Reality Bytes

Any fool can start a political revolution; it takes a real revolutionary to overturn the patterns and substance of ordinary life in the search for something new and better. The Russians, who have long been obsessed with everyday life, use the term “byte” to refer to the quotidian. Svetlana Boym argues in her fittingly named book, Common Places, that Russian intellectuals have had a long and complicated history with byte. Indeed, Russians were more often than not at war with byte: they sought to overcome or surmount the banal stuff of everyday life in a quest for personal or national transformation.



The Russian tendency to think of byte as something that stands opposed to greatness--as opposed to merely representing its context or background noise--is not universal. It may also be destructive. It’s been said that Russians accept or perhaps even embrace suffering in their quest to rise above the ordinary stuff of life. Better to court war, conflagration, political upheaval, mass murder, and famine, than submit to the exigencies of soul-destroying byte.

Like Boym, Christina Kiaer has examined the question of byte, although she focuses on aesthetic approaches to the topic in her wonderful book, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism. Fascinatingly, certain strands of Russian constructivism embraced everyday life, even eschewing “high art” traditions in the process. Some of these artists saw their principle task as revolutionaries to be that of participating in byte rather than escaping it. Some constructivists went so far with the concept that their own artistic projects were almost indistinguishable from physical culture of existing Russian peasants and proletarians. Whether this amounted to avant-garde work or its opposite is an open question.

To the credit of Russian revolutionaries, the end of the Russian Civil War saw the country actively debating almost every aspect of byte. Trotsky, still at the apogee of his political influence, wrote a treatise on the subject, and various art journals carried on a rich dialogue about its import. Trotsky’s view was that everyday life was essentially conservative in nature. The past clung to people, held them tightly to old and discredited traditions. It was crude and crass. Even people’s seemingly insignificant household objects were dangerous and ultimately counter-revolutionary. They signified proletarian attachment to outmoded bourgeois ideals, and they deflected proletarian aspirations away from worthy goals. Bourgeois-inspired objects celebrated purely aesthetic values, and largely visual ones at that.

This was hardly appropriate for people who hoped to become better than they had ever previously been. Revolutionary material culture wasn’t predicated on a search for beauty for its own sake; rather it sought to implement principles of hygiene, mass production, rationality, and usefulness. Bourgeois material culture celebrated conservative values such as patriarchy and individuality and privacy; its revolutionary counterpart would move decisively toward values related to freedom, collective action, equality, and community. I understand Trotsky’s concerns. Material culture is like quicksand.

I think of George Clooney’s speech in Up in the Air. “Imagine you have a backpack. Imagine you can put all of your things into that backpack. “That backpack just gets heavier and heavier. You need to watch an episode of hoarders to get the full import of that speech. But even with well-disciplined byte, you’re a victim of everyday life and everyday material culture. Watch that inspiring movie about an orphan-turned-football start. Who is in charge, the family, the orphan, or the massive, tastefully decorated house that surrounds them? Byte always wins.

I have decorated my office in bourgeois display. I’ve got an antique wooden desk, inherited from my grandmother’s basement (an episode of hoarders that somehow never got taped), filled with knick-knacks, including a mawkish portrait of two dogs, inherited from grandfather, and vine wreath, made by a friendly horticulturalist for a holiday fundraising event. And of course there are books on it, Russian books, holding me back, keeping me from my revolutionary destiny. Twenty years ago I prided myself on my barren walls, my opposition to photography, my Spartan insistence on sleeping without a pillow. That was before I got dragged down by the tacky seductions of Pier One.

Poshlost

There are of course better and worse examples of the kind of Russian intellectual fluff to which I’ve referred in the previous post. I think Imagining Nabokov: Russia between Art and Politics is one of the better sorts of intellectual fluff pieces. Notwithstanding the author’s heavy-handed biographical presence in the book, she does have a real thesis: that Nabokov’s books are especially relevant to contemporary, crisis-laden, post-Soviet Russia. As the author notes, Nabokov, once banned from publication in Russia, is now enjoying a major resurgence in popularity among Russia’s younger reading audiences.

The author believes that this popularity stems from Nabokov’s radical break from Russian literary tradition. For Nabokov was a post-modern author rather than a modern one, and, more importantly, Nabokov believed in the priority of the personal over the collective, as well as the possibility of achieving happiness, a very un-traditional Russian literary theme. (Incidentally, the book recalls Lesley Chamberlain’s intellectual history of the Russian Diaspora, which includes Nabokov and his father. Here, Chamberlain points out that many exiled Russian intellectuals were religious thinkers who were crafting a highly individualistic response to modernity called personalism.)

In one section of Imagining Nabokov, the author discusses the traditional Russian concept of the banal, or poshlost, which was odious to most major Russian authors. Better to suffer or do evil than to wallow in the un-dramatic or ordinary. She says Nabokov recognized the pitfalls of such contempt for poshlost. Lolita’s tragedy is not that she lived an ordinary life before she met Humbert. Her tragedy is that Humbert robbed her of this bland but worthwhile life. The interesting thing about this book is that its blend of literary criticism and diary resulted from the rich imagination of Nikita Khrushchev’s granddaughter, Nina Khruschcheva.

The granddaughter of a man accused of mass murder in the Ukraine has surely thought deeply about the superiority of ordinary life when weighed against the heroic but bloody acts of state socialism. If only Ukrainian peasants had been left to enjoy their boring lives rather than starved to death or transported in the pursuit of a Bolshevik Utopia. Incidentally, Boym’s Common Places , which approaches Khruschcheva’s theme about the role of banality in Russian culture from another angle, is also worth reading.