Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's The Return of Munchchausen

Surely Sigizmund Krzhizhandovsky is one of the smartest writers twentieth century Russia has produced.  Filled with lyrical prose, and beautiful descriptions of various locales, all of Krzhizahdovsky's books are filled with powerful and original ideas about life and art.  In fact, their absurd, modernist plots sometimes seem overshadowed by the complex ideas the author is explicating.  Half science, half art, The Return of Munchausen is probably one of Krzhizhandovsky's most innovative books.  In fact, it reminds this blogger of a better version of Ilya Ehrenburg's later work, The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, which is also an absurdist adventure tale of genius. 

The Return of Munchausen contains a reasonable narrative arc, but that arc is often less important that the vitality of the myriad ideas that populate each chapter.  Krzhizhandovsky is a brilliant thinker and an original modernist stylist, whose flights of fancy make a  master American modernist like William Burroughs look almost derivative by comparison.

The author's surreal plot points mock many different aspects of modern European life but are particularly effective at satirizing the early years of Soviet Union.  For Krzhizhandovsky, the Soviet experiment appears to be insanely bureaucratic, criminally negligent, duly scientific, unthinkingly militaristic, and cruelly egalitarian.  Krzhizhandovsky is not, however, merely concerned with criticizing the Soviet government.  Rather, he seems to be dissecting the post-World War I human condition, which involves violence and disorientation.

Notwithstanding his apparent disgust for Soviet rule, Krzhizhandovsky evidently has a grudging respect for the importance of revolution, which, the baron claims, is the primary method for dividing time into different historical periods.  Not merely serving as the numbers on a clock, revolutionary events serve to speed up time.  If 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 came as violent shocks, 1917 threatens to throw everyone off balance entirely.

The shock of the 1917 revolution is particularly unnerving as a result of its close connection to war.  Throughout The Return of Muchchausen, traces of World War I appear, including Versailles and other so-called peace treaties.  But Soviet society seems to be the society most specacularly transformed by the Great War.  The impact of World War I on Russian life is paritcularly evident in the author's recurring use of war terminology, including trenches, missiles, artillery barrages, musket locks, and hunger.  It's also evident when the baron encounters buffer states, guard towers, frontiers, and customs officers as he attempts to make his way into the secretive "Land of the Soviets."  As a reflection of the future, Russia is perhaps inherently warlike.

However, the impermeability of the Russian frontier also speaks to the fact that non-Russians find the mysterious Soviet Union as tantalizing as a glimpse of the unknown future should be.  Bad or good, people want to know what the future has in store for them.  They expect to keep their eyebrows raised continuously as they encounter the future in every facet of Soviet life.  In the case of the baron, he eventually has to restart to riding on the back of a rocket to enter Bolshevik Russia to get a proper taste of modernity.  "Yes, I had at once to admit that you cannot outrun technology.  Even phantasms cannot outstrip it."

The new revolutionary government isn't merely modern by virtue of its warlike qualities.  It is also modern in its class antagonisms.  In Soviet Russia, the baron is obviously an atavistic presence.  As an American writer once said, the world had (formerly) been ruled by men who did less than two hours of work a day.  Things would be different in this Soviet society of the future where everyone could be equally impoverished.

What of the politics of the future?  In Russia, men and women lived in a state of constant surveillance.  Soviet people lived "lives fenced off by denunciations and chekaneries;  raise your eyes to theirs and you see pupils like point-blank muzzles."  The baron notes that democracy has no role whatsoever to play in this most modern of countries.  In fact, back in Britain, the British are forced to do some extraordinarily absurd calculations--i.e., they quantify the work power required to move the tongues of politicians--to justify the system they have defended for so many years.

One of the more interesting aspects of Krzhishanovsky's portrayal of time, revolution, and modernity, is that he demonstrates that modern men and women are increasingly disoriented by their headlong movement into unknown territory even as they continue to have access to the experiences of multiple historical epochs. 1917 wasn't just a year of political experimentation, it was a year of films, electricity, and "rivers of automobiles."

Russia's current experiment with centralized bureaucratic rationalization has its antecedents in Catherine the Great's flirtation with the Enlightenment, the Russian people are somehow able to remember life before the Soviets brought them electrification and every other symbol of modernity.  Post-World War I life in Russia wasn't therefore merely a bold movement into the future. It was also a radical juxtaposition of many different historical eras operating on the same temporal plane.  As a countess argues:  "And when we became angelless, the smoke rose up from space to time and so began our beclouded (as through a haze) Time of Troubles. Time itself became troubled and the centuries confused, the thirteenth with the twentieth,  and then:  revolution."

To be sure, Krzhizhanovsky's problem with time isn't unique.  As literary critics have pointed out, many modernist authors were deeply concerned with the nature of time, and set out to explore its mutability in bold literary experiments.  Krzhizahanovsky may be reasonably original, however, in that he has associated a new temporal reality with the Russian Revolution.  For his characters, modernist time isn't merely something to be explored, it is something to be lamented.  As the countess continues:  "Look at the street-clocks disks:  are their hands not trembling with disgust, flicking off the seconds' soot and cinders?  Are your eyes not crying, stung by the smoke of the times?"

Even in Europe's most modern state, the underside of modernity continues to exist.  Thus, officially atheist Russia continues to harbor deeply religion peasants, and communist leaders of a nationalized economy continue to feel anxiety about the possible return of exiled property owners.  Even the ancient "hordes" of Russian history remained ready to strike out in violence against undetermined targets.  Thus, on one level at least, communist Russia remains "unhurrying, ever in slow motion."  As one Russian puts it, "We may inch along, but we do advance."  Paradoxically, the Land of the Soviets was therefore a site of technological innovation and a site of peasant "pitchforks" and "bast shoes."  It was a place where superstitious, "know-nothing" peasants might yet take heed to the baron's stern advice:  "I told him he should be ashamed, at his hoary age, of trading God for socialism."

The Land of the Soviets was therefore essentially a series of paradoxes.  It was the kind of place where plans were being drawn up for everything, including that which could not, or should not, be planned.  As the baron recalled, upon entering the Soviet Union he "drew up a plan to rationalize brigandage."  The expression, of course, seems to perfectly capture the criminality of Stalin's version of socialism.  The Land of the Soviets was a place where advanced "Red Science" could easily coexist with basic food shortages.  As one Soviet representative told the baron, "Our life is like an exhibition:  One of everything, but not more."  In the topsy-turvy landscape of modernity, Russian reality rubbed against Russian dreams.  "We are poor and shall be poorer still," states a communist apologist. "But all the same, sooner or later, our country of huts shall become a country of palaces."





Below are some favorite quotations from the book.

"You do Berlin a disservice, baron.  We too have mastered a few things:  ersatz, for instance, and the metaphysics of factionalism--"

"Not at all:  Life, like any ware, is subject to supply and demand.  Have newspapers and wars not taught you that?"

"I flatter myself that I have made better and wider use than other barons of my right to flights of fancy."

"Yes, ladies and gentlemen, now you must not object.  In your hands you hold not only glasses of champaign;  you have opened a savings account for me in Being."

"Russia, unhurrying, ever in slow motion"

"On arriving in Moscow, I must find out how long the supplies of Russian literature will last."

"At this I raised my eyebrows and indeed I did not lower them during my entire sojourn in Moscow.  Prepared for extraordinary things, my heart pounding, I now entered that city build on blood and mystery."

"Yes, I had at once to admit that you cannot outrun technology.  Even phantasms cannot outstrip it."

"The sun and I, having completed our trajectories, were both ready to drop."

"here I was in a country of superstitious know-nothings..."

"I told him he should be ashamed, at his hoary age, of trading God for socialism."

"I applied my spurs, but you cannot gallop away from four-legged horses on a two-legged one."

"I drew up a plan to rationalize brigandage."

"people are kind so long as you don't contradict them."

"These men had enviable lungs (the Russian people develop their lungs by blowing on their samovars)..."

"an asthmatic man was running, butting the air with his bald pate"

"My interlocutor spoke tersely (without incidental or dependent clauses), preferring question marks to all others.  He put his questions the way people put buckets and basins under cracks in the ceiling ahead of rain, and waited."

"Our life is like an exhibition:  One of everything, but not more."

"We are poor and shall be poorer still.  But all the same, sooner or later, our country of huts shall become a country of palaces."

"His laugh lengthened, then shortened the crack of his mouth, like an aperture during a short exposure."

"So then, all of our penmen are given a choice:  feast or famine.  Some work steadily;  others starve."

"The Dictionary of Omissions: Complete and Unabridged"

"Revolution's notorious broom, which raises more dust than it sweeps out, tried to sweep the idealists out of Russia's house, but of course, so I reflected, many of them got stuck in the doorway"

"Have you noticed that the crows of Tsverskoi Boulevard, instead of cawing, have started hurrahing? Now what could be the point?"

"And when we became angelless, the smoke rose up from space to time and so began our beclouded (as through a haze) Time of Troubles. Time itself became troubled and the centuries confused, the thirteenth with the twentieth,  and then:  revolution."

"Look at the street-clocks disks:  are their hands not trembling with disgust, flicking off the seconds' soot and cinders?  Are your eyes not crying, stung by the smoke of the times?"

"..lives fenced off by denunciations and chekaneries;  raise your eyes to theirs and you see pupils like point-blank muzzles."


















































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Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz

Below are a few favorite citations culled from Ilya Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz. Please also see my other post on the subject, Laz Roitshvantz's Russia.

"She can claim such early Party adherence that it makes you dizzy to think of it.  Just look at those eyes!  What relentless determination lurks there!"

"It was not his surname that ruined Laz.  A sigh was to blame.  Or perhaps not a sign, perhaps the economic system, or the heat wave, or even some high-level problem."

"For how could old Hershanovich claim to be a craft worker (self-employed)?  What did he produce?  Nothing but circumcisions of innocent little boys, at three rubles a-piece."

"That fellow Schatzman stared at me ten minutes without blinking, either he means to marry you or he wants to get me beyond the Artic Circle."

"Time is not money.  Time is more than money.  You have robbed me, and consequently the workers' State as a whole, of five valuable minutes."

"In the old synagogue school I was taught the Talmus.  Of course, that is all deception, and since then I have read the ABC of Communism from one cover to the other."

"Surely you don't really think that I, Lazar Roitshvantz, who have survived eight different regimes, do not know so simple a thing?"

"From the standpoint of eugenics, a marriage consumated in a graveyard is likely to produce abnormal offspring."

"I will even promise never to sigh again and to devote the rest of my not unlimited life to the Chinese Question."

"Laz knew very well what had ruined him in court, and he had now solemnly sworn to himself in future to reduce thought to a minimum."

"As we say in Gomel, there can even be honor in spitting."

"I am a victim just like Beilis, except that America took Beilis' part, but who's going to take mine?  Nobody."

"Not to lead lesser men into temptation, Chebyshev only wore his English suits in the home behind tightly closed shutters."

"Before the Revolution I occupied myself exclusively with Roman Law.  That's quite a bit different from planting cabbages."

"How is a man like me going to earn his living, a simpleton, a naive Russian, amid all this impudent Jewish confraternity.  How, I ask you!"

"Your wisecracks are not to my taste.  They are tiresome and middle-class."

"But my vision beheld those eyes, and in a flass all my class-consciousness evaporated."

"...he was not really human flesh, he was nothing but elevated thought."

"...though you and I are both good Marxists, we are, pardon me, also real human beings..."

"You have just not got a glimmering of the most elementary dialectics."

"I have had six different domicilary visits about those accursed trousers, and if anything saved me in the end it was having a pure red past."

"...I am merely a non-established addressee."

"Will you claim to be as clever as Trotsky?"

"It's good pre-war stuff, and it has withstood eight very assorted regimes."

"Laz was quite clear that when the imperialists of Paris wriggled their feet, that was merely the death spasms of corpses already in a state of putrefaction."

"..I am a Party candidate without a stain on my name..."

"...you are interested in diseased pleasures, erotic excesses, the scum thrown up by the NEP policy."

"I am devoted to the resplendent ideal, and I am wriggling my way towards it."

"...instead of stupid sturgeon we have before us men like Kant and together with him are 1,071 other criminals."

"There you have it," he cried, triumphantly, "typical rose-water of a petty-bourgeois superstructure."

"Like a mangy sheep you should drive from your presence any man who sinks so low as to substitute love skilly like that for iron materialism."

"In the shrubberies were couples totally divested of Party, locked in kisses."

"And where is it written that I have the right to purchase the happiness of the whole of complex mankind with old Hersch's life?"

"Laz could not have lived a day here by his scissors.  He was saved by his brilliant dialectics."

"Well, and what do you feed your rabbits on?"...Nothing but official imagination," he said.

"Roitshvantz, you lie as if you were not human, you might be a newspaper."

"I am not a divinity.  I do clerical work."

"When all was said and done, dear Fanny was fruit of a reactionary tree..."

"Now explain exactly who you really are!"..."Very simple.  If you're the foundation, I'm the superstructure."

"I can carve anything up from the Marxist angle."

""I am just coming to the end of the sixth volume of a Marxist critique of a variety of configurations."  In some this excited respectful alarm, in others, envy."

Laz Roitshvant's Russia

Ilya Ehrenburg published his rollicking satire, The Storm Life of Laz Roitshvantz, in 1928.  The novel, st in the Russia, Poland, Britain, Italy, and France, serves as a useful antidote to biographies and histories of Europe in the period, and the Soviet Union in particular.  What did Soviet intellectuals know about their society a decade after the October Revolution?  If Joshua Rubenstein's meticulously-researched biography, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, is any guide, even ostensibly loyal Soviet intellectuals were often deeply unsettled by the Soviet experiment.  But perhaps Rubenstein's book doesn't go far enough.  If you read Ehrenburg's prose, you get a devastating if satirical portrait of a delusional police state bent on the intrusive subjugation of its monitored, overregulated, and distrusted citizens.  Of course, The Stormy Life was written and published prior to Collectivization and the Great Terror, but Ehrenburg's portrait of Russia at the end of the New Economic Policy is already deeply pessimistic about the world's first experiment in socialist government.  Ehrenburg's Russia is a land of censorship, propaganda, suspicion, surveillance, bigotry, and empty ideological jargon.  The protagonist, an apolitical Jew, butts up against the state with darkly comic results.

Laz Roitshvantz's tragedy is that he has somehow remained human in an utterly inhuman environment. Roitshvantz's individualism crashes repeatedly against the rock of Soviet totalitarianism.  Time and again, Roitshvantz is confronted by inhumane Soviet officials, institutions, and ideological assumptions.  Soviet officials are depicted as cruel, anti-Semitic obscurantists.  Soviet institutions are portrayed as irrational, unnatural, and inefficient, but also impersonal if not diabolical.  Worst of all, Soviet ideology hampers Soviet citizens from living productive or happy lives.  Ehrenburg's Russia sometimes seems to move from traditional satire toward dystopian science fiction.  Although filled with jokes, Laz Roitshvantz's adventures in the Soviet Union show that Soviet citizens routinely suffered from Soviet assumptions about good government.  For Ehrenburg in the 1920s, Bolshevik ideology was, paradoxically, both crassly materialistic, and absurdly Utopian.  The Soviet creed was seemingly tailor-made  to undermine the human spirit. Dostoyevsky once said that if God did not exist, everything would be permitted.  Similarly, Ehrenburg seems to be arguing that Marxism as a faith permits everything, including class prejudice, censorship, empty ritualism, arbitrary justice, arcane and scholastic ideological debates, Party bureaucracy, and meaningless sloganeering.

Roitshvantz's humanity ultimately lands him in jail. His run-in with Soviet authorities is of course predicated on a satire which is at least partly softened by extending the ridicule to a number of other countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and to some extent, America.  Ehrenburg's barbs against the Soviet Union are also mitigated by attacks on the White Russian diaspora, which is portrayed as insular, militaristic, archaic, and vengeful.  Ehrenburg's critique of Soviet life is also set against a larger critique of European civilization as a whole.  For Ehrenburg sees Soviet anti-Semitism as a variation on a common European theme.  If the Soviet Russians and Ukrainians are anti-Semitic, so too are the Poles, Germans, Exiled Russians, and French. Ehrenburg's decision to compare Judaism with Marxism is also intriguing.  If the Jews continued to faithfully practice a set of empty rituals, weren't the communists guilty of doing exactly the same thing?  When all was said and done, Eherenburg didn't see the difference between the Talmud and Bukharin's ABC of Communism.

The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz is a wonderfully witty book and deserves a wider readership. Although the book sometimes can sometimes stray from satire to didacticism, its central comedy of adventure reminds one of Saul Bellow.  When Laz Roitshvantz tries to sell his share of the communist utopia, it also demonstrates kinship with Gogol's Dead Souls.  Alas, Laz's adventures really reveals that interwar European intellectuals were able to forsee a future which was far darker than anything even Gogol could have imagined.

Ilya Ehrenburg

Perhaps no other writer's career illuminates so many facets of the Soviet experience as that of the prolific Ilya Ehrenburg.   For many decades, Ehrenburg was one of the Soviet Union's most internationally recognized writers.  His various successes as a writer neatly correspond to many of the Soviet Union's most important milestones in socialist government.  For Ehrenburg was a poet and avant-garde novelist when the Soviet Union was itself a sort of experimental project;   Ehrenburg was a patriotic propagandist when the country was engulfed in Nazi atrocities;  Ehrenburg was a court flatterer when almost everybody in Russia was collaborating on some level or another with the phenomenon of Stalinism;  and Ehrenburg was a humanist when the country made its fateful, if short-lived and uneven, move away from unbridled totalitarianism.

Joshua Rubenstein's portrait of Ehrenburg, Tangled Loyolaties:  The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg,  sheds light on a dozen different aspects of modern Soviet history.  Most importantly, Rubenstein's biography demonstrates the pervasiveness of anti-semitism throughout modern Russian history.  In his early career, Ehrenburg was a Bolshevik and rebel, but quickly became revolted by revolutionary successes, only to return to Leftist politics when confronted with the violent Jew-baiting of the Whites.  Although Ehrenburg compromised his integrity over and over again in order to survive Stalin's extraordinarily dangerous regime, he worked hard to temper political violence and ideological extremism, and never more so than when this violence and extremism was directed against Jews.

It's remarkable to trace the history of anti-semitism in twentieth century Russia, but Ehrenburg's life bears witness to its tenacity.  Although never a religious man, Ehrenburg grew up in a Russia which prevented Jews from living outside of the "Pale of Settlement" without special permission from the government.   He then watched much of the Civil War's fury directed against Jewish civilians. After that, Stalin's regime proved decidedly unfriendly to Jewish interests before Nazi Germany took anti-semitism in the East to hitherto unimagined extremes.  This orgy of bloodshed wasn't the end.  After winning the Second World War, Stalin moved decisively against Russia's large Jewish population, labeling them "rootless cosmopolitans" with no allegiance to the socialist state. The so-called "Doctor's Plot," in which Stalin and his henchmen falsely accused Jewish doctor's of plotting the medical assassination of several leading communists, Stalin included, was certainly the signal for a wider campaign against Russia's defenseless Jewish population.

Ehrenburg, almost alone among the Soviet Union's leading Jewish writers and other cultural leaders, survived.  Rubenstein speculates that this was because Ehrenburg demonstrated his usefulness to the regime as a bridge to Western cultural figures.  But he also wonders whether Ehrenburg's fame helped Stalin to cloak the destruction of most other leading Jewish writers, actors, and cultural leaders.  In any event, Rubenstein's title, Tangled Loyalties, is descriptive.  Ehrenburg did repeatedly demonstrate some measure of political courage, notwithstanding his decision to remain publicly loyal to the Soviet Union's political establishment.  In fact, throughout his career, Ehrenburg defended countless intellectuals and writers who demonstrated some level of autonomy in the Soviet Union.  He was, for instance, a champion of Pasternak, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova.  More importantly, he helped to document the holocaust in the East.  In the end, Ehrenburg may be best known for writing the book, The Thaw, which gave a name for the liberalization that the Soviet Union experienced after Stalin's death, and for producing a memoir which, while politically cautious by today's standards, were filled with liberal, modernist, international, and humanist sentiments, sentiments that inspired a generation of Soviet dissidents and reformers and artists.

One thought that stayed with me is that Ehrenburg's humanity, like that of the Russian people, somehow survived Stalinism.  At the same time, Ehrenburg was honest enough to avoid any simple claim that he had been duped or overawed or purely victimized by Stalin's villainy.  Although Stalin was a brutal dictator, Ehrenburg believes that the Soviet people participated in their own degradation.  Why?  Many have argued that the Russian people were spoiled by centuries of rural ignorance.  To his credit, Ehrenburg rejects this thesis.  Germany had no such excuse:  an educated populace was no barrier to Hitler's charism.  Whatever the case,  on some level the Russian people liked Stalinism, even embraced it. While Ehrenburg couldn't explain why this should be the case, and even expected historians to wrestle with the questions for several decades if not more, he acknowledged that this paradox of what Terry Eagleton calls "holy terror" (i.e., desirable, even transcendent, brutality) must eventually be resolved if people are ever to avoid the horrors of modern totalitarianism.