The Return of Lenin

Studying the Russian Revolution has rarely led me to examine current debates among the "New Leftists."  Those debates have ordinarily struck me as either esoteric (even by the lax standards of this unread blog) or morally abtuse (after all, both Stalinism and the collapse of planned economies can't be lightly dismissed).  Reading Lenin Reloaded:  Toward a Politics of Truth convinces me that this has been a mistake on my part for two reasons:  first, by embracing many of Bolshevism's core values, the New Leftists help contemporary historians to get a better feel for the now ostensibly discredited values of the Revolution;  and second, the New Leftists continue to say highly original and remarkably productive things about the Revolution and its main architects.  Right or wrong, today's generation of Marxists give one a lot to consider about the Revolution.  Indeed, if the essays in Lenin Reloaded are any guide, their current debates about Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky are anything but sterile.  Of course, some modern Marxists are more thoughtful than others, but certainly Lenin Reloaded employs more than a few of best of them, including Zizek and Eagelton.

The book's essayists advance diverse arguments about the legacy of Lenin and, by extension, the Revolution.  But perhaps the overriding argument is this:  Lenin was too great a thinker, and too important a thinker to too many other serious thinkers, to be discarded altogether.  The authors' other claim about Lenin, that he can't really be blamed for the excesses of either the Revolution or, more especially, its statist legacy, aren't really convincing.  In fact, whatever the reason, the authors don't spend much time refuting the notion that Lenin can in any way be blamed for Stalinism.

What makes Lenin a great thinker, worthy of continued study?  Most of the essayists remind us that Lenin got a lot right.  He was rightly a serious critic of Tsarism, anti-semitism, colonialism, nationalism, and globalized warfare, to say nothing about his critique of capitalism.  Most also note that Lenin had a tremendous talent for operationalizing theory, or indeed for theorizing operations.  What they mean, is that Lenin adjusted theory according to experience, and used theory to open up a space in which actual and substantive change finally became possible.

The whole point of the New Leftism of course is that Lenin, or at least his immediate interpreters, didn't get everything right.  But reviewing this rich collection of essays, all of which analyze mistakes in the light of what they take to be a very valid project, sheds an immense amount of light on the whole subject of revolution.  If we take it to be no more than a bloody pathway to the gulag, we miss something vital about the aspirations of millions of people who then, as now, are searching for something better than the everyday barbarism we so often accept as our inescapable reality.   Do we have to be perpetually at war in the Middle East?  Is it necessary for Africa to be impoverished?  Is radical income disparity in the United States and a racialized prison system unavoidable?  Lenin the quintessential revolutionary might have argued otherwise.  More than that, he might have tried to do something about the sad situation.  


Alain Badiou, "One Divides Itself Into Two." 

"Extreme violence is, therefore, the reciprocal correlative of extreme enthusiasm, since what is at stake is indeed, to talk like Nietzsche, the transvaluation of all values."

"The century is lived as the century of victories, after the millennium of attempts and failures."

"For a revolutionary, the world is an ancient world full of corruption and treachery.  One has constantly to start again with purification, with disclosing the real under its veils."

"What is new?  This is the obsession of the century."

"The new man is either restored or his is produced."

"...the new man..resists all categorization and characterization.  In particular he resists the family, private property, and the nation-state."

"Marx..stresses that the universal singularity of the proletariat is to resist categorization, to have no characteristics, and, in particular, in the strongest sense, to have no particular nationality."

Citing Gide:  "To all families, I hate you!"

Alex Callinicos, "Leninism in the Twenty-First Century?  Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility."

Citing Lenin:  "There are no miracles in nature or in history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignments of forces and contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that much appear miraculous."

"History, as Hegel argues in his dialectic of master and slave, is a struggle to the death:  the institutionalized violence of class society can only be removed through revolutionary violence."

Terry Eagelton, "Lenin in the Postmodern Age."

"Yet both literature and revolution are of course art forms.."

"Anyone can revolt, but not everyone can carry through a successful revolution."

Fredric Jameson, "Lenin and Revisionism."

"Lenin does not know he is dead."

"...it is for one thing allegorically improper for a collective movement to be represented by a single named human individual."

Francois Furet, "Leaps, Leaps, Leaps."

Citing Furet:  "The idea of another society has become almost impossible to conceive of, and no one in the world today is offering any advice on the subject."

"Be ready for the improbable, for the unexpected, for what happens."

Sylvain Lazarus on Revolution

"...revolution is the unheard-of experience that the end of the state is possible.  It is unheard-of because the state itself asserts its inalienable perpetuity..."

It's difficult to digest Sylvain Lazarus' short but theoretically sophisticated essay, "Lenin and the Party, 1902 to November 1917," in Lenin Reloaded:  Toward a Politics of Truth.  However, Zylvain Lazarus' brilliant little essay makes me think that I put far too little emphasis on analysis and far too much emphasis on description.  What does Lazarus have to say about the October Revolution?  I think Lazarus' main point is this:  that the truly revolutionary moment is over almost as soon as it begins.  The point is best illustrated by Lenin himself.  Who was Lenin?  There are many versions of Lenin, even in terms of his political philosophy. The principle versions of Lenin are these:  first, there is the Lenin who modified Marxism in an anticipation of radical freedom from bourgeois social control;  second, there is the Lenin who consolidated power by wedding the newly formed socialist state to the communist party;  and third, there was the Lenin who was incorporated into the Stalinist philosophical project, namely Marxist-Leninism.

The point here is that there is, at least, a before and after in any revolutionary moment.  Is it fair to analyze Lenin as a political thinker, or revolutionary politics in general, from the vantage point of 1918, 1924, or even 1938?  Perhaps not, or at least not entirely.  Lazarus reminds us that in the nineteenth century the very notion of politics implied revolution.  No where was this more true than in Russia.  To be political, was to be opposed to the Russian status quo, to the monarchy, to the state in general.  This Lenin's thinking prior to November, 1917, is truly revolutionary in the sense that it pushes us to be free, free of colonialism, class oppression, and tyranny in general.  But after the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin's thinking means something else entirely.  Although the Bolshevik Revolution invented new forms of state activity, including the soviets and the Communist Party, in power the Revolution was no longer, well, revolutionary.  In other words, before taking power, Leninism represented something brand new, something perhaps inherently better than world war and colonial exploitation;  but in power, Leninism became another expression of state activity, not quite as bad as the Marxist-Leninist variety, but certainly not revolutionary as we should really understand the term.

To sum up, as a category of analysis, revolution is something more than what the "revolutionaries" made of it.  It's that rare break in the continuity of the state, a promise of freedom that can't really be reduced to the actual events that unfold in its name.

George M. Young on Fedorov and Company

E.L. Doctorow once wrote that Melville's genius lay in the fact that he broke every book in the writer's rulebook when he wrote Moby-Dick.  For instance, Melville doesn't introduce one of his central characters, the White Whale, until the final pages of his book, and doesn't hesitate to continuously stray from the plot in order to describe some arcane facet of nineteenth century American life in minute detail.  Doctorow goes further, suggesting that all truly great literature is a product of radical excess.  Ordinarily, a digression distracts a reader from his or her interest in the mechanics or action of a developing plot.  However, if you stray often enough from that plot, and spend enough energy in the attempt to escape the main storyline, you may very well discover something wonderful about American life or modernity in general by the radical and unsettling juxtaposition of dozens of overlapping explorations.  If radical excess is akin to genius in literature, why shouldn't this also be the case in philosophy?  Certainly one of modern Russia's most original of thinkers, Nikolai Fedorov, was also one of its most absurd ones.  For, as George Young writes in The Russian Cosmists:  The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers, Fedorov spent his life cultivating one very extreme idea, namely that human beings would someday conquer death itself.

The concept of resurrection isn't of course a recent invention, but Fedorov talked about resurrection in a physical, even literal way.  He believed that all of humankind needed to direct its creative and technological energies into the project of staving off death and raising our ancestors from the dead.  The idea didn't end there. Fedorov believed that men and women would eventually become so successful at the project of physical resurrection that they would be able to bring back our remotest ancestors, not excluding Adam and Eve.  Indeed, Fedorov's vivid imagination conjured up a picture of a retrofitted planet earth that could be steered toward the stars in an attempt to collect the cosmic dust of the earliest humans, dust which would be scientifically engineered to come back to life.  If Fedorov's project sounds a little off putting, we must remember that it inspired countless men (and presumably many women) of genius, including Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and isn't so very far removed from the current science of, say, the human genome project. Fedorov never wrote all that much, but many polmaths and renaissance men followed in his footsteps, some of whom made significant contributions to Soviet science.  Even today, Young tells us, the ideas of Fedorov, and other thinkers who also demonstrated an interest in resurrection or other semi-occult projects, are appealing to Russians.  

The overall impression left by reading Young's book, the Russian Cosmists, is that Russia really does deserve its reputation for producing large numbers of hugely original if slightly irrational thinkers.  Fedorov was clearly a brilliant and unique philosopher and indeed religious thinker.  But there were others whose brilliance closely paralleled the librarian recluse and at least shared some of his peculariarly Russian notions about religion, Russia's special destiny in the world, the cosmos, and the occult.  These include what Young calls the "Religious Cosmists," a category broad enough to include Solovyov, Bulgakov, Florensky, and Berdyaev, as well the "Scientific Cosmists," who include Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky, Chizhevsky, and Kupevich.

Nadezhda Mandelstam on Poetry and Socialist Morality

Some random samples of Nadezhda' Mandelstam's musings on poetry and socialist morality:

"If this life was given to us, it must have a meaning, although the very idea was dismissed out of hand by everybody, young and old, whom I have ever known in my lifetime."

"He always had children's socks hanging up to dry on his balcony, and I remember being astonished that people should have children during all this turmoil."

"Our grim-faced parents went to their doom while we enjoyed life hugely."

"I had the impression that death for him was not the end, but a kind of justification for one's life."

"Cruelty is anathema to any true artist.  I could never understand how Mayakovsky, who certainly was one, could say the brutal things he did.  He probably keyed himself up to utter such words, believing it was the modern and manly thing to do.  Weak by nature, he trained his delicate soul to keep up with the times, and paid dearly for it."

"The peculiar feature of this society--after it had been gripped in any iron vise and reduced at breakneck speed to a state of what is called here "unanimity"--was the fact that it proved to consist of individuals working for their own self-advancement either singly or in small groups."

"Nationalism is at a lower level of consciousness.  When it comes to the forefront, crowding out fundamentals, it is a sign not of health but of sickness;  not of depth but of shallowness."

"...bogus poetry is a poison."

"Poets should not be murdered, but neither should they be overpraised."

"It is said that every nation gets the rulers it deserves.  This is even truer of its poets."

"Briusov, it must be said, really had become a Leader (all my life there has been no getting away from Leaders!)."

"The mania for innovation always leads to speculative traffic in arbitrary notions;  and reliance on pure inventiveness invariably brings with it the spurning of man's accumulated riches, with all the fateful consequences this entails."

"In 1922, when this was written, everybody around us was talking about the new regime being hard, but nobody paused to consider that we are each one of us responsible for what happens in the world."

"The "strong" men of our heroic age always demanded praise from their womenfolk.  This was by way of compensation for all the indignities inflicted on them in their public life."

"This is a very good poem, Osip, but when it is finished, not a single one of the present words will remain."  Gumilev to Mandelstam.

"In the terrible years she had been  much more courageous, but now, with age, she had turned into a real specimen of Soviet womanhood."

"I do not fancy myself as the historian of Acmeism.  I think it can do without a history."

"...leading him back to a normal way of life, on one side or other of the barbed wire..."

"In our life, civic courage is a much rarer things than military valor."

"The Union of Poets applied to Gorky on his behalf for a pair of trousers and a sweater.  Gorky agreed to the sweater, but the trousers he crossed out with his own hand."

"They smelled too much of dust and a kind of prosperity strange in a city that was dying so catastrophically."

"...hauled of at night to the incredible jails of the twentieth century..."

"Evil is never greater or lesser--evil is always simply evil."

"..everybody now dreamed of a strong regime, so that they could rest and digest the experience of the years of chaos."

"In Kharkov we were struck of the fact that nobody conversed any more.  Conversation had come to an end--forever.  On the other hand, there was no end of talkers, all vying with one another to tell their stories."

"This apparat has stood the test of time and exists to the present day, even though the individual members of it have constantly been replaced by more efficient ones, like cogs in a machine, their predecessors being thrown out to moulder in concentration camps or in the provinces."

"All the same, I am glad that my capital is Moscow, not Kiev--my native language, after all, is Russian, and if the Jews are going to be slaughtered in both places, better it happen to me in Moscow.  In Moscow there will always be some kindly old soul who will try to stop the mob with a good good-humored oaths.  "Don't touch this one," she will say, "you so-and-so sons of bitches!:"  It will be easier to die to the familiar sound of Russian swearing."

"One can already see the tooth-mark of the times on you."  Nadezhda citing Sologub.

"The new regime's call for complete openness in public affairs--particularly in international relations--was followed by an unparalleled mania for secrecy about absolutely everything, down to the prettiest of details."

"One can live only with people one is close to--though better still is to live alone.  I rapidly learned the art of doing this and discovered that the worst part is sitting down to eat by yourself.  You never accustom yourself to that, but living with a person you are not close to is even harder."

"No woman without her folly," as the Russian saying has it.

"There are still many ordeals ahead, and nobody should be allowed to forget that you have to put all of yourself into the battle for another man's life--as Frida Vigdorova's example showed."

"We were on the threshold of a new era in which "men" ceased to exist."

"It brought home to us that madness is contagious--one madman just hands over to the next, as in a relay race.  The nature of the mania may change, but the torch of lunacy has been passed on and continues to burn."

"M. could not stand "omnivorousness in anything, and he regarded a capacity to select and define the components of one's inner world as the most important thing about a person."

"But if you think about it, a society is no better than its rulers.  It would be well for people to remember this, instead of putting on a resigned air or an innocent smile--nothing strikes me as more indecent."

"It does not matter what place a poet has in it, however small it may be.  The very smallest place--just a couple of successful lines, one good poem, a single well-said word--entitles him to enter the fellowship of poets, to be one of "us," to partake of the feast."

"Another things that distinguishes a poet is a sense of his own sinfulness--particularly important in the twentieth century, now that the very concept of sin has been abolished."

"Living in Petersburg is the same as lying in a coffin."  Nadezdha citing Mandelstam.

"It is easier to live with a pistol pointing at your head than in a necropolis with an immigrant, constantly shifting, always lifeless population, its citizens walking the streets like automons, their already dead eyes glazed by the worst terror in the country."

"A certain philosopher noted for his inordinately brilliant insights once publicly declared that an eschatological mood is the hallmark of dying classes."

"...poetry, even more than philosophy, is a preparation for death."

"The highest honor they can confer on a writer is to steal his body--as happened with Pushkin--or throw him in a mass grave.  A nation which has chopped up icons to light its stoves has given proof of an incredible failure of love."

"And there was not one of us who did not weep real tears when the high heel--a legacy from a very different life--broke on her beloved only pair of those foolish shoes which had once been designed for stepping from one's gracious residence into a waiting carriage, and no farther."

"But do you have any icons?"  "I don't believe in icons," she said.  "I believe in Soviet power."

"I did not understand the difference between a husband and a lover, and I must confess that I still don't."

"Today all my ideas are out of date."

"I have been told about an old man who walked out on his wife after forty years with her.  He left a note saying the past has been one big mistake."

"We all lived on a volcano--and still do.  Love and passion apart, a wife is there to build a home and organize a domestic routine.  In our times a girl friend was handier than a wife."

"He knew everything from all the cannibal talk he heard in the houses of his wife's relatives.  The only people who knew nothing were those who did not want to know--and that's no excuse."

"I think that at the beginning our rulers still believed in the rightness of their cause--hence their willingness to let out some of those who wanted to go."

"The great beauties of the day must all have managed to get away after the Revolution--at least I have seen only the leftovers, all of whom struck me as funny in a somewhat excruciating way."

"Poverty trying to look its best is comic."

"I have read in Sergei Trubetskoy that miracles convince only those who believe already."

"We answer for everything-for every deed and every word--and memory invites us to consider why we have lived, what we have done with our lives, whether we had a preordained purpose, and if so, whether we have fulfilled it;  whether our life had a unifying thread of meaning, or whether it consisted only of random and absurd happenings."

"Fifty years hence nobody will ever be able to clean up this gigantic mess."

"...but I lied and hid my real thoughts every day and every hour:  in the classroom, in the lecture hall, at home, in the kitchen.."

"This whole experience of the age of nihilism is highly significant, and it is most important that we fully understand it, as something eventually destroying life altogether."

"It clearly pays to read only as M. did:  turning only to the best and passing over the bad and the bogus."

"Those who once advocated realism and called on us to fight prejudice were quite remarkably quick to lose all sense of reality, and none are now so mortally afraid of facts."

"...the greater the success of the plans, the worse everybody lived..."

"I would like to think that all of today's scoundrels, murderers, and bureaucrats are descended from domestic serfs, not from real peasants."

"Ahkmatova and I once confessed to each other that the most powerful sensation we had ever known--stronger than love, jealousy, or any other human feeling--was terror and what goes with it..."

"A man possessed of inner freedom, memory, and a sense of fear is the blade of grass or wood chip that alter the course of the swift-flowing stream."

"In Russia," he used to say, "there is no space, only kilometers."

"...everything that goes on in our literature smacks of something concocted in a monstrous kitchen."

"But with us peace was always accompanied by unspeakable outbreaks of self-destructiveness."

"The funeral of Lenin was the last flicker of the Revolution as a genuine popular movement.."

Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned

Nadezhda Mandelstam's twin memoirs, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned, are two of the best pieces of writing ever produced by Soviet citizens.  (See my earlier post on Hope Against Hope).  The poet's wife writes beautifully, but it's the power of her intellect, as opposed to the power of her prose, that overpowers the reader.  They say that writing and thinking are essentially one and the same thing, but I doubt that this is precisely true.  In Hope Abandoned, we are seldom impressed by the texture of the author's words, or the grace of her images, but we are often impressed by the wisdom and clarity of her arguments and the power of her moral vision.  Nadezhda's memoirs accomplish several related tasks:  they defend the literary and humanistic legacy of one of Russia's greatest poets;   they analyze and contextualize Mandelstam's poetic oeuvre;  they depict the tyranny of the Soviet system;  and they analyze the individual's moral responsibilities in a totalitarian age.  If the poet Mandelstam was a master of verse, his wife may approach the level of her husband's competence with respect to the genre of memoir. There's something akin to St. Augustine's Confessions here.  Just as St. Augustine analyzed his own moral failures at every age, including infancy, Nadezdha applies the moral scalpel to her own behavior at various stages of life. However, Nadezhda isn't merely interesting in self-analysis:  her main concern is understanding how Russians allowed the moral catastrophe of Stalinism, and Bolshevism more broadly, to engulf them.  Mandelstam approaches this question on many different levels.  She's concerned with the broad and narrow questions of evil.  She wants to know why Russia became a land of totalitarian suffering, but she also insists on exploring how evil operates from one day to the next in the lives of Russian citizens.  In the last analysis, Nadezhda believes that all Russians bore responsibility for Stalinism.  Why did Russians kill and degrade one another?  Nadezhda argues that this became a possibility only because ordinary Russians co-signed Stalin's bloody check. If Nadezhda believes that all or almost all Russians bear responsibility for the state's brutality, she is also interested in how and why so many Russians went above and beyond the call of duty to monitor, denounce, harass, and torture one another.  Nadezda's explanation of evil isn't economic but entirely moral.  Russians placed their own self-interest above that of their neighbors.  This selfishness is complex:  sometimes collaborators hoped for social or economic advancement, sometimes they hoped merely to survive, but in all cases the root of the matter was narrow-minded selfishness.  Nadezhda's examination of Russian criminality remains relevant in the twenty-first century.  When one reads Russian blogs today one is quickly immersed in raging rivers of homophobia and anti-semitism, to say nothing of generic expressions of xenophobia.  While Russia's root problems may be economic in nature, related as much to a crisis of capitalism as to a legacy of communism, there's clearly a continuing failure of moral imagination in Russia's citizenry.  Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Abandoned may be one of the best remedies for this sad situation.  And if moral analysis doesn't work, perhaps poetry will.

Ilya Ehrenburg

Perhaps no other writer's career illuminates so many facets of the Soviet experience as that of the prolific Ilya Ehrenburg.   For many decades, Ehrenburg was one of the Soviet Union's most internationally recognized writers.  His various successes as a writer neatly correspond to many of the Soviet Union's most important milestones in socialist government.  For Ehrenburg was a poet and avant-garde novelist when the Soviet Union was itself a sort of experimental project;   Ehrenburg was a patriotic propagandist when the country was engulfed in Nazi atrocities;  Ehrenburg was a court flatterer when almost everybody in Russia was collaborating on some level or another with the phenomenon of Stalinism;  and Ehrenburg was a humanist when the country made its fateful, if short-lived and uneven, move away from unbridled totalitarianism.

Joshua Rubenstein's portrait of Ehrenburg, Tangled Loyolaties:  The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg,  sheds light on a dozen different aspects of modern Soviet history.  Most importantly, Rubenstein's biography demonstrates the pervasiveness of anti-semitism throughout modern Russian history.  In his early career, Ehrenburg was a Bolshevik and rebel, but quickly became revolted by revolutionary successes, only to return to Leftist politics when confronted with the violent Jew-baiting of the Whites.  Although Ehrenburg compromised his integrity over and over again in order to survive Stalin's extraordinarily dangerous regime, he worked hard to temper political violence and ideological extremism, and never more so than when this violence and extremism was directed against Jews.

It's remarkable to trace the history of anti-semitism in twentieth century Russia, but Ehrenburg's life bears witness to its tenacity.  Although never a religious man, Ehrenburg grew up in a Russia which prevented Jews from living outside of the "Pale of Settlement" without special permission from the government.   He then watched much of the Civil War's fury directed against Jewish civilians. After that, Stalin's regime proved decidedly unfriendly to Jewish interests before Nazi Germany took anti-semitism in the East to hitherto unimagined extremes.  This orgy of bloodshed wasn't the end.  After winning the Second World War, Stalin moved decisively against Russia's large Jewish population, labeling them "rootless cosmopolitans" with no allegiance to the socialist state. The so-called "Doctor's Plot," in which Stalin and his henchmen falsely accused Jewish doctor's of plotting the medical assassination of several leading communists, Stalin included, was certainly the signal for a wider campaign against Russia's defenseless Jewish population.

Ehrenburg, almost alone among the Soviet Union's leading Jewish writers and other cultural leaders, survived.  Rubenstein speculates that this was because Ehrenburg demonstrated his usefulness to the regime as a bridge to Western cultural figures.  But he also wonders whether Ehrenburg's fame helped Stalin to cloak the destruction of most other leading Jewish writers, actors, and cultural leaders.  In any event, Rubenstein's title, Tangled Loyalties, is descriptive.  Ehrenburg did repeatedly demonstrate some measure of political courage, notwithstanding his decision to remain publicly loyal to the Soviet Union's political establishment.  In fact, throughout his career, Ehrenburg defended countless intellectuals and writers who demonstrated some level of autonomy in the Soviet Union.  He was, for instance, a champion of Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova.  More importantly, he helped to document the holocaust in the East.  In the end, Ehrenburg may be best known for writing the book, The Thaw, which gave a name for the liberalization that the Soviet Union experienced after Stalin's death, and for producing a memoir which, while politically cautious by today's standards, were filled with liberal, modernist, international, and humanist sentiments, sentiments that inspired a generation of Soviet dissidents and reformers and artists.

One thought that stayed with me is that Ehrenburg's humanity, like that of the Russian people, somehow survived Stalinism.  At the same time, Ehrenburg was honest enough to avoid any simple claim that he had been duped or overawed or purely victimized by Stalin's villainy.  Although Stalin was a brutal dictator, Ehrenburg believes that the Soviet people participated in their own degradation.  Why?  Many have argued that the Russian people were spoiled by centuries of rural ignorance.  To his credit, Ehrenburg rejects this thesis.  Germany had no such excuse:  an educated populace was no barrier to Hitler's charism.  Whatever the case,  on some level the Russian people liked Stalinism, even embraced it. While Ehrenburg couldn't explain why this should be the case, and even expected historians to wrestle with the questions for several decades if not more, he acknowledged that this paradox of what Terry Eagleton calls "holy terror" (i.e., desirable, even transcendent, brutality) must eventually be resolved if people are ever to avoid the horrors of modern totalitarianism.

Viktor Shklovsky and the Sound of the Cicadas

One of my favorite Soviet writers is Viktor Shklovsky, dean of soviet literary theorists.  I've reviewed many of his books on this blog, or at least celebrated them.  Shklovsky's most important contributions to literary theory may well be over my head.  Even so, you never read one of his book without appreciating dozens if not hundreds of bon mots.  Rarely is Shklovsky anything other than poetic. Bowstring is filled with witticisms and poetic throwaway lines.  If he had been a television writer, he would have had no trouble writing the final line of every single episode of television's most prolific series, Law and Order, as well as its numerous and long-running spin-offs.  Here are a few scattered lines from Bowstring that seemed to call for careful consideration.

"When one is old, one likes to reread.  Old age will come to an end."

"A grateful crawfish or a frightened devil won't bring back the golden rings, tossed into the water by the imprudence of youth."

"Nightingales sang below my window, or maybe they weren't nightingales at all.  They don't care that they have been in exhausted in poetry;  they don't know that they've been refuted."

"I was born in 1893, before the Revolution of 1905, but was awoken by the first revolution and anticipation of the new...In our poems, we tried to guess the date of its arrival."

"The Drosophila flies are not sent into space for a vacation.  They enable the study of how the cosmos affects living organisms."

"There are names of people in my old phone book that I can't call anymore."

"[Boris Mikhailovich Eichenbaum] was poor, but he wasn't burdened by poverty."

"He was passionate about music and kept his violin, despite passionately hating it."

"He was a man of politely extreme convictions."

"The empire was coming to an end."

"He was headed toward a bright future.  I ruined his life by engaging him in an argument."

"[Osip Brik]  Not quite a soldier, not quite a futurist."

"..a moldering displeasure was quietly brewing inside.."

"I witnessed everything from the very beginning, I began to understand things much later."

"Uplifted by the wave of the revolution, without really comprehending it, we were immersed in it, and we were in love with it as a young people can be in love."

"During those years he passed his library through fire.."

"The dejected, grotesque Russia of Nicholas I stretches outside its windows.  The wind of the empire bursts into the novella's structure."

"It is possible to live without the life-sensation of one's existence."

"We were in love, we experienced death, we saw our children die, and we saw our own history unfold."

"The sound of the cicadas is not art (yet), but it has potential."

"Barefooted, Socrates rested under the plane tree, listening to the cicadas, turning its pages anew."

"Going over Tolstoy's diaries, you get a sense of looking at the blueprints of an experimental shop in a huge factory."

"The whole world was moving.  The Soviet Union was pulling the world and it was changing slowly--from our perspective, and quickly--from the historical point of view."

"Our generation of people who were sent in the wrong direction by a casual passerby because they were lost.."

"Death replaces the rows of people; it is preparing a new edition, restoring life."

"Eugene Onegin is a river, the shores of which have been described, but which hasn't been fully explored yet."

"The young Tolstoy noted that there wouldn't be enough ink or paper in the world had he recorded everything a person goes through in a single day."

"But then Socrates says how beauty can be found in the way that shoes are lined up or coats are sorted."

"We still use religious terms to say something antireligious."