Since I don't regularly read the Times Literary Supplement I thought I'd pick through a couple of issues to see what coverage of Russian literature and history the magazine offered. So here are a couple of fragments.
Lewis Siegelbaum’s short review of Claudia Verhoeven’s The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism is entitled “Spectral Enemies.” Verhoeven’s book analyzes a failed attack against Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator who freed the serfs in the 1860s and was assassinated for his troubles by Karakozov in 1881. Karakozov is less famous than Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, Nechaev, and many other opponents of the Old Regime.
On the face of things, the attack led nowhere. Yet although Karakozov’s attack was unsuccessful, the author believes that this violent incident elucidates a new dimension of modernity. For the first time, criminals believed they were capable qua individuals and citizens to shape the very fabric of society through an act of protest. Siegelbaum intimates that Verhoeven over thinks the Karakozov attack but does accept the basic premise that the state and its terrorist foes are paradoxical partners: as the state tightens surveillance over citizens in the interest of security, the citizenry becomes increasingly paranoid and this ultimately reinforces the argument in favor of violent resistance to the state. Clearly, the literature on Russian terrorism—including books such as Russia’s Road to Revolution and the Roots of Revolution--tells us something about our current predicament, and indeed the predicament of Putin’s Russia.
Neal Acherson’s “They’re Just Not Ready” reviews four books, including Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, There is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism, and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. As Acherson points out, thinks look good now but looked extremely bleak twenty years ago when economies were in ruins and the Yugoslavian war was raging. These books examine the meaning of the 1989 revolutions.
It seems that it’s still too early to explain them, but Uncivil Society advances the interesting if controversial thesis that Communism did not allow for civil society, with the notable exception of Poland. Mass mobilization did not topple the Soviet Union and its erstwhile allies; rather, the system collapsed and there was what amounts to a “run on the bank” of the system’s remaining political capital. The overall impression of this explosion of historical accounts of 1989 is that we’ve already managed to forget what might have happened at the time. Even Bush and his advisers sometimes worried that Gorbachev might possibly re-invent the Eastern Bloc, making it more dangerous than ever to the Western democracies. And Gorbachev was proposing radical alternatives to the current European system of states with its reliance on NATO and the common market. Was anything possible in 1989 or was nothing but what happened possible? And will archival research reveal contribute to an answer to what amounts to an epistemological question?
There’s also a commentary by Michael Wood on Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments. Is it more than a pale imitation of Lolita? Would it have been?
Showing posts with label Imagining Nabokov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Imagining Nabokov. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Deep Russian Thoughts a la Jack Handey
This post is a work in progress. I'll be adding favorite quotations related to Russia and the Soviet Union here from time to time.
Nina Berberova,from Alexsander Blok: A Life. “The history of Russia might be the evolution of boredom, transformed over centuries in its vast spaces, under the too-grey sky, into passivity, heavy cruelty, and laziness.”
Ivan Bunin. Quoting Chekhov. "You'll see, when Tolstoy dies, everything will go to the dogs." "You mean literature?" "Everything. Literature included."
Nabokov. The Gift. Koncheyev talking to Godunov-Cherdyntsev in imagined scene. “Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”
Aleksander Blok. "What is darker wins."
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Nabokov: First Phase of Exile
Lolita—book or movie—seems quintessentially American in many ways. It’s about suburbia, modernity, motels, and road trips. But its hero is vaguely European, and its author is precisely Russian. The first of half of the massive Nabokov biography--Brian Boyd's Vladamir Nabokov: the Russian Years--is dedicated to the Russian years, including his early years in Russia as well as exile in the White Russian Diaspora.
The book spends too much time analyzing the long series of Nabokov’s Russian language novels, but the life is exceptional in every respect. The book begins with a description of Nabokov’s wealth, supremely self-confident, courageous father—who became a popular February Revolution politician until the October Revolution forced him to become one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Diaspora. In exile, Nabokov Senior was killed defending another politician during an assassination attempt. Nabokov Junior, who worshiped the memory of his father, didn’t take up the political cause. He didn’t follow in his political footsteps. Instead, he became poet and novelist, eventually the equal of Ivan Bunin.
The magic of Nabokov—aside from the art—stems from his acute intelligence, mastery of Russian as well as English, aristocratic inheritance, love of logic and language, and self-confidence. The paradox is that Nabokov carried the cultural legacy of Russia’s old world with him but also epitomized Western modernity. Of course, Russian cultural modernity predated the revolution. And literary modernism is traditionally associated with an obsession with the past, Proust’s Temps Perdu. So Nabokov’s nostalgia was, in the end, perfectly compatible with innovative writing, modernism, and perhaps even post-modernism. And the life he led, which included displacement, diaspora, exile, multiculturalism, and stints in Petersburg, the Crimea, Berlin, Prague, London, Paris, and America--hints at the affinities between post-modern biography and post-modern literary trends.
The book spends too much time analyzing the long series of Nabokov’s Russian language novels, but the life is exceptional in every respect. The book begins with a description of Nabokov’s wealth, supremely self-confident, courageous father—who became a popular February Revolution politician until the October Revolution forced him to become one of the leaders of the counter-revolutionary Diaspora. In exile, Nabokov Senior was killed defending another politician during an assassination attempt. Nabokov Junior, who worshiped the memory of his father, didn’t take up the political cause. He didn’t follow in his political footsteps. Instead, he became poet and novelist, eventually the equal of Ivan Bunin.
The magic of Nabokov—aside from the art—stems from his acute intelligence, mastery of Russian as well as English, aristocratic inheritance, love of logic and language, and self-confidence. The paradox is that Nabokov carried the cultural legacy of Russia’s old world with him but also epitomized Western modernity. Of course, Russian cultural modernity predated the revolution. And literary modernism is traditionally associated with an obsession with the past, Proust’s Temps Perdu. So Nabokov’s nostalgia was, in the end, perfectly compatible with innovative writing, modernism, and perhaps even post-modernism. And the life he led, which included displacement, diaspora, exile, multiculturalism, and stints in Petersburg, the Crimea, Berlin, Prague, London, Paris, and America--hints at the affinities between post-modern biography and post-modern literary trends.
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