Sex with nuns,
children and his
own daughter —this biography casts
a shadow over thefamous lover
BIOGRAPHY
John Carey
Adventurer The Life and
Times of Giacomo Casanova
by Leo Damrosch
Yale UP £25 pp422Adventurers, Leo Damrosch
finds, formed a distinct
subculture in 18th-century
Europe, moving freely
through society and
exploiting it. Many lived by
gambling, and Giacomo
Casanova was a lifelong
gambler. What distinguished
him, though, was that he
recorded his escapades, and
notably his sexual exploits,
in a huge autobiography.
Written in French, it is called
Histoire de ma vie and covers
more than 3,000 pages in
modern editions. Damrosch
considers it “an enduring
classic of world literature”,
and it has been praised for
giving an unparalleled view of
daily life in the 18th century
— its balls, theatres, coffee
houses, festivals, inns,
brothels and nunneries.
Born in Venice in 1725,
Casanova was the eldest son
of two actors. Exceptionally
bright as a child, he graduated
from the University of Padua
and grew up tall, handsome
and golden-tongued, and by
his own account irresistible
to women. In good Venetian
society wives did not choose
their mates, but were directedby their parents. This
advantaged Casanova, since
married women saw him as a
welcome change from unloved
husbands. He once seduced a
young bride in her carriage
during a thunderstorm.
Unlike some previous
biographers, Damrosch does
not see Casanova as a
charming rogue but as —
among other things — an
exploitative paedophile. Once
at an inn in Ancona he had sex
with two girls, aged 10 and 11.
Their mother was forced by
poverty to prostitute them,
and Damrosch works out that
Casanova paid her the
equivalent of €40 apiece.
The girls’ sister was disguised
as a castrato and earned her
living as a singer, but
Casanova felt sure she was a
girl too, and in bed he found
he was right. He was always
turned on by cross-dressing
and he remembered sex
with the false castrato as hisRed and White
bloodbath
The two sides were as vicious as each
other in Russia’s revolution and civil war
HISTORY
Dominic Sandbrook
Russia Revolution and Civil
War 1917-1921 by Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld £30 pp592
In the summer of 1919 gunfire
echoed around the streets of
Kharkiv. Since the outbreak of
the Russian Revolution two
years earlier, the Ukrainian
city had been convulsed by
violence, and control had
already changed hands
several times. Yet now, as the
counter-revolutionary Whites
marched into the city, even
they were shocked at what
they found.
In the Technological
Institute, which the
Bolsheviks had been using as
a torture centre, there were
“traces of blood everywhere”.
The basement walls were
covered with “blood, pieces
of skin and hair, brains”, as
well as three “gloves” of
human skin, peeled from the
hands of victims while they
were still alive. “When we
passed on to the examination
of over 300 corpses which
were found there,” one
observer wrote, “my hair
stood on end... They were all
naked, with shoulder boards
cut out of their shoulders,
straps on the backs, and
stripes on the legs.”
What happened in Kharkiv
was nothing unusual. Almost
every page of Antony Beevor’s
new history of the Russian
Civil War, which tells the story
from the first uprisings in
early 1917 to the Reds’
definitive triumph four years
later, is stained with blood.
“Where,” he wonders at one
stage, “did the extremes of
sadism come from — the
hacking with sabres, the
cutting with knives, the
boiling and burning, the
scalping alive?”
He never quite answers
his question, but perhaps
the best answer is horribly
straightforward. What
happened in Russia between
1917 and 1921 was an object
lesson in the depths to which
human beings can sink,
whether driven by fear,
hatred or sadistic pleasure.
As Beevor’s account makes
clear, civil war was probably
inevitable from the moment
Nicholas II signed his
abdication papers in March- Russia was already a
violent, repressive and deeply
divided society, its tensions
exacerbated by the pressure
of the First World War. The
Bolshevik leader, Lenin, was
explicit about his enthusiasm
for mass killing, demanding
“war to the death against the
rich and their hangers-on,
the bourgeois intellectuals”,
whom he called “lice”, “fleas”
and “vermin”.
As for his White opponents,
former tsarist commanders
such as Anton Denikin and
Lavr Kornilov and Alexander
Kolchak, they had nothing to
offer except savage repression
and antisemitic violence. In
one revealing incident
Winston Churchill, who
loathed Bolshevism and was
desperate to support the
Whites, wrote to Denikin
begging him to stop the
“massacres of the Jews”.
Yet it did no good. The Reds
were no better. On their trains,
a correspondent from The
Times reported, was chalked
“Beat the
Jews and save Russia”.
It’s impossible to give a
summary of Beevor’s book
because the war was just so
complicated. In essence
it was not one war but a
“kaleidoscope of chaos”,
dragging in the Germans,
the British, the Americans,
the Japanese and the Poles,
as well as several rival
nationalist armies and even
a Czechoslovak Legion made
up of former prisoners of war
who roamed Siberia on
armoured trains. The Reds
won in part because they
controlled the industrial
cities, but also because Lenin
and Trotsky gave them an
ideological discipline that
their White rivals lacked.
Yet their victory came at
an almost unimaginable cost.
In four years about ten million
people were killed, and
some of Beevor’s details are
mind-bogglingly horrible. In
Azerbaijan villagers smeared
themselves with excrement to
save themselves from being
raped by Cossacks. The
soldiers simply wiped it off
with rags and raped them
anyway. Later, in a town in
southern Russia, the Reds
decided to wipe out every
Cossack over 45. They got
drunk, had an orgy and
brought them one by one
from the prison for target
practice, “shooting at them,
striking them with swords,
stabbing with daggers”.
So it continued until the
Reds’ victory. As in Beevor’s
previous books, he is keener
on gory detail than analysis.
He never varies the tone and
rarely pauses for reflection,
preferring to whisk you on
to the next mass killing. It is,
however, an epic story, and
has never been more
gruesomely told. cRabble
rouser
Lenin on
the balcony
of St
Petersburg’s
Kschessinska
Mansion,
April 1917BOOKS
SHUTTERSTOCK. INSET: ALAMYCasan
GETTY IMAGES22 22 May 2022