Anna, soror ...

The theme of the novel is the incestuous connection between brother and sister. The action takes place in the kingdom of Neapolitan at the very end of the XVI century. Spanish officer Don Alvaro de La Serna married Valentina Montefeltro, the last representative of an ancient and glorious family. Two children were born in this marriage, Anna and Miguel. Alvaro, a cold and hard man, "devoured by ambition, often falling into ecstatic religious repentance," did not engage in children, entrusting them to his wife. Donna Valentina, a pupil of the famous Vittoria Column , was a woman who was mystically inclined, but rather in Plato's spirit than in the Christian spirit ^[1] , and instilled in her children a desire for elevated and perfect feelings.

Children were very attached to each other, and over time, affection turned into a stronger feeling. After the death of the mother, who could not withstand the heavy malarious summer, they could no longer resist their mutual passion, but the consciousness of the sinfulness of the deed forced Miguel after five nights of forbidden love in Passion Week in the castle of Sant Elmo to seek death on board the royal galley in a fight with the barbaric pirates.

After burying her brother, Anna went to the Spanish Netherlands to the court of Infanta Isabella , where she married the Flemish nobleman Egmont de Wirken. She spent the rest of her life among mournful memories in the lands of her unloved husband in Picardy . Don Alvaro, who guessed that the daughter had caused the death of his heir, could not forgive her, and, having left the royal service, he himself took the monastic vows.

"Anna, soror ..." was one of the early works of Yursenar. Initially, it was part of the “extensive and chaotic project of the novel,” which was to be called “Whirlpool,” and contained the germs of many of the later works of the writer ^[2] . The original version was written in 1925 in Naples and on the way out of it, and in 1934 it was published as a part of the three novels “The wagon ruled by death” entitled “Based on El Greco” ^[3] .

In 1981, the short story was published in final form, and the following year it was reprinted as part of the collection “Like Flowing Water”. According to Yursenar, she made many stylistic corrections while preparing this version, and also made several edits to the story ^[4] .

Realizing that an appeal to the slippery topic of incest can raise many questions, Yursenar accompanied the final text with a detailed epilogue in which she explained her interest in this story, citing a list of works of classical and modern literature describing the incestuous relationship of a brother and sister ^{[5] [K 2 ]} :

• "What a pity that she is a whore" (1633) by John Ford
• Persian Letters (1721) Montesquieu
• “The years of the teachings of Wilhelm Meister ” (1795-1796) Goethe (there, this topic is only played up)
• " Rene, or the consequences of passions " (1802) Chateaubriand
• The Abydor's Bride (1813), Manfred (1816–1817), Cain (1821) by George Byron
• Volsung 's Blood (1921), Joseph and His Brothers (1926–1943), and The Chosen One (1951) of Thomas Mann
• "African Confession" (1930) by Roger Martin du Gard

According to Yursenar, who agrees with Thomas Mann ^{[K 3]} ,

... in the plots about incest two themes prevail: first, the union of two exceptional beings, united by common blood, separated from other people by their outstanding virtues, and, second, the delusion of reason and feelings, leading to a violation of the law.

- Yursenar M. Afterword, p. 371

The writer, whom critics have repeatedly reproached in misogyny , presented Miguel in kind more noble, understanding that such a grave sin can be redeemed only at the cost of life, while Anna spent the rest of her life not in repentance, but in inconsolable grief from the loss of her beloved ^[6] .

In response to possible questions about whether personal incestuous experience is at the heart of the novel, the writer reports:

Why did I choose the incest theme? Let us immediately abandon the naive hypothesis that every literary work is based on a real event from the life of the author. I have already mentioned that fate only granted me a stepbrother, nineteen years older than me, with whom, fortunately, we only met from time to time; he was either grumpy with me, or sullen and rather poisoned by my childhood. By the time I started writing “Anna, soror ...”, I had not met with this dear brother for ten years. Out of courtesy towards supporters of the above hypothesis, I will not deny that some of the fictional situations that arise in the mind of a novelist can be likened to a negative image of real situations; in my case, however, the exact negative would not be the younger brother, seized by sinful passion, but a loving and devoted elder brother.

- Yursenar M. Afterword, p. 375

Nevertheless, she believes that she called the hero Miguel for no reason, since the first male boys in her family always bore the name Michel, and therefore she “could not give the hero of this story a different name than what all our sisters called their brother " ^[7] .

The artistic significance of the theme of incest, according to Marguerite Jürsenar, is its importance as one of the few prohibitions of traditional morality that has survived in the modern era:

In fact, belonging to two warring clans, as in Romeo and Juliet, is rarely seen in our civilizations as an insurmountable obstacle; adultery has long become commonplace, and with the simplification of the divorce procedure, it has completely lost its appeal; even same-sex love got the right to exist. Incest alone remains a taboo and shameful affair, it is almost impossible to prove, even in cases where it clearly takes place.

- Yursenar M. Afterword, p. 376

In Russia, the novel was published in 2003 by N. Kulish.

• Yursenar M. Anna, soror ... / Selected Works. Volume I. - SPb. : Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2003. - ISBN 5-89059-040-5 .
• Yursenar M. Epilogue / Selected Works. Volume I. - SPb. : Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2003. - ISBN 5-89059-040-5 .

• Comme l'eau qui coule (Fr.) . CIDMY . The appeal date is April 6, 2016.
• Marguerite Yourcenar: Anna, soror ... (German) . The appeal date is April 6, 2016.
• Marguerite Yourcenar. Anna, soror ... (fr.) . Éditions Gallimard . The appeal date is April 6, 2016.
• Anna, soror (fr.) . Bnf . The appeal date is April 6, 2016.
• Partage du savoir et differenciation des personnages dans Anna, soror ... // Marguerite Yourcenar: biographie, autobiographie (Actes du Colloque Marguerite Yourcenar. T. II). - Universitat de València, 1988. - ISBN 9788437004082 , p. 53f [1]
• Guéorguieva-Dikranian N. La femme méditerranéenne dans l'œvre de Marguerite Yourcenar // Marguerite Yourcenar et la Méditerranée. - Presses Univ. Blaise Pascal, 1995. - ISBN 9782909880112 , p. 59f [2]
• Hornynen A. The erotic in Marguerite Yororin's Anna soror ... and Alexis: transgression and discretion (English) (inaccessible link) . The appeal date is April 6, 2016. Archived April 20, 2016.