Opinionated

Vladimir Nabokov's book of interviews, letters to the editor, and editorials establishes the following: Nabokov... 1) is a genius; 2) knows that he is a genius; 3) doesn't usually make any aesthetic or intellectual compromises; 4) hates communism and other forms of political dictatorship; 5) eschews literary trends and labels and schools; 6) is proud of his scientific publications about butterflies; 7) loves America; 8) thinks The Gift is his best Russian book and Lolita may be his best overall book; 9) believes that Russian liberalism was vibrant on the eve of the Revolution; 10) believes he is better than most other major European or American authors, living or dead; 11) is confident about his translations, and also about his philosophy of translation; 12) is contemptuous of other people's translations; 13) is not interested in religion; 14) dislikes interviews and interviewers, by and large; 15) has a well-established creative process and philosophy of literature; 16) is not particularly found of literary criticism; loathes Freud, Marx, Sartre, et cetera and so on.

Comedy by Chernychevsky

Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift, is often said to be one of the greatest twentieth century novels. For me, it’s been a long struggle to even complete the book. Nabokov, genius though he is, pains me with his lack of concert for plot or suspenseful pace. Indeed, I freely admit that I only kept reading to see what Nabokov’s protagonist would say about Russia’s famous nineteenth century radical and godfather of Bolshevism, Chernychevsky.

Chernychevsky was Lenin’s nineteenth century hero, a widely-read, hard-working man who wrote the influential if badly written novel, What is to be Done?, which first spelled out the ascetic path to revolutionary sainthood so many zealous, socialists would eventually follow. The first portion of the book takes place in Berlin and seems, at least in a general way, to be autobiography. The second portion purports to be prose from the author’s study of the famous editor of the liberal organ, The Contemporary. This, interestingly, is followed by a short series of post-modern rants against this same history.

Nabokov’s interest in Chernychevsky is not hard to understand. The utopian socialist’s theories, as well as his whole intellectual milieu, have everything to do with what came later, although it’s hard to tell whether Bolshevik communism was an extension of this milieu or a reaction to the fuzziness and innocence of it. Chernychevsky, the materialist philosopher who had been born the son of a priest, believed in peasant communalism. He was an important interlocutor of men such as Herzen (they lived together in London briefly), Belinsky, and others.

According to Nabokov’s book, which is written with such irony and perhaps subtlety that it’s hard to know precisely where he stands on the man’s legacy, Chernychevsky was extremely popular with liberal opponents of autocracy in the age of peasant emancipation, rampant conspiracies, censorship, and millennial aspiration. His famous novel (there was at least one more) was very well-received—more popular than anything Tolstoy or Dostoevsky wrote his protagonist claims--as the incarnation of everything chic at the time. What was this thinker like? Nabokov’s protagonist is condescending, saying that for all his magnetism and courage, he was awkward, badly dressed, and unsophisticated as a thinker. He critiques his poetry, understanding of the natural world, shallow esthetic philosophy (he believed that art should always serve life), and philosophical pretensions.

In the end, Chernychevsky suffered for his unrelenting radicalism. He was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, exposed to a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. While he was imprisoned, fellow radicals dreamed of freeing him. They didn’t understand that he couldn’t even ride a horse. His wife came to see him in Siberia, as so many Decembrist wives had done for their husbands, but apparently slept with somebody on the way. (Chernychevsky loved his wife deeply, perhaps more intensely as a result of his status as a cuckold).

Nabokov’s treatment of this phase of socialist activity is redolent of E.H. Carr’s treatment of another famous Russian radical, Bakhunin. In both instances, the radical hero appears sympathetically but ridiculously. It’s hard to know whether this understanding of the past is fair or not. Does an intellectual current that took itself so seriously—and had such a serious opponent—deserve to be laughed at? Perhaps the comedy of that gentler century only became emerges in relation to the decidedly “un-funny” legacy of its heir, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In any event, the paraodox of a comic tragedy or a tragic commedy reminds me of Woody Allen's bad film, Melinda and Melinda, which had at least a wonderful premise: that any story can be told, or perhaps it's all in how the story is received, as a happy comedy or a depressing tragedy. That's how history works.

The Gift

Thus far I've not had all that much luck with podcasts related to Soviet history. I did however stumble upon a good Standford lecture by historian Nancy Shields Kullmann entitled "Dealing with Corruption in Early Modern Russia." Kullmann's lecture builds upon similar studies in France and England. As she points out, if tiny, prosperous England was undergoverned and underpoliced, we can only imagine how hard it was for the tsar's to exend their influence to remote corners of their vast empire. Indeed, Russia was both vast and hard to navigate. Roads were few and far between, and the long winters made them impassable for large portions of each year.

Corruption is perhaps inevitable; sociologists say that the phenomenon exists in every kind of society. Even so, early modern Russia was awash in it. The tsars did what they could to raise revenues and enforce laws throughout the land. They sent agents with very limited authority to the furthest reaches of Siberia. But for whatever reason the tsars relied on a very limited pool of well-connected or well-educated servants to do their bidding. This mean that they often re-appointed their agents even when these agents amassed a great deal of wealth at the expense of the areas they administered.

In theory, the tsar's agents were entitled to some graft. The concept of the gift--see Marcel Mauss' book of the same title--was well established. Kullmann points to the scene in the Godfather: "don't insult me with money but allow me to do this favor for you and then, perhaps, one day, I'll ask a favor in return." The tsar's agent arrived on the scene, and received gifts from the locals who needed his favor. Their were limits, of course. Early modern populations could become disgusted with the enforced gift-giving if it exceeded custom. They could become irritated if favors were not granted in return for gifts. They could become offended if the government official granted assistance to only one faction or group in the area. They could complain if the tsar's agent beat or arrested local people too frequently.

But in general local people knew that they needed to give gifts to the tsar's agent (or more usually his wife or children) on birthdays or festivals, or at times when a legal dispute was likely to occur. Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great, made some inroads against corruption. However, the depiction of local government in Russian novels isn't far from the mark. These officials were somnolent at best, and venal at worst. The Russian Center never erected the bulwarks that Western states used to limit the sphere of corruption in their realms, such as reasonable state salaries, a culture of public disgust for scandal, an active press, pluralistic civil society, reform movements, and general transparency in the arena of government.