Love and Crime Among the Maize

The Supreme Crime by Dorothea Gerard (Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1901, 288 pages)

Want to read something about Ukraine? A great lost Catholic thriller from the early 20th century, The Supreme Crime, is set there. Elite newspapers publish annual recommended summer reading lists (“Hottest Summer Reads,” “Ultimate Beach Reads,” etc.), which are usually books on current events, or, alternatively, are scorching page-turners that are easy to read while on vacation? This book is both.

“Oh, what are you reading there?” a friend asks you on the beach. You: “The Supreme Crime, it’s about Ukraine.” Your friend will assume you are tres chic and that the book title refers to a crime by Vladimir Putin. You will instantly score big points from the liberal intelligentsia. “Sounds interesting. I might like to borrow that when you’re done.” Uh-oh. Little will they know that you are reading an intensely Catholic novel which attacks modernism at its earliest Nietzschean inklings, and idealizes the simple faith of Ukrainian peasants, not the intelligentsia.

The Supreme Crime tells the story of Gregor Petrow, a young village schoolteacher who lacks self-confidence and is being supported begrudgingly by his uncle. The author paints Gregor as, “A fine young fellow, taken all in all, despite a slight stoop in the shoulders, and with the hand and foot of a woman -delicate, narrow and yet strongly moulded”.

Gregor manages to get up the gumption to ask the local priest for his eldest daughter’s hand in marriage (these are Greek Rite Catholics fully in union with Rome with the discipline of allowing seminarians a year or so after completion of their studies to marry a wife if they are content to be a village priest and do not aspire to the hierarchy. But once ordination happens, the possibility of marriage ends). The priest thinks the schoolteacher’s prospects are insufficient but offers to sponsor him in the seminary, which would be a step up for him, if he will agree.

Gregor goes off to the seminary in Lemberg (Lvov, Lviv) and finds the priest within himself. But he has one spiritual flaw, to which the rector has alerted him. Meanwhile, his only prior face-time with the eldest daughter, Zenobia, has consisted in an adventure in the family’s backyard, which also serves as the churchyard and dilapidated cemetery, placing flowers on the Matka Boska (Virgin Mary) with his intended and her baby sisters.

So when he returns from Lemberg, Gregor finds that he has actually fallen in love with one of the baby sisters, Wasylya, now fully-grown. Wasylya is not only fairer but a free-spirit, at least by 19th century Ukrainian peasant standards. To the stiff and melancholic Gregor, this presents an antidote that he heretofore did not know even existed and now craves. Distance and four years, however, has only made the hard-working Zenobia’s heart grow fonder. A bit of a Martha/Mary contrast is drawn between Zenobia/Wasylya.

Was Gregor’s deal with the priest a promise? And who was the promise to, Zenobia or the priest? If the latter, would marriage to Wasylya satisfy the promise? At some later point, Nietzsche slithers into the story from Vienna, in the form of one of his disciples, a returning medical student who is also a priest’s son who has had a long-standing crush on Zenobia.

And since to go further with the plot is to spoil a perfect novel for Culture Wars readers, who are most-deserving of the respite of an uplifting Catholic cliff-hanger, the balance of this review will attempt to explain the paradox of Dorothea Gerard having fallen so undeservedly into obscurity.

Gerard is a tough novelist to pigeon-hole. She was born in 1855, an inconvenient year for a novelist inasmuch as half of her novels would be written when Queen Victoria was alive and half after her death. Does that make her still a “Victorian novelist”? She is a rare Catholic Victorian novelist, if that. Or does she belong to the 20th century English Catholic literary revival? A contemporary reviewer noted that “the novel is written in a decidedly realistic style [which is modernistic], but the characters are finely drawn [very Victorian]”1. The psychological development of Gregor smacks of romanticism (early 19th century).

“To the patient student of fiction, it is amazing that Madame [Longard] de Longarde [Dorothea Gerard] is not better known than she is in England (in Austria she has at least a wide public) for in spite of many stories all of them notable in their way she has made no popular success since her charming “Lady Baby” of many years ago. This is probably due to the fact that she is often deficient in humor, that the strength of her recent work lies in its tragedy and that the surroundings of her dramas have latterly become a little remote. The general reader has made up his mind that his fiction must be cheerful and he prefers it confined to an environment that he understands. Madame de Longarde is the wife of an Austrian officer and apt to place her stories in far corners of the land of her adoption and though being an Englishwoman she knows precisely with what

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2022 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)