By Stephanie de Montalk
VUP, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Robert Metcalf

The Fountain of Tears is a singular achievement by poet, non-fiction author and novelist Stephanie de Montalk. She has realised the distant settings of Poland, Crimea and Russia in both 1752 and 1821 with clarity and lucidity. This is testament to her own personal interest in these places and events as well as the depth of her research. Indeed, there is a useful afterword containing historical information, along with a map and an extensive list of books in the author’s acknowledgments.

While The Fountain of Tears is a book set in the past, the characters are alive and well-drawn, and we consistently obtain insights into their thoughts and memories. Much of the story takes place inside the heads of the two main characters, Maria Potocka and Alexander Pushkin. This is a fitting narrative style, as both characters are captives in their own way. De Montalk employs both a wide and a narrow focus in relation to time, which at once highlights the captivity of the two characters, while also establishing their ephemeral place in a broader canvas – two minor players on the wide Tatar steppe.

Maria Potocka is a Polish countess, daughter of a venerable Polish family, part of the ancient nobility of Poland – the Szlachta - who exercised great influence in the then powerful kingdom. Maria’s memories while sitting in her cell range across her privileged childhood, which consisted of strolling in her father’s grounds, playing the harp and receiving suitors. Poland at this time was at the frontier of conflict between East and West, and there are references to King Jan Sobieski’s triumph over the Ottoman Turks at Vienna in 1683, which effectively shut the door to Europe and halted the Ottoman advance. Living on this frontier ultimately renders Maria’s privileged childhood vulnerable to attack, and she is abducted by the Tatars on a slave raid to Poland. After a long journey over the steppes she arrives at the palace of the Khan in Bakhchisaray, Crimea. These experiences are related as memories, both as part of the third-person narrative and in Maria’s own words in her verse recollections. Maria’s story in the book takes place over one day in September 1752, between midnight and dawn, as chapters intersect with those dealing with Alexander Pushkin, set in Odessa on 26 May 1821.

Pushkin is here realised as a young man captive to his passion for Sofia Potocka. De Montalk removes Pushkin from the literary canon for a day, so that we may get to know him as a living man, before his works have gained their place on the world’s bookshelves. There is no certainty that Pushkin will develop into a mature writer and produce his later works. His passions may yet consume him. He is a “clumsily-wrought poet without rank or commission”, who is “unwilling to tame his drinking, gambling and whoring; unable to placate his family, to retain all but close friends”. One feels a greater affinity for Pushkin after reading this book and seeing him wrestle with captivity and memory in the early hours of an Odessa morning.

Ultimately the two stories, and their two vanished characters, intersect through a physical medium, the fountain of tears of the title. This was the monument constructed by Maria’s captor, Giray Khan, in memory of the Polish countess with whom he fell in love but who would not return his affections. There is a photograph of the fountain in the book, and there is a sense that, as well as connecting Maria Potocka and Alexander Pushkin, it also connects those personalities (both in their historical and literary incarnations) with the author and her audience.

The Fountain of Tears is a distinctive book by a New Zealand writer in that its action takes place entirely elsewhere, at a time when European contact with New Zealand was only beginning, yet the worlds of Maria and Pushkin are successfully evoked. It is worth reading from this point of view, but also for its poetic style and its meditative explorations of the ideas of captivity, memory and the fluidity of time. The Fountain of Tears represents a further development from an original and innovative New Zealand writer.