfather's work - should keep her off the breadline. 'It isn't just our family. All over the city people are living with just as much difficulty now as they did in Dostoevsky's time. What he described has returned in a horrible new form. He foresaw it all.'

Hunched in her chair, wearing layers of darned clothes to keep out the cold, Tatyana makes a convincing Dostevskian figure: defenceless and despairing, an ordinary person bewildered by how society has treated her.

There are just six direct descendants of Dostoevsky still alive: Tatyana, her son and grandson, her brother Andrei Dostoevsky (who scrapes together a living as an unregistered taxi driver), his son and granddaughter. All of them live in St Petersburg, struggling to survive.

For most of her early life Tatyana was oblivious to the status of her great-grandfather. With the tightening of ideological controls in the 1930s, his writings were excluded from the school curriculum and his novels published rarely until the 1970s. The anti-revolutionary and deeply religious convictions at the heart of his philosophy were deemed unconstructive. 'He was considered an obscure writer. Even before I got married and took my husband's name, people rarely commented on my surname,' she said.

She developed no particular interest in literature and studied at a technical college before working first as a telephone engineer and then as a state central heating official. 'When we were children, our father used to read the books aloud to us, but I found it much harder when I started reading them myself. He has a very difficult style,' she said.

Throughout the 1960s her father campaigned to have Dostoevsky's reputation restored and helped to persuade officials to open a museum in the building where the writer died. Just before her father's own death, she helped him to take those heirlooms which were not lost along with the family property and savings in the Revolution - a few pieces of furniture and clocks - from their flat to be displayed in the new state museum.

In her more desperate moments, she fantasises about the price they might have got if they had sold these belongings instead. In this same mood, she feels envious of Leo Tolstoy's offspring, who made themselves rich in the West; she wonders why no one has ever invited her to attend a Dostoevsky literary conference; she wants to know why the money still being generated by his writing never filters back to help her family.

Natalia Ashimbaeva, the Dostoevsky museum's new director, is sympathetic. 'We know how much she needs help,' she said, adding that staff had done what little they could to support her, given their own battle against underfunding.

But she was perplexed by the idea that the state had a moral obligation to support the writer's relatives. 'She needs an increase to her pension - but if the state helps her just because she is Dostoevsky's great-granddaughter it would create a dangerous precedent. They'd have to start helping Chekhov's relatives and then Glinka's - there would be no way of stopping.'

When she is feeling more rational, Tatyana concedes that her problems are common to everyone her age. Russia's pensioners are a neglected generation. Having spent most of their lives working for a system which collapsed dramatically in their old age, they have been left without the social support the old regime would have guaranteed them. Stripped of their savings in the financial crises of the 1990s, those who do not have families to look after them find their pensions utterly inadequate. Many go on the streets to sell their possessions or trade cigarettes. Some 12 million pensioners across Russia are thought to be battling poverty.

'People of my age are no longer living, they are simply existing,' she said. 'Old people are hungry and can't afford to buy themselves medicines.'

She is ashamed she only developed an interest in Dostoevsky late in life, but says she was guided by other priorities.

'My father used to say, "Never forget you are the great-granddaughter of a great writer". But I forgot. I married a sailor and became a worker. I believed in the socialist goal. I believed we were working to build a wonderful future. The reality has turned out to be nightmarish.'

THE GUARDIAN

Julia Ormond / Didn't you used to be famous?

Didn't you used to be famous?

Julia Ormond was swept off to Hollywood to become a star - but somehow it didn't happen. Now she's in London to appear in David Hare's new play. She tells Harriet Lane why she came back

Harriet Lane

Sunday 10 September 2000

F

ive years ago, the smart Hollywood money was on Julia Ormond becoming the new Julia Roberts or the new Meg Ryan. Instead, she went off at a different angle and became the new Geena Davis. Like Davis, Ormond enjoyed a spectacular launch in Hollywood, buoyed by gallons of publicity rocket fuel: a dazzling ascent swiftly followed by a tumble back to earth at the end of a blackened stick.

There is something rather Hilaire Belloc about Julia Ormond's story, something a little cautionary. Or rather, there would be if she would only play along with it, cast herself as The Fallen Star, or The Girl From Surrey Who Thought She Was Audrey Hepburn. But one role she's simply not interested in is that of victim. 'For sure, you don't believe the good stuff,' says Ormond, referring to the hullaballoo that surrounded her in 1995 when Legends of the Fall , First Knight and Sabrina all opened more or less simultaneously. 'I mean, the good stuff is just insane - wacky. If you don't take it too much to heart, it does help when the negative stuff hits. And you know the negative stuff is coming. It's got to! What comes up must come down.'

And it's true: she did know it was coming. At 29, Ormond hadn't submitted rapturously to the star machine. There were sacrifices she didn't want to make. On-set admirers called her 'formidable' and 'flinty' and 'honest'; unnamed sources grumbled about 'attitude'. Looking back at her earliest interviews, conducted amid a swarm of excitable movie execs and publicists, with superagent Michael Ovitz himself on hand to fetch her glasses of water, you note a rich seam of ho-hum scepticism. 'They seem to be very sure things are going to be a success,' Ormond told Vogue in 1995. 'I'm not being negative about it, but I'm hedging my bets.'

Certainly, the timing was unfortunate. Legends of the Fall, where she played the love interest, was quickly followed by First Knight, a hilarious turkey in which a trumpet-sleeved Ormond was Guinevere, torn between Sean Connery and Richard Gere. Then came a remake of Sabrina, in which director Sydney Pollack misguidedly steered her into Audrey Hepburn's ballet pumps. Though she knows Sabrina was a mistake, Ormond has no regrets. 'It was a fantastic learning experience and OK, I got slammed because I wasn't Audrey Hepburn... but you could have predicted that, really, if you'd opened your eyes wide enough. But I was hungry for the learning experience and didn't feel secure enough to say no. You need to be bloody secure to say no.'

She knew she was lucky, but she also knew she was out of her depth - not with the acting, but with the stuff that surrounded it. 'The odd thing for me is the focus on looks which happened in the States. I'd always felt that was not going to be a strong point. That made me feel very disturbed, because it never seemed to be about how much hard work was involved. Ever. It was about... "hazel eyes". It does help if you can brush that stuff off.'

Billed by the publicists as an ingénue, Surrey-born Ormond was no such thing, and this may have saved her bacon. After drama school and an advert for cottage cheese, she had spent a decade as a jobbing actor in the UK, carving out a strong reputation on stage (in 1989, she'd won the London Critics' Award for Best Newcomer, in Christopher Hampton's Faith Hope and Charity at the Lyric Hammersmith) and television (in particular, as a drug addict in Traffik) before landing Legends.

'I found it all very scary. This fairytale gets built around you - as if you've been walking through the streets and then Sydney Pollack sees you and goes, "I'll put you in something!" When really you've gone to drama school and rep and then you've come to London and gone to auditions... and you've worked, solidly, for years. But that all gets forgotten. At first I was a bit indignant about it, and then I realised, "No, that's what people want, so that's what is given." But it's not in your control. It's just what happens to you, and that's what's frightening.'

The roles, on the other hand, were a gas. In the UK, 'I'd seemed to play a lot of people who'd slit their wrists or cut off their hair or shot themselves or died of the plague. And if you do anything for too long, it starts to lack edge, to become too easy. Easy is the kiss of death. And so for me what I needed was to get my head out of my bottom, and so to go off and do First Knight - gallivanting around on a horse, with a cape, and knights in blue corduroy - was quite fun.'

So Ormond gallivanted for a bit, airing her famous, transfixing smile as required ('You watch her just to wait for it to happen,' wrote one journalist), and then... vanished, at least from the mainstream. Stepping off the red carpet, she took bigger risks. A doomed film version of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow , directed by Bille August. A three-hour Russian epic, The Barber of Siberia, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov. When she was white-hot she'd been offered the Holy Grail of movie-star accessories, her own production company, and Ormond actually did something with hers, making a documentary about Bosnian women in Serbian detention camps, and working with Harold Pinter on a Karen Blixen short story that she hopes to direct. Last year she married an American who works in e-commerce.

For her next trick, she's coming back to the London stage for the first time in nine years. At the Royal Court, in a break from rehearsing David Hare's new play My Zinc Bed , Ormond looks very London, very theatre. She's wearing a black jersey, chinos and navy flipflops, and her hair is rather tangled, as if it hasn't been brushed for days. No make-up. Her face has more character, more shade, than I was expecting. You do find yourself staring at her, just so you won't miss the wild energy that surges across it when she laughs.

Ormond hasn't turned her back on film (the marital home is in LA, and The Prime Gig, a comedy co-starring Vince Vaughn and Ed Harris, is in post-production) but the Hare project was too good to miss. What swung it for her? 'The fact that David had written it and David was directing it at the Royal Court and it was a new three-hander. Plus, it's a brilliant play. I'm not making any comment on how we execute it or what we achieve through doing it, but reading it, it's a phenomenal play.'

Since there's some sort of unofficial embargo about My Zinc Bed, neither Ormond nor her co-stars Tom Wilkinson and Steven Mackintosh will spell out what actually happens in the play, other than saying that it's about an entrepreneur who recruits a young poet to jazz up his internet empire. Ormond, who plays Elsa, the entrepreneur's wife, says the Hare script outshone every film script that was coming her way. In any case, she'd been keen to get back to theatre.

'I ride,' says Ormond, who has a way with analogies, 'and doing theatre after doing film is a bit like doing dressage or showjumping after you've been out for endless hacks, having just a wild old time. You're put through your paces in a different way. And it's not that going out for a hack is wrong or bad, I certainly don't view it as that; it's just that there's something about the dressage, being put through your paces, that makes you better.'

Yes, she feels the stakes are high this time around. 'I feel that David took a risk with me. I have a sense that by starting off in the theatre and going off to do films you are seen to sell out in some way. I don't hold truck with that, but you can't stop people from feeling it. So I think people are a little guarded about me. Oh, God! It's never just about the piece. Something else always washes over it.'

She's anxious that her own trajectory, her own reputation, should not obscure Hare's work. When she adds, 'But then, my sense is that that' s all something in the past - I've escaped it', she sounds like she really means it.

THE GUARDIAN

George Saunders's Pastoralia / Beautiful losers

Beautiful losers

Adam Begley enjoys strange satire in George Saunders's Pastoralia

Pastoralia 

by George Saunders 

188pp, Bloomsbury, £9.99 

Adam Begley

Saturday 5 August 2000 01.27 BST

Pastoralia: a good name for a theme park. It suggests rural simplicity tweaked, enhanced by modern technology and superior management skills. Though George Saunders uses it as the title of a story set in a theme park, it could also be his wry comment on the circumstances of the unnamed narrator, whose job is to impersonate a caveman. He lives in a cave and sleeps in a "separate area" equipped with a fax machine. On the cave walls are fake pictographs; outside, a herd of "robotic something-or- others" appears to be feeding.

Saunders's bitterly funny stories here and in his extraordinary debut, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), succeed in squeezing meaning and emotional resonance out of absurd, post-real predicaments. His satirical jabs are sharp and scary, but also sad and unexpectedly touching. In Pastoralia, the faux -caveman is urged to denounce a "subpar" colleague, but resists with a truth so primitive it shocks: "'She's a friend,' I say." Though he's meek and dim, beset by troubles and half-brainwashed by his inane job, he acquires with that single utterance a provisional heroism. In Saunders's world, that's the best you can hope for.

Saunders specialises in giving losers - the ugly, the weak, the self-absorbed - a flicker of appeal or delusional hope. We meet them in motivational seminars, drivers' education courses, walking home from dead-end jobs. We follow them to places like Sea Oak, with "no sea and no oak, just 100 subsidised apartments and a rear view of FedEx". Inside those apartments, the tenants are watching TV: "How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who's always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they've been sainted by pain."

Saunders's stories present an unsettling amalgam of degraded language and high art: slogans, jargon and the crippling incoherence of daily speech, arranged on the page with meticulous care. He cherishes the brutal solecisms of the American vernacular, working them for laughs and the odd shot of beauty, too. Who can resist a high school education "mini-session" called "Who You Do Is Up To You"?

Less shocking, less zany than CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, in which the subnormal, paranormal and not yet normal all clamour for a hearing, Pastoralia sticks mostly to plausible absurdities. There's one ghost story, but the supernatural dimension is eclipsed by the ghost's all-too-human complaint: "Why do some people get everything and I got nothing?" The rest of the stories succeed on the strength of fine-tuning, not special effects.

A darling of American critics, Saunders was last year chosen by The New Yorker as one of the 20 best fiction writers under 40. Though his sensibility is easy to spot, it's nearly impossible to pick out his voice. He's a self-erasing author, happy to let other voices do the work. This absence could be ominous - a black hole that sucks in the contemporary scene and spits out satire - but it reads more like confidence, or serene faith, or philosophical calm. Or a good sense of humour.

• Adam Begley is literary editor of The New York Observer.

THE GUARDIAN

Mary Beard / The Invention of Jane Harrison / Secret history

 

Secret history

The Invention Of Jane Harrison

by Mary Beard

That elusive heroine of classics, Jane Harrison, has met her match in her biographer, Mary Beard

James Davidson

Saturday 19 July 2000

 

Someone was running across the gardens of "Fernham College" at a terrific pace. Her features were indistinct; the half-light made phantoms of everyone. But there was something familiar about her. "Could it be J- H- herself?"

Mary Beard

Jane Harrison, who had died a few months before, would have enjoyed her cameo role in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a fleeting, unstoppable ghost. Born bang in the middle of the 19th century and passing into the Land of the Shades only in 1928, Harrison remains one of the most important and influential women in the field of classical studies.Almost a century after they were written, her books - Themis, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion - are still in print. She is famous for being among the first to dig through the sublime surfaces of Greek civilisation to expose the stranger and more primitive culture lurking underneath.

Prime ministers knew her, as did Eliots TS and George. André Gide wrote a poem, "Persephone", based on her ideas about the vegetation cycle, while Virginia Woolf was on hand to observe her "billing and cooing" with Hope Mirlees, the woman with whom she shared her later years and who became her devoted but reticent archivist.

As well as being clever and important she was also, of course, a Character, full of self-belief. Indeed, she was several Characters, depending on the audience and the mood - a professionally bluff Yorkshirewoman when it suited her, at other times the chain-smoking Sappho of Colville Gardens, whose intimate seminars were the subject of an admiring article in the Pall Mall Gazette.

Her lectures were full-scale theatrical events that she toured around the country. She dressed for the occasion, most famously in a shimmering beetle green, talking emphatically and always down to her audience, casting shadows over the hand-painted images of bearded serpents, sacrificial oxen and key words projected onto the screen behind her. There were sound effects, too. On one memorable occasion she had two friends whirl bull-roarers at the back of the hall to evoke the noises of a mystery cult. In Glasgow, 1,600 people came to hear her talk on Attic grave stelae, or so she told the reporter from the Gazette. To many she was a living monument, to others a brilliant self-publicist.

With her Sapphic love, her fondness for William Morris wallpaper, her languor and quotability, her deployment of teddy bears - in one letter, Harrison's toy bear invites Hope Mirlees, "his young wife", to dine in Hall with Harrison, his "elder wife", and signs off with a picture of the constellation Ursa Major - Harrison fits perfectly into the history of the Decadents and Effeminates, a history in which women rarely find a place. In some ways she is what Oscar Wilde, four years younger and the most brilliant male classicist of his year, might have been had he succeeded in his ambition to become an Oxford don.

Mary Beard has spent long hours in Jane Harrison's company, digging through the archives. She is interested less in Harrison's biography than in the way her students constructed her life and her archive. How to be honest and truthful about a woman they admired and loved without giving away her "Secret"? Harrison had herself published a book of reminiscences, but she destroyed much other material. Mirlees planned a personal biography shortly after Harrison's death, but found over several decades that it was an impossible task. It was Mirlees above all who made the archive, but the archive is designed to hide as much as it reveals. In Mary Beard, however, Jane Harrison has met her match.

The star of The Invention of Jane Harrison has to share the limelight with another character who is much more obscure. Ten years younger than Harrison, Eugenie Sellers, known to posterity as Mrs Arthur Strong, seemed at one time an equally good bet for posthumous glory. A great beauty in the 19th century who modelled for the pre-Raphaelites, in the 20th she became a pioneering historian of Roman art.

According to Asquith, she was the most "distinguished woman scholar" in the world: one of the first women to become a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, recipient of the CBE and the gold medal of the city of Rome. She dominated the British School of Art and Archaeology for years, although not in title Director, but his Assistant.

When the director eventually married, troubles inevitably arose, ostensibly over fondness for animals. Was it true, as was alleged, that Mrs Strong had actually encouraged students to attend a bullfight? From such trivial beginnings a feud grew. When it seemed to be reaching a crisis, all three were summarily, if politely, dismissed.

Eugenie stayed on in Rome and increased her renown and her collection of calling cards. Her friends and acquaintances included Henry James, Ezra Pound, Mussolini and a whole clutch of cardinals. We know this because she saved the calling cards, as well as the correspondence over the bullfight dispute, annotating her letters. She left two rich archives, one in Cambridge and the other in Rome at the British School. Jane Harrison, on the other hand, burned her letters. Nevertheless it is Harrison and not Strong who is remembered.

Since they seem to have known almost everyone else worth knowing, Beard has a hunch that - despite the almost complete silence from their biographers - these two famous scholars must also have known each other. Mrs Strong, she notes, contributed to Harrison's memorial fund the carefully unobtrusive sum of one pound and five pence. Going much further back, she finds both as eager participants in a series of Greek tableaux put on in the spring of 1883 in the private theatre of Cromwell House, home of Sir Charles and Lady Freake, a couple not renowned for their refinements (Lady Freake, it was noted with some amusement, pronounced Homer without the aitch).

These were glittering events. Sets and poses were arranged by the great painters of the time, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones. Gladstone and Tennyson were to be discovered in the audience. The beautiful Eugenie was often to be found playing Helen, of course, and the costumes, poses and ladies received extravagant praise. But, as Beard discovers, the connection between Eugenie and Jane went rather deeper than sharing the same stage.

In fact, it seems likely that they shared a flat and feelings for each other. While Harrison worked up her lectures, Strong was busy booking venues and arranging publicity. At some point, however, there was a "terrific bust-up" and Harrison is later to be found angered by Strong and the "unscrupulous way she used people to get on", while in the drafts of her autobiography Strong refers darkly to the kind of woman who applied "the power of fascination... where she could, on callow youths chiefly and younger women".

Beard is too careful a scholar to draw conclusions about the precise nature of the "bust-up", and too careful a historian to out Harrison and Strong anachronistically as a lesbian couple, but she makes a cogent case for rewriting the history of Classics in a way that would make Harrison less isolated, treating the two women as partners rather than ships that passed in the night. This book does not celebrate a rare and uncomplicated feminine triumph in the still-too-butch Academy, nor does it make easy connections between Harrison's Sapphic life and work, for all its bearded snakes, powerful goddesses and transient gods.

What it does do is evoke wonderfully the kitschy Hellenic craze of the end of the 19th century, female friendship and rivalry and, above all, what it is like to be led by ghosts through an archive - careful ghosts with high expectations of the life you will produce, ghosts with a secret and endless ways to distract you from it with calling cards, precisely measured donations, wrongly labelled photographs and endless other false trails.

THE GUARDIAN

Mike Phillips's top 10 crime novels

Mike Phillips's top 10 crime novels

Mike Phillips's latest book, A Shadow of Myself, is published by HarperCollins.

Mike Phillips

Wed 31 May 2000

1. A Coffin for Demetrios by Eric Ambler

Extraordinary originality for a time when the anodyne Agatha Christie was a bestseller. Still fresh as new, it is a political satire and a travelogue round eastern Europe as well as a gripping thriller.

2. Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Like walking a maze through history. Wonderful characters and an intricate, coruscatingly brilliant plot.

3. Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Displays an amazing grasp of the social geography of cold war Russia, predicting the issue of organised crime in the east.

4. The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky

Funny, original, acute outline of Czech society. It argues the social construction of 'crime' and its role as an instrument of political power.

5. The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Bitter satire about a corrupt society. There's not been anything better about terrorism and the state.

6. Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Often imitated but no one has done it better. Chandler was cuter but he lacked Hammett's knowledge, passion and political bite. In his hands Hammett's satirical lambasting of California society eventually became an endlessly cliched formula.

7. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

Union of gothic horror, mystery, and the leisurely detail of 19th century characterisation, along with a pre-cinematic approach to narration. Reading it again is a surprising pleasure.

8. The Way We Die Now by Charles Willeford

One of the few American crime writers to avoid propagating a rightwing agenda.This book is exceptional in focusing on the cruel exploitation and murder of migrant workers in Southern farms.

9. Murder in the Central Committee by Manuel Vazquez Montalban

Neglected Spanish master.

10. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

Greene's entertainments look better now than most of his pretentious and overpraised 'serious novels'. One of the few British crime novels of the time which matched the modernist tone of the Americans, while remaining completely authentic.

Peter Handke / Stand up if you support the Serbs

Peter Handke

Stand up if you support the Serbs

Austrian writer Peter Handke does, and his pro-Milosevic stance has enraged fellow artists. Ian Traynor reports

Wed 21 Apr 1999

The poet Ezra Pound and the novelist Louis Ferdinand Celine encountered the same reaction: admired for their literary talents, they were pilloried for their pro-fascist sentiments in the 30s and 40s.

Today it is the turn of Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright. Handke is one of the most influential and thought-provoking writers in the German language, a view supported by John Updike, who has described him as the finest writer in Germany.

But Handke's standing as the flag-bearer of Germany's left-leaning '68 generation has been undermined by a succession of increasingly forthright pronouncements about the prevailing moral issue in Europe at the century's end: bombs and pogroms in Serbia and the response of western artists.

'It's a paradox that the remnants of the peace movement are running around with supporters of mass murder,' remarked poet and essayist Hans-Magnus Enzensberger.

His remarks were prompted by Handke's words on his return from a visit to Belgrade, likening the fate of the Serbs to that of the Jews under the Nazi regime. While the Balkan war convulses the German-speaking literary world - with novelist Erich Loest calling for a 'war congress of writers' to take place in Berlin in order to wrestle with the crisis - Handke's actions and statements have triggered fierce polemic and controversy across Europe.

A 'baptised and occasionally practising Catholic', Handke, 56, says he is quitting the 'current' Roman Catholic church in protest at the Vatican's views on the Balkan conflict.

He is also returning the 10,000 marks he received in 1973 as the winner of the Buchner prize, Germany's top literary award.

The writer has just returned to his home outside Paris after spending several days in Serbia, driving from Hungary to Novi Sad and Belgrade 'to get a feel for the country' and to 'retain my credibility' after years of voicing support for Serbia.

According to the Belgrade media, Handke received the Order of the Serbian Knight while in Serbia, the latest in a long list of decorations awarded in recognition of his propaganda value to the Milosevic regime.

'Mars is attacking, and Serbia, Montenegro, the Republika Srpska [the Serb part of Bosnia] and Yugoslavia are the fatherland of all those who have not become Martians or green butchers,' declared Handke.

His decision to return the Buchner prize money led Christian Meier, head of the German Society for Language and Literature, which awards the prize, to suggest it should be donated to Albanian refugees deported by Serbs: 'A Handke tent in a refugee camp that would be something.'

Handke's pro-Serb sympathies and his rage at the west go back to 1991 when the bloody dismemberment of the country began.

The son of a German soldier father and a Slovene mother, Handke was raised in the conservative southern Austrian province of Carinthia, an area he grew to despise while falling in love with what was then Yugoslavia, just across the border in Slovenia.

His affection for Slovenia turned to contempt when it became the first part of Yugoslavia to gain independence in 1991. Slovene nationalism, he railed, was 'the most wretched and lowest form of humanity'.

Three years ago, in a travel essay subtitled Justice For Serbia, Handke wrote lyrically and semi-mystically about life in Serbia and Serb-held Bosnia in the wake of the Serbs' brutal campaigns.

His fervour was not diminished by the recently ended three-year Serb siege of Sarajevo. He claimed that the Muslims had staged their own massacres in Sarajevo and had blamed this on the Serbs.

Nor did he believe that Serb troops had butchered thousands of Muslim men at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.

Instead, he found in Serbia a society that western sanctions had turned into a pre-consumerism idyll. He hoped (patronisingly to any urban Serb) that the country would stay that way.

When Nato threatened to bomb the Serbs last October, Handke promptly set out for Belgrade. 'My place is in Serbia if the Nato criminals bomb,' he stated. In February, during the Serb-Albanian negotiations in Rambouillet, outside Paris, Handke appeared on Serbian state television.

'Sometimes I would like to be a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo,' he said.

'There is not a people in Europe in this century which has had to endure what the Serbs have had to put up with for five, or more, eight, years. There are no categories for this. There are categories and concepts for the Jews. You can talk about that. But with the Serbs, it is a tragedy for no reason, a scandal.'

The writer later apologised for his 'slip of the tongue' in comparing Serbia's fate to that of Jews during the Holocaust.

Handke relishes causing a stir and has courted controversy before. He has previously dismissed three of the holiest names in 20th-century German letters Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Franz Kafka as rubbish.

An early play from the 60s, Insulting The Public, consisted of four speakers haranguing, taunting and insulting the audience.

His faith is in the revelatory power of the Word, in the writer as a holy scribe and vessel of a larger poetic force. This is a constant running through several of his novels, from The Afternoon Of A Writer to My Year In The Bay Of Nobody, although he is also noted for his speechless dramas such as The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, staged to critical acclaim by Luc Bondy at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival.

Susan Sontag, the American writer who spent several months in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war staging a performance of Waiting For Godot, said that Handke was now 'finished' in New York.

Alain Finkielkraut, the Paris intellectual, said Handke had become 'an ideological monster'.

Handke's 'glorification of the Serbs is cynicism', wrote Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek, while Bora Cosic, a Berlin-based Serbian novelist, has denounced Handke with exquisite irony:

'This writer, the Austrian, has his very personal style. The very worst crimes get mentioned rather sweetly. And so the reader completely forgets that we're dealing with crimes. The Austrian writer who visited my country found only very proud people there. They proudly put up with everything that happened to them, so much so that in their pride they didn't bother to ask why all this was happening to them.'

Handke has just written a play about the Bosnian war, and this is currently in rehearsal at Vienna's celebrated Burgtheater. But he is threatening to withdraw the work unless the chorus of media and peer criticism abates.

The play entitled The Journey To The Dug-Out, Or The Play About The War Film is to have its premiere in Vienna in June and be staged in Belgrade immediately afterwards.

'Handke is just being completely dismissed, in every respect morally, politically and professionally. It's all part of the war mood which I find a bit frightening,' said prize-winning novelist Martin Walser, rallying to the Austrian's defence.

'I can only say that any policy that leads to a war is the wrong policy.'

Life of Handke

Born on December 6, 1942 in Griffen, southern Austria.

Educated at the University of Graz, 1961-65.

His experimental poetry and anarchic, anti-authoritarian work win him a following among Germany's left-wing '1968ers'. Handke aims to strip away unnecessary words and challenge linguistic conventions, developing a spare, robust prose style.

In the 70s and 80s his work becomes increasingly introspective and autobiographical. At the same time his affection for Yugoslavia deepens.

Books:

Offending The Audience (1966), Self Accusation (1966), Prophecy (1966), Calling For Help (1967), Kaspar (1968), My Foot My Tutor (1966), Quodlibet (1970), The Ride Across Lake Constance (1971), They Are Dying Out (1974), The Long Way Round (1989), My Year In The Bay Of Nowhere (1994), A Writer's Journey To The Rivers Danube, Sava, Moraba And Drina, Or Justice For Serbia (1996).

Screenplays and stories:

The Goal Keeper's Fear Of The Penalty Kick (1970), Short Letter, Long Farewell (1974), Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1975), A Moment Of True Feeling (1975), The Left Handed Woman (1976), Slow Homecoming (1979), The Lesson Of Monte Sainte Victoire (1980), Across (1983), Absence (1986), Repetition (1986), The Afternoon Of A Writer (1987), Wings Of Desire (1987, co-writer).

THE GUARDIAN