Sulamith: A Romance of Antiquity

Aleksandr Kuprin’s Sulamith proposes that Solomon, owner of vast wealth, wives, and existential despair, needs a barefoot thirteen-year-old vineyard girl to explain the point of living. He has exhausted philosophy and declared all is vanity; she sings about foxes and undoes his entire worldview before lunch. Their love is luminous and doomed, because arguments about love’s supremacy apparently require a body count. The book also debates Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, insisting love alone escapes vanity, at a cost Kuprin does not soften. Meanwhile, Queen Astis, the neglected wife, behaves like the only sane person and gets labeled the villain. The problem sits in plain view: Kuprin’s lingering, aestheticized gaze on Sulamith as a child. The prose is lush, confident, and deeply uncomfortable, like a jewel with something rotten inside. Beautiful, troubling, and utterly convinced of itself.