06 Aurelia and Michael Strogoff
- Jon Nelson
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
The Frenchman Jules Verne appeared with a blaze of novels that were all "voyages" (but all Science Fiction stories are ‘voyages’ in a sense): Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864); From The Earth To The Moon (1865); Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870); Around the World In Eighty Days (1874). Verne’s "voyage"novels were genial and pleasant and original. There was good comedy in them. As a comic writer, Verne was at least equal to Mark Twain. There is some good technology for the times, and even a touch of science. The ‘voyages’ were freighted with magic and gold; but it wasn’t recognized immediately that Verne was an authentic sun. — “Great Awkward Gold”
A digression on an oddity.
What is Michael Strogoff doing in Aurelia?
Michael Strogoff is one of those figures modern readers have largely forgotten, though he once held a place in the popular imagination. He is the heroic protagonist of Jules Verne’s adventure novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar (1876). Brave, loyal, and almost preternaturally self-controlled, Strogoff is a courier in the service of the Russian czar, sent on a dangerous secret mission across Siberia to warn the czar’s brother, the Grand Duke, of a rebellion led by the traitor Ivan Ogareff and invading Tatar forces. It is one of Verne’s best books.
The novel follows Strogoff’s journey from Moscow to Irkutsk, a journey of physical danger, disguise, betrayal, capture, and, well, torture. Along the way he meets Nadia, a young woman traveling to find her exiled father. Much of the plot turns on Strogoff’s endurance, patriotism, and self-command as he struggles to complete his mission against overwhelming obstacles. Like the best of Verne’s work, the book offers travel, suspense, geography, and adventure. What it does not offer is science fiction. It is a political and military thriller.
Strogoff appears as a blinded man in the riverboat set piece that already existed in the original draft of Aurelia. The curious point, however, is that he was not in that draft. Lafferty evidently decided, when reworking the material, that the passage needed something Strogoff could supply.
In Verne’s novel, Strogoff’s blinding is one of the great dramatic moments. Captured by the Tartars and exposed by the traitor Ivan Ogareff, Michael is sentenced to be blinded by a white-hot saber passed before his eyes. Verne makes the scene emotionally powerful by having Michael look at his mother, Marfa, believing that she will be the last thing he ever sees. For several chapters, the reader believes he has been blinded. Only later does Verne reveal that Strogoff’s tears, brought on by the sight of his mother, protected his eyes from the heat, allowing him to continue his mission while pretending to be blind. It is melodramatic and so very sentimental.
Does this mean that Strogoff is not really blind in Aurelia? What is Lafferty doing with him?
Let's go through how he appears in the novel.
We first meet Strogoff when Aurelia boards the River Boat. Around the table sit the gamblers: Karl Talion, Blaise Genet, Julio Cordovan, Helen Staircase. These are the Hoffmannian figures playing the game of symbols, the people I take to be powers and principalities. They play dangerous card games involving blood, death, masks, and fraud. Michael Strogoff sits at the same table, but he is separate from the action:
There was one other man at the table, playing cards, and yet not playing with the others. This was the very old man, Michael Strogoff, who was blind and who played by himself with blank cards.
Later, Strogoff adds one special card to his own deck. While the others play corrupt and violent games, his attention turns wholly to Aurelia. The gesture links her to the novel’s symbolic economy of horns and marks her singular importance on the River Boat:
The old blind man, Michael Strogoff, was also playing cards, by himself, at the same table. To his blank cards he had now added one value-card. It was a multi-colored Aurelia card. It was equal to the ace of trumps, to the ace of trumpets as they once called it correctly.
True to his borrowed identity from Jules Verne, he later in the book acts as a
courier, and he fulfills his Verne-like role by delivering a vital message:
A man, oh, he was that blind man Michael Strogoff (he’s been at the same table with the gamblers on the River Boat) handed Aurelia a bank newspaper. "There is a piece here about you and your dark companion, in The Afternoon Endeavor," he said. And he pointed it out to Aurelia.
Near the end, we see him one last time, a part of the River Boat’s weird
fake/replica world. Aurelia sees the River Boat figures again—Karl, Julio,
Blaise, Helen, Michael, and even Aurelia herself—continuing their endless
game, only now revealed as mechanical constructs:
And they were in the gambling room now, Karl Talion, Julio Cordovan, Blaise Genet, Helen Staircase, Michael Strogoff, and Aurelia herself. And they were playing "brag," except Michael who was playing solitaire with blank cards and with one Aurelia-value card. Well, they were wax figures, wax over some sort of jointed armatures, and they moved very mechanically.
I do not know with certainty why Michael Strogoff is in the book, but I would hazard this: he is there to show what kind of world Aurelia has entered. It is an amnesiac world of blank signs, counterfeit persons, violent games, and distorted messages. Strogoff is a messenger with an all-important content that must be conveyed, and his one clear action in Lafferty’s novel is to recognize Aurelia as a valuable card in the game of Hoffmannian symbols. Blind or not, he sees enough to know that Aurelia matters. She is the trump card that wins Gaea. Like him, she carries an important message from the King, though unlike him, she does not really know the message she bears. That is the point made possible by the novel’s postfigural logic: Aurelia is not the source of the message, but she has become its bearer.
