Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N

While Leonid Dobychin is today a footnote in the book of Soviet literature, his short novel, The Town of N, is a wonderfully sensitive portrayal of pre-revolutionary life on the outskirts of the empire.  The novel tells the story of a child who grows up in the decade prior to the Bolshevik Revolution.  The Town of N is a bildungsroman:  the child narrator is coming to terms with sex, politics, religion, education, and culture. He's also coming to terms with European and Russian literature.  In the course of 100 odd pages, the narrator tackles almost canonical work of Russian prose, and many European classics as well. Although the child doesn't ordinarily understand what he's reading, he's moving through them, and wrestling with their meaning on some rudimentary level.  Whether or not he has understood them, the narrator is familiar with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Andreyev, Chukovsky, and other Russian writers, as well as Dickens, Nietzsche, Pinkerton novels, and a variety of other Western writers and artists.

As Dobychin's title is redolent of Gogol, so too are his cast of small-minded provincial characters.  Richard Borden's introduction to the European Classic edition of the book, argues that Dobychin's protagonist is beset by a veritable circus of venal, self-important, and grasping of Russian bourgeois.  Certainly the protagonist's family and immediate circle of acquaintances is bourgeois, anti-Semitic, and nationalist if not xenophobic.  The child has grown up in an atmosphere of deep suspicion.  As town-dwellers, the protagonist and his mother regard both workers and peasants--to say nothing of Japanese, Poles, and Jews--as dangerous elements which threaten to overturn the natural order of society.  Once, after the disturbances of 1905, the protagonist regurgitates his mother's disgust that the poor, who lived in dark and smelly basements, were beginning to feel that they had a right to open their windows for air once in a while.

Notwithstanding the protagonist's limited worldview, my own (admittedly first) reading of The Town of N suggests that Dobychin is mainly concerned with depicting his protagonist's world realistically; after all, from a youthful vantage point, adults almost always appear as inscrutable, mysterious, and vaguely threatening, beings. If his protagonist's mother doesn't trust her own maid, and blames Witte's for purposefully landing Russia in trouble with the Japanese in order to appease his Jewish wife, what middle class adult in later imperial Russia did not also harbor similar prejudices?

What's interesting about Dobychin's take on a classic coming-of-age story, is that his narrator is confronting modernity as well as adulthood.  In fact, the plot of The Town of N revolves around mico as well as macro-level events, which often intersect.  On the one hand, he's monitoring the progress of the construction of a local church or paying attention to the activities of his neighbors;  on the other hand, he's bearing witness to the introduction of new technologies, Eastern fashions, political trends, and even social facts, to borrow from Durkeim's terminology.  In the space of just a few years, the character observes the appearance of cinema and electricity and notes the arrival of a new level of political violence characterized by strikes and assassinations which culminate in the Russian-Japanese War and the failed revolution of 1905.

Richard Borden tells us that Dobychin was disgraced by the Soviet literary established and committed suicide shortly thereafter.  His work clearly did not conform to the conventions of socialist realism. Certainly it did not glorify Soviet workers or Soviet construction projects.  Whether or not The Town of N reflects badly on Bolshevik Russia is difficult to say.  Borden points out that comparing modern Russia to Gogol's Russia demonstrates that the Soviet regime would ultimately fail to transform or even improve the dismal circumstances of the Russian people.  The Russian people remained what they had been in Dead Souls. Russian lives remains short, nasty, and brutish.  Their society remained authoritarian, elitist, superstitious, and lubricated by patronage.  (In the Town of N, the police commissionar has his own designated box at the theatre!) But of course this novel isn't set in Soviet Russia.  It's failures are prevolutionary and as such they inherently testify to the Soviet Union's raison d'etre.  The Town of N is in fact a site of intense and rising political dissatisfaction, confusion, and conflict, symbolized by politicized funerals, strikes, terrorist bombings, police shootings, school closings, mobilized soldiers, anti-war literature (i.e., The Red Laugh), expressions of monarchical support, police-issued "certificates of political loyalty," and Black Hundreds marches. If anything, Dobychin's adolescent narrator is observing (or perhaps reflecting) a flawed, divided society in search of radical or event violent transformation.


Some quotes from The Town of N:


"One said he had not sorrrows and wept bitterly:  "God has forgotten me," he grieved."

"Maman told her about how the count had caught two peasant women mushroom picking in his forest and had beaten them up, and she was indignant."

"That fall Father was infected doing a postmortem and died."

"She died there.  She left me three hundred rubles, and maman told me not to spread this fact around."

"Have you read the book "Chekhov"?--she finally asked, reddening."

"Whenever it fell silent, the people near us would discuss England and condemn her. --A Christian nation--they would say--and she's helping the Japanese."

"He was a ragamuffin, and it occurred to me later that he might have a knife and that he could help me take revenge on my penmanship teacher."

"--You've got to eat more rice--maman now said at dinner--and then you'll be strong.  The Japanese eat only rice--and look how they're defeating us."

"Ladies, stopping by the cartloads of food, were sampling.  Peasants were saying foul things out loud.  I was seeing them up close for the first time.--They're like beasts--said Olov, and we had a chat about them."

"We asked Kanatchikov to keep an eye on Evgenia [the family servant]."

"Peasabnts were harrowing.  Ravens revolved around them.  I pictured to myself Chichikov's travels."

"The common people are rebelling--we said. --Measure that can be taken are few."

"I was forbidden to go beyond the gate, and I didn't aspire to.  It would have been terrifying suddenly to encounter peasants alone."

"Father Nikolay explained to us that all creeds had been granted freedom, but that didn't really have much significance and, as before, the principal religion would remain ours."

"I've noticed that I'm already becoming like a grown-up. Sometimes I'm already reminded of childhood."

"I was a bit surprised to hear peasants conversing, just like we did."

"In a cupboard I found a book called "The Life of Jesus."  It astonished me.  I didn't think it possible to doubt in the divinity of Jesus Christ...--Whatever, then--I said to myself--can you be sure of completely?"

"I noticed now that mamam has begun spying on me.  From that day on I tried to behave in such a way that it would be impossible for her to find out anything about me."

"After that they conversed about how sad it is when you suddenly learn that somebody is against the government..."

"--I recall--she said--the year '05.  It was terrible.  People were impertinent then, like wild beasts."

"A policeman came along and made everybody remove their caps."

"One hundred years had passed, it turned out, since the birth of Gogol."

Fainting Into the Past

Someone once said that the past is a foreign country.  I think this expression means that the present is not merely a logical extrapolation or even natural continuation of the past.  Instead, the past is alien, mysterious, and unknowable if one doesn’t know the language.   We feel, or should feel, more like tourists than residents even when we delve into our own personal histories.  In some ways, investigating former modes of living is as difficult as trying to get to know our own subconscious or unconscious lives.  

A few days ago I came face to face with this form of foreign territory when I fainted dead away, collapsing face first on the floor of my apartment.  The doctors told me that the incident was caused by an electrical event in the heart unrelated to the machinations or strivings of a promiscuous subconscious motive.  Be that as it may, loosing control of one’s physical movements, even for a moment, is a reminder that we are not always authors of our own storyline; more often than not, we are puppets of the past, or characters in somebody else’s play, or even victims of a set of circumstances we hardly seem to recognize.  

The past, when it bursts through to the present, is dark, furtive, powerful, and even terrifying.  The strange thing about the past is that it cannot be ignored for very long.  You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to remain in the present, but sooner or later you lose the battle and “faint” into the past.  It’s as if you went up to the bartender and asked for a beer but he served you a freezing blast of high-powered water from the hydrant instead.  I think the point of therapy is to introduce you more gradually and gracefully to the foreign country of your own history.  You can’t help but see a foreign country as strange and unpredictable, but you can become slowly acclimated to its bizarre rituals and traditions.  

What happens when a whole country “faints” into its own past rather than slowly comes to terms with the archeology of alien memories?  What is the national equivalent of individual therapy?  I think most nations try to manage the jarring effect of historical consciousness by erecting sites of memory and mourning and fostering some sort of ritualized collective remembrance.  Some nations are better than others at remembering.  Remembering takes courage of course.  It’s easy to celebrate a one-sided, triumphal arcadia, and much harder to admit to national pain, loss, conflict, and guilt.  Complicating the question of remembrance is the fact that some countries have more to remember than others;  or, to put matters another way, some countries have more subconscious motivations to avoid remembering than others.  

Russia, of course, is traditionally seen as one of the most tragic nations ever to walk upon the stage of history.  Perhaps this is an unreasonable cliché:  is it really possible than one group of people have had it harder than any other?  Whatever the case, Russian intellectuals and non-Russian observers note that the Russian nation’s understanding of the past, both recent and distant, is extraordinarily dark.  An elderly Russian today may indeed remember the chaos, humiliation, and corruption of the early 2000s; spectacular geopolitical collapse of the 1990s; the moral and economic stagnation of the 1970s;  the apocalypse of WWII;  the abject horror of the Great Purges;  the decimation of  the Collectivization famine;  the bloodiness of the Civil War;  and the trauma of the Revolution.  The Russian past is truly monstrous in many respects.   

Although it’s easy to dismiss the triumphs of Russia’s modern history—including the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the creation of a modern economy for instance—most Russians did not, and could not, afford to dwell on national tragedy.  In fact, David Satter’s book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened. Anyway, Satter's book shows that even twentieth century Russian history contains ample evidence of objective historical achievement.  For instance, Russians today often correctly remember that the Soviet government offered them job security, educational benefits, health benefits, and a general sense of international prestige.  Satter even argues that Russian working class citizens in the 1970s might well say that they had it has good as their counterparts in the West; while they certainly earned less, and possessed fewer objects than their Western brethren, they also worked far fewer hours, and at a much slower pace.  In the end, Soviet citizens may not have had much apartment space, but they did get paid vacations and never sweated about whether or not they would get fired for poor performance.  

Satter’s analysis of Russia’s complicated relationship to the past, and to Soviet history in particular, is nothing short of masterful.  Russia’s problems are manifold.  First, Soviet history is particularly (though of course not uniquely) horrific.  The author draws upon seemingly hundreds of discrete episodes of Soviet political terror and mass murder to explain the tangled web of Russian past and present.  Second, notwithstanding the fact that Russians played a leading part in The Soviet Union’s Party leadership circles, Russia has tried to detach itself from the wider story of the murderous Soviet Empire.  While the USSR may have been the “prison of nations,” Russia was allegedly only one of the many victims of international communist conspiracy.  Third, Russians, before, during, and after the Soviet experiment, have celebrated the principle of raison d’etat and autocracy;  almost every crime has been justified in the context of Russian power., and many today celebrate the Rise of former KGB leader, Putin, as some sort of paradoxical anecdote to the historical angst of the Russian people.  Fourth, so many Russians were involved in Stalin’s bloody tyranny, or its heirs, that the process of repenting, confessing,  or publicizing past crimes seems confusing or even overwhelming to most Russians.  If almost all of the country’s leaders (and many of one’s own family patriarchs) participated in abuses, can we reject them all? Are there really no heroes in a 73 year period of history in which the Soviet Union triumphed over Hitler and became a superpower?  

The confusion is Russia is all-consuming.  As one citizen asked:  how is it possible to erect a monument to both Stalin and his victims?  Fifth, the Russian people often seem to prefer to blame others for the sins of the past, including Jews.  If even the great writer Solzhenityn could ignore historical statistics in order to ask the Jews to accept responsibility for vicitimizing the enormous Russian population, how are ordinary Russians expected to blame their own state for their present predicament?  In the end, the past in Russia is more of a foreign country than almost anywhere else.  This is understandable.  The Soviet past beggars the imagination for its bloodiness and cruelty.  According to Satter, Russians have been victims of an ideology that devalues human life in favor of the state and its alleged needs.  Even the greatest of Russian writers, including Pushkin, Gogol, Chaadaev, Berdyaev, and Solzhenitsyn, have sometimes embraced this sad logic, accepting the cruel and antihumanist notion that Russians were born to suffer.  Until the Russians learn to grieve the past, and repent of their countrymen’s enormous mistakes, it seems they will be likely to faint repeatedly into the past.

Kerensky's Signature

My copy of Alexander Kerensky's autobiography, Russia and History's Turning Point, is apparently signed by the author around 1965. Kerensky's signature appears along side the hand-written date of 7 August 1917, the tangible reminder of just how close we remain to that seminal event in world history. Kerensky, who was the most important member of the Provisional Government, was one of Russia's most eloquent speakers. His book, released in the 1960s, reflects the intelligence and rhetorical power of its famous author. It's also a fascinating glimpse at the pre-war history of Russia.

Kerensky, a student activist, radical lawyer, and budding politician, makes the convincing case that Nicholas II was personally responsible for at least some of the tragedies that later befell his country. Prior to the war, Kerensky believes that Nicholas supported a blind, atavistic policy of antidemocratic and anti-modern conservatism. To Kerensky's mind, Nicholas II was absurdly attached to a dying political class, the landed gentry, and scattered elements of chauvinistic and anti-Semitic Russian society. More specifically, the Emperor allowed his government to slaughter miners (Lena Fields Massacre), shoot proletarians (Bloody Sunday), and prosecute Jews for the insane myth of the blood libel (Mendel Beylis), while it simultaneously encouraged the police and secret organs of the state to harass, detain, imprison, and otherwise intimidate any hint of political opposition.

Karensky is kinder to Witte and Stolypin, two of the tsar's only competent and forward-thinking advisers, who nevertheless failed to fully embrace the concepts of constitutionalism and parliamentary democracy that alone might have saved the monarchy from its own incompetence. Kerensky's main contention, a contention supported by the novelist Nabokov and many others, is that without World War I, Russia would have, one way or the other, been transformed into an a liberal democracy.

Contrary to the opinion of the Bolsheviks, history was not on the side of radical revolution. After all, even though Russia was officially governed by a man of limited intellectual subtlety, a man who listened to the likes of Gregory Rasputin, Russia was rapidly becoming a country with a healthy public sphere, including active political parties, rising literacy rates, a freethinking student population, and an active Duma. Kerensky's self-interested argument is that a rapidly industrializing country was bound to be at odds with the medieval concept of unlimited government.

One irony of Kerensky's book is that its obsession with the origins of World War I helps one to understand one of the Provisional Government's primary weaknesses. If Russia's peasant masses failed to care about Russia's commitment to the allies, how much less should historians care whether or not Russia's diplomatic posture was correct or not in the Serbian crisis. In the end, the war could not have been good for Russian under even the best of circumstances. But after several years of military and economic disaster, Kerensky's honorable commitment to continue the war may well have been preposterously misguided.

Antithesis, Anti-World, Anti-Self

Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia is a perfect little book. Like the Elif Batuman's Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them--and hopefully, modestly, this blog--it's a blend of the personal and the historical. That is, Brent discusses the historical controversies surrounding issues such as the Kirov Assassination, the Doctor's Plot, the destruction of the literary and artistic elite, Lenin's role in establishing a police state, the Comintern's level of activity in various nations, Isaac Babel's demise, the legacy of the KGB, moral responsibility for the gulag, etc., while also documenting his confused but sensitive reactions to the alien and shifting landscape of post-collapse Russia. It's a landscape of suffering, fear, poverty and economic hardship, strident anti-Semitism, burgeoning consumerism, and general shabbiness. In one telling scene, the author moves about his host's apartment cautiously, less he break or destroy any one of the dozens of poorly made consumer items or delicate pieces of furniture that litter the place. In this ill-constructed country, even turning a faucet on or off can result in a major plumbing disaster.

Brent went to Russia at the end of the Cold War as Yale University Press' chief negotiating dignitary. As such, Brent has a keen sense of the importance of his mission. Although he could not have known with certainty that Russia's archives would soon be closed to outsiders, he did understand that the world's ability to see many of these rare and precious documents was fragile and tenuous. Blessed with a novelist's rhetorical powers, Brent is able to articulate that which this blog sometimes struggles to assert, that Russian archives and Russian history lies at the heart of all quests at modern self-understanding. Russia was not only the mirror-image of the West throughout much of the previous century, it was also the boldest experiment in "engineering men's souls" ever attempted. That the experiment failed so disastrously is merely one more reason to persevere in our attempt to explain its origins and results.

As Inside the Stalin Archives is so closely aligned to the worldview of this blog, perhaps a few quotations are in order.

First, here is Brent discussing Russia's place as the Russia as America's alter-ego:

"...I had grown up under the sign of the Cold War; I had hid under my desk as a child in fear of a nuclear attack from an unknown enemy; I had watched on television the U.S. and Soviet ships off the coast of Cuba in their fateful standoff; I had gone to bed many nights fearful of the invisible particles of radiation raining down on us continually from the skies from our atom bomb testing; I had protested the Vietnam War and spend a night in prison as a consequence; as a child I had ridden the bus to school every morning trying to make out the import of the words, "We will bury you," that were printed on an advertisement for the United Nations along with a picture of a small, round man standing at a podium with one first raised as if in anger..."

Second, here is Brent stating this blog's central premise:

"..the history of the Soviet Union was, in my view, the entryway into understanding the history of the world for the last seventy-five years of the twentieth century. I emphasized that for me this was not only a project of understanding Soviet history but also of understanding my experiences and those of my generation growing up in post-Sputnik America."

Third, and finally, here is Brent discussing the proper ambivalence with which we should confront Soviet history:

"Never clearly seen, never understood, a mortal enemy--yet for those who fell in love with the revolution and its literature and music, not only an enemy. It seemed the inevitable reflux of everything around us. It was that which had always existed contra to us, an anti-world, an in some ways an anit-self. It formed the natureal complement, the necessary antithesis that mirrored our every move and made us conscious of ourselves."

We're All Socialists Now

People today are cyborgs—half human, half communist. Notwithstanding the collapse of formal communism, socialism has changed people beyond recognition. We’re all socialists now.

We’re all utilitarians; We all believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people, whenever possible. We all support progress. We all like the future. We’re all cosmopolitans. We all believe in brotherhood or sisterhood. We’re all feminists.

We want women to be doctors and lawyers. We’re all opposed to bigotry and anti-Semitism. We all support universal education, universal literacy, and free housing for everyone. We want everybody to have a job and a house. We support abortion rights; we support equality and social justice and anti-colonialism. We like hard work. We like workers. We want workers to get ahead in life.

We want the children of workers to have every opportunity, to become whatever they want to become. We love social mobility. We love the idea of a pig farmer becoming our political leader. We believe in the productive capacity of the industrial revolution. We love machines and technology and electricity and industrial power. We’re into engineers.

We want modernization at all costs. We like to plan, to map, to design, to create, and to build. We want to make things. We want to invent things. We want government to wither away once and for all. We’re against exploitation and lazy fat cats. We want solidarity, fraternity, and happiness. We want better, more meaningful art and literature and culture.

We hate fascism. We like fairness. We think people can get better and will get better. We think that men and women today are better than men and women of the past. They are stronger, smarter, and bigger. We like heroes. We believe that men and women who are born fifty years from now will be better than we are. They’ll be more rational, less emotional. We’ll look like troglodytes to our descendants.

We want our children to believe in something bigger and better than village or clan or tribe or race. We like community. We want utopia now.

Conservative Critique of Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 wouldn’t have made sense without the French Revolution of 1789. The French Revolution defined radical struggle as well as its inevitable byproduct: self-conscious conservatism. The terms, Left and Right, emerged as a result of the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly. So Ivan Bunin’s critique of Red Russia was not a recent invention. Edmund Burke has said it all before in Reflections on the Revolution in France more than hundred years previously.

Burke’s critique of the French Revolution was predicated on a wider critique of the Enlightenment. Although he was a reformer, Burke stood firmly against the notion that society could or should be improved by rationality alone. Burke’s argument is complex, perhaps even a touch defensive, because the case for Revolution was strong. People knew the Ancien Regime was corrupt, abusive, arbitrary, and illogical.

On the face of it, thinking people could no longer accept the principle of autocracy, which allowed the king to rule by divine right with little regard for the welfare of his subjects, the rule of law, or the dictates of reason. The king’s arbitrary power was only the most obviously irrational aspect of pre-revolutionary France. The church ruled vast swathes of land and enjoyed immense privilege, including an exemption from taxation. The aristocracy enjoyed similar rights, which ranged from the right to carry weapons and the right to be executed by a dignified beheading as opposed to a more plebeian hanging.

The French system was rooted in feudalism, which was rooted in local privileges for local aristocrats who exercised enormous influence over the lives of serfs and peasants. The bourgeoisie, while gaining in influence from one decade to the next, were lumped together as a group with everyone in France who had no claim to aristocratic or clerical privilege. In these circumstances, the Revolution had a lot going for it. The new order it promised seemed fairer, smarter, and more efficient, that what it proposed to displace.

Burke rejected the logic of revolution, but respected that logic and made his case without relying on purely religious sentiment. Instead, he maintained that society was a slowly evolving organism that embodied the mystical but important lessons of history. If England’s system of government appeared irrational—with kings, lords, and an uneven electoral franchise—the system had evolved over many generations, contained myriad checks and balances, and worked well enough to preserve the people’s liberty. The conservative approach to politics was applied to Russia. While it might appear that the revolutionaries were overthrowing a destructive autocracy and an exploitative economy, Russian traditions had evolved over time for good reason.

Bunin, for instance, believed that—for all Russia’s flaws--the wisdom of the ages was contained in the Russian Orthodox Church, the Aristocracy, and other traditional institutions. If Old Russia represented a host of injustices, anti-Semitism included, Bunin thought that quick solutions would make things worse—much worse. Quick solutions, based on short-sighted claims to utilitarianism, reason, and universal truth, would result in violence and the triumph of an impoverished conception of humankind. We know now that Bunin turned out to be right: revolutionary Russia did make things worse.

The hubris of revolutionaries helped them to do away with the Tsar, but also with all other institutions that might have put a break on the government’s power, including the Church, the peasant commune, the Duma, independent judiciaries, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, the Jewish Bund, the intelligentsia, the arts, the military, and subject nationalities. Eventually, Stalin even moved against the family as an institution, and private life in general.