In The Kazan

Apparently, "Kazan" means "Cauldron."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT p. 499.

The Kazan is a large astrobleme on the continent of Rodna on the planet, Dennitza. Lake Stoyan and the Dennitzan capital, Zorkagrad, are at the centre of the Kazan which is filled with woods, farms and rivers. The Dubina Dolyina province takes its name from a gorge cut through the Kazan ringwall by the Lyubisha River.

Danilo Vymezal is voivode of Dubina Dolyina. The Vymezal estate is on high ground, overlooking farm, forest and river. There is an outer gate, then a driveway through gardens and parks. The tile-roofed, half-timbered, brick manor has a rear court surrounded by servants' cottages, garages, sheds, stables, mews, workshops, bakery, brewery, armoury, recreation hall, school and chapel. Dennitzans have lived thus for centuries but now are under threat.

The voivode receives Flandry in the darkly wainscoted, heavily furnished, third storey Gray Chamber, decorated with rugs and drapes, which has a doubly thick door for confidentiality.

More On Fedoroff

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero, CHAPTER 5.

OK. I am learning something, I think:

the Kazan (scroll down), or Cauldron, is an astrobleme on the planet Dennitza in Poul Anderson's Technic History;

Kazan is a Russian city;

Kazan Cathedral is in St Petersburg;

but there is also a reconstructed Kazan Cathedral in Moscow.

When Fedoroff returned from Delta Pavonis, he had experienced twelve years although forty three had elapsed on Earth. He was pleased still to recognize:

Kazan Cathedral (the one in St Petersburg);
Alexander and Bucephalus over the Nevsky Prospect bridge;
the Hermitage.

The Kazan

"...the Kazan, Cauldron, huge astrobleme on the continent Rodna, a bowl filled with woods, farmlands, rivers, at its middle Lake Stoyan and the capital Zorkagrad. Her father was voivode of Dubina Dolyina province, named for the gorge that the Lyubisha River had cut through the ringwall on its way south from the dying snows."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Domininc Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 499.

The snows are dying because, although human beings had colonized Dennitza six hundred years ago during an Ice Age, there is currently a Great Spring, causing storms, floods, extinctions, ecological changes, migrations and rising sea levels. The Kazan is not far inland but sheltered by its walls from the northerly winds. Gospodar Bodin Miyatovich keeps a hunting lodge on the tundra far north of the Kazan.

In Zorkagrad, the executive center is the Zamok, a creeper-covered ancestral stone castle with turrets, battlements and banners above the steep tile roofs of Old Town and also above twisting lanes, broad boulevards and the docks on the Lake which stretches west over the horizon. The surrounding country has both Terran and native foliage. From the Zamok, both the Lyubisha River flowing from the north and the Elena flowing to the east are visible. The latter enters the ocean on the Obala, the east coast of Rodna.

Hunting In The Kazan II

See Hunting In The Kazan.

Before killing the dyavo, Kossara had clear shots at a soaring orlik and a bull yelen poised on a crag but let them live. Indeed, why go out and kill anything? Manse Everard had hunted in the Pleistocene but Wanda Tamberly taught him to take a camera instead of a gun.

Kossara and Trohdwyr make camp:

"...high in the bowl of the Kazan, where that huge crater bit an arc from the Vysochina."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT II, p. 365.

Trohdwyr was born in a fishing village, presumably on the Obala.

Dense purple mahovina, springy to walk on and spicy to smell, is studded by white and gold wildflowers. To the east, the ringwall slopes down to trees and yellow evening light falls on misty forest.

From The Ice Cliff To The Black Ocean

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

In imagination, we might follow a single drop of water through Dennitzan geography. 

In the far north, there are glaciers and a two-kilometers-high ice cliff. A river from the melting cliff flows fast past Bodin Miyatovich's hunting lodge.

The "Melt-begotten...Lyubisha River..." (XIV, p. 524) flows through a canyon in the northern ringwall of the Kazan and eventually enters Lake Stolyan, site of the planetary capital city, Zorkagrad, at the centre of the Kazan.

The Elena River flows east from Lake Stoyan, cuts through the eastern ringwall and enters the Black Ocean where the ychani hero, Gwyth, dared climactic storms three hundred years ago. There are:

"...docks at the Elena River mouth..." (XVI, p. 544)

- and the Kazan ringwall is visible on the horizon, from the Obala, the east coast of the Rodna continent.

But our main focus here and now is on a single drop of water making its way from the ice wall to the Black Ocean.  

About Dennitza

(This is an image of the Russian city of Kazan.)

I am sold on Poul Anderson's fictional planet of Dennitza, particularly that planet's much-linked Kazan, Obala and Zorkagrad Old Town. It is good, when rereading A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, to find as if for the first time some Dennitzan detail that generates a blog post like the blue sky over the Kazan in the previous post. I have not yet reread as far as Flandry's and Kossara's arrival on Dennitza so I hope to find more such details but will in any case reread the rest of the novel.

The View From The Zamok

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, V.

An earlier post, The Kazan, identified the Dennitzan capital city, Zorkagrad, on Lake Stoyan in the center of the Kazan and summarized the view from the Zamok in Zorkagrad so let us now take a closer look at that view:

Old Town has steep tile roofs and pastel-tinted half-timbered stucco;

the small city slopes down from Old Town;

twisting lanes become broad boulevards;

later generations have raised geometrical buildings in modern materials;

traffic flits;

ships crowd the docks and the bay;

glittering, deep blue Lake Stoyan stretches west beyond the horizon;

the sky is cloudless;

from a sun deck of the Zamok, Kossara sees cultivation along the shores, both green Terran and blue or purple native, widely spaced buildings and sunpower towers, the Lyubisha River flowing from the north and the Elena River, with barges and boats, flowing east;

the crater walls are below the horizon but she knows that they protect this "...chalice of warmth and fertility..." (p. 408) from "...glacier and desert..." (ibid.) 

She feels a breeze, smells flowers and hears the singing guslars that nest in the vines on the gray stone of the Zamok.

Hunting In The Kazan

When Kossara and Trohdwyr hunt a dyavo, we learn a little more of Dennitzan geography. The northern rim of the Kazan cuts through the Vysochina hills. There is a view of the "...sungold whiteness..." (Chapter II, p. 365) of the Planina Byelogorski and of smoke from Vulkana Zemlya. Poul Anderson probably created a consistent Dennitzan ecology but showed only parts of it in the text. For the planet Daedalus, see here and here.

Before cooking the meat, Trohdwyr invokes Aferhdi of the Deeps, Blyn of the Winds and Haawan who lairs on the reefs, asking only that they "...trouble us not..." (p. 366) He remains an old-fashioned pagan ychan, unconvertible to Orthochristianity.

Kossara thinks:

"Surely the Pantocrator didn't mind much, and would receive his dear battered soul into Heaven at the last." (ibid.)

Why should the Pantocrator mind respect for His deeps, winds and reefs? Kossara expresses the same benign universalism as Father Tomislav in The Merman's Children. See here.

The Obala III

Rereading Poul Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, I want to post about the Obala but find already on the blog:

Dennitza;
The Obala;
The Obala II;
Khyrwedhin;
The Kazan.

Dennitza is a human-colonized extrasolar planet with a Merseian minority;

Dennitzan Merseians mainly inhabit the Obala, the east coast of the Rodna continent;

Khywedhin is moot-lord of the steadcaptains of the Obala;

the Elena River flows from the Kazan to the Obala.

I will carefully reread A Knight..., Chapter XVI, in search of any information not already summarized in the above posts.

See The Obala IV.

Lyubisha

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XIV.

We cannot get enough Dennitzan geography but unfortunately there is only a limited amount. Regarding the Lyubisha River, see:

In A Dennitzan Forest

 

By The Lyubisha River

 

Five Senses By The Lyubisha

 

There might not be much to add here. I have not noted before that "Lyubisha" is a personal name meaning "seriousness, thought, intuition, intent and wisdom."

 

The gorge cut through the Kazan rimwall by the Lyubisha is called the Dolyina and has been conserved by the Vymezals "'...from olden time...'" (p. 525) so that Flandry is able to appreciate its natural beauty while he and Kossara trek through it into Dubina Dolyina province of the Kazan.

Vysochina And Captain Flandry

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, II.

I am fascinated by Dennitzan geography. Much is already on the blog, e.g.:

the Kazan

The Obala 

Zorkagrad

 

On p. 365, we read that the huge crater of the Kazan bites an arc from the Vysochina so what is the latter? First, it is named after a region of the Czech Republic. Secondly, further down p. 365, there is a reference to "...Vysochina hills." We read elsewhere that Kossara wants to show Flandry an overlook in the Vysochina highlands. And that is it, at least so far. There are three previous references on the blog (see here; scroll down) but all say much the same.

 

Hopefully, this is the last attempt to put the Captain Flandry sub-sub-series in the right order in hypothetical new editions:

Volume I

Two diptychs:

"Tiger By The Tail" and "Honorable Enemies"

"Message in Secret" and "The Plague of Masters"

Volume II

One trilogy:

"The Game of Glory," "Hunters of the Sky Cave" and "The Warriors from Nowhere"

Volume III

One novel:

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

 

As a rule, each installment refers back to the previous one but "The Game of Glory" refers back to "Honorable Enemies" and the second diptych can fit between them.

By The Lyubisha River

On Dennitza, the Kazan is a large astrobleme. During glaciation, a colter of ice pierced the Kazan ringwall, then the melt-begotten Lyubisha River formed a canyon. Flandry watches the broad, brown river which is:

"...quiet except where it chuckled around a boulder or a sandbar near its banks."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT p. 524.

(In Anderson's Time Patrol series, time is compared to a river with changeable features like sandbars that can divert its course.)

"...ocherous palisades..." are "...maned with forest." (ibid.) Leaves are bluish-green or plum-coloured.

"...trees...grew taller than the taiga granted." (ibid.)

My points are, first, that Anderson shows us an alien landscape where, e.g., we must not assume that leaves are Terretrial green and, secondly, that his vocabulary is rich even when describing features that might be common to Earth and Dennitza.

Imaginative Multiverse

Dennitza may be the best realized of Poul Anderson's fictional planets with its geographical features like the Kazan and its capital city of Zorkagrad. See also here.

When Kossara and Trohdwyr hunt in the Kazan, Kossara reflects on Trohdwyr's ychani paganism in terms that reminded me of Father Tomislav's sermon at the end of Anderson's historical fantasy, The Merman's Children (see here).

Now imagine the Creator of a multiverse that encompasses merpeople in the fourteenth century on Earth as well as Kossara and Trohdwyr on Dennitza over a thousand years in the future. They are contained in Poul Anderson's imagination if not also in a material multidimensional multiverse.

Blue Over The Kazan

See prayers written by Poul Anderson here, also Mary And Grass and Prayers.

"Then rest while you can, Kossara. Sleep comes not black, no, blue as a summer sky over the Kazan, blue as the cloak of Mary.... Pray for us now, and in the hour of our death."
-A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, X, p. 468.

O, men from the fields!
Come softly within.
Tread softly, softly,
O! men, coming in.

Mavourneen is going
From me and from you,
To Mary, the Mother,
Whose mantle is blue!

From reek of the smoke
And cold of the floor,
And peering of things
Across the half-door.

O men from the fields!
Soft, softly come thro'.
Mary puts round him
Her mantle of blue.

-copied from here.

Some Sights In Technic Civilization

"...a summer sky over the Kazan...," here

the view from the Zamok, here 

the Obala 

Mount Anrovil in the Weathermother, here

the Oronesian archipelago

the city of Centauri

Falkayn Bay 

Daybreak Bay

the High Sierra 

Archopolis 

the Flone Valley

Nova Roma

I was struck by Kossara's reference to the blue of a summer sky over the Kazan but, of course, I have posted about that before as also about various other scenes in Poul Anderson's Technic History.  

Dennitzan Geography

Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows.

In the far north, there is a two-kilometer high ice cliff. A river of melt water flows from the cliff through the tundra past Bodin Miyatovitch's hunting lodge. Further south, the Lyubisha River, also melt water, flows through taiga and has cut through the northern wall of the Kazan into the Dubina Dolyine province where Kossara's father is both voivode and nachalnik.

The Lyubisha flows into Lake Stoyan where the planetary capital, Zorkagrad, is located at the center of the Kazan. The Elena river flows east out of Lake Stoyan and enters the Black Ocean on the Obala, the east coast of the Rodna continent, where most of the zmayi live.

There may be a few more details to round up.

Gravbelts II

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, XIV.

I have corrected a factual detail in Gravbelts. Flandry's and Kossara's trek into the Kazan took not three but seven days. This is far too long in view of the facts their mission was urgent and that they had used gravbelts to descend to Dennitza but thereafter made no reference to these faster means of transport. We have returned to the point on which we ended yesterday, having spent most of today in other activities.

Let me end today on two more general points. First, when I first read Poul Anderson, Ian Fleming and many others in the 1960s, we thought that a "space age" was beginning. Sf writers described that age and authors of contemporary fiction assumed its imminence. James Bond thought that a younger man had been:

"...born into the buyers' market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic bombs and space flight."

-Ian Fleming, Thunderball (London, 1961), 2, p. 14.

But we also knew that most predictions were wrong.

Secondly, the diversity of human mentalities and motivations should open our minds to the possibility of even greater diversity among non-human intelligences. Anderson listed a sample of six kinds of human beings (see "Homo Sum" and The Discovery Of The Past II) and Fleming's You Only Live Twice addresses the perception of suicide as an honorable act in Japan.

Interim Post

Mainly posting to say laptop definitely failing so maybe sporadic contact for a while.

Van Rijn worked with a woman from Esperance, the Terran attack on the Domain of Ythri was launched from there and Aycharaych's men posed as Esperancian spies on Diomedes so the planet of peace has been mentioned in different ways in three periods of the Technic History.

Ivar Frederiksen was the nephew-in-law of Hugh McCormac, Firstman of Ilion on Aeneas. Kossara Vymezal is the niece-in-law of Bodin Miyatovich, Gospodar of Dennitza. Both planets are, at the time, close to breaking away from the Terran Empire under Aycharaych's influence but this does not mean that Poul Anderson repeats himself. The two planets and their civilizations differ significantly.

The Emperor believes that Dennitzans are fomenting revolution on Diomedes but does not know whether the Gospodar sent them. The Gospodar knows that he did not send anyone but someone else on Dennitza might have... There must be real world situations like this that never get cleared up.

On Dennitza, the Lyubisha River has forged a canyon through the Kazan ringwall. I think that more information on the Dennitzan environment will be a good idea.

Fictional Universes II

Fictional universes contain not only persons but also places that take on a life of their own. In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Virgilian System includes the planets, Dido and Aeneas. The latter, lighter and dryer than Earth, kind of like a Mars with a breathable atmosphere, would have been more suitable for colonization by the nearby Ythrians. However, human scientists, wanting to study the tripartite inhabitants of the even less hospitable Dido, established a base, which became a University, on Aeneas. The Rebel Worlds, set mainly on Dido, has one chapter set on Aeneas. Its sequel, The Day Of Their Return, is, except for a single early flashback, set entirely on the surface of Aeneas. 

Hermes, important as the home planet both of David Falkayn and of Sandra Tamarin, remains off-stage until it becomes a major setting in Mirkheim and is again visited in A Stone In Heaven.

Avalon, is shown at four different stages of development in three short stories and one novel. Its notable locations include the Weathermother mountain range and the cities of Gray and Centauri, the latter containing Livewell Street named after a local flower.

Dennitza appears only in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows where, however, it imparts a real sense of place to the Kazan, the Obala and Zorkagrad.

Returning again to another author in another medium and genre, Alan Moore fully exploits the connotations and implications of the familiar place name, "Gotham City," before bringing on stage its most notorious inhabitant.

More Merseians On Dennitza

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, IV.

"Day of Burning" and A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows are linked across several centuries. Life was hard on Merseia because the planet was modernizing and moving into space at the same time as it had to be protected from supernova radiation and there was a three-sided struggle for power between Vachs, Gethfennu and nations like the Republic of Lafdigu. Merseian immigrants were welcome on the human colony planet, Dennitza. Able to stand cold better than human beings, they do most of the fishing and pelagiculture, especially on the eastern seaboard of the main continent, Rodna. They are organized in Vachs and have their own House in the Shkoptsina, Parliament. Kossara remembers a gruff welcome at the campfire of great green hunters and is overcome by emotion. After Abrams' and Flandry's (fully justified) hostility to the Roidhunate, Anderson's account of inter-species harmony on Dennitza is welcome indeed. It is hard to choose but I think that Dennitza is my favourite planet in the Technic History. Its place names are resonant:

the Kazan

the Obala

Zorkagrad

I would not participate in Orthochristian prayers or sacraments but would meditate in a side chapel of St Clement's Cathedral. I would also learn how to recite Eriau prayers with Trohdwyr. Paganism encourages ritual observance but does not insist on credal assent.