The most unusual reason for stabbing a friend

BarcelonaNot long ago, it was reported that a former Russian literature professor had been arrested in a region of the Urals on suspicion of stabbing a friend while they were discussing—now you see, this is a proper conversation—literary genres. The victim maintained that the only serious literature was prose, while the accused maintained the opposite: there is no greater literature than that written in verse.

The teacher would be one of those Russians who have read Pushkin and who, quite rightly, considered the father of contemporary Russian literature to be a giant, insurmountable. Josef Brodsky, Nobel Prize winner for literature, once came to Barcelona and, instead of talking about his work, in a public lecture, he began to recite by heart hundreds of verses from theEugene Onegin which, in fact, can be considered a novel. It is understandable that the murderer would end the life of someone who admired the novels of Goncharov, Tolstoy or Pasternak, which are very good but prosaic, more than Pushkin.

The two men, one still alive, the other deceased, would have been able to understand each other perfectly. In all literatures, the first thing invented was verse, and over time, prose literatures were born: discourses, history, philosophy, and narratives. This has historically determined that prose, too, feels obliged to possess certain musical cadences that do not quite become verses, but which are close to them, because they soundThe first sentence ofHe Quixote begins with an octosyllable and a decasyllable: "In a place in La Mancha / whose number I don't want to remember..." The first sentence of the Research, by Proust, has a musicality ―like the whole book― that is difficult to translate: "Longtemps / je me suis lying de bonne heure" is not the same as "For a long time I went to bed early," which would be an acceptable musical translation.

That is why, when Mr. Jourdain, in The bourgeois hidalgoMolière's 1911 summed up his theory of genres by saying that "everything that is not verse is prose," making a grave error. All prose should strive to approach the beauty of verse, and it's a bad thing when prose becomes thorny, syncopated, and unmusical.