"Melpomene" by Alexander Devyatov, summary Automatic translate

Melpomene is a 2023 novel by Alexander Devyatov; it was published on Author.Today on February 1, 2023, and later appeared on book services as historical fiction with a romance and dramatic plot. In the book, the young playwright Philippe Lavoine receives a commission for a new play, and his work quickly becomes entangled with poverty, insomnia, and a vision of a spider named Melancholia.

Having moved from Calais to a southern port city, Philippe lives in a cramped room at Madame Boche’s, is behind on rent, and is unable to begin his love play for the theater. At night, Melancholia, a spider, comes to him, taunting him, recalling his failures, and instilling in him a sense of his own worthlessness. During the day, things are hardly better: there’s no money, the canary is annoying, the landlady demands payment, and Lavoine himself tries to cling to the idea that his talent will yet make itself known.

In search of a plot, he goes to the sea. There, he first encounters his old friend Mélisa Dubois, a theater actress well acquainted with his weaknesses and habits. Then, at the chess tables, he sees Mélanie Marceau. Philippe loses several games to her, but the defeat only heightens his interest: Mélanie’s silence, precision of movement, and cold politeness affect him more than any external beauty. He still remembers his failed relationship with Michèle, the baker’s daughter, and against this backdrop, this new encounter seems exceptional.

Philippe brings Mélanie to the Opéra Dramatic, where he introduces her to the company and simultaneously tries to woo director Gaubert, who has long been waiting for at least a general outline of a new work. On the fly, he concocts a story about a strong female knight forced to navigate a man’s world. Gaubert agrees, seeing the theme as a box-office hit. Lavoine himself takes this success as a sign: he’s beginning to believe that Mélanie is the muse he’s been searching for.

Returning home, he quickly writes the first scenes and mentally connects the heroine with Joan of Arc. That night, Philippe encounters Frieda Schlosser, a modest theater cloakroom attendant who lives next to Mélanie and tells him about her admirers, especially Colonel Victor Moreau. Later, Lavoine and Frieda arrive at Mélanie’s house, overhears a scene at the door, and sees Moreau persistently pursuing her. He then persuades Frieda to open Mélanie’s apartment and secretly examines her home, hoping to discern her character from her belongings.

After this breakdown, Philippe reaches the brink. Melancholy drives him into a dead end at night, and he nearly commits suicide with rat poison stolen from Madame Boche. His neighbor, Dr. Schultz, saves him from death by giving him sleeping pills. A deep sleep brings him clarity for the first time in a long time. In his new state, Philippe makes a date with Mélanie at a play, promises her a role for Frida, and, wanting to get Victor out of his way, pushes the jealous Mélisa toward Moreau.

The romance then temporarily becomes a story of intense passion. After Hamlet, Mélanie herself takes Philippe out of the theater, spends the night in his room, and their relationship quickly becomes permanent. She brings him a rare sense of peace and simultaneously a renewed creative fervor. The play grows, and the author himself writes with ease for the first time in a long time. At Mélanie’s request, he secures the lead role for Frida, thereby humiliating the arrogant Pierre Cherreau. Frida is supported by her cousin Helmut; Melissa and Jacques Truffaut assist her in the troupe, while Pierre greets her with hostility.

The next tangle involves a chess tournament, which Mélanie wants to attend at any cost. Women are not allowed, and Philippe endlessly visits offices, trying to bribe officials and failing. Then, through Mélisa, he approaches Victor Moreau. The colonel initially refuses, mockingly speaking of the suffragettes and Mélanie herself, but then relents after hearing Philippe’s passionate speech about love and duty. Meanwhile, Melancholia is growing stronger again: the pills suppress it, but they interfere with his writing, and Lavoine gradually weans off the medication.

The turning point comes suddenly. On the street, Philippe sees Mélisa’s body with a broken head, and Victor nearby, already being held by the gendarmes. Convinced he is facing the murderer, Lavoine, enraged, smashes his typewriter over Moreau’s head. He is immediately arrested. In prison, he learns that the state benefits from concealing the colonel’s guilt and making the writer himself a convenient defendant. Gaubert visits him only to retrieve the manuscript and make it clear that Philippe is easily sacrificed for the sake of the army and the theater’s reputation.

The hardest blow isn’t the cell, but the severing of old ties. Gaubert fires him and erases his name from the play. Melanie doesn’t come and, according to Frieda, is leaning toward the general consensus of his guilt. Even Jacques, who tried to visit him in armor, proves useless. Only Frieda truly believes him. A girl named Mary appears in the next cell — strange, crippled, talkative, and connected to a traveling circus. Through her, Philippe first comes into contact with a different kind of people, people the city has become accustomed to regarding as freaks and scum.

That night, Aida, the leader of the circus community, comes to free Mary. At the girl’s insistence, she also takes Philippe, despite despising him as a possible murderer. Thus, Lavoine finds himself in a secret circus camp outside the city. There he meets the hairy acrobat Daniel, the scaly boy René, the gypsy Nadia, the Berber Amalou, and other camp inhabitants. Among them, he begins to write again. Nadia, laying out cards, speaks to him of the power of pride and egoism; Daniel argues with him about the play’s ending; Aida demands a balance between utter darkness and a sweet fairy tale.

Philippe creates three endings for his play. The first is tragic: the heroine is betrayed by her own people, and her death becomes the price for someone else’s calculations. The second is happy, almost fairytale-like, with love, salvation, and punishment for the villains. The third is in between. None of them gives him peace for long. The decisive opinion is René, who secretly searches for all the versions of the text and recognizes the first, the darkest and most honest, as the best. This conversation restores Lavoine’s faith in his own taste and gives him a rare sense of creative righteousness.

Then he goes back to the city with Renée. There, more blows await him. Madame Boche’s house is half-destroyed by a rat infestation, and Philippe feels a certain guilt, having once stolen poison from her. In his old room, he finds a complete mess and the remains of a canary devoured by rats. Frieda reports that everyone thought he was dead, and the play has already been rewritten without him. She also reveals that Melanie is living with a new admirer, the Ethiopian chess player Alexander Negash, who secured her entry into the tournament.

Philippe goes to the theater and learns that the revised play has been enthusiastically received: critics, audiences, and suffragettes praise the very ending that the author himself finds false. He leaves his true version with Jacques and nearly renounces writing. Then, after drinking absinthe, he heads to the tournament, sneaks into Negache and Melanie’s room, hides in a closet, and, blinded by jealousy, pours rat poison into a bottle of champagne. But the lovers carry it downstairs, and the poison ends up with others, not just them. When one of the drunks collapses and begins coughing up blood, Philippe realizes he has killed an innocent man.

Afterwards, he runs to the river, torn between fear, guilt, and the desire to disappear. Along the way, he tries to help a drunken tramp who has broken his head, but this incident only reinforces the idea that everything around him ends in blood. Melancholia, who has long haunted him in the form of a spider, in the finale directly identifies herself as his true Melpomene, his dramatic muse. Lavoine, having lost Mélanie, Mélisa, his name, and his play, goes to meet her, and here the narrative ends.