Fortino Samano

Mexican photographer Augustin Victor Casasola here captures one of the last moments in the life of Fortino Samano. A leader of the rebel forces during the Mexican Revolution, Samano was sentenced to death and was executed by a Federal firing squad in 1916. He was not yet 30 years old. 

Looking quite casual in this portrait, while smoking a cigar that was surely his last, Samano presents a kind of inevitability and acceptance to his final hour. Perhaps as a revolutionary in such a turbulent time, Samano faces his death in the same way that he lived his life, with complete confidence in his beliefs, and a willingness to die for them. Still, though, mustn't he have some regret?
  
In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot,  the character Prince Myshkin tells a story of a prisoner who is sentenced to be executed, but who is saved at the last minute. Myshkin describes the story so vividly it is as if it was he who was experiencing the agony of his final moments. The prisoner thinks to himself, "What if I didn't have to die! I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for..."

Like the prisoner in Prince Myshkin's story, in Puccini's opera Tosca, the character Cavaradossi heartbreakingly contemplates the glorious details of his life, the night before his own execution for political crimes. In the famous aria "E lucevan le stelle," Carvaradossi passionately proclaims his love not only for his beloved Tosca, but for the incredible minutia ("shimmering stars") of life itself: 

In a way, Casasola's photograph, Dostoyevsky's story, and Puccini's opera, all serve to fulfill the dying wish of Prince Myshkin's prisoner, who would "turn every minute into an age." For, as artistic forms, they are immortal and enable an infinite extension to each man's final moments, offering his epiphany and pain as a lesson to anyone who will hear it. 

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