Checking In

 I've taken a long break from posting here, but wanted to just briefly check in.  I believe my break from this blog, and from my almost single-minded focus on Russian history and literature, was a result of COVID.  During the first year of the pandemic, I felt like I need a change and so dived into many non-Russian literary rabbit holes. At first, I just read all of George Eliot novels, which certainly took a long while, but then I read all sorts of things, including Greek and Roman history, non-Russian classic novels, etc.  

But this week I will teach a topic course in the Russian Revolution and I've decided to finally tackle Trotsky's classic book(s), The Russian Revolution.  So far, so good!  I loved Trotsky autobiography, and even tried to visit his home in exile when I visited Turkey a couple of years ago, although I don't think I actually found his home even though I was wondering around the right island.  

Of course, I never veer too far away from Russia.  I recently read Creating Anna Karenina:  Tolstoy and the Birth of Literature's Most Enigmatic Heroine, for instance, a wonderful biography and piece of literary criticism about Tolstoy's life at the time he was focused on Anna Karenina.   I've posted about this book, and some other works related to Russia, on Goodreads, but I hope to get back to posting here more regularly too.

 These are challenging times.  My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine at this difficult hour.  

That said, I'm going to try to post a little more often in the coming months.  In part this is because I am planning to teach a course in the Russian Revolution, and that course starts next week.  The book I've assigned for this course is Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution, edited by Todd Chretien.  The book does a reasonably good job of stringing primary sources together to describe both the bourgeois and Bolshevik phases of the unrest of 1917.  However, the book is clearly intended to describe the October Revolution from a pro-Bolshevik standpoint.  It relies very heavily on Bolshevik sources, or sources friendly to Lenin's general line of thinking.  It fails to provide readers with many alternative perspectives. For me, it was interesting to hear how Leftist historians might interpret each phase of the Revolution, but for students without much historical context the selected sources might prove misleading. Still, I'm hopeful that I can use the pro-Bolshevik sources as a counterpoint to my own views about the meaning of events.

As preparation for online presentations, I looked at some of the Very Short Introduction books related to the general context of the Russian Revolution.  All of these were fairly good.  The most relevant of these books was S.A. Smith's Russian Revolution, but I used Stephen Lowell's book, The Soviet Union, to help me think about how the Revolution fits into the overall trajectory of the USSR, and Michael Newman's book, Socialism, to place the Bolsheviks into a broader socialist tradition.  I also relied on the introductory chapters of Jack Goldstone's Revolutions, if only to remind me of some basic questions students should think about when they come to the study of social unrest for the first time.  (See my earlier post on this book) I do think that book should be tempered by Hannah Arendt's On Revolution is better, however, in that it tries to explain that revolutions aren't really an ahistorical phenomenon, as Goldstone seems to contend.  In other words, the term Revolution, as we understand it today, has very little to do with premodern forms of social unrest, revolt, and armed resistance.

While discussing Russian books in this series, I should conclude by saying that earlier, I also read and liked Catriona Kelly's Russian Literature.  And I hope to read the books on Marx and the Russian Economy soon. 

S.A. Smith's The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

As one might expect from the author's expertise, S.A. Smith's The Russian Revolution: A Very Short Introduction is a very informed account of the Russian Revolution and its influence up until the 1930s.  The book provides readers a concise account of revolutionary events but tries to introduce readers to some of the major areas of research into the revolution and its immediate aftermath.  Smith seems particularly interested in issues related to nationalism and ethnic minorities in the Revolution and in the Soviet Union.  He touches on issues related to gender, the arts, modernization, etc.  One might do better to read his relatively recent Russia in Revolution, however, since this book does feel caught somewhere between a high school text and a grad school preliminary exam preparation book.  And perhaps the issue is that Smith attempted to cover the narrative but also the historiography, and that might be too hard to do in A Very Short Introduction, even though I recall liking Catriona Kelly's Russian literature book in this series fairly well.

Hannah Arendt's On Revolution Revisited

 I'm a huge fan of Hannah Arendt and think there's nothing finer than her Origins of Totalitarianism in particular.  But for some reason, I wasn't thrilled with her book, On Revolution, the first time around. I was confused by the extensive discussion of the so-called American Revolution, which hardly seems like a revolution at all when set alongside of the French or Russian Revolutions.  But in preparation for a class, I gave the book another read and liked it much better this time.  I particularly like the way she explains why revolutions are inherently modern phenomena.  An expert in Greek history, she admits that previous epochs knew regime change.  However, she asserts that regime change, or even the eruption of religious mass hysteria, is quite different than revolution in the modern sense of the word.  Revolutions, she argues, involve rectilinear time. They demand revolutionary calendars that begin in Year One.  The idea of novelty is essential to the revolutionary experience.  People need to know that the future is wide-open, almost unpredictable.  

In the 18th century, people moved closer to the idea of overturning the world to create something brand new, or even utopian.  But they weren't searching for freedom, or at least the freedom to do something unprecedented.  In pre-modern eras, discontents might search to recover lost liberties, but they didn't do so to create a unique, open-ended future.  They didn't even call for liberty for all male members of society, or citizens.  They also made no pretensions to speaking on behalf of the world. They required the return of lost liberties, and these liberties were generally very specific to particular places, or particular classes or even nobles.  According to Arendt, pre-modern people didn't seek comprehensive, total, terrifying, change.  Slaves sought freedom, palace elites sought a new leader, sections of an empire sought independence; but no one sought global freedom for all citizens.  

Like Goldstone, Arendt does some historical work.  But here she notes that nobody even used the word revolution until quite recently.  And when like Machiavelli does identify a secular realm of politics, he's looking to the past, to Polybius.  Indeed, medieval thinkers couldn't even conceive of anything other than a rebellion in order to exchange rulers.  Medieval thinkers made no claim whatsoever that the people should gain any share in government.  You were born a ruler, a noble, and that was that.  The English levellers did finally demand something new:  a constitution.  Still, they were primarily concerned to get their ancient rights restored to them.  To use the scientific term, they demanded a complete revolution of the social order, or, in other words, a return to the ancient status quo.  

Arendt even includes the US revolution in a pre-modern rebellion, in the sense that the revolutionaries were demanding their rights as Englishmen restored to them.  The French Revolution, by contrast, called for the execution of the king and queen, and then the radical unfolding of new knowledge about politics, a new society, a new future.  And at first, they wanted radical decentralization, and later, and as a response to the threat of counterrevolution and invasion, the reverse:  radical centralization.  Of course, the French Revolution also added an economic dimension to the notion of radical freedom.  From 1789 onward, revolutionaries would also be thinking of social and political freedom.  

Jack Goldstone's Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction

 As will be evident, I've taken a long break from my Soviet reading list.  The general Covid situation made switch to other readings.  Even so, I have recently decided to teach a short course on the Russian Revolution and so I'm reading a few books that I thought might help me with this task.  The first book I read was Jack Goldstone's Revolutions, part of the Very Short Introductions series.  I thought my class should start with some reflections on the nature of revolution, and the history of the concept, so I appreciated Goldstone's first chapters on the subject.  Goldstone's first couple of chapters raise a number of interesting questions. After reading these chapters, I thought my class could begin by discussing questions such as the following:  How should we define the word, revolution?  What is the difference between a revolution and a revolt or rebellion or civil war or insurrection or guerilla warfare? Are revolutions common or rare in world history?  Why do they really matter?  Are they essentially violent?  Do they often or even usually lead to dictatorship?  Are they varied in their expression or a unified phenomenon? Why and when do people think they can revolt, or that they should revolt, or that they simply have no choice but to revolt?  Do revolutions occur because the people are optimistic or pessimistic about the future?  Do revolutions always contain a democratic element, or are they almost by definition democratic?  Do revolutions occur only when leaders are isolated or weak?  Do they occur only when the military waivers?   Are revolutions essentially political by nature, or are they mainly an economic occurrence?  Can a revolution be an elite affair, or is it always a matter of the masses revolting?  Are the reasons revolutionaries give for rebelling the real reasons revolutions occur, or are there more important reasons they occur?  Does inequality help or hurt the cause of revolution? What's the role of religion in revolution?  Does modernization prevent revolution or cause it?  How do we judge the results of a revolution?  Should we use a short-term or long-term standard of its effects on society?  Do elites need to be divided for a revolution to be successful?  When do revolutions have a global impact?  Is there a science of revolution?  Can they be predicted to any degree?  How have revolutions change over time?  What's the relationship between war and revolution?  Can revolutions be coopted by bringing rebels into the ruling establishment?  Are revolutions moral by nature?  Do revolutions require foreign assistance?  How do revolutions draw on past rebellions or revolutions to make their case for radical change?  Do revolutions require charismatic leaders?  Why do they attempt to adopt new language, new rituals, new religions?  Must revolutionaries be conspiratorial? Do revolutions have to lead to post-revolutionary power struggles?  How can revolutionary regimes best be stabilized?   How can they deal with external threats?  Do they do best to adopt constitutions?  Can revolutionary regimes remain democratic?  (Is the US Revolution truly a revolution?)  Do revolutionary regimes always adopt purges as a technique of government? Do the radicals always win in post-revolutionary power struggles?  What are the benefits and costs of revolutions?  Why do some revolutions have ethnic or nationalist overtones, or do they always have to have them?   How did revolutions change between 1688, 1776, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1917, etc.?  How did non-European revolutions incorporate anti-colonialism into ideologies?  What do the Iranian Revolution and Arab Revolt say about revolutions?   

These are all great questions.  Goldstone also believes that revolutions require five characteristics:  1) economic or fiscal stress; 2) elite alienation; 3) popular) a narrative of resistance; 5) international support. 

Golstone's book also covers different broad historical epochs and their experiences with revolutions.   I found these chapters less than useful.  I think Hannah Arendt's book, On Revolution, helps to explain why this is the case.  According to her, revolutions are modern by nature.  They demand something brand new, rather than a return to lost privileges, whether real or imagined.  They usually have global pretentions.  They are utopian.  She makes her point by analyzing the Puritan Revolution and the Glorious Revolution.  Both had some modern elements, but neither sought to bring about a millenarian future.  They called for the reestablishment of ancient liberties.  They used the scientific definition of the term, revolution, to call for a return to the way society was supposed to be. Although Goldstone is right to point out that the Greeks and Renaissance princes knew regime change, they aren't quite right to equate this with the French or Russian revolutions, which called for the implementation of modern utopias that would scarcely resemble any past.  

George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in the Rain

George Saunders' new book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, analyzes several Russian short stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Gogol.  As a Russophile, I was happy to read or reread the stories he selected, which included The Nose, The Master and the Man, The Cart, and at least one story from A Sportsman's Sketches, and other nineteenth century classics.  On the other hand, I was just slightly disappointed that Saunders didn't have any special expertise in either Russian literature or history.  Picking up the book felt like a case of false advertising.  Yes, Saunders had taught a course in the Russian short story for several decades and knew these stories intimately.  However, he was primarily concerned with the craftsmanship of the stories, rather than their Russian themes or the Russian literary contexts from which they emerged. Indeed, Saunders analyzed these short stories primarily from the point of view of a writer, or would-be writer.  In some ways, Saunders could have written the same sort of book about any group of short stories.  He really did not need to limit himself to Russian stories, so the book seemed a bit gimmicky.  In any case, Sanders did something new by asking readers to read these stories, and then carefully deconstruct them in terms of their plot and other literary devices.  And certainly it was nice to approach these classics from the point of view of a writer learning a craft.  It was somewhat exciting to be asked by Saunders to think about the many choices each of these Russian authors made when creating their masterpieces.  It was also interesting to see that Saunders thinks that a writer like Turgenev may have actually created something unique as result of his own creative limitations.  That is to say, Saunders argues that Turgenev was not an expert at plot, but therefore turned characterization and setting and detail into something extraordinarily beautiful.  

Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism

Vivian Gornick, where have you been all my life?  As famous and prolific as she is, I don't remember ever reading anything by Vivian Gornick before.  I actually just stumbled upon her this week when I encountered a short book of her insightful literary essays entitled, The Men in My Life.  Loving this small book, I moved on to a larger book, The Romance of American Communism.  This book is phenomenal.  A work of oral history, The Romance of American Communism traces the rise and fall of American Communism by relying on many of its surviving members.  Gornick was perfectly positioned to write this book.  A product of of the New York Jewish Left, Gornick grew up around every shade of American socialist, cooperative enthusiast,  trade unionist, Wobbly-descendent, and communist.  She also writes beautifully, and seems just how to conduct interviews that honor their subjects without a critical spirit of inquiry.  The variety of communist experience was of course vast, and Gornick captures that variety.  Still, Gornick's respondents elucidate some big and unifying themes in the movement.  Many people were practically born into communism, especially those whose families emigrated from Tsarist Russia or other lands of poverty and persecution.  Others were appalled by the Depression and specific injustices, often in the California agriculture districts.  Many communists were attracted to the idea that they were participating in something larger themselves.  Interestingly, a great many men and women said communism helped them to "discover" politics for the first time.  In other words, prior to recruitment, these men and women had no way to explain their lives, and how those lives connected to communities, and how those communities connected to the world at large.  After recruitment, these men and women had a diagnosis for what was wrong in the world, and felt that they could make a difference.  Over time, communism was confronted with state-sanctioned harassment.  Also, Stalin's Show Trials and later Soviet conduct in the Cold War did much to dampen the enthusiasm of American communists.  But even after the diminution and end of the American communist movement, former communists remembered how much the movement had meant to them.  Participation in the Party had given their lives meaning.  They had made friends and lovers by way of their political activity.  Some were disillusioned, but even many of these were convinced that nothing else in their lives had been so important, so meaningful.  

Julian Barnes' Noise of Time

 Since the pandemic arrived, I've taken a bit of a hiatus from Russian subjects, reading widely.  However, I try to make sure a few Russian books, or Russia-themed books, stay in the mix.  I happened about Julian Barnes' novel on Shostakovich in a roundabout way. I had just finished several books by Flaubert, and was in particular greatly impressed by A Sentimental Education.  This, in turn, led me to pick up Barnes' magnificently clever paean to the master stylist, Flaubert's Parrot.  After that, I needed to find another Barnes book immediately, so selected Noise of Time.  Well, Noise of Time can't compete with either A Sentimental Education or Flaubert's Parrot, but Barnes does do a wonderful job of depicting the moral dilemma of many ordinary (and extraordinary) Soviet citizens.  For Shostakovich was neither pure saint nor pure sinner.  Like many, he lived through the Great Terror and entered into the Thaw in a somewhat traumatized state.  While I didn't find Barnes had all that much to say about Shostakovich as a musician or artist, he did help demonstrated the complexity of making one's way in a totalitarian society.  Of course, Shostakovich's own memoir, Testimony, is an even more eloquent account of survival in Soviet society.  That great work is filled with Shostakovich's rage and bitterness at all kinds of people who made dark compromises with power.  Some have argued that Volkov actually authored (or too actively curated) this memoir, but even if he did, the work expresses deep truths about moral corruption.  Rubenstein's  biography of Ehrenberg, Tangled Loyalties, is another exceptionally insightful take on artists who managed to maintain some moral integrity despite being frequently called upon to serve as apologists for Stalinism and post-Stalinism.   

Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark

Over time, I hope to make my way through most of Nabokov's books. However, thus far I've only read Lolita, Mary, the Gift, Speak, Memory, and now, Laughter in the Dark.  Laughter in the Dark is a short, delightful book, originally written in Russian. The book is seems more concerned about a suspenseful plot than Nabokovian wordplay or complexity.  It's a short book, but filled with urgency.  It's hard to put down.   As its title suggests, Laughter in the Dark somehow both tragic and comical.  One stands in awe at Nabokov's ability to describe the state of blindness standing at the center of the novel's denouement.  Nabokov's book is lots of fun, but the protagonist's physical blindness to say something profound about the metaphorical blindness of its bourgeois hero, about the metaphorical blindness of all of us.  Metaphor or not, the book mainly succeeds in describing the inevitable costs of infidelity. 

Steinbeck on Russia

I am sure someone has already written a wonderful dissertation or book (or several) about the many famous Western writers who visited the Soviet Union and wrote up their travel journals.  Benjamin, Feuchtwanger, Hughes, Gide, ee cummings, and others come to mind.  Reading a massive Steinbeck biography by Jackson Benson (perhaps I should have gone with Parsini's shorter one), I figured it was time to read Steinbeck's contribution to the genre, A Russian Journal.  Not a particular fan of Steinbeck's fiction (with the exception of East of Eden), I was skeptical that he would be able to escape his official minders or see beyond the ideological constraints of the early Cold War.  However, Steinbeck's book is really pretty good.  His strengths as a fiction writer are revealed in his approach to travel writing.  That is to say, he goes out of his way to avoid taking sides, or sermonizing.  

Steinbeck's biographer claims that both communists and capitalists often criticized his fictional depictions of worker exploitation and unrest.  One can see why.  In this book, Steinbeck tries to stick to what he can see or hear for himself.  He calmly notes what his American friends say about Russia before he goes, but doesn't give any of these anti-Russian comments a great deal of weight.  In Russia, he is careful to tell his readers what he is and is not allowed to see, and how his stay is mediated by Intourist and various prohibitions against photography, industrial reportage, etc.  He also notices many hallmarks of totalitarianism, including Stalin's pictorial omnipresence, the general culture of secrecy, and Trotsky's elimination from Soviet history, but tries to be as open-minded about the Russian people as possible.  

The best part of Steinbeck's book is that he really doesn't try to be make too many overarching claims about his Russia as a result of his relatively short stay there.   Steinbeck's relative humility is even evident in his treatment of Russian questions about America.  When they ask him about Truman, he truthfully admits his relative ignorance about the man.  And he's careful to say that he isn't really all that qualified to speak about America as whole, knowing only certain portions of the country, or certain segments of it.  Another interesting aspect of the trip is that it occurs in 1948, when Russia was just barely recovering from the German invasion and war years.  He visits Moscow, Ukraine, and Georgia, but his trip to Stalingrad is perhaps the most revealing portion of the book.  The city remains physically devastated.  In the end, Steinbeck offers readers few theoretical insights about the Soviet Union or communism.  However, he does make readers feel as if they themselves were on the tour, visiting a country recovering from war, and still in the throes of dictatorship, but still resilient.  Of course, neither Steinbeck or the reader ever visit the places in the Soviet Union, including the gulags, which might have forced him to do more sermonizing than he did. 

Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man

Soviet Roulette has taken a bit of a hiatus.  I required a break and dove into all manner of literature since the pandemic broke out, starting with George Eliot's oeuvre.  Yet I'll keep my oar in the water by mentioning a few Russian books now and again.  Today, I'll mentioned that I've read Ivan Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man and found that the novella seems to foreshadow many of the later classics of modern fiction, including Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground or Goncharov's Oblomov.  In truth, I wasn't a huge fan of Turgenev, and was particularly underwhelmed by his most famous work, Fathers and Sons, which seemed a little crude, a novel of ideas rather than a novel of living characters.  However, as I've read more of Turgenev, I've become more and more impressed with his versatility.  They say Turgenev is a great stylist, and perhaps that is difficult to capture in translation.  But what strikes me most about the man is that he was willing to continuously test out new ideas and new literary forms.  While I have many more books to read, I am struck by how different each of his books can be.  Smoke seemed like a light, gossipy novel;  Fathers and Sons seemed obsessed with philosophical posturing;  Diary of a Superfluous Man seems like an investigation into morbid psychology;  First Love seems like a tender romance. I now have the feeling that I will get a wonderful overview of Russia's literary tradition if only I allow myself the time to read all of his diverse novels.  That's a wonderful thing.  I am not sure if I will ever encounter a Turgenev book I like as well as Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, or any of Chekhov's major plays.  Even so, I think I will come to think of him as deserving to be considered in their company.  I will have to tackle Saunders' new book to see how it looks when he considers a Turgenev story along side stories of these other greats.  

Some favorite quotes

How is that that fourteen days are less than fourteen years or fourteen centuries?

..she was always busy, forever bustling about like an ant--and completely without purpose, which cannot be said of an ant.  

That is what children are for, to keep their parents from getting bored.  

While a man is truly living, he has no sensation of his own life;  like a sound, it becomes clear to him only a short time later.  

I have nothing against happiness;  in fact, I have tried to approach it from every angle...

Timothy Synder's On Tyranny

Although I thought I'd dislike this little book, thinking Synder might have put together a short list of democratic clichés, I came to realize that Americans need a practical book like this to teach us that freedom isn't a purely abstract concept. Rather, it depends on everyday decisions made by plebeians like me.  In a sense, Synder's book is the counterpoint of Fitzpatrick's book, Everyday Stalinism.  His book might have just as easily been called Everyday Democracy. 

In fact, in the age of Trump and Putin, Synder's little book is long overdue.  While Synder doesn't have the space to incorporate too many historical analogies into this small book, his call to resist creeping authoritarianism in clearly grounded in the Soviet and Nazi pasts he explored so brilliants in Bloodlands and other books.  What, specifically, does Synder call us to do to defend our fragile liberties?  First, he asks us to think carefully before we surrender any freedoms.  Indeed, he actually believes citizens tend to give up freedoms in anticipation of upcoming threats from would-be dictators.  Second, he asks us to defend institutions, whether they be national, state, or local ones.  An ordinary citizen may not be able to support all institutions simultaneously, but if each of us would invest in a newspaper, a union, or a legal entity, the system itself will remain more resilient.  Third, Synder reminds us to resist any one-party solutions be proposed by participating in local, regional, and national elections.  Fourth, he asserts that we can defend the public sphere best by supporting vulnerable minorities and social groups.  Fifth, Synder insists that professional groups, and the ethical rules these groups uphold, are a vital bulwark against state power.  Sixth, Synder leverages historical experience to point out the dangers of paramilitaries and other forms of lawlessness.  The list continues, but generally calls upon citizens to support factual and investigative journalism, verifiable reality, honest political language, social connectivity, the sanctity of private life, skepticism of overblown state claims about the dangers of terrorism, panic-based politics, patriotism (as opposed to blind, xenophobic nationalism), etc. Most importantly, Synder asks us to beware of the "politics of inevitability" or the "politics of eternity."  Freedom can be defended, but it takes ordinary citizens (and not just heroes) to do so.  

Marina Tsvetaeva's Poem of the End, etc.

As translated by Nina Kossman, Marina Tsvetaeva poems hold up relatively well in English. Below are a few favorite lines from them.

From on a Red Steed

No Muse, no Muse

Sang over my shabby

Cradle, or took me by the hand.

I clang--blare--clap,

I snarl, I shoot sparks.

An alliance of winds

Sweeps the big roads.

 

Poem of the End

In the sky, rustier than tin,

Is a lamppost like a finger.

In every eyelash, a challenge.



Sky of bad omens. 

Rust and tin.

This soundless kiss:  

The stupor of the lips.

Thus--empresses' hands are kissed,

Thus--dead men's hands...

(The exaggeration of life,

In the final hour.)

What yesterday was waist-high,

Suddenly reaches the stars.

(Exaggerated, that is: 

To its full height.)

Gypsy brotherhood--

This is where it led!

Like thunder on the head,

Or a naked blade,

My brother in sin,

My fever and fervor.

They dream of running away

The way you dream of home.

The water--a steely strip of it,

Deathly pale.

I stay with it like a singer

Sticks to the score;  like a blend-man

Sticks to the edge of a wall.

    The dead are faithful.

Yes, but not all in the same basket...

On my left side, death;  on my right--

You.  My right side seems dead.

Too much breaking, too much smoking,

But mainly too much conversation!

What's that smell?  The smell of haste,

Of connivance and petty sins,

Of business secrets

And ballroom powder.

Too much laughing, 

But mainly--too much calculation!

..The smell of business deals

And ballroom powder.

Too much stroking, too much groping

But mainly--too much squeezing.

(Yesterday's left-overs, 
But who minds the smell?)

The chain's too short?
At least it's platinum, not steel!

Their triple chins shaking,

Like calves they eat their

Veal.  

Love is flesh and blood, a flower

Steeped in its own blood.

Or did  you think love was 

A chat across the cafe table?

A quick hour, and then away?

Like all these gentlemen and ladies?

Love is...

    --Is it a temple?

Hardly, child;  it's a scar upon

A scar.  In full view of servants

And drunks.  (Soundlessly, I say,

"Love is a stretched 

Bowstring:  a partying shot.")

"And love is, above all, a shared

Bed."

    "Or did you want to say:

Abyss?"

Death--and no conditions!

--Life!--Like a Roman commander,

Surveying what's left of his

Troops.

    "Let's call it quit."

    (Silently: Listen.

Wanting is what bodies do, 

Now we are only souls.)

    (Courteous liar,

You hand your love

The bloodstained honor of parting

Like a bouquet.)  Say it clearly:  Syllable

By syllable.  "Let's call it quits,"

You said?  (Like a handkerchief

Dropped in a moment of sweet

Mischief...) In this battle you are 

Caesar. (What an insolent thrust:

To hand back to the opponent 

The sword he surrendered

As a trophy).

The shadow of money

In a shadow land.  Soundless,

These coins.  

It burns... As if my soul were torn

Away with the skin.  Like steam through a hole,

It vanished, that notorious silly heresy

Called the soul.

That Christian anemia!

Separation--it's not Russian talk.

Not women's, nor men's.

Nor God's.  What are we, sheep, 

Gaping at our dinner? 

Separation--in what language?

There's no sense in it,

Not a sound.  

Losing everything at once--

There's nothing neater.

Love is a seam.

A seam, not a sling;  a stitch, not a shield.

Oh, don't ask to be shielded!

The stitch by which the dead are sewn to the earth,

By which I'm switched to you.

Better to rip than unravel.

It's there, but not for us!

A stepmother, not a mother!

Ahhh, the game's lost,

Ladies and gentlemen!

Suburbs everywhere!

Where are the real cities?

Life is a place where no one can live:

The Jewish quarter...

Wouldn't it be a hundred times better

To become the Wandering Jew?

For anyone not scum

Life is a pogrom.

Expect no mercy

In this most Christian of worlds

All poets are yids.

Weep!  With others you'll recover

The dignity you lost with me.

We are fish of one

Sea.  An upward sweep!

..like a dead seashell,

Lips upon lips.

Attempts at a Room

I remember three walls,

I can't vouch for the fourth.

    Urgent wires

From everywhere and every when.

A portable chair of emptiness.)

The door--the threshold is sensitive to shoe soles!

The sheer wall of the Cheka,

A wall of dawns, of sunlit firing.

Squads of gestures more clear-cut than

In the shade--shot from behind, in the back.

What I can't understand: executions.

But leaving aide the torture-chamber theme,

The ceiling was definitely

Intact.  

        All of us, in that other world,

Will learn to walk upon

Emptiness. 

A floor is for feet...

How embedded man is, how rooted!

So it won't leak:  a ceiling.

Remember the ancient torture, one drop

Per hour?  A floor:  so that grass won't

Grow into the house, so earth won't enter---

Not a plasterer, nor a roofer

But a dream, a guard on wireless

Pathways:  A He meeting a She

In chasms underneath eyelids.

        The unsparkinling

Flood.  A room?  Mere surfaces.  

        After all, the desk is fed by

An elbow.  Elbow out along its inclines--

That will be your desk's deskless.

        Don't fret beforehand.

The chair will arise with the guest. 

Gestures serve me 

In psyche's hall.

In a child's stringed, inmost memory

Distance is hand luggage and a governance.

        (Distance is stylish).

He who built (dug) the corridors

Knew where to curve them--

To give the blood time

To turn the corner

To give the brain time

To assign seats,

For a rendezvous is--a location,

A signature--a calculation--a draft--

        Into time's farthest point:

Maybe the walls were go ne,

The ceiling definitely gave

a lurch.  In our moths only the vocative

Blossomed.   The floor was definitely a gap.

And seen through that gap--green as the Nile..

The ceiling was definitely adrift.

By a single dash is the poet held

Together....

New Year's Greetings

        We have blood ties

With the beyond.  Whoever had been to Russia

Has beheld that world in this.

Doubtless, I see poorly from my pit.

Doubtless, you see better from up there.

Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky

 I have a shelf of Leon Trotsky biographies so I was not in a hurry to read Irving Howe's small, yellowing, and seemingly dated biography.  However, Howe's book is a brilliant overview of Trotsky's life and theoretical contributions to Bolshevism and Marxist theory and practice.  In fact, this short book goes a long way toward explaining many of the fundamental mistakes of the Soviet experiment.  Perhaps Howe's greatest strength as an historian of the Soviet Union is his balanced approach to his subject matter.  He is deeply sympathetic to socialist project, and yet willing to critique almost every mistake Trotsky and other Bolshevik (and Menshevik) leader made.  

According to Howe, Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution was a genuinely important contribution to socialist thinking.  It essentially predicated the course of events in post-revolutionary Russia by pointing out that a fragile working class would necessarily depend on ongoing, global revolution to avoid counterrevolution or degeneration.  On the other hand, Trotsky flipped sides on this question after the February Revolution, arguing that the Bolsheviks had every reason to overthrow the Provisional Government and even socialist democracy in the service of the working class.  Thus, Trotsky (who was of course not alone in this) ironically came to be responsible for working against the very theory he had once proposed, and would propose again once he had left power.  

Howe's Trotsky was a deeply ambivalent figure.   He was in a sense a deeply divided thinker.  On the one hand, he produced relatively sensitive works that advocated for some level of social  and intellectual plurality.  Literature and Revolution is a case in point.  Trotsky admitted here that Proletarian culture was not yet rich enough to afford Russia or the world with a rich literary culture. In fact, Trotsky believed that the Russian Revolution would eventually mean that the Proletariat, qua class, should wither away.  When workers created enough wealth, they would have ample opportunity to stop behaving as workers.  They would have enough leisure time to produce worthy literary and artistic creations.  Until then, Russian workers should appreciate the great bourgeois works of the  previous century.   On the other hand, Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism celebrates authoritarianism, and defends the Bolshevik's rather outrageous claim that the Party could fully represent Russia's workers.  

In the end, Howe agrees with the Menshevik position that Russia was not yet ready for a socialist revolution.  Like the Mensheviks who seemingly abandoned the field of combat, Howe thinks Stalinism was the almost inevitable result of the Bolsheviks' decision to prematurely eliminate both the bourgeois parties and competing socialist parties from political life.  Indeed, Howe believes that once Lenin and Trotsky convinced their reluctant comrades to take power, the Party was doomed to rely on ever increasing levels of compulsion and terror to maintain their fragile grip on power.  

 

My response to the current pandemic was to step back from Russian history and literature for a few months.  I've used the time to read a variety of things, including the entire oeuvre of George Elliot.  I've also ready biographies of Elliot, Dickens, Hardy, and other Victorians.  I even started watching BBC productions of Victorian classics, including wonderful productions of Vanity Fair, Tess, and Bleak House.  Since I majored in British history, I used the time to remember why British history and literature was once so interesting to me.  Elliot's sophistication as a thinker is probably the best advertisement the Victorian age ever had.  I've also started reading about the American prairie, polishing off three Little House books , one Willa Cather novel, 'O Pioneers, and the fascinating biography of Wilder and her daughter, Prairie Fires.  But never fear, once a Russophile, always a Russophile.  For instance, I've just completed Gary Shteyngart's memoir, Little Failure. While not a huge fan of his fiction, I did enjoy this witty and sardonic analysis of his experience as a Russian immigrant in New York City and Wooster College.  While the book would probably resonate with anyone who is interested in how immigrants experience the world, Little Failures specifically discusses the Jewish Russian in the context of the 1980s.  The period is fascinating, but especially so for someone venturing from an ailing superpower to a  dominant one near the end of the Cold War.   

    Shteyngart's memoir is a deeply personal one, filled with his own personal insecurities, but it takes place against the backdrop of Russian history.  We learn that Shteyngart's family was decimated by the German invasion, and his grandfather suffered a further calamity after being sent to Siberian hard labor for the crime of praising German technology.  We learn that his family only escaped the Soviet Union as a result of the deal his country struck with the USA, a deal to exchange exit visas for Jews in exchange for grant and limited technology transfers.  Like most emigrants, Shteyngart's family lived in fear of being prevented from leaving, and shed most of its possessions in the flight, via Vienna and Italy, to America.  More mundanely, we learn about Shteyngart's everyday life in late Soviet Russia, including his experience with bureaucracy, queues, airport searches, space shortages, anti-Semitism, poor medical assistance (e.g., he didn't receive albuterol for his asthma until arriving in America), communist propaganda, and limited material comforts.  

    In America, Schteygart's memoir helps us to see how the Cold War affected Russians. In addition to the traditional dilemmas of finding work, learning English (and a new alphabet), and navigating a brand new culture, Schteygart endured a great deal of psychic distress by learning that Americans were still afraid of the Soviet Union.  In the late 80s, the Soviet Union was an "Evil Empire" that would, according to Reagan at any rate, be bombed "in five minutes."  On the other hand, American Jews did help Schyngart's family, with used furniture, used clothing, job assistance, and cash.  As embarrassing as the assistance was to a nerdy child, it seems to have been a vital element in moving Schyngart's family from poverty to the coveted American "middle class."  

    

Tolstoy's A Confession

As a free thinker, I've hesitated to delve too deeply into Tolstoy's religious writing for fear of undermining my love of his novels.  However, the excellent novel, Resurrection, helped me to understand that his secular and religious writings are not so far apart as they first appear.  Tolstoy's short tract, A Confession, seems much less "religious" than one might expect it to be.  Instead, the long essay has a philosophical tone, and is relatively free of mysticism or theology or even religious fervor.  It's a biographical exploration that is not unlike the kind of exploration Tolstoy makes when analyzing his characters' complex, mercurial, and layered decisions.  A Confession also bears similarities to Tolstoy's What is Art? in that it often seems more of an intellectual exercise in rational analysis that any kind of investigation of a supernatural force.  When reading Tolstoy biographies, the two periods of his life seem sharply divided.  In the first part of his life, Tolstoy sins and then writes a series of brilliant novels.  In the second part of his life, he repents and pens a series of didactic and/or religious tracts.  However, A Confession seems to suggest that Tolstoy's signature and quasi-religious self-doubt is the source of his genius as a novelist, and his intellectualism and rationalism the source of his creative power as a religious thinker.  Tolstoy's plays also seem to suggest an absence of a divide between the two halves of Tolstoy's life, since even deeply religious themes turn into abstractly philosophical moral dilemmas.  Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised: I've always speculated that the best religious thinkers have much more in common with the best atheist thinkers than they do with the majority of men and women who lead the Church, Mosque, and Synagogue. 

Uptain Sinclair's Coop

 It's difficult to discover or "contract trace" the origins of an obsession.  So it's hard to really know how or why I became interested in Russian history or the history of the Russian Revolution.  But I sometimes suspect that my interest in revolutionary Russia can be traced back to my interest in my grandfather's politics.  Although I never knew my grandfather, I grew up hearing about grandfather's single minded pursuit of Leftist economic and social upheaval.  Be this as it may, my grandfather wasn't a communist, and he never preached overt revolution.  Rather, he was a collectivist or devotee of cooperatism.  He might also fit under the broad category of Christian Socialist.  In any event, I believe my grandfather learned about collectivism in the shadow of the First World War at Harvard University around 1915.  In any event, he never let go of the idea after leaving Harvard.  Although experiencing several farming failures, my grandfather served as a postmaster general and small town newspaper editor for about 40 years.  He also helped to found a couple of small cooperative ventures.  

Knowing that my grandfather talked about nothing else, I have often wanted to know more about collectivism, and especially how it relates, if it did relate at all, to communism.  For this reason, I was especially happy to find a novel by Upton Sinclair entitled, Co-op: A Novel of Living Together.  Of course, the idea of turning a dry economic or political idea into a novel seemed odd, but as it turns out, the novel reads relatively well, and gives one a wonderful picture of the "romance" of cooperatism, such as it was.  

In general, the novel suggests that cooperatism was a response to the economic dislocation that followed World War I and eventually reasserted itself in the Great Depression.  According to Sinclair, cooperatism was an extremely rational response to poverty,  unemployment, overabundance, and currency scarcity.  In his novel, the unemployed gather together to barter outside of the cash economy.  The coop was a nexus or alternative market for workers who lacked both cash and commercial employment.  Its internal politics were fundamentally democratic, and many  of its adherents professed to believe in some form of Socialism or communism.  However, the coop movement sidestepped traditional politics in order to avoid being quashed by the U.S. government and Big Business.  

Sinclair's novel is a paen to the virtues of cooperative living, which he suggests are a perfect mixture of realism and idealism.  To the modern eye, the economic system seems inherently unproductive, with coops avoiding monetary incentives and sharing bartered tools and goods whenever possible.  However, one can readily imagine how many Americans were ready to try something midway between Capitalism and Bolshevism in the 1930s.  

And what was the relationship between the American cooperative movement and the Russian Revolution?  According to Sinclair, the American bourgeoisie was always terrified by the prospect of Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, expropriations, and economic chaos.  One of his wealthy characters does business with the coop precisely because he wants to make friends with Leftists in the event that there is a Russian-style revolution.  Better to do business with the coop than to be "shot in the cellar" later on.  

Upton Sinclair claims in his novel that California had over 200 coops in the 1930s, and that thousands of people worked for one of these coops in one way or the other.  Politically, coops were propped up by former Wobblies, radicals, liberals, syndicalists, reform-minded Christians, socialists, and communists.  Economically, they were fueled by people who found themselves excluded from the cash economy.  

Ivan Turgenev's Smoke

 Although Smoke is a short and somewhat awkward blend of romanticism and cynicism, it's often very witty, and in places reminds me of Truman Capote's hilarious roman-a-clef, Answered Prayers, or even Ernest Hemingway's viciously entertaining A Movable Feast.  Set in the fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, Smoke describes a twice-failed love affair, but sets that bitter romance against the backdrop of a debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles.  One of the best parts about the book is the specificity of its historical context.  Set in the 1860s, Turganev mentions every fashionable idea of the era, including Mesmerism,  spiritualism, liberalism, Polish nationalism, Italian nationalism, LaSalle's socialism, the American anti-slavery movement, serf emancipation, German unification, women's emancipation, worker protection laws, the Russian nationalities' quest for autonomy or independence. Whether or not one becomes invested in the protagonist's love affairs, one cannot help feel the excitement of the decade.  Having just emerged from the humiliation of the Crimean War, Russia was now experimenting with local government (Zemstvos), serf emancipation, land redemption plans, technological innovation, farming improvement schemes, and German philosophy.  And Russians were excited by foreign ideas and occurrences, as well as the British Crystal Palace, Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and news of submarine cables.  Of course, Russia was also entering into a bitter controversy over whether Russia would do better to adapt to European fashions, or double down on those things that made it unique.  Turgenev was clearly on the side of the Westernizers, but Smoke seems less concerned with the Westernizers' point of view than with the fact all Russians were caught up in a frenzy of clashing, and sometimes disorienting, ideas. But again, the book is somewhat awkward, because Turgenev's story of betrayed love doesn't really depend upon its setting.  In fact, the story would likely have worked in any era.


Favorite quotations

Everlastingly short of cash, and everlastingly in raptures over something, Rostislav Bambaev wandered, aimless but exclamatory, over the face of our long-suffering mother-earth.

"What is his work about?" inquired Litvinov.
"About everything, my dear boy, after the style of Buckle, you know...but more profound..more profound...Everything will be made clear."

"I never read novels now," was Madame Suhantchikov's dry and sharp reply.
"Why?"
"Because I have not the time now;  I have no thoughts now but for one thing, sewing-machines."

Fyodor Sologub's Bad Dreams

I did not finish Fyodor Sologub's Bad Dreams so I won't write very much about the book.  I only write to try to record a few fleeting impressions of his tone or style. The tone or style are particularly important insofar as the book contains descriptions and dialogue but little action, and few plot points.  Sologub was a turn-of-the-century writer, a product (or producer) of the Silver Age, and a Symbolist par excellence.  Today, at least in the English language, he seems primarily remembered as the author of The Petty Demon.  At any rate, the tone of Bad Dreams might be described as gloomy, melancholy, or depressive, if not also alienated and estranged.  The characters speak to one another, but don't seem overly hopeful that they will be understood by one another.  Individuals are isolated.  Login, the protagonist, "was enveloped in longstanding melancholy, the coldness of a life that was self-centered and dominated by chance.." The author's style is mysterious, or elliptical.  Indeed, Solugub reminds me of Platonov, although Platonov was not a part of the same literary school.  Solugub seems peculiarly modern insofar as he makes little effort to explain his meaning, or the meaning of his characters' conversations.  If the prose can be described as symbolist, it is because the author probably believes a conversation has a symbolic rather than purely logical or rational meaning.  The entire atmosphere might be characterized as dreamlike, or magical, and filled with "prophetic dreams, bells, candles, house-sprites, the evil eye..." The goal of life, if there is any goal, is to appreciate this magic.  In Login's dream a woman tell him this:  "Dear one," answered another voice," from the horrors of life there is one salvation--our love.  Do you hear?  The stars are laughing.  Do you see?  The blue waves are breaking on the silver starts. The waves are my heart, the stars are your eyes." The mystical nature of wisdom in Bad Dreams is beautiful, but also morbid.  As one character says:  "It would be sweet to die.  I have no no need of happiness.  Love, death--it's all one and the same.  To melt away quietly blissfully, to forget the phantoms of life--that is the heartfelt rapture of dying!"



Quotations From Fydor Sologub's Bad Dreams


Life seemed menacing;  premonitions oppressed him;  misfortunes lay in wait for him.

The housekeeper's sullen face, cratered with pock-marks, increased his melancholy. 

"Tell me," Login spoke up again after a brief silence, "what color does life seem to you, and how does it taste?"

"But why is life frightening?"
"It's too dead!  We don't live as  much as we play at living." 

The ancient elms bent down their branches as though they wanted to eavesdrop on this strange conversation.  But they were not listening and did not hear.  They had their own affairs.

"People, as they always were, are ready to gobble up each other.  But all of them are personally as flexible as willow switches.  Their man at least dares to be openly cruel."

"I looked intently into myself, and within I found the same ardent but impotent audacity of all human beings, and that same dreary question about the fate of our country..."

"Speaking frankly, old friend, our society still, thank God, is not ready for such things.  We have no use for communism and anarchy."

Andozersky waxed candid:  "You know, old friend, I'm getting married soon."
Login felt curious:  "To whom?"
"Right now, you see, it's still hard to say to whom exactly."

"In this nervous age no one has the strength to accomplish anything.  With the temperament of a disillusioned frog, how can we go in for adventures?"

"After all, I don't live between the covers of a book:  I've got a real flesh-and-blood body;  I'm young, high-spirited, nimble."

"..disipline is the first thing in life.  Our people couldn't get along without it."

P.A. Markov's The Soviet Theater

Like Vladimir Nemirovitch-Dantchenko's My Life in Theater, P.A. Markov's book, The Soviet Theater, was published in the middle of the 1930s, long after Stalin had consolidated his control of the country.  Unlike My Life in Theater, Markov's book is an unapologetic advertisement for the salutary impact of the Revolution on the Russian theater.  According to Markov, the Russian Revolution overhauled a deeply flawed Russian aesthetic tradition and paved the way for a marvelously improved theatrical experience.  Following a fairly strict line of Marxist analysis, Markov argues that pre-revolutionary theater was inappropriately consumed with the narrow concerns of small and privileged economic classes, namely, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.  According to Markov, the old theater was obsessed with irrelevant, purely personal, or distracting topics.  The old theater favored light comedy and sentimental drama, and focused on petty, personal, light, and sentimental issues.  After the Revolution, the Soviet theater gained gravitas but grounding itself in the broader and deeper political and economic concerns of the Russian masses. The Revolution widened the Soviet audience, both theoretically and practically, since the Soviet Union's institutional leadership now regularly sent Soviet trade union or Party delegations to attend ideologically mature performances. 

Although the Markov asserts that the new theater could assimilate the best of nineteenth century traditions, he believed that the new theater was endowed more serious, even didactic, purposes. The day of the private entrepreneur was over. The Revolution was creating new plays, with new and better heroes (i.e., shocker workers, Young Communists, scientists, collective farmers), and a more active audience.  Now, Revolutionary playwrights wrote about the following:  "The life of the Soviet intelligentsia, the revolutionized village, scientific institutions and factories, collective farms and administrative offices," etc.  Indeed, the Revolution even interpreted class plays in new ways, highlighting economic or political "contradictions" whenever necessary.  In fact, the new theater was organically linked to the proletariat and peasantry, since factory workers and collective farmers now regularly attended the theater, and actors now regularly toured factories and collective farms in the remotest corners of the Soviet Union.  The close connection between theatrical workers and the proletariat and collective farmer economy meant that the playwrights adopted better theatrical forms too, including vaudeville, propaganda poster plays, and musical comedies.

The Revolution ensured that theater now had a higher calling than it ever had before.  It was, Markov maintained, a link a "chain of production" that was creating a stronger, more modern country.  Echoing Stalin, the new playwrights were engineers of the soul, and were no longer permitted to serve the whims of rich individuals or indeed wealthy classes.  Of course, Markov also approved of state censorship or aesthetic direction. As he explained, the Commissariat of Enlightenment "does not permit the performance of plays, which are socially insignificant or harmful, and it insists the theaters in the correct interpretation of a play."

To conclude, Markov's book defends a highly politicized theatrical movement in the Soviet Union.  On the other hand, even Markov's commitment to the Revolution, and to Stalinism, doesn't prevent him from attempting to argue that the new theater could still accommodate diversity, including Meyerhold, the Moscow Art Theater, and Tolstoy.