It's tempting to think that literary greatness confers a kind of immortality, but the sad truth is that even great works can perish along the way, victims of rot, fire, or simply a loss of interest.
Countless lost works have been completely forgotten, but hundreds remain known, despite their absence. This kind of loss may exist in our cultural heritage too - if it turns out to be true Petar Petrović Njegoš allegedly also wrote the second part of "Mountain Garland" with the humorous incidents of Vuk Mićunović and Duke Draško in Venice.
Here are eight of the most famous examples from the "gone but not forgotten" genre of world literature.
1. Homer's "Margit"
The author of "Iliad" and "Odyssey" laid the foundations of Greek literature and the epic approach to military history and travelogues.
In addition to the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer is believed to be the author of a third, humorous epic, which was called "Margit" or, in translation, the Fool. So much is known about his hero Margit that he lacked the courage of Achilles and the cunning of Odysseus, and that he was from a rich family, that he could not count with numbers higher than five, that he did not even know whether his mother or father carried him in his belly , and that on the first wedding night he turned out to be a donkey because he was not allowed to touch his wife for fear that she would later sue him to his parents... The poem consisted of a series of picaresque stories about Margit's follies, and Aristotle considered it as valuable as the other two works of Homer .
Aristotle says in "Poetics" that "as the Iliad and the Odyssey stand to tragedy, so Margit stands to comedy," and that Homer in Margit gave dramatic form to the ridiculous. But, unfortunately, we do not know what the definition of ridiculous would be, given that that the second part of Aristotle's "Poetics", which was dedicated to comedy, was lost.
In the novel "The Name of the Rose" Umberto Eco deals with the fate of this book: "Each of Aristotle's books destroyed part of the knowledge that Christianity had accumulated for centuries", says the head of the famous monastery library, and that is why, of all the forbidden books, only the pages of Poetics 2 were covered with poison, so it was impossible to copy them. "There was such a fear of laughter," says Eko.
2. Jongle encyclopedia
Between 1403 and 1407, more than 2.000 scholars gathered in the Ming Dynasty capital of Nanjing to work on the largest literary project ever undertaken in China. The Jongl encyclopedia or "Jongl dadian", which can also be translated as "the great norm of the Jongl era", is named after the third emperor of the Ming dynasty.
Jongle was one of the greatest Chinese emperors of all time. The most respected Chinese scientists of the time carried out a rigorous selection of materials. After almost a year and a half, they brought what they had done to the emperor for inspection. The very demanding emperor rejected them and appointed a new editorial board.
In addition to literary ones, there were also articles from the domains of religion, astronomy, geography, history, philosophy, art, medicine... Confucian texts, considered sacred at the time, were also systematized. When the encyclopedia was completed in 1408, it had almost 23.000 sections and an incredible 11.000 volumes - handwritten. It occupied a space of as much as 40 cubic meters. The original manuscript was lost by the end of the 17th century. In 1860, most of the only manuscript copy was lost during the looting and burning of Peking by Anglo-French forces during the Second Opium War. After the Boxer Uprising broke out in the summer of 1900, Chinese insurgents mistakenly set fire to the Hanlin Academy and the Imperial Library, which housed the remaining copy of the encyclopedia.
After the Chinese destroyed their own magnificent work, a smaller part of the encyclopedia was saved, parts of which are scattered all over the world. Fortunately, several hundred volumes were prevented from burning.
3. Aztec and Mayan codes
One of the unusual aspects of the spoils of any conquest is the ability to erase or rewrite the history of the conquered peoples. When the fourth Aztec emperor, Icoatl, using a military alliance to try to consolidate the empire in 1426, he is believed to have ordered the destruction of all previous historical records, in order to better promote a pure story of the origins and rule of the Aztecs. In Yucatan, Mexico, 136 years later, a representative of a different kind of invader did a similar thing.
In 1562, Diego de Landa, the leader of the Franciscan order in the Yucatan, ordered the destruction of thousands of Mayan religious and historical artifacts, including at least 27 hieroglyphic manuscripts. Landa saw his orders as a one-man inquisition that would "cleanse" the Maya of their old religious practices. Ironically, most of what little we know about Mayan history and religion comes from a book Landa wrote to support himself after being sent home to Spain as a punishment for his illicit activities.
Only three books, called the Maya codices, escaped the Catholic pogrom. They are known today as the Madrid, Dresden and Paris Codes. Sometimes parts of other destroyed codexes appear. Deciphering the now lost Mayan language has become a long and arduous task. Some elements were deciphered at the end of the XNUMXth and the beginning of the XNUMXth century. By the end of the XNUMXth century, most of the Mayan texts were deciphered.
4. The Lost Shakespeare
There are 36 of Shakespeare's preserved and confirmed plays, an oeuvre that left a great mark on the English language and literature. But two 400-year-old scraps of paper suggest there may have been two more Shakespearean plays hitherto lost to history.
In 1598, the list of Shakespeare's surviving works includes a comedy called "Love's Labour's Won". Many scholars assumed it was simply an alternate title for "The Taming of the Shrew." But the 1603 fragment, discovered much later, includes both titles. A similar mystery surrounds a play called "Cardenio," which is believed to have been co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher and performed in June 1613. If it did exist, "Cardenio" is likely based on a side story in the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes, which had appeared in English translation a year earlier - creating a challenging opportunity for a narrative blend of two of the greatest literary minds of their era, who died on the same day.
5. Memoirs of Lord Byron
George Gordon, Lord Byron, was the quintessential poet of the Romantic era, who wrote and lived passionately, with lots of emotion and a desire for adventure. In 1816, Byron fled the staged scandal and breakup of his marriage to spend the rest of his life in genteel exile across Europe, engaging in superficial foreign affairs in both senses of the term (he had affairs with a number of women in Italy, eventually dying of fever in 1824 , helping the Greek revolutionaries in the fight against the Ottoman Empire).
Eight years before his death, Byron entrusted his friend Thomas More with his autobiography, on 78 manuscript leaves. Days after the news of Byron's death reached England, More, along with the distinguished publisher John Murray and another friend (with his wife's approval), decided to destroy Byron's autobiography, burning it in Murray's fireplace in London. The two claimed that they did so to save Byron and his family from scandal, although Byron himself wrote to Mary about the manuscript, claiming that he had “left out all his loves (except in a general way) and many other things of the greatest importance (because he does not want to endanger other people)". Byron, however, promised Mary on that occasion “a detailed account of his marriage and its consequences, which is probably what his widow did not want ever to see the light of day.
6. Gogol's "Dead Souls", part two
The most shocking self-immolation in the history of world literature was the destruction of the second part of "Dead Souls".
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol worked on them for almost ten years, and the first part, according to him, was supposed to be only "a doxat to the castle, which is planned on a colossal scale." In a dark plot worthy of the kind of Russian novel he pioneered, Gogol destroyed the second part of perhaps his greatest work, under the influence of his clergyman who convinced him that everything he had created was an expression of evil. The writer called the servant to light the fire. One by one, the leaves were consumed by the flames. When everything was over, he crossed himself, kissed the horrified young man on the forehead and collapsed sobbing. Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls, which depicts a man roaming the Ukrainian countryside buying up legal rights to deceased serfs as part of a get-rich-quick scheme, is considered one of the most important Russian novels of the 19th century.
After burning an almost complete sequel to Dead Souls, Gogol immediately regretted it and fell into deep despair, refusing food until his death nine days later on March 4, 1852.
7. Hemingway's lost and (found) luggage
In December 1922, Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, left her luggage unattended on a train for a few seconds; when she returned, the suitcase containing almost all of her husband's unpublished records had been stolen. Hemingway himself rushed to Paris in a futile attempt to recover the lost manuscripts, which contained an almost complete novel based on his experiences in World War I. His early work is lost - it was such a break from the past that some literary critics think it actually fueled his creativity in the decades that followed.
In 1956, the aging Hemingway had better luck with his lost luggage when he found two trunks he had left for safekeeping in the basement of the Parisian "Rico". The crates contained notes and sketches of his experiences in Paris in the late 1920s that would eventually form Hemingway's posthumous memoir, The Moving Holiday, published in 1964.
8. "Double Exposure" by Silvija Platt
When the American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, she left behind numerous poems and manuscripts, as well as two small children and an estranged husband, poet, future laureate of the title of British Poet Ted Hughes, who became, based on of English law, in charge of her literary legacy. The last months of Sylvia Plath's life were extremely productive - during which she wrote many of her best poems, including several about the breakdown of her marriage. In his 1977 memoir, Hughes revealed that Sylvia Plath had also “typed about 130 pages of a second novel, tentatively titled 'Double Exposure'. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970".
Since then, many Sylvia Plath devotees have questioned Hughes' passive attitude towards the "missing novel", noting that since it was probably autobiographical, he and his infidelities would not have been portrayed in a favorable light.
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