The Age Was ...

The age was Shakespearean, Dickensian, Wellsian, Orwellian; named for poets and writers, not Kings and Queens. The age was... not our own; their morals not ours; nor their...; nor their...; nor their... even. The age was dot dot dot; that unsaid left to the imagination, to the poets and writers to supply. The modern reader would feel everything was different; another temper altogether. The moment put to paper brief, the moment gone in pages; the moment alive then dead in the act of reading.
A fictional Russia caught in a different era: its landscape pine and snow and wild horses. A fictional London, the Thames frozen over, in the Court of King James. The poets sing of a disastrous winter that saw frost and flood; that saw Shakespeare's Othello staged in a carnival atmosphere, with ice and skating as its backdrop. The writers speak of the trance that followed, of thousands comatose, as if put under a spell by a wicked fairy or by too many party sedatives, which no amount of noise would waken before the advent of Spring. And then both - in poetry, in prose – describe how if Russia was mentioned an uneasy hush, an uneasy gloom would fall; though with all memories wiped nobody could – if pressed – explain why. A note that penetrated modern minds...

Picture credit: The Sleeping Beauty, 1890, Edward Burne-Jones (source: WikiArt).

Indebted to Orlando by Virginia Woolf. 

Written February 2022.