Fainting Into the Past

Someone once said that the past is a foreign country.  I think this expression means that the present is not merely a logical extrapolation or even natural continuation of the past.  Instead, the past is alien, mysterious, and unknowable if one doesn’t know the language.   We feel, or should feel, more like tourists than residents even when we delve into our own personal histories.  In some ways, investigating former modes of living is as difficult as trying to get to know our own subconscious or unconscious lives.  

A few days ago I came face to face with this form of foreign territory when I fainted dead away, collapsing face first on the floor of my apartment.  The doctors told me that the incident was caused by an electrical event in the heart unrelated to the machinations or strivings of a promiscuous subconscious motive.  Be that as it may, loosing control of one’s physical movements, even for a moment, is a reminder that we are not always authors of our own storyline; more often than not, we are puppets of the past, or characters in somebody else’s play, or even victims of a set of circumstances we hardly seem to recognize.  

The past, when it bursts through to the present, is dark, furtive, powerful, and even terrifying.  The strange thing about the past is that it cannot be ignored for very long.  You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to remain in the present, but sooner or later you lose the battle and “faint” into the past.  It’s as if you went up to the bartender and asked for a beer but he served you a freezing blast of high-powered water from the hydrant instead.  I think the point of therapy is to introduce you more gradually and gracefully to the foreign country of your own history.  You can’t help but see a foreign country as strange and unpredictable, but you can become slowly acclimated to its bizarre rituals and traditions.  

What happens when a whole country “faints” into its own past rather than slowly comes to terms with the archeology of alien memories?  What is the national equivalent of individual therapy?  I think most nations try to manage the jarring effect of historical consciousness by erecting sites of memory and mourning and fostering some sort of ritualized collective remembrance.  Some nations are better than others at remembering.  Remembering takes courage of course.  It’s easy to celebrate a one-sided, triumphal arcadia, and much harder to admit to national pain, loss, conflict, and guilt.  Complicating the question of remembrance is the fact that some countries have more to remember than others;  or, to put matters another way, some countries have more subconscious motivations to avoid remembering than others.  

Russia, of course, is traditionally seen as one of the most tragic nations ever to walk upon the stage of history.  Perhaps this is an unreasonable cliché:  is it really possible than one group of people have had it harder than any other?  Whatever the case, Russian intellectuals and non-Russian observers note that the Russian nation’s understanding of the past, both recent and distant, is extraordinarily dark.  An elderly Russian today may indeed remember the chaos, humiliation, and corruption of the early 2000s; spectacular geopolitical collapse of the 1990s; the moral and economic stagnation of the 1970s;  the apocalypse of WWII;  the abject horror of the Great Purges;  the decimation of  the Collectivization famine;  the bloodiness of the Civil War;  and the trauma of the Revolution.  The Russian past is truly monstrous in many respects.   

Although it’s easy to dismiss the triumphs of Russia’s modern history—including the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the creation of a modern economy for instance—most Russians did not, and could not, afford to dwell on national tragedy.  In fact, David Satter’s book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened. Anyway, Satter's book shows that even twentieth century Russian history contains ample evidence of objective historical achievement.  For instance, Russians today often correctly remember that the Soviet government offered them job security, educational benefits, health benefits, and a general sense of international prestige.  Satter even argues that Russian working class citizens in the 1970s might well say that they had it has good as their counterparts in the West; while they certainly earned less, and possessed fewer objects than their Western brethren, they also worked far fewer hours, and at a much slower pace.  In the end, Soviet citizens may not have had much apartment space, but they did get paid vacations and never sweated about whether or not they would get fired for poor performance.  

Satter’s analysis of Russia’s complicated relationship to the past, and to Soviet history in particular, is nothing short of masterful.  Russia’s problems are manifold.  First, Soviet history is particularly (though of course not uniquely) horrific.  The author draws upon seemingly hundreds of discrete episodes of Soviet political terror and mass murder to explain the tangled web of Russian past and present.  Second, notwithstanding the fact that Russians played a leading part in The Soviet Union’s Party leadership circles, Russia has tried to detach itself from the wider story of the murderous Soviet Empire.  While the USSR may have been the “prison of nations,” Russia was allegedly only one of the many victims of international communist conspiracy.  Third, Russians, before, during, and after the Soviet experiment, have celebrated the principle of raison d’etat and autocracy;  almost every crime has been justified in the context of Russian power., and many today celebrate the Rise of former KGB leader, Putin, as some sort of paradoxical anecdote to the historical angst of the Russian people.  Fourth, so many Russians were involved in Stalin’s bloody tyranny, or its heirs, that the process of repenting, confessing,  or publicizing past crimes seems confusing or even overwhelming to most Russians.  If almost all of the country’s leaders (and many of one’s own family patriarchs) participated in abuses, can we reject them all? Are there really no heroes in a 73 year period of history in which the Soviet Union triumphed over Hitler and became a superpower?  

The confusion is Russia is all-consuming.  As one citizen asked:  how is it possible to erect a monument to both Stalin and his victims?  Fifth, the Russian people often seem to prefer to blame others for the sins of the past, including Jews.  If even the great writer Solzhenityn could ignore historical statistics in order to ask the Jews to accept responsibility for vicitimizing the enormous Russian population, how are ordinary Russians expected to blame their own state for their present predicament?  In the end, the past in Russia is more of a foreign country than almost anywhere else.  This is understandable.  The Soviet past beggars the imagination for its bloodiness and cruelty.  According to Satter, Russians have been victims of an ideology that devalues human life in favor of the state and its alleged needs.  Even the greatest of Russian writers, including Pushkin, Gogol, Chaadaev, Berdyaev, and Solzhenitsyn, have sometimes embraced this sad logic, accepting the cruel and antihumanist notion that Russians were born to suffer.  Until the Russians learn to grieve the past, and repent of their countrymen’s enormous mistakes, it seems they will be likely to faint repeatedly into the past.

Communist Ruins

"There will rise, believe me, comrade
A star of captivating bliss, when
Russia wakes up from her sleep
And when our names will both be written
On the ruins of despotism."

(Pushkin to Chadeev, 1818, cited by Orlando Figes in in the introduction to Pushkin's History of Pugachev)

What does the term, ruin, connote? What makes something worthy of being called a ruin? A ruin is something more than a collapsed or demolished building. To be a ruin, something must hold our sentimental attention and call forth feelings of awe and wonderment. A ruin is a collapsed architectural structure--with pretensions to grandeur.



Visiting St. Petersburg, one would expects to find ruins everywhere. Since the city was only founded in 1703, we can't expect to find any building fragments with ties to antiquity. Even so, since we know that one of the world's grandest and most destructive experiments in living was launched here in the city, we expect to see the physical fragments of the greatest social phenomenon of twentieth century on almost every street corner. Surprisingly, these fragments aren't all that easy to find, at least in the historic heart of the city.

Of course, the physical manifestations of seventy years of Soviet rule do in fact exist; they are just less prominent than one might expect, at least in the city's tourist areas. The vast majority of Lenin statues have been removed, though a few still remain. Totalitarian governmental buildings and monstrous housing projects do the landscape, but are overshadowed in the historic heart of St. Pete by the works of Italian and French masters of the eighteenth century. Here and there we notice a socialist realism frieze or statue. Here and there a hammer and sickle or red star adorn a building wall or metro stop. But the era of the Soviet Union isn't all that easy to spot unless you know what you're looking for.

There are a few museums that bear witness to the triumphs and tragedies of the birthplace of Bolshevism. The Museum of Political History, for example, is housed in the famous palace of ballerina Mathilda Kshesinskaya, where the Bolsheviks once convened, and where Lenin once preached to his followers from one of the balconies. But the home of the Petrograd Soviet, the Tauride Palace, is no longer a monument to the Soviet idyll, but rather a working governmental building dedicated to the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States. The nearby Smolny Institute, Lenin's home for a brief period, site of the Kirov assassination, and home to the Bolshevik Party during 1917, still exists. And a Lenin statue there hasn't been removed. But the Smolny Institute, as opposed to the cathedral, doesn't seem to be on anybody's tourist agenda. The guides don't mention the Institute at all.

To be a ruin, something must be much more than merely a remnant of the past. A ruin is a Romantic concept, a monument to a great (though not necessarily good) but defeated cause. St. Petersburg is home to myriad physical reminders of an important era in the life of the nation. However, the Russian people haven't apparently had either the time or the inclination to romanticize their grim past by highlighting the ruins in their midst.

Rachel Polonsky's Russian Obsession

Rachel Polonsky's book, Molotov's Magic Lantern, is a long series of poetical reflections on the nature of Russian leaders, artists, places, and ideas. Here are just a few quotations drawn from the book. Note that her own prose is almost as magical as that of the poets and writers she quotes so liberally and admires so greatly. She seems to capture the essence of the Russophile obsession and bibliophilia that pervades this blog. Here are a few gems in Polonsky's own words:

"Is there a set of secret maps to be found among a person's books, a way through the fortifications of the self?"

"Old books are objects of a mysterious and compulsive kind of desire, fed by a stubborn intuition that the past might yield its secrets to the touch, as though some further meaning or spirit dwells in their very matter."

"Each place I have explored has beckoned me towards the next, toward some further arrangement of landscape, politics and myth, which I have reassembled in this book of travels. All my expeditions have been half-blind shadowings of the pursuits of others, sometimes tracing lines leading to places of exile, quest or crime..."

"Thinking about the meaning of the scene on the staircase, I sense that this house was not merely a setting for history, but a player in the drama. These apartments were velvet cases fashioned for the families of the bourgeoisie, for love and peace and the accumulation of possessions."

"They register the fear of all those who face the prospect or the memory of years spent over books: the fear that their reading might be no more than a sterile game, an escape from life, leading nowhere, as thought dissolves to nothing with the passing of time."

"In the intimate relationship of ownership, a person lives inside his possessions, makes a dwelling place for his spirit."

"The nonreading of books, as Benjamin said, is characteristic of collectors, who can become invalids if they lose their books and, in order to acquire them, can easily turn into criminals."

"A weary impatience with the unknowability of other people is sometimes a characteristic of the bibliophile, who loves with fervor publication dates and catalog numbers, all the categories of exact knowledge that a book can be made to represent.."

"In a city dizzy with fashion, this library is a carnival of anti-fashion."

Perhaps Polonsky is on to something about why I love books so dearly. Perhaps book collecting is a mild form of Asperger's syndrome or another kind of mental dysfunction. Certainly reading in general draws one away from one's social obligations or dating opportunities. How much worse is it to collect books one doesn't even have time to read? What does it signify, especially in the age of the Kindle, when one fills every nook and cranny of a home with unread books on arcane subjects? Polonsky's quotations offer many convincing explanations for the mania, but I am convinced that book collecting is ultimately related to a fear of mortality. For somehow it seems unlikely that we will die before we have a chance to complete the books we've purchased. So if we purchase enough books to last us the next fifty years, surely the Grim Reaper will, out of respect to learning if nothing else, be patient and hold off on executing his appointed task.

Before I finish this post, let me just cite a few random passages Polonsky quotes in her adventures through Russian time and space:

"After all, an entire nation consists only of certain isolated incidents, does it not?" Dostoevsky from Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

"Everywhere the soul of Onegin

Involuntarily reveals itself,

Whether by a brief word, by a cross

Or by a question mark..." Pushkin.

"A body has been given to me, what am I do to do with it?

So single and so my own?" Osip Mandelstam from Stone.

"Ask me my biography and I will tell you the books I've read." Osip Mandelstam from a letter.

"You know, Moscovites are a people who, more than any other, like to talk about their city--the streets, the ice rinks, the houses, the Moscow River.." Varlam Shalamov from the short story, "Dry Ration."

"The state is not pure spirit." Leon Trotsky.

Mankind will leap from "the kind of necessity" to the "kingdom of freedom" where the "extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself." Frederich Engels.

Socialists believe that historical materialism "leads inevitably to the crumbling away of historical reality." Berdyaev. The Meaning of History.

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.

Russian Life

A Russophile wouldn't be a Russophile if he or she were prone to joy. But imagine my surprise when Google robbed me of my privacy in order to deliver me into the hands of the wonderful bimonthly magazine, Russian Life. Yes, it's true, there is a magazine for people like me, who take Russian literature and culture seriously but aren't academic professionals. If this isn't niche marketing I don't know what it is.

Russian Life is incredible. My inaugural issue came with articles on Chekhov, the legacy of Tolstoy's children, the Russian tradition in Berlin, a history of Pushkin's Literary Gazette, and some fleeting nods to contemporary Russian language, news, and culture. With magazines like this, I'm tempted to discontinue the blog and sign off. After Russian Life, what claim can any Russian history and literature buff have to originality?

I do wonder about the audience. Are ethnic Russians reading the magazine? I note from the letters to the editor that the magazine isn't sold on newsstands even in Moscow, but that American Russian teachers are probably using articles in their classrooms. The magazine's archives are available for sale, and more impressively, Russian Life is publishing some out-of-date Russian novels in translation. I'm especially interested in their sister publication devoted to translating contemporary Russian fiction. Or how about a book on 93 Untranslatable Russian Words?

At any rate, I'm hooked. I suppose the magazine's flaws will turn out to be nostalgia and light-weight literary analysis. But I'm interested to know whether Russian Life courts the favor of the current Russian regime (and related advertising dollars) or merely Russophile geeks like me. And do geeks like me tend to favor White or Red versions of the Russian past?