Such Women Are Dangerous (40ft Press, 1965) – by Paul Kavanagh
Nastasya Kuprin (1899–1985) was arrested by hard men. She gravitated towards them, even though she knew being a satellite had many dangers. She admitted to being one of those women who hang around prisons and marry murderers, robbers, thugs, and rapists.
‘Her book is a Bowie knife,’ said Ernest Hemingway to Sylvia Beach (Paris, 1921). Kuprin said and I quote: It is my gift to you. I want you to run the razorblade across your smirking face and widen that stupid smile.[1]
Her favourite word was Akeldama.
I pick up her book, Such Women Are Dangerous (40ft Press, 1965), and thumb through the leaves. A serrated edge cuts my forefinger. This is a perfect Kuprinian motif. However, the slice is a little fissure and would disappoint the author. There is a bead of blood. This is not a Kuprinian motif. In her books, blood flows, cascades, are mighty Wordsworthian cataracts.
Give me War over peace. Peace is paralysis. War is life. I wept on 8 May 1945 as though the world had ended[2].
Aeneas also wept. He wept like a baby on seeing Dido’s frescoes celebrating the war he had lost. He would have given anything – Rome! – to return to that battlefield.
I check my wristwatch – another Kuprinian motif. It took me five minutes and thirty-three seconds to read the first chapter. It took me four minutes and five seconds to read Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile (Calder, 1960).
Kuprin drank only vodka, three bottles a day. She was a chainsmoker, always removed the corktips. She feared starvation, food had to be kept close, within arm’s reach. She never pontificated on literature, music, or art. She never went to the movies and hated television with a passion. She loved horse racing, car racing, and fencing. ‘Then’ and ‘the’ and ‘and’ are the most used words in her lexicon. She allowed only red and black to be used on her books – her two favourite colours. Some say she came from White Stock. Unproven. There is no full-length biography or even a photograph of her posing with a hand glued to her face – a face feigning profound contemplation. She said and I quote: You would never catch Marinetti doing the peacock. She said she never ran, not even as a young girl. She said and I quote: I will only run when death is behind me. She said her epithet should be and I quote: Death take me now or forever be my shadow. Gabriele D’Annunzio said to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘It’s a damn good epithet[3].’
I have stepped into the space left by man. I stand in that space and watch man as he retreats and I lament. My father would puke at the sight of today’s man, panting and wheezing.[4]
Kuprin’s great-great-great grandfather, Boris Kuprin, a serf, won a small fortune playing cards against Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in Sevastopol. After the card game, he was never the same. He invested in a printing press. He might have published Tolstoy. He fought a duel over slander and was killed. While taking ten steps back, with the pistol to his chest, he fell down a disused well. Her great-grandfather Dmitry Kuprin built on the small fortune manufacturing balaclavas. He stopped the production of balaclavas and produced bullets. The Revolution made him a very wealthy man. Two gypsies (Stalin’s henchmen, no doubt) dispatched him, theoretically over unpaid wages. Her father lost all the family’s money. On a dark, wintry night, a shovel removed half of his head. His body was never found. We do not know which side he was fighting on. Stalingrad 1944.
Her first husband, Patrick Murchadha was an Irish Rebel. They met in the city of ----------- in 1922. They fell in Irish love. His face was pitted with scars. She loved them – the scars. This had the young girl in profound thralls. She said and I quote: I came just by running a finger along one of those deep ruts. A bomb went off in his face. He was planting the bomb under a car. He lost an eye. The missing eye is important – a Kuprinian motif. He fashioned an eyepatch. She loved this. She said and I quote: He was my emerald pirate. He was killed in a motorcar accident. There is speculation that Kuprin was at the wheel of the car. The couple were being chased by other Irish Rebels wanting the return of some stolen cash. She married the week after the accident. Her second husband, Yakub Asantewaa swept her off her feet. She said and I quote: He was a lion! It was in Paris in the late 30s. A giddy time. Champagne and dancing. He was eluding the French Foreign Legion. As you know, they are tenacious in their pursuit of escapees. She adored the chase. Always on the move, from hotel to hotel, from bed to bed. She said and I quote: God created a man without fault or blemish when he created Yakub Asantewaa. He was the night sky. I truly believe Yakub Asantewaa was Kuprin’s greatest love. She said and I quote: He was composed not from mere bones but Ivory! He must have been a paragon of a man. He was a great soccer player, juggler, thief, and street fighter. He was murdered over two aces of diamonds. Stabbed more than a hundred times. The knife was never found. The police found the abandoned body on Rue Lepic, not far from where Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote his two masterpieces and complained about the Montmartre smell and noise. Her third and final husband was Markus Montgomery-MacArthur. She said and I quote: His nose was Roman, but he was very, very stinking rich. His achievements were many. He won gold in Helsinki 52. Boxing, I think. He was accused of bribery. After Helsinki 52, he took up badminton. Only after a year of playing badminton did he win the Badminton World Championship. He beat Rajiv Ambani in a thrilling final. It was aired on the BBC. It was the first Badminton World Championship to be broadcast on live television. The people at the BBC didn’t bother to record it onto tape for posterity. In the crowd was Kuprin. She said and I quote: Not love at first sight but a shuttlecock can change things. While on a World Tour, they found and lost religion. They spent a year with the Aghori. The devotees of the God Shiva. They themselves became a symbol of the God Shiva. As with the Aghori, they washed in sand and dried in water. They consumed food from a begging bowl fashioned out of a human skull. She said and I quote: We lived within a cremation ground, sitting peacefully upon a charred cadaver. The corpse upon which we meditated was a symbol of our own body. Opposites are identical and the distinctions between purity and impurity are ultimately illusory. After losing religion, they moved to a seaside town in the south of England. In the hotel where pleurisy took out Aleister Crowley. During this time, Montgomery-MacArthur led mercenaries to battle in Africa, the Middle East, and South America. It is believed she took up arms with him. We know she took up the pen. During these violent sojourns, she wrote her books. The books sold rather well. They moved to the island of Capri. They drank, dined, and swam with the best of them. One night, after a session of heavy drinking and drug taking, Montgomery-MacArthur passed out while swimming. He was never seen again. This death hit Kuprin hard. Being over eighty, she said and I quote: To the chastity belt I am one.
Her eyes cut me to the quick. The little pinholes emanated no light. If there were colour in the irises, I saw none. Her eyes were as black as the coffee – laced with vodka – she drank[5].
The first and only interview took place in 1934, in Berlin. It was a horrible interview. Henry Black did a wonderful job painting the country, bringing alive the sound, the smells, the colours.
She is a small, stocky woman, with bricklayer’s shoulders, and with a head like a cabbage and hair like a Brillo pad.[6]
The interview went horrible from the introduction. Henry Black insulted Kuprin with his Oxford fashion and with his idiosyncratic manner in which he sat and crossed his legs at the ankles. When he asked about her childhood, she stood up and slapped the poor Englishman across the face. After the slap, she sat and demanded an apology. The shocked, red-faced Englishman apologised. Of course, he did. This capitulation ended the interview.
[1] Letter to Guston Kevinour. 1933. Translation: Larry Caomhánach.
[2] Nastasya Kuprin: The Queen of War. The Felleon Review. 1932. Henry Black.
[3] Translation: Larry Caomhánach.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Nastasya Kuprin: The Queen of War. The Felleon Review. 1932. Henry Black.
[6] Ibid.
Paul Kavanagh has been published in The White Review, Sleeping Fish, The Chaffey Review, Fourteen Hills, and Exacting Clam. He is the author of the novels The Killing of a Bank Manager (Honest Publishing, 2011) and Iceberg (Honest Publishing, 2012). Everybody is Interested in Pigeons is published by Sagging Meniscus Press (2026).
