Jaspers wrote "[there] exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsibile for every wrong and every injustice in the world...If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent [crimes], I too am guilty. If I was present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally, politically or morally. That I live after such a thing has happened, weighs upon me as indelible guilt."
"Dostoevsky was convinced that there was not a "villain or scoundrel among the Russians that did not know that he was disgusting and vile," whereas among other peoples a person who does evil congratulates himself and pretends he is a flower of civilization." David Satter.
[Chaadaev wrote that] "there is in Russians a lack of stability, a lack of a certain consistency in mind, a certain logic. The Western syllogism is to us alien. In our minds there is something worse than superficiality. The best ideas, in the absence of connections and consistency, like sterile outbreaks, paralyze in our brains."
[According to Chaadaev,] "Alone in the world we gave the world nothing and took nothing from the world. We did nothing to assist the movement forward of human reason, and everything we received from this movement we distorted." David Satter.
Having recently overcome a small health crisis, I have felt a little more gloomy than usual. Looking at my DVR memory, which consists of dozens upon dozens of different crime shows, I wondered if I shouldn't consider turning toward some more cheerful entertainment. Watching 30 Rock helped, but I eventually realized that twentieth century Russian history doesn't contribute to cheerfulness. David Satter's sophisticated book on historical guilt, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, was particularly depressing, even by the high standards of modern Russian historiography. As mentioned previously, the book is a catalog of criminal state activity, including mass executions, man-made famines, and the sometimes random violence of the great purges. The author's conclusion of present-day Russia is equally depressing. As Satter writes: "The passivity on the part of ordinary Russians, combined with a seeming inability to make moral judgements, gives Russia's rulers the conviction that they never will be held to account." Of course, if both the recent past and present are closed, one can and should start reading 19th century Russian history and literature. This is what I've done. I'm reading Oblomov and finishing Henri Troyat's biography of Gogol as a start. Reading the classics of Russian literature soothes the soul, although it's sad to think that the chicanery of Gogol's Chicharev and the laziness of Goncharov's Oblomov are dependent on serfdom. How is it that even a country's tranquil century is predicated on slavery, to say nothing of imperialism, war, famine, and social turmoil? At any rate, Gogol and Goncharov are funny and so a lot to lighten one's mood. Here are a couple samples from Gogol's letters, as translated by his biographer, Troyat.
Here is Gogol's advice to a young acolyte:
"For the love of God, don't sit in one place for more than an hour and a half at a time, and don't lean over the tables: you have a weak chest, you must know it. Try always to be in bed by half past eleven. And do not dance at all, especially not these wild dances! They stir up the blood but do not allow the body to move enough, and you are not light enough on your feet. You are not pretty. Are you quite sure you know that? You are only pretty when your face expresses some elevated emotion. Your features were patently made to express the nobility of your soul; as soon as you lose that expression, you become plain. Therefore, give up all social functions, however modest. You must see that society can give you nothing. Keep your childlike innocence; that is worth more than everything else."
Here are his reflections on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land:
"What have all these Stations of the Cross of Our Savior got to say to us know; the Holy Sepulcher, Golgotha, the place where Christ was shown to the people by Pontius Pilate, the residence of the High Priest, where he was taken, the site of the Holy Cross--when all these places have been fathered together under the roof of a single church? What is there for artist or poet in the landscapes of Judea with their monotonous hills, like the gray waves of the sea in a gale? No doubt, it was all very picturesque in the Savior's lifetime, when Judea was nothing but gardens and every Jew sat in the shade of the tree he had planted himself; but today, when you met five or six olive trees straggling up the mountain slope, gray and dusty as the rocks themselves, when a thin membrane of moss and a few tufts of grass showed green in the middle of a barren, irregular plain strewn with stones, when after five or six hours' travel you saw some tiny Arab hut glued somewhere to the hillside, looking less like a human habitation than a terra-cota pot, an oven, or some animal's lair--where in this could you see the land of milk and honey?"
Showing posts with label Henri Troyat. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Henri Troyat. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Saturday, May 12, 2012
House Hunting with Gogol (or, How I Lost My Mother)
Although I am officially on hiatus, I continue to read Russian history and literature, however fitfully. So I'll post now, just to keep in practice. Currently, I'm reading Henri Troyat's wonderful biography of Nikolai Gogol. Like all of Troyat's biographies (and I've previously commented on his books about Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turganev, Alexander I, Catherine the Great, and Pushkin), this one balances a healthy regard for the author's literary genius with an equally healthy regard for the more absurdly comic aspects of his author's unusual life. I'm also reading Norman Mailer's biographical work about Lee Harvey Oswald, who spent some of his formative years in Communist Russia.
But to return to the subject of hiatus, I'm wondering why Oswald and Gogol aren't inspiring me to write as they would have one year previously. I'm wondering whether the problem is that I'm too bored to write, or, conversely, too preoccupied with an increasingly active life to spend time on this blog. It's strange to be unsure if one's life is too empty or too full at a specific moment in time. At any rate, my life hasn't been uneventful in the past few months. I got engaged, for instance, just one week ago, to a wonderful woman. Without her, as Victor Shklovsky said, the sea has no color. This, of course, has led me to reflect on all sorts of things, including love. But one of the most emotionally destabilizing things I've done recently is to tour homes with the intent to buy one with my bride-to-be.
First, of course, is the question of location. Where does one live? Should one live cheaply or well? Should one look for low taxes or high aesthetic quality? And even if one decides in favor of the beautiful, does one look for a beautiful home or a beautiful neighborhood? Looking for a house is an almost overwhelming experience, since it's one of the few times in life one is often forced to think in terms of one's entire lifetime. When looking for a home, we're not just asking whether or not he'd like to live somewhere in the coming year, we're asking if we'd mind (potentially at at least) living and dying in a particular spot. And like Steven King's book, The Shining, we find traces of other people's life decisions everywhere we go.
In one home I recently visited, the seller's hopes and dreams were overpowering. This was, perhaps, largely because he insisted on showing us the home himself. Having lived in the place for many, many decades, he seemed to be asking us to take up a life journey he could no longer pursue. The fact that the home was hopelessly outdated, a mixed up jumble of luxuriously ugly features, didn't help matters. There was a pool, a bar, reflecting pools, Japanese decorations, and a hundred other reminders of 1960s splendor. The whole place reminded one of how proud Mr. Brady must have been of his Brady Bunch ranch palace. The seller's description--a taste of the Hollywood Hills in suburban Chicago--just about fit the bill. This place spoke to the suburban glory of the 1960s, before the suburbs had lost their charm. And the seller, a doctor with a tightly clad Playboy Bunny wife about forty years past her prime, still saw this wreck of a house, whose yard was (not ironically) made up of AstroTurf, as something Bob Hope or a member of the Rat Pack might well covet. Pondering the place, I wondered what the right response is? Does the home need to be loved? Would it be the death or birth of my own dreams? Would I sell some space-aged, middle aged man this place forty years hence?
House hunting is an emotional process by any reckoning, so readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that my search inevitably led to the very source of my emotional volatility: my mother. Like Gogol, my mother's presence looms large in my life. For Gogol, who lost his father at an early age but was doted upon by a mother who believed her odd son could do no wrong, his mother was never far from his mind. Long before he had any right to believe he might befriend Pushkin and make an enormous mark on the literary world with Dead Souls, The Inspector General, The Nose, Diary of a Madman, and The Overcoat, Gogol's mother told anyone who listened that her strange and awkward son was a genius and demigod. Gogol, who had only sisters, was doted upon by his mother, and never doubted her messianic interpretation of his life's mission: to conquer the world, one way or the other.
I encountered my own mother in the process of home hunting, and encountered her on multiple occasions. With apologies to the writers of one of my favorite television shows, my experience in home buying might, thus far, deserve the title: How I Lost My Mother. The fact that my mom died decades ago didn't lesson the impact of her several appearances on Redfin and ReMax tours. At the outset of our search for a matrimonial home, my fiancee and I looked at small homes in Hinsdale, Illinois. The location, astride two convenient highways and right next door to my place of employment, and surrounded by wonderful schools, seemed too good to ignore. Additionally, it had the advantage of being someplace other than the suburb in which I grew up. Who wants to repeat the past so precisely by moving into the very suburb one grew up?
One of our favorite homes in Hinsdale turned out to be directly across the street from the hospital where I was born. Surely buying the house would have been something more than a metaphorical return to the womb? Of course, as Gogol taught us, life is a strange mixture of comedy and tragedy, and so I soon recalled that this hospital was also the scene of my mother's chemotherapy. Recalling childhood trips with my mother to that dreaded site of cancer treatment, I found myself driving once more over the small, fragile bridge right outside the hospital that I once knew so well. The rickety bridge was, once upon a time, a special joy for a little kid: in the middle of a ordinary suburb, this awkward, single-lane bridge over the train tracks seemed to belong to a much more remote time and place. The bridge was fun, but sentimentally tied to locus of death and dying in my child's imagination: the Hinsdale hospital.
Looking in LaGrange, my fiancee and I found another wonderful house, but this time the home turned out to be two doors down from my first home, which had long since been torn down. How strange to be pondering the purchase of something so proximate to one's original shelter? The home, located right along the train tracks and right next to my high school, had an enormous backyard, but the noise of the passing trains was almost unbearable. It was so loud there that I wondered how my mom and dad dealt with the noise themselves over forty years ago.
My mother has appeared to me in dreams these past few weeks as well. When she died, she visited me regularly for the first several years. I'd dream that her cancer had turned out to be less severe than originally diagnosed. Everything had been a mistake: Mom had somehow survived, and life could continue on its normal trajectory. The dreams themselves were delicious: I was safe and sound, for Mom had never left the stage of my life. Waking from these dreams was another matter. How many times does the average survivor re-experience the death of a loved one in the waking hours of morning? Probably hundreds of times.
Last week, I dreamed that I was looking for a home and found a really perfect one in LaGrange Park. The home only had one regular bathroom, but there was a crude, unfinished half-bathroom in the basement that would make things work. In a pinch, the kids could use that one. The three bedrooms were large, the closet space was excellent, and there was a large yard and garden. The house wasn't anything special, but it was very livable. With a porch, living room, separate dining room, and expanded kitchen (not pretty, but large), what more did one need? The school was reasonably good too, only a short walk for the kids.
Imagining my current family in that home felt wonderful, but it soon occurred to me that this was the very same house in which I grew up. As such, it was also the last home I shared with my mother. I moved only a year or so after her death. And of course I realize now that by moving I not only left my childhood behind, I left my mother, whose spirit even now probably lingers in that place, a place of mingled joy and sadness. If one hasn't been traumatized by loss one might not understand how a place, or a person, can be haunted. But Gogol would have understood me. Accustomed to writing about Ukrainian spirits and Romantic encounters with St. Petersburg phantasmagoria, even without the benefit of Freud, Gogol's Gothic imagination would have allowed him to appreciate the irrational and supernatural dimensions of even an ordinary house hunt. (And no, it has no escaped me that today is Mother's Day).
But to return to the subject of hiatus, I'm wondering why Oswald and Gogol aren't inspiring me to write as they would have one year previously. I'm wondering whether the problem is that I'm too bored to write, or, conversely, too preoccupied with an increasingly active life to spend time on this blog. It's strange to be unsure if one's life is too empty or too full at a specific moment in time. At any rate, my life hasn't been uneventful in the past few months. I got engaged, for instance, just one week ago, to a wonderful woman. Without her, as Victor Shklovsky said, the sea has no color. This, of course, has led me to reflect on all sorts of things, including love. But one of the most emotionally destabilizing things I've done recently is to tour homes with the intent to buy one with my bride-to-be.
First, of course, is the question of location. Where does one live? Should one live cheaply or well? Should one look for low taxes or high aesthetic quality? And even if one decides in favor of the beautiful, does one look for a beautiful home or a beautiful neighborhood? Looking for a house is an almost overwhelming experience, since it's one of the few times in life one is often forced to think in terms of one's entire lifetime. When looking for a home, we're not just asking whether or not he'd like to live somewhere in the coming year, we're asking if we'd mind (potentially at at least) living and dying in a particular spot. And like Steven King's book, The Shining, we find traces of other people's life decisions everywhere we go.
In one home I recently visited, the seller's hopes and dreams were overpowering. This was, perhaps, largely because he insisted on showing us the home himself. Having lived in the place for many, many decades, he seemed to be asking us to take up a life journey he could no longer pursue. The fact that the home was hopelessly outdated, a mixed up jumble of luxuriously ugly features, didn't help matters. There was a pool, a bar, reflecting pools, Japanese decorations, and a hundred other reminders of 1960s splendor. The whole place reminded one of how proud Mr. Brady must have been of his Brady Bunch ranch palace. The seller's description--a taste of the Hollywood Hills in suburban Chicago--just about fit the bill. This place spoke to the suburban glory of the 1960s, before the suburbs had lost their charm. And the seller, a doctor with a tightly clad Playboy Bunny wife about forty years past her prime, still saw this wreck of a house, whose yard was (not ironically) made up of AstroTurf, as something Bob Hope or a member of the Rat Pack might well covet. Pondering the place, I wondered what the right response is? Does the home need to be loved? Would it be the death or birth of my own dreams? Would I sell some space-aged, middle aged man this place forty years hence?
House hunting is an emotional process by any reckoning, so readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that my search inevitably led to the very source of my emotional volatility: my mother. Like Gogol, my mother's presence looms large in my life. For Gogol, who lost his father at an early age but was doted upon by a mother who believed her odd son could do no wrong, his mother was never far from his mind. Long before he had any right to believe he might befriend Pushkin and make an enormous mark on the literary world with Dead Souls, The Inspector General, The Nose, Diary of a Madman, and The Overcoat, Gogol's mother told anyone who listened that her strange and awkward son was a genius and demigod. Gogol, who had only sisters, was doted upon by his mother, and never doubted her messianic interpretation of his life's mission: to conquer the world, one way or the other.
I encountered my own mother in the process of home hunting, and encountered her on multiple occasions. With apologies to the writers of one of my favorite television shows, my experience in home buying might, thus far, deserve the title: How I Lost My Mother. The fact that my mom died decades ago didn't lesson the impact of her several appearances on Redfin and ReMax tours. At the outset of our search for a matrimonial home, my fiancee and I looked at small homes in Hinsdale, Illinois. The location, astride two convenient highways and right next door to my place of employment, and surrounded by wonderful schools, seemed too good to ignore. Additionally, it had the advantage of being someplace other than the suburb in which I grew up. Who wants to repeat the past so precisely by moving into the very suburb one grew up?
One of our favorite homes in Hinsdale turned out to be directly across the street from the hospital where I was born. Surely buying the house would have been something more than a metaphorical return to the womb? Of course, as Gogol taught us, life is a strange mixture of comedy and tragedy, and so I soon recalled that this hospital was also the scene of my mother's chemotherapy. Recalling childhood trips with my mother to that dreaded site of cancer treatment, I found myself driving once more over the small, fragile bridge right outside the hospital that I once knew so well. The rickety bridge was, once upon a time, a special joy for a little kid: in the middle of a ordinary suburb, this awkward, single-lane bridge over the train tracks seemed to belong to a much more remote time and place. The bridge was fun, but sentimentally tied to locus of death and dying in my child's imagination: the Hinsdale hospital.
Looking in LaGrange, my fiancee and I found another wonderful house, but this time the home turned out to be two doors down from my first home, which had long since been torn down. How strange to be pondering the purchase of something so proximate to one's original shelter? The home, located right along the train tracks and right next to my high school, had an enormous backyard, but the noise of the passing trains was almost unbearable. It was so loud there that I wondered how my mom and dad dealt with the noise themselves over forty years ago.
My mother has appeared to me in dreams these past few weeks as well. When she died, she visited me regularly for the first several years. I'd dream that her cancer had turned out to be less severe than originally diagnosed. Everything had been a mistake: Mom had somehow survived, and life could continue on its normal trajectory. The dreams themselves were delicious: I was safe and sound, for Mom had never left the stage of my life. Waking from these dreams was another matter. How many times does the average survivor re-experience the death of a loved one in the waking hours of morning? Probably hundreds of times.
Last week, I dreamed that I was looking for a home and found a really perfect one in LaGrange Park. The home only had one regular bathroom, but there was a crude, unfinished half-bathroom in the basement that would make things work. In a pinch, the kids could use that one. The three bedrooms were large, the closet space was excellent, and there was a large yard and garden. The house wasn't anything special, but it was very livable. With a porch, living room, separate dining room, and expanded kitchen (not pretty, but large), what more did one need? The school was reasonably good too, only a short walk for the kids.
Imagining my current family in that home felt wonderful, but it soon occurred to me that this was the very same house in which I grew up. As such, it was also the last home I shared with my mother. I moved only a year or so after her death. And of course I realize now that by moving I not only left my childhood behind, I left my mother, whose spirit even now probably lingers in that place, a place of mingled joy and sadness. If one hasn't been traumatized by loss one might not understand how a place, or a person, can be haunted. But Gogol would have understood me. Accustomed to writing about Ukrainian spirits and Romantic encounters with St. Petersburg phantasmagoria, even without the benefit of Freud, Gogol's Gothic imagination would have allowed him to appreciate the irrational and supernatural dimensions of even an ordinary house hunt. (And no, it has no escaped me that today is Mother's Day).
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Tour de Horizon de Troyat
I've been packing up Russian history and literature books for three days. It's time to put my small Henri Troyat collection away. Troyat was part of the Russian diaspora that was displaced by the Russian Revolution. I think he was a teenager when his family settled in France, one of the centers of counter-revolutionary and general White Russia intellectual activity. Troyat was a prolific writer to say the least, and penned many successful novels (including one work of historical fiction, Red and White, which I have yet to review in this blog) as well as dozens of biographies of Russian historical and literary figures. It's no exaggeration to say that one of the best ways to fall in love with Russian cultural history is to read a Troyat biography, which are like potato chips insofar as you can't stop at just one. Troyat's biographies, as I've said before, are all almost uniformally good. They all read well and possess a literary quality in their own right. They all move quickly to decisive, adult junctures in the subject's right.
Troyat seems to have had divided loyalties, as I also do. (In graduate school in Montreal, I somehow divided my time almost equally between very traditional political biographies of the Stale Male and Pale men of British history such as Castlereagh, Palmerston, Gladstone, Churchill, and Lloyd George; and more recent works about queer, Beatnik authors such as Burroughs and Kerouac--never quite finding any connection between my subjects despite one failed doctoral dissertation that vainly attempted to find a link between literary and political modernism).
In this spirit, Troyat loved politics as well literature. He wrote biographies of the tsars, including Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Alexander I, and many of the minor female tsarinas. But he also wrote brilliant and sensitive portraits of Russia's greatest authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky--all good, although the Tolstoy book overshadows the others. Orlando Figes, for example, said it remained a sentimental favorite of his.
As I pack up my Troyat books, including many of the books mentioned above, I'm thankful that I still have a few left to read. I've got his portrait of daily life in Moscow at the turn of the century, one of his many French biographies (Flaubert, friend of Turgenev--apparently Troyat's attention couldn't even remained fixed on Russia), and his novel, Red and White. But there are other Troyat books out there, many others. Some are rare, out-of-print, and expensive: just try to find his biographies of Gogol and Dostoevsky for instance. Others are apparently untranslated. It's enough to make you learn French.
Troyat seems to have had divided loyalties, as I also do. (In graduate school in Montreal, I somehow divided my time almost equally between very traditional political biographies of the Stale Male and Pale men of British history such as Castlereagh, Palmerston, Gladstone, Churchill, and Lloyd George; and more recent works about queer, Beatnik authors such as Burroughs and Kerouac--never quite finding any connection between my subjects despite one failed doctoral dissertation that vainly attempted to find a link between literary and political modernism).
In this spirit, Troyat loved politics as well literature. He wrote biographies of the tsars, including Ivan, Peter, Catherine, Alexander I, and many of the minor female tsarinas. But he also wrote brilliant and sensitive portraits of Russia's greatest authors, including Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Gorky--all good, although the Tolstoy book overshadows the others. Orlando Figes, for example, said it remained a sentimental favorite of his.
As I pack up my Troyat books, including many of the books mentioned above, I'm thankful that I still have a few left to read. I've got his portrait of daily life in Moscow at the turn of the century, one of his many French biographies (Flaubert, friend of Turgenev--apparently Troyat's attention couldn't even remained fixed on Russia), and his novel, Red and White. But there are other Troyat books out there, many others. Some are rare, out-of-print, and expensive: just try to find his biographies of Gogol and Dostoevsky for instance. Others are apparently untranslated. It's enough to make you learn French.
Monday, March 29, 2010
My Most Influential
I feel like we should contribute to this slightly irritating thing going around the blogosphere where you list and describe the 10 books that have had the biggest influence on you (not necessarily best or favorite books). So here are my biggest Russian influences:
1.Hendrik Smith, The Russians. I attended a small rural high school and one of our few electives was a freshman “Russian History” course. This was the textbook. I haven't looked at it since I was 14, but my impression was that it was designed to scare students and mold capitalists. It depicted Russian life as unbearably narrow, drab, and oppressive. When I later (briefly) grew more responsive to the principles of socialism I assumed that Smith, a New York Times reporter, was just a shil for the anticommunist establishment. Now I imagine he got things about right, and he may have been more sympathetic to the Russians than I remember.
2.Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. I was a lazy student and one quarter I forgot to do my junior year English book review. Half mockingly a friend and I suggested to the teacher that perhaps reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace for next term would make up for our negligence. We didn't know anything about these books or their authors, but we read them. I'm not sure what I responded to. I felt pity for Sonia; I was upset by the beating of the horse; my flesh crawled at the thought of Raskolnikov's room. I don't think the murder, or the philosophical reflections, or the arrest and imprisonment of Raskolnikov made much of an impression. I didn't even know who Napoleon was. But this was the first non-juvenile important book I read of my own free will and I still remember how it felt to think that I had put away childish things, as they say.
3. Saltykov-Schedrin, The Golovlyov Family. I read this as a sophomore in college for a Russian Literature course. The class was taught by a grad student and didn't leave many lasting memories. But this book struck me for some of the same reasons Crime and Punishment did. The singular ability of the Russians to wallow in both crapulence and filth, to seek and celebrate the lowest, most degrading forms of existence, and furthermore to find redemption in that degradation reaches its apex in The Golovlyov Family. In a recent episode of 30 Rock, Jack tells Liz that when you realize you can “go lower” you find ways to escape your problems. I think this is a profound truth. We can always go lower.
4.Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. This is not a Russian book in any sense, but it did draw me into the world of Western marxist thought and by extension made Russia seem like a special place. I remember first learning of the existence of the Swedish marxist Goran Thernstrom's book What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? and experiencing an unadulterated delight at the thought that the malign workings of ruling elites could be so brazenly exposed, not necessarily for all the world, but at least for that small coterie of my fellow marxist initiates to observe. A few years later I read the book, which didn't quite live up to its title. Oh, and this would have been around 1993: kind of a ridiculous time to become a marxist.
5.Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky. For someone like the me of my early 20's Trotsky was irresistible. A literary critic who could run an army? I probably wanted more desperately to imitate him than anyone else, and yet it didn't take. Today I couldn't be less Trotsky-ish (which is probably all the better).
6.Dostoyevsky, The Gambler. This book played a big role in my dissertation and is the only real act of literary criticism I've performed, however unsuccessful.
I don't want to take up too much space, so I'll just list the others, maybe returning to them later:
7.Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain.
8.David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb
9.Henri Troyat, Tolstoy
10.Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
1.Hendrik Smith, The Russians. I attended a small rural high school and one of our few electives was a freshman “Russian History” course. This was the textbook. I haven't looked at it since I was 14, but my impression was that it was designed to scare students and mold capitalists. It depicted Russian life as unbearably narrow, drab, and oppressive. When I later (briefly) grew more responsive to the principles of socialism I assumed that Smith, a New York Times reporter, was just a shil for the anticommunist establishment. Now I imagine he got things about right, and he may have been more sympathetic to the Russians than I remember.
2.Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. I was a lazy student and one quarter I forgot to do my junior year English book review. Half mockingly a friend and I suggested to the teacher that perhaps reading Crime and Punishment and War and Peace for next term would make up for our negligence. We didn't know anything about these books or their authors, but we read them. I'm not sure what I responded to. I felt pity for Sonia; I was upset by the beating of the horse; my flesh crawled at the thought of Raskolnikov's room. I don't think the murder, or the philosophical reflections, or the arrest and imprisonment of Raskolnikov made much of an impression. I didn't even know who Napoleon was. But this was the first non-juvenile important book I read of my own free will and I still remember how it felt to think that I had put away childish things, as they say.
3. Saltykov-Schedrin, The Golovlyov Family. I read this as a sophomore in college for a Russian Literature course. The class was taught by a grad student and didn't leave many lasting memories. But this book struck me for some of the same reasons Crime and Punishment did. The singular ability of the Russians to wallow in both crapulence and filth, to seek and celebrate the lowest, most degrading forms of existence, and furthermore to find redemption in that degradation reaches its apex in The Golovlyov Family. In a recent episode of 30 Rock, Jack tells Liz that when you realize you can “go lower” you find ways to escape your problems. I think this is a profound truth. We can always go lower.
4.Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. This is not a Russian book in any sense, but it did draw me into the world of Western marxist thought and by extension made Russia seem like a special place. I remember first learning of the existence of the Swedish marxist Goran Thernstrom's book What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? and experiencing an unadulterated delight at the thought that the malign workings of ruling elites could be so brazenly exposed, not necessarily for all the world, but at least for that small coterie of my fellow marxist initiates to observe. A few years later I read the book, which didn't quite live up to its title. Oh, and this would have been around 1993: kind of a ridiculous time to become a marxist.
5.Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky. For someone like the me of my early 20's Trotsky was irresistible. A literary critic who could run an army? I probably wanted more desperately to imitate him than anyone else, and yet it didn't take. Today I couldn't be less Trotsky-ish (which is probably all the better).
6.Dostoyevsky, The Gambler. This book played a big role in my dissertation and is the only real act of literary criticism I've performed, however unsuccessful.
I don't want to take up too much space, so I'll just list the others, maybe returning to them later:
7.Stephen Kotkin, The Magnetic Mountain.
8.David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb
9.Henri Troyat, Tolstoy
10.Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward
Monday, September 7, 2009
Best Historian of Russia
Today’s question: Who is the best historian of the Russians? And what should the criteria for such a contest be? I would say that if the main criterion is influence, the answer might well be Trostky. Everybody seems to quote his work and praise it, and of course it has the unusual merit of being written by one of the principle partitants in the Revolution. But, notwithstanding important commentary on a number of related subjects in modern Russian politics and culture, Trostky essentially limits himself to a single episode in Russia’s long history.
My sentimental favorite is Henri Troyat, who was apparently born in Russia but grew up in France. The man penned endless books on Russian history and literature, and they are all emminently readable if perhaps slightly formulaic. His biography of Trostky was a favorite of Orlando Figes—which says a lot. It makes for wonderful reading and is sympathetic even when it comes to some of Tolstoy’s more bizzare opinions and behaviors. The drama between Tolstoy and his wife is portrayed with a great deal of humor, but not ridiculed per se.
Troyat’s Chekhov and Turganev are excellent too. (I have yet to discover a copy of his Gogol or Dostoyevsky biographies—but can hardly wait until I do, and don’t quite want to spoil the hunt by ordering copies online). The Gorky biography is a first-rate introduction to the man, but it’s almost too short, too flippant, to deal with such a central man in the history of Russian literature. Of course, Troyat also deals with the emperors, and I have loved his Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I. The fault with Alexander I, it appears from subsequent reading, is that to tell a good story, Troyat seems to impute all historical processes to this man’s will when, in fact, even subscribing to the Great Man Theory of History, one has to admit that the leading generals and aristrocrats influenced Alexander as much as he influenced them.
Other candidates for leading historian? I’d put Bruce Lincoln right up there, although I admit the bias that comes from recently finishing about four of his books in a row, including his books on Siberia, the 1890s, the Revolution, and the Civil War. We’ll see how well he can deal with the history of Russian arts. Other candidates might include Tolstoy, who wrote now formal history but whose War and Peace had lasting influence on our perception of the Napoleonic invasion as well as on historiography itself.
Maybe Marx also deserves consideration, since Trostky and all other writers—both pro and anti-Revolution—formed their analysis based on his categories of analysis, however perveted to serve events he had not anticipated. And current favorites, in terms of producing the kind of history that would bear scrutiny from current historians at the top of their game, might be the author of Young Stalin and the Court of the Red Czar (the spelling of the man’s name elludes me), or Orlando Figes, whose The Whisperers may have even topped Natasha’s Dance.
Perhaps others will think Scott Reed’s fame gets him into the finals. Or some 19th century historian whose work was somehow foundational? Or the auther of the Magnetic Mountain? What's your vote?
My sentimental favorite is Henri Troyat, who was apparently born in Russia but grew up in France. The man penned endless books on Russian history and literature, and they are all emminently readable if perhaps slightly formulaic. His biography of Trostky was a favorite of Orlando Figes—which says a lot. It makes for wonderful reading and is sympathetic even when it comes to some of Tolstoy’s more bizzare opinions and behaviors. The drama between Tolstoy and his wife is portrayed with a great deal of humor, but not ridiculed per se.
Troyat’s Chekhov and Turganev are excellent too. (I have yet to discover a copy of his Gogol or Dostoyevsky biographies—but can hardly wait until I do, and don’t quite want to spoil the hunt by ordering copies online). The Gorky biography is a first-rate introduction to the man, but it’s almost too short, too flippant, to deal with such a central man in the history of Russian literature. Of course, Troyat also deals with the emperors, and I have loved his Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I. The fault with Alexander I, it appears from subsequent reading, is that to tell a good story, Troyat seems to impute all historical processes to this man’s will when, in fact, even subscribing to the Great Man Theory of History, one has to admit that the leading generals and aristrocrats influenced Alexander as much as he influenced them.
Other candidates for leading historian? I’d put Bruce Lincoln right up there, although I admit the bias that comes from recently finishing about four of his books in a row, including his books on Siberia, the 1890s, the Revolution, and the Civil War. We’ll see how well he can deal with the history of Russian arts. Other candidates might include Tolstoy, who wrote now formal history but whose War and Peace had lasting influence on our perception of the Napoleonic invasion as well as on historiography itself.
Maybe Marx also deserves consideration, since Trostky and all other writers—both pro and anti-Revolution—formed their analysis based on his categories of analysis, however perveted to serve events he had not anticipated. And current favorites, in terms of producing the kind of history that would bear scrutiny from current historians at the top of their game, might be the author of Young Stalin and the Court of the Red Czar (the spelling of the man’s name elludes me), or Orlando Figes, whose The Whisperers may have even topped Natasha’s Dance.
Perhaps others will think Scott Reed’s fame gets him into the finals. Or some 19th century historian whose work was somehow foundational? Or the auther of the Magnetic Mountain? What's your vote?
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