Comedy by Chernychevsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

E.H. Carr

Is a blogger who deals with the Russian Revolution obligated to read E.H. Carr’s massive treatment of the 1920s? As Carr doesn’t actually cover the Revolution or the Civil War, I have a plausible if not persuasive case for amnesty. However, Carr has dealt with this period of the consolidation of revolutionary energies in more detail than any other author, and by a wide margin. Carr has in fact written over 4000 pages on the subject, and this count doesn’t include any of his other smaller studies of men like Bakunin or Herzen. He’s covered NEP, Socialism in One Country, and many other key Russian events with patience and diligence. (For Carr, Stalin’s approach to the challenge of Trotsky and others was extremely practical: could Communists be expected to wait for the global revolution rather than advance Russia’s national interests in the meantime?)

I’m not about to take on this monumental task of reading a large portion of Carr anytime soon, so I’m thankful for Laqueur’s short overview of the work, written over two decades ago. Back then, the jury was still out on E.H. Carr. Carr has a lot to recommend him. He had a rich diplomatic past and excellent command of the primary sources available in the West. He is also relatively objective, if such a thing is possible, and knows how to write, as evidenced by his wonderfully comic treatment of Bakunin’s strange career for instance. He also appreciated the gravity of what was happened in the Soviet Union. This really was an experiment without parallel in modern history. However, E.H. Carr’s heroic attempt to turn his long series of books the post-revolutionary era doesn’t quite measure up to Macaulay’s treatment of Rome, which remains as a profound work of literature even if its historical explanation are often out of favor with professional historians.

If Laqueur was critical of Carr he was not yet prepared to past judgment on Carr’s project. It was, he thought, too early for that. By now, Carr’s mistakes loom larger and his enormous oeuvre is only sometimes seen as useful let alone authoritative by the present giants of Russian history. Laqueur naturally found fault in Carr’s decision to omit the Revolution and Civil War, since the policies and structures of the 1920s only make sense if one understands how and why they were first created. Laqueur also finds fault in Carr’s claim to impartiality, which admittedly waxes and wanes which each book, according to the shifts in modern European experience. For Laqueur, objectivity can be a mask for insensitivity to human suffering, or a mask for one’s hidden but also present viewpoint and prejudice.

The fascinating thing about Carr is that he wrote a history that left out most personalities and focused instead on legal, political, and economic structures. This approach helps Carr to overlook dramatic stories that didn’t really make a difference in the bigger life of the Soviet state. However, Laqueur says Carr often overlooks the reality behind formal structures. The Soviet Constitution, for instance, is really not very important. It reads surprisingly well, but since it was never implemented, the real story of Soviet jurisprudence is that it never evolved to protect the most fundamental rights of Soviet citizens.

Carr’s major response to his critics was that he was attempting to do a kind of history that made few moral judgments. As he said on some occasions, it would be inappropriate for historians to judge the morality of players in the English or French Revolutions, so why do so now with the Soviet one? Moreover, what’s true of France and England may not be true of the Soviet Union. If the Soviet government would look brutal if it appeared in the West, it’s not quite so unusual in terms of Russian experience. As the facts are now known, this seems to be a woefully insensitive to the millions of Russians whose lives were ruined or ended by Stalin’s police state.

Stalin verus Trostky

Now that I’ve renuminated on my favorite Russian historian, I’ll ask a similarly ridiculous question: who is the most interesting revolutionary? In former days, Stalin never seemed to rank very high. Trostky attacked him relentlessly as a mediocrity with little to recommend him except, perhaps, amorality or street smarts. But the book, Young Stalin, puts an end to that myth.

In his youth, we learn that Stalin was everything, including successful poet (shades of Mao), singer, underworld boss, student, priest-in-training, revolutionary, bank robber, lover, prisoner, exile, and theoretician. Clearly, Stalin was a talented man. Not for nothing did Lenin keep him on the Bolshevik all-star team, even during the Revolution. So despite Trostky’s brilliant efforts to explain Stalin away as an upstart and a fluke, Stalin had earned his place at the top of the revolutionary command structure.

Beyond his charisma, he was an intelligent and effective organizer. Of course, later Stalin had the opportunity to show other levels of talent. As he gradually earned Lenin’s seat at the heart of the Communist Party during the 1920s, Stalin showed that he could be by turns (and when it served him) cunning, unsentimental, cruel, well-spoken, humorous, machiavellian, and patient. A

nd it’s my opinion that he won out over his opponents for another reason: he was realistic. For instance, his Socialism in One Country seems much more realistic than the brands of internationalism advocated by either Trostky or Bukharin. The strange thing about the term, realism, in the context of Communist Russia in the 1920s or 1930s, is that realism and socialism were almost oxymorons. So realism or even moderation of Stalin’s kind could lead to gulags and five-year plans.

Even so, Stalin was “neither left nor right” in comparison with some of his rivals, especially Trostky on the left, and Bukharin on the right. Now Stalin is justly critiqued for his disastrous misreading of Hitler at the onset of World War II. I wonder what this truly says about the man. He clearly erred, and his error cost the Soviets a great deal. However, Stalin had made a number of previous realistic, if utterly brutal, moves that set the Soviets up to fight the Germans with some chance of success.

The purges were crazy and self-defeating, to be sure. But some of level of political terror, industrial preparation, diplomatic intrigue (at the expense of the West as well as Finland and Poland,) and military build-up, probably helped the Soviets. Moreover, the instinct to avoid conflict with Germany (if taken to the level of dellusion in the weeks leading up to the German invasion) was logical, either in classical balance-of-power terms, or in terms of an encircling capitalist menance.

So Stalin makes for an interesting revolutionary, a force of personality, a political genius of the first order. Yet Trostky has a case to be made. His books are wonderful and humane, for the most part. You can’t help but appreciate the man when you read My Life, for example. His role in 1905 as well as 1917 and the Civil War, obviously outpace that of Stalin or any other revolutionary save perhaps Lenin. In the public’s mind, as well as the mind of the Old Guard Bolshevik Party, Trostky was the revolution.

Isaac Deutcher’s three-volume biography leaves one in awe of Trostky’s creativity, courage, intellect, ethical rectitude (however controversial), theoretical acumen, linguistic, and oratory skills, etc. The man was of course beaten by Stalin and his allies in terms of the dynastic struggle that evolved after Lenin’s death. Other historians say his arrogance, Jewish heritage (in an anti-semitic nation), and overconfidence did him in. This is probably right. Yet his time in exile, both internal and external, add to his lustre, although one man’s heroism is another man’s egotism, because Trostky’s family and friends were largely sacrificed in his battle with Stalinism.

Okay, this post is longer already than it should be. I’ve not come to Lenin, Plekhorov, Bakhunin, Axelrod, Herzen, Zinoviev, Bukharin, or anybody else for that matter. All subjects for future posts.