David Bergelson's Judgement

David Bergelson's Yiddish novel, Judgment, reminds me of Platonov's beautiful but profoundly sad book, Soul.  Bergelson resembles Plotonov in his capacity for deploying metaphors and similes to make everyday life feel exceedingly unfamiliar and strange.  Like Platonov, Bergelson's prose is powerfully original, and derives much of its poignancy from its systematic conflation of the animate and inanimate worlds.  In Soul, Platonov describes the emotional condition of his protagonist by projecting that protagonist's desperate loneliness and existential isolation onto the animals he encounters in his travels.  For Platonov, every camel, vulture, or dog, is actively reflecting the ongoing tragedy of earthly existence. Here, for example, is a description of homes in a local Jewish village:  "The houses were buried deep in the snow.  Like wrestlers in the ring too exhausted to throw their opponents, they remained hunched over in their corners."  For Bergelson, every cloud, gust of wind, forest, or home is alive with a kind of ominous and willful intensity. Thus, abandoned buildings "peer" out of dark corners, storms are "measured and coldblooded," and the moon has the "face of a cadaver." Bergelson's depicts the physical world as dark, threatening, and unsafe, but also curiously magical and furiously alive.  Probably the greatest similarity between Bergelson and Platonov is that they each somehow manage to demonstrate that the world can be both sad beyond recoking and simultaneously beautiful.  Take, for example, Bergelson's bleak depiction of characters who are both tragic and magnificently unique.  One character was "gypsy dark with gold hoops in her ears, with a pair of eyes that always looked exhausted, worn out from her own beauty."  Another character was a "deaf-mute" but still had enough vitality to "flood the whole world with pancakes" if he wasn't told to stop cooking. 

If Bergelson's novel resembles the mood and style of Platonov's Judgment, its plot or subject matter more closely resembles Babel's Red Cavalry short stories. For both books deal with the chaotic period immediately following the Revolution.  While Babel's Red Cavalry follows the Bolsheviks' ultimately unsuccessful campaign against non-communist Poland, Bergelson's novel depicts a border region in which the communists are still working to more fully exert their influence. In Bergelson's world, revolutionaries are still rounding up enemies, patrolling the border areas, and suppressing Social Revolutionary plots. A doctor waits to see if the revolution will be overturned.  As Bergelson writes, "Every time he put a piece of gauze in a patient's mouth, he would run to the window to check whether the current regime had been abolished."

 Bergelson's view of the Revolution is complex and multifaceted. To be sure, the revolution is violent.  In the new revolutionary climate, you could grab and whip you "just the same as if you'd done nothing."  It was best "not to get in the revolution's way."  And many were "given the authority from the revolution to reduce everyone standing here to ashes..."  The revolution is also a monumental force of change, capable of rupturing both time and space.  In terms of time, the revolution has created a clear divide between past and present.  New types of people had emerged in its wake.  "In the past men like Filopov didn't exist," writes Bergelson. The world had been overturned by revolution.  As the narrator laments, "People just didn't know how to live in times like these." Bergelson's characters agree with the narrator.  One says that "if you knew somebody yesterday, that doesn't mean you know who he is today," and another exclaims that "life got rerouted onto a strange and crooked path."   In terms of space, the revolution was someone akin to Tarkovsky's alien zones in the film Roadside Picnic.  Where the revolution existed, life operated according to one set of almost physical laws;  where the revolution did not exist, life operated in entirely different ways.  As one characters declares, a "journey of a mere four or five hours gets you to a place where the revolution is over" and this meant that one could encounter a "different kind of snow, whiter and freer..."  Just across Russia's border there was a "city at the seashore" where "music will be playing--just music, without speeches."  The revolution's defenders agreed with this sentiment and saw the revolution as a sack.  "We keep on patching it up, but you here at the border are like mice, nibling away."  The fear was that the revolutionary zone would spill into the non-revolutionary zone, or vice versa.  "You are eating out a hole at the edge of the sack and everything's going to spill out," declared the local communist boss. 









"


"'

Westerman's Engineers of the Soul

“Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of glass. This is why I say:  the production of souls is more important than that of tanks.”  J. Stalin.

There is an Andrei Tarkovsky film about a few forlorn humans who make their living by trying to navigate mysterious, unintelligible, alien-crafted zones. In these zones, the normal laws of physics do not apply. Nothing is predictable.  

These zones, utterly bereft of our ordinary understanding of cause and effect, reminded me of something a former colleague once told me about an old employer of mine.  He said:  "Derek, take everything you've learned over the years;  take your three graduate degrees, years of college teaching experience, and decade of administrative experience--take all that you have learned from mentors of the years, and...set all of this aside. These experiences are of no value to you here."  He meant that trying to be good in a truly bad place didn't work, and in fact might make both my life and the place itself worse than it had been.  Ia bad place, even good intentions can be mistaken for cynical ploys and interpreted as aggressive overtures.  

I think sometimes of what Afghanistan must be like, 1960s Vietnam, or Iraq.  Without, I hope, descending into xenophobic, cultural short-sightedness, I think it's safe to say that from time to time a place lapses into prehistoric, moral anarchy.  In such situations, it's impossible, or almost impossible, to tell right from wrong.  Does one side with a criminally corrupt central government, a reprehensible rebel group, a vicious warlord, a distorted religious creed, a foreign colonizer of incalculable power, or one's own backward and bloodthirsty clan?  

In such a moral vacuum, isn't any decision to side with one group against another bound to be a bad one?  And what if the landscape of alliances changes from one year to the next?  What then?  What is right this year might very well prove to be wrong next year. And even if, like Demosthenes, I've managed to encounter  a good man with whom to ally, if that good man in turn is allied to criminals, is my alliance a worthy one or not?  The answer isn't easy to discover, even if one is, against all self-interest, inclined to honesty.

I've worked in such conditions here in America, even though American civilization isn't, as a rule, bereft of morality, or at least moral checks and balances.  We have, after all, an active press, free elections, an independent judiciary, separation of church and state, a written Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a reasonably healthy tradition of civil rights.  So, having worked in places where moral decisions are seldom made, I wonder how much worse things were in places like the U.S.S.R., where no leader was bound by anything other than the fear of Party hierarchy or state authority.  

Reading Frank Westerman's book, Engineers of the Soul:  In the Footsteps of Stalin's Writers, I wonder how sensitive souls navigated even the most pleasant years of the Soviet regime, the period of the so-called Thaw.  Westerman's book reminds us that most Soviet writers were obligated to celebrate Soviet civilization, which more often than not meant praising its most conspicuous hydraulic engineering projects, namely its many canals.  Even Maxim Gorky--who almost always tried to wed his tremendous writing talent to moral causes--wound up writing a paean to a canal, and one that had been built by slave labor.  Paustovsky also wrote about a massive engineering project.  And if Plotonov failed to get much work related to these Stalinist engineering feats, it wasn’t for lack of trying.  Of course, the best Soviet authors found a variety of ways to remain more or less connected to their own understanding of objective (as opposed to Socialist Realist) truth, their own dignity, and the dignity of literature in general.  Some, like Pasternak, avoided poetry and focused on the ideologically safer work of translation, although he famously also took the approach of writing clandestinely.  Some, like Paustovsky, wrote different types of books, some directly pleasing to the apprachniks, others more personal.  But all Soviet writers, with the possible exceptions of Solzhenitsyn a few others, made significant moral and of course aesthetic compromises.  The Ghetto Boys famously rapped that “the world is a ghetto.”  For Soviet authors, the world they knew was “a gulag.”  And it’s a prison or prison camp that most clearly conjures up the perfect collapse of a morally intelligible universe. 

Memory Is A Bitch

"Don't turn a scientific problem into a common love story."

"What a ghastly sight. I can never get used to all these resurrections."

Solaris is perhaps the Soviet Union's best modern film. Based on Stanislaw Lem's science fiction masterpiece of the same name, the 1972 film deals with inter-species communication and, more importantly, humankind's relationship to the past. The planet Solaris is home to a living sea, a vast pink fluid with some indeterminate level of cerebral activity or consciousness. The sea has made contact with the men who occupy the station that orbits the planet, but its message is ambiguous, impossible to decipher.

Over time, the scientists of Solaris lost patience with their mysterious host, and decided to irradiate it. The planet's reaction, while not perfectly comprehended, is decidedly hostile: the pink sea enters into the individual memories of the station's crew members, with disturbing results. Shockingly, the planet has the ability to create physical manifestations of a human being's most personal memories. Over time, Solaris' scientists are driven insane by these tangible memories. By the time the film's protagonist, Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, arrives at the station, only two other crew members are left at the station to welcome him. His close friend has only recently committed suicide.

The meaning of the film, Solaris, is as open-ended as the planet's mode of communication. Is the film about how we necessarily fail to communicate effectively with one another? Is it about the power of the past to subvert the present? In the film, Kris Kelvin encounters his wife, Haris, who committed suicide ten years previously. Hari represents the planet's best effort to communicate with Kris, although it's impossible to say whether the planet has a positive or negative message for its most recent visitor: the deceased woman, after all, is both a source of intense joy and intense pain for Kris. Presumably, she reminds Kris of good times, bad times, love, and brutal separation. In any event, Hari incarnates another type of communication, or perhaps miscommunication. This is the inevitable flawed intercourse (pardon the expression) between man and woman. Although Tarkovsky's style is always elliptical, one senses that Kris and the original Hari understood each other almost as poorly as Kris now understands the pink sea below him.

The darkly comic essence of memory in Solaris is encapsulated by Kris Kelvin's doomed efforts to overcome the past by shoving this alien avatar of his ex wife into a rocket in order to ship it into outer space. Needless to say, Kris burns himself in the process. But who wouldn't like to do as Kris did and ship the memory of a beloved girlfriend to a distant star?

Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Stanislaw Lem's acclaimed science fiction book, Solaris, made a huge impression on me twenty years ago. As a rule, I read little science fiction, but this book seemed to say something very meaningful about the nature of knowledge and communication, to say nothing of life in outer space. Unlike most boilerplate science fiction, Solaris is about the failure of species or civilizations to communicate with one another. Resistant to all analysis, the alien presence on Solaris remains inscrutable, subject to human speculation but little more.

Literature in general seldom acknowledges that good will and good intentions doesn't always lead to positive results. But remember E.M. Forster's brilliant exception, Passage to India? In that book--if my hazy memory serves me--the heroine sets out to understand a foreign culture, India, but is soon overwhelmed by the exotic magnitude, feinting in a cave and then, in her confusion and fear, falsely claiming that her Indian minder had raped her. There is a field of human inquiry and action, or several overlapping fields, that deals with the science or perhaps art of compromise, communication, and conflict management. The theory is that negotiation is a skill that can be learned and shared in order to mitigate or end conflict between warring groups.

I've always wondered whether this field is a sham. Aren't there some conflicts or human divisions that cannot be mitigated or bridged? More often than not, spousal wars end only when a brutal external force, the court, intervenes. And when did the Irish really come to terms? Wasn't this great compromise really only the recognition of colonial exhaustion and a different balance of power?

Andrei Tarkovsky is famously concerned with communication, or the limits of communication. His film, Solaris, is his masterpiece on the subject. Yet an earlier film, Stalker, deals with a similar theme. Stalker, a 1979 film loosely based on the short science fiction book, Roadside Picnic, follows three men, "Professor," "Writer," and the Stalker, as they enter a mysterious area known as the Zone. The Zone, cordoned off from surrounding areas by military forces, is alleged to contain an area that grants visitors wishes.

In the movie, as opposed to Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's book, the Zone is not clearly defined. We know little about it. It's unusual, deserted, eerie, awesome, and dangerous. It's also thoroughly unknowable. The Stalker, a term used to denote those unique individuals who risk their lives to take visitors into the Zone, has some rough familiarity with this area. Yet his knowledge is generally not positive. This is to say, the Stalker, for all of his journeys into this center of almost religious mystery, has only learned that the Zone requires its supplicants to behave with humility and respect, if not awe.

The film, I think, acknowledges the wisdom of the Stalker's worldview, which is essentially a religious one. The world is unknowable: we cannot do more that accept the mysteries of life reverentially. As we've said, at the heart of the Zone lies a room that grants its visitors their innermost wishes. However, in order to enter the room, one adventurer--the first to enter the space--must be sacrificed in the "meat-grinder," a space in which the normal rules of physics are suspended long enough for a man to be twisted and crushed by invisible forces. Just as worrisome, the room grants someone their innermost wishes, but these wishes are not their conscious ones, but rather their subconscious ones. And who, after all, can vouch for the health and goodness of one's unconscious?

The Stalker seems to understand the problem. Unlike the men he leads, he personally refuses to enter the room. Does he intuit that in the last analysis people don't know themselves, let alone their fellow human beings? According to Wikipedia, the book upon which the movie is based, Roadside Picnic, gets its title from a striking metaphor. According to the Strugatsky brothers, the Zone is one of six sites of alien visitation, a place of extraordinary mystery. How can human being possibly come to terms with the refuse that the aliens left behind when they departed from the planet? The Zone is like a roadside picnic: when humans stop by the side of the road to eat, they leave behind debris. The human picnickers don't notice the insects all around them when they eat, and the insects don't know what to make of the garbage and other artifacts left behind. The result of the picnic--the Zone--is mystery, the mystery of incomplete communication, which is perhaps the most typical kind of communication on planet Earth.

Tarkovsky's War

This blog suffers from one mortal wound--its author's unfamiliarity with the Russian language--and dozens of lesser injuries, which include the author's unrelenting dilettantism in the dozens of fields related to Soviet intellectual history, including music and film. Nevertheless, Soviet Roulette has one merit: it doesn't use ignorance as an excuse for quitting. Thus, this entry, on Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film, Ivan's Childhood, made in 1962, in the midst of Khrushchev's Thaw.

According to Vida T. Johnson, coauthor of The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky and featured guest in Criterion's Film Appreciation segment of the its DVD of Ivan's Childhood, the Thaw period marked a strong revival of Russian film-making. At the end of Stalin's life, film making was both heavily censored and heavily restricted to older men who had earned the Party's trust. In fact, in 1953, the year of Stalin's death the Soviet Union, only released about 50 or 60 films. During the Thaw, that number had been increased to over 100, with a corresponding increase in intellectual excitement over the industry's artistic and creative potential.

Tarkovsky's film, about a young boy who, reacting the massacre of his mother and and sister during World War II, seeks vengeance against the Germans before (spoiler alert) being tortured and executed in Berlin, maintains some of the elements of socialist realism. As Johnson argues, Tarkovsky's film, while highly inventive and subjective, retains some of the key socialist realist storytelling conventions, including heroism, Soviet patriotism, a clear moral message, and unsympathetic enemies. On the other hand, Tarkovsky, like some of his contemporaries in the Thaw period, was experimenting with different kind of war film than the grand, heroic films of the early 1950s.

In Ivan's Childhood, the war is personalized, and its searing trauma highlighted. Tarkovsky, Johnson reminds us, was about ten, roughly Ivan's age, during World War II. This film is therefore a very personal account of war's impact on the mind of a child who would have been representative of the millions of other Soviet children who lived through the war. Over time, Johnson tell us that Tarkovsky's unique style of film-making became more developed, revolving around complex narrative styles, pronounced subjectivity, dream sequences, cinematic poetry, moody images, and invitations to enter the director's inner world. But even in Ivan's Childhood the director was testing the limits of what a genre war film could be. His story (originally Vladimir Bogomolov's tale) is nonlinear, filled with innocent, light-filled dream sequences which are contrasted with dark, brutal, styled portraits of Ivan's horrific waking life.

The contrast, between life as it should be for a young boy, and life as it is, isn't particularly subtle, but it transforms an action story about a boy hero who risks his life to go on a scouting mission behind enemy lines, into a more intimate description of profound psychological loss. The child-killing enemy remains, and the film doesn't hesitate to use historical footage of the Soviet Union's ultimate victory celebration in Berlin; but Ivan's Childhood is ultimately successful as a result of its personal, subjective account of Ivan's damaged personality. Ivan, courageous and vengeful, is also beset by anger, sadness, loneliness, and, above all, loss. Of course, this mental landscape is beautifully rendered by Vadun Yusov's brilliant visual metaphors, including dark battlefields, ruined natural landscapes (see Yusov's interview in the same Criterion DVD), eerie birch groves, luscious apples, and pristine beeches.