An Esperanto Nightingale

The nightingale

She sang topical songs in Esperanto, but how did they know they were topical?

It’s just a short item in the San Francisco Call of April 14, 1906 under the title “Here Is a Quartet of the Most-Talked-Of Women in the Domain of the Czar.” The article makes brief comment on four women, only one of whom is referred to with a full name. The four women are Mlle Vera Delaroziere, Mlle Slavin, Mlle Tcherniaskaia, and Mlle Tamara. That’s not a lot to go on.

The first, Ms. Delaroziere (I’ll go for a more contemporary means of referring to these women), is said to have “announced her divorce from the stage of the Strelna Winter Gardens” after which she “proceeded to read the amorous letters she had received.” It’s probably a safe assumption that the letters weren’t from her soon-to-be-ex husband. Ms. Slavin was described as trying to get the “smart set” (presumably just the women) to adopt her style of elaborate head ornamentation she wore. The third was a dancer suing her doctor for a botched cosmetic surgery job (artificial knee dimples). Finally, Ms. Tamara sang topical songs in Esperanto.

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Russian Censors Study Esperanto

Esperanto: A force for
free speech!

It’s not like they were seeking to bring the world together in unity and peace. They were more afraid of what the Esperantists might be writing. This was one of the worries that Marcus Zamenhof, Ludivick’s father, had about his son’s creation. New language: not going to go over well with the Czarist officials. It’s entirely possible that Marcus Zamenhof’s motivation for destroying the predecessor to Esperanto, lingwe uniwersala, was not so much “don’t waste your life on this crazy dream,” but “don’t jeopardize my job,” since the elder Zamenhof had become a censor.

Marcus Zamenhof was still alive when Esperanto came to the attention of the Russian censors. He couldn’t have been happy about it. The censor’s office probably wasn’t happy when the censor assigned to study the language “died within a couple of weeks of learning the language.” Least happy would be the poor man who died, though I don’t think we can implicate Esperanto in the matter.

The United States has a long-standing tradition of freedom of the press, and so there hasn’t been a need for censors. The Sedition Act of 1798 was a notable blot on this tradition, and ironic given the role of seditious newspapers in spurring the Revolution. Its successor, the Sedition Act of 1918 was upheld by the Supreme Court, but subsequent decisions would seem to make clear a constitutional right to criticize the government.

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Esperanto — A Nest of Spies?

So much for holding the UK in Moscow

Such was the contention of the Russian government in 1911 after convicting the president (and founder) of the Russian Esperanto League[1] of treason. An article appeared in various papers[2] in early September 1911 of the September 8 trial. It was clearly big news out of Russia.

Other reading I’ve done has made it clear that the Russian government was suspicious of Esperanto from the start. There were reports that the Czarist censors were learning Esperanto, and at other times that sending Esperanto materials into Russia was forbidden. It’s one of the oft-told Esperanto tales that Marcus Zamenhof, Ludovik’s father, worried what the official response to his son’s language would be, and if it would have an effect on Marcus’s job as a censor.

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