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Letters & Essays: J-L

Letters & Essays of the Day

Women Sweeping

By Ishion Hutchinson

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.

Mishima in 1958

By Donald Keene

Yukio Mishima was born Kimitake Hiraoka on January 14, 1925 in uptown Tokyo. His father was the deputy director of the Bureau of Fisheries in the Agriculture Ministry; his mother, from a family of educators and Confucian scholars, was herself well-versed in literature. The family lived in a well-to-do neighborhood in a rented two-floor house with a houseboy and six maids, an unusual extravagance. But for the first twelve years Mishima lived downstairs with his grandmother in her sickroom, leaving the room only with her permission.

Incidents

By Daniil Kharms

The life of the Russian avant-garde author Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was every bit as absurd, as abrupt and as symbolically charged as one of his stories. The son of a populist-radical writer with religious leanings, he began a promising career as a poet in the freewheeling artistic scene of late-twenties Leningrad; he knew the great avant-garde artists Malevich, Tatlin, and Filonov, the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky and the famous children’s authors Evgenii Shvartz and Samuil Marshak.