4. Count and Countess Labinski, or the Transfer of Souls
- Théophile Gautier, Avatar, 1857
The cover of the French edition of Gautier's Avatar and other stories. Source: public domainWith the collapse of the Polish state, the uprisings and subsequent waves of emigration, Polish refugees marched into France – and into French literature. In different disguises – as heroes, beautiful aristocratic ladies, mysterious counts or searchers for the absolute – they can be found scattered around the works of Balzac and others. Perhaps the strangest and most bizarre of such appearances comes up in Théophile Gautier’s fantastic short novel titled Avatar.
Avatar tells the story of a young man named Octave de Saville who falls in love with a Polish aristocrat, a woman of angelic beauty, countess Prascovie Labinska. The problem is that Prascovie is happily married and in love with a fellow Pole, and a count at that, by the name of Olaf Labinski, a childhood love, to whom her heart and body belong eternally.
Another, even more serious problem is that Saville’s condition, that of unrequited love, turns out to be a terminal disease. Here’s where the fantastic sets in: being devoured by a strange illness, Saville ends up in the hands of strange quack, Balthazar Cherbonneau. The doctor, who spent several years in India studying the ascetic teachings of the yogis and thus acquired some truly mystical skills, recognises the true (that is incurable) character of the feeling and offers his help. He proposes to transfer Octave’s soul into the body of Olaf Labinski, and vice versa – thus enabling Octave to fulfil his great passion and unite with the woman he loves.
As you can guess, things do not turn out so rosy for our protagonist as the idea of the swapping of souls in this context is rather disgusting. Octave’s soul will have to wait for the ultimate bliss a tad longer.
Back to our Polish couple, one has to say that their Polishness may come across as rather cosmopolitan as it only befits aristocrats. In fact, Gautier’s idea of Polishness seems to contain a good deal of Russianness in it: from their first names (Prascovie and Olaf), ‘a Muscovian samovar’ in their saloon, to count Olaf’s backstory which includes years spent fighting in the Caucasus (against the Chechen leader Shamil, as the narrator suggests) – in the Russian army, that is.
But then Madame Labinska does read Mickiewicz in her garden, and the Polish language plays ultimately a key role in the denouement of the plot – with its tongue-twisting, ‘mind-boggling’ qualities it serves as a sort of shibboleth as well as a symbol of the devotion to fatherland – and leads to a failed recognition scene.
Luckily, all ends well for our Polish couple; the body thief Octave is, however, less lucky. Meanwhile, for Balthazar, the esoteric doctor, this turns out to be the start of a whole new adventure in metempsychosis.
With its mix of the scientific and esoteric, Avatar holds a unique place in the history of 19th-century literature. For one, we can rest assured that there’s hardly any other piece in world literature where you can find esoterism, migration of souls, mesmerism, beautiful Polish women and Mickiewicz on one page. Oh wait, there’s this guy Tadeusz Miciński…