Sara Wheeler's Mud and Stars

Sara Wheeler has written a wonderful little book about her relationship with Russia.  The book focuses on author's visits to the homes of Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Lermontov, and Dostoevsky.  But it also touches on her delightful attempt to master the Russian language as she approached the age of fifty.  The book isn't especially original, or tightly organized.  It's also a slightly awkward mixture of travel writing, literary criticism, and collective biography.  On the other hand, the author provides readers with a nice introduction to varied Russian literary giants, and provides readers with a number of amusing anecdotes about her travel and language adventures.  At any rate, Russophiles will definitely envy her trips to so many literary shrines in Russia.  I know that I treasure my own visits to apartments or homes once owned or occupied by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Block, Nabokov, Akhmatova, and Gogol, and regret not being able to find or enter apartments or homes once owned by Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, and Chekhov. When all is said and done, I guess we're all religious, one way or the other. 

Some favorite quotes from the book are below

Dostoevsky

He pawned his watch so many times that his saintly second wife said she never knew what time it was.

From Brothers Karamazov.  "For real Russians, the question of the existence of God and immortality are of course first and foremost."

A Dostoevsky biography reads like a Greek tragedy.

Pushkin

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a lubricious, bawdy, imperious, whoring gambler who seldom missed an opportunity to pick a fight.

From Queen of Spades.  Would she like a Russian [novel]?  "Are there any Russian novels? the countess queries.

Pushkin produced the first major Russian work in almost every literary genre.

Pushkin was a heroic shagger who had time to write only when he had a sexually transmitted disease.

Two years later, he married her, writing to a friend to say that she was his 113th love.

Turgenev

Turgenev's father:   My son, fear the love of woman;  fear that bliss, that poison.

Lermontov

I have a congenital desire to contradict;  my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind.

Gogol

Gogol's mother was proud of her son and in old age told neighbors that Nikloai Vasilyevich had invented the railway engine.

According to one academic there are eighty-six kinds of food in Dead Souls.

Chekhov

His stories and plays deal with the essential problem of being:  How to find meaning before the return to dust.

Chekhov felt that he had "wasted his life on fornication"--who hasn't--and wished to write a report on the condition of the prisons and prisoners, hoping that it might do some good.

"It seems to me," he said, "that Pushkin and Gogol are not understood here."

On Russia

Their lives were and are consumed with the generally dreadful business of being Russia.

Russia emerged as an increasingly shocking country. 

Catherine the Great said [Russia] was too big to govern, or so they say she said.

Russians claim the banya as their first doctor, vodka being the second and raw garlic the third.

Russia has two eternal problems, roads and idiots.

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "Russians are nice people, though in certain parts of Russia the admixture of Oriental blood may lend a definite touch of deviousness to their thought and behavior."

Quoting Alexandra Kropotkin:  "The whole of Russia is a prison camp."

Dostoevsky:  "The most basic spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, incessant and unslakeable suffering, everywhere and in everything."

I remember my friend Colin Thubron, an accomplished Russia watcher and fluent speaker, saying that in decades of visiting, he had never met a smiling Russia.

The author's prose [Grossman's]  reinforced my opinion, forged both through direct experience and through reading, that for most people, being Russian has always been miserable--before, during, and after communism.

...the Soviets like shifting graves around, controlling death as they did life.

One of my Russian grammar books says that da and nyet "loosely correspond to yes and no."

We covered kto, "who," and chto, "what," or "that."  Cats and dogs, it turns out, had to be referred to as "who."  I asked Irina why.
"Well," she said, "they are not insects."

Words I had to look up

Lubricious





Other

Raisa Gorbacheva, we heard, was the first Russian First Lady who weighed less than her husband.

A Brief Hiatus from a Hiatus

This post is just a reminder that Soviet Roulette is currently on hiatus.  I have taken a break from posting here in order to make progress on a competing academic project.  I will try from time to time to post here briefly to update readers on my continued obsession with Russian history.  As we approach summer, I continue to read a variety of different books on Russian or Soviet history.  For instance, I am reading Catherine Merridale's excellent Red Fortress:  History and Illusion in the Kremlin.  The book has reminded me that Russia's modern history is no more interesting than its early modern history, and I hope eventually study Ivan the Terrible's reign and the Time of Troubles, for instance, in much more depth.  The links between early modern and modern, or even contemporary, Russia may sometimes be overestimated by Western observers, but they do exist.

In addition, to Merridale, I've begun Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.  I tried to begin this book in tandem with Tolstoy's Resurrection to resolve once and for all the eternal question of Russian literature:  who is the better author?  Sadly, both books haven't begun all that well for me.  They both seem to share some sort of heaviness or perhaps didacticism.  I'm sure they are both great books, but even geniuses can produce uneven works.  I think of Oscar Wilde producing Salome after so many other magnificent plays.  One Russian novella that has surprised and delighted me is Leskov's The Enchanted Wanderer, a book that seems to combine adventure, Russian madness, and high comedy.

Russia was also in my mind when the Institute of International Education and the State Department hosted a workshop to assess the success of its Community College Administrators Seminar in Russia.  At this workshop in Washington, D.C., approximately 15 American Fulbright alumni met and discussed their Fulbright experiences and the future of American-Russian collaboration in higher education, with specific reference to the value of America's community colleges in this ongoing dialogue.

Liza Knapp on Russian Literature

Looking at my poor blog's record of annual activity, I noticed a marked decline in productivity from on year to the next.  Determined to reverse the trend, I will post something very brief today about Liza Knapp's audio lecture series, The Giants of Russian Literature:  Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov.  What shall I say about this Modern Scholar course?  Only that it left little impression on me.  No matter:  today I'm going to be a good student of Soviet production by committing to the quantity rather than the quality of my posts.  Dear reader, the problem is not all on my side:  audio courses about literature rarely seem to succeed.  I'm all for literacy criticism, but most audio courses dealing with novels seem to offer little more than thinly disguised synopses.  While I have nothing negative to say about this particular course, I can't see how it benefits anybody to spend more than fifty percent of a lecture describing how characters move through time toward marriage, or worse, death.  

At any rate, Knapp gives us some biographical detail about these four authors of genius.  We're reminded that Turgenev was a master stylist, an unrepentant Westernizer, the father of an illegitimate girl, the lover of an opera singer (the physical aspect of this relationship not absolutely proven), and the author of a book, Notes of a Hunter, which helped to discredit the institution of serfdom. We're also reminded that Dostoevsky--Christian mystic, Slavophile, and literary innovator (Knapp uses Notes from the Underground as well as the Diary of a Writer to prove the point)--was once condemned to death for joining the ranks of a minor conspiracy against the government.  And Tolstoy?  Knapp discusses his multidimensional life, in which he played a shockingly large variety of different parts, including moralist, landowner, author, aristocrat, Christian penitent, autodidact, translator, bee-keeper, ersatz peasant laborer, patriarch, and saint.  Knapp's emphasis with Chekhov is his dualism as both doctor and writer.  

Knapp's course is long on description but just a little short on analysis.  Her purpose, however, may be limited to getting us interested enough in Anna Karenina or the Underground Man or the Lady with a Dog to go out and read the novels or short story.  Her thesis about the nature of the Russian literature is that it offer English readers something special:  an expanded understanding of the nature of love.  That is to say, the great Russian writers don't limit discussions of love to physical and romantic love.  Instead, they explore many other kinds of love, including love for one's fellow human beings, love of personal or social transformation, and love for the transcendent.  

Master and The Man

The first meeting of the newly established Lake County Tolstoy Reading Group met for the first time. Eight readers met at a private home and discussed Tolstoy's late short story, The Master and the Man, in the Penguin Classics edition. Two readers were Ukrainians who shared a few tales of communist-era life. For example, they lived inter-generationally and share a stove top with at least one other family. When that family was out of the flat, they sometimes dared to use all four burners, but not usually. They also remembered that, contrary to popular belief, it was dangerous to arrive at work late. "It wasn't like in the days of the gulag but it could could get you into trouble."

As for Master and the Man, the group liked the story. Whether flattering or not, comparisons to Jack London's short stories were made. The discussion focused on Tolstoy's admirable command of language, foreshadowing and suspense, characterization, and biblical imagery. There was some debate about whether or not the master in the story was portrayed realistically. Wasn't his character a bit too one-dimensional? Wasn't Tolstoy relying on an old cliche about peasant virtues to deride bourgeois ones? Overall, the group didn't seem to mind the liberties Tolstoy had taken with the bourgois master. Moreover, they liked the peasant man's earthiness, folk wisdom, religiosity, and common sense. And they embraced the master's conversion to Christianity.

Mix Tape

Nick's post on his ten most influential books about Russia inspired this post. Here are my top ten Russian history or literature books:

1) Riasanovsky's History of Russia. I don't recall much about this book, only that it was a magisterial undergraduate introduction to the study of the world's largest country. I took Russian history by a quirk of my undergraduate catalog: it was the only two-semester course that counted as both a Western and non-Western European country. I'm not sure the college understood the depth of the statement they were making about the Russian soul. It's all a blur now (although Vikings, Old Believers, Byzantines, Cossacks, Mongols and the Time of Troubles come to mind), but I saw a copy of the textbook in a used book store the other day, and also heard that Mark Steinberg of University of Illinois had taken over the famed textbook. Bravo.

2) Dostoevsky's The Possessed. This was the first and probably best novel of ideas I'd ever read. Although very little happened, the Possessed (often translated as the Demons) was enthralling. The plot, such as it is, centers around a criminal conspiracy among radical youth to kill one of their own. This criminal act was based on a real scandal of the day and therefore felt "ripped from the headlines" in the best sense of Dick Wolff's oft-repeated phrase. Whether the conservative author intended the reader to sympathize with nihilists or not (and I guess he couldn't have), I suspect that this book retarded my moral development for many years to come.

3) Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Nick and I agree on this one. I am not sure how this book influenced me, but it's one of the most thrilling books I have ever read. It established Dostoevsky in my mind as perhaps the greatest novelist ever born, and made me suspect that Russian literature as a whole might be the greatest literature in the world. I liked the fact that the author seemed to understand radical as well as conservative impulses. (Who else but Isabel Allende in House of Spirits has done this so well?) I liked his noir sense of style and his grim and claustrophobic depiction of St. Petersburg.

4) Trotsky's My Life. The book convinced me that Trotsky's self-aggrandizement was right: there never was a smarter man than he. One wonders if Stalin let him escape Russia alive because he knew that a Great Man needed an equally Great Adversary. Or is Orwell's nastier formulation of this equation more plausible?

5) Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. I share this choice with Nick. I taught this book frequently. It's such a wonderfully easy book to read, but so persuasive and prophetic. I remember thinking that even the Cosby Show didn't make sense without Marx's analysis of the bourgeoisie.

6) Gogol's Dead Souls. It's been 20 years since I read this book. Who knows if it has influenced me or not. But how does one appreciate what it means to be a government bureacrat or modern city-dweller or everyday flim-flam man without referring to Gogol? Would St. Petersburg be St. Petersburg without him? Would we have a proper regard for dark cynicism, gothic ghost stories, and black humor without Gogol? Would later Russian writers have been possible without Gogol? Surely it's time to read him again. I think the magic of Gogol can best be explained with reference to Terry Eagleton's theory of gothic literature outlined in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. Eagleton says that gothic literature is always inspired by concrete crimes, usually of an economic nature. Murder, slavery, and stolen land inevitably give rise to at least subconscious guilt in the occupying or offending social classes. This guilt, in turn, leads to great ghost stories, or at least haunting story lines. By Eagleton's logic, Gogol owes his strange imagination to Peter the Great's brutal construction of St. Petersburg at the expense of thousands upon thousands of Russian serfs. Perhaps Dostoyevsky, who hated St. Petersburg, also owes his unusually feverish prose style to the original crime that was the founding of St. Petersburg.



7-10) Tolstoy's War and Peace. I think this book took a year out of my life so it deserves a few slots. Immersing myself in the book I realized at long last that I was closeted introvert. For me, the irony of War and Peace is that I read it when I was too young to understand its themes, but now that I am mature enough to handle it, I doubt that I will be able to find the time to re-read it.

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

Breaking News

If I had a readership, it might be interested to know that Soviet Roulette (why not refer to a corporate entity now that I have got official business cards?) is "in talks" with a fellow Russophile to start a Lake County Russian literature reading group.

I realize that publicizing these discussions before they are finalized is tres gauche. (I recall Joseph Heller's line, that a character in Something Happened was "too gauche to know what gauche meant.) And I think specifically of a friend's blog that tracks her own dating adventures in real time (It's hard enough to plan a romantic date without subjecting that date to the scrutiny of a thousand blog readers, isn't it?). Even so, this blog hasn't broken a single piece of news to date, so it's time to start.

At first, we discussed a general Russian literature reading group, but that seemed too open-ended. This led us to agree upon Tolstoy as the logical unifying theme for this group. We've all read War and Peace and Anna Karenina, I'm sure. But don't a lot of us overlook Tolstoy's shorter work? And isn't Tolstoy the perfect choice for a reading group? He dominated the 19th century, but also lived well into the twentieth century, on the cusp of the Revolution.

And Tolstoy is for everybody, as the bumper sticker, or bell hooks, might say. He's written on everyone and everything. And if the reading group decides to branch out to other great authors, Tolstoy has had a great deal of personal contact with almost every other major Russian author of the 19th and early 20th century, including Chekhov, Gorky, and Turgenev. (In fact, I've just come across an interesting passage in Stanislavsky's biography where Tolstoy invites Stanislavsky over for assistance on one one of his plays but then demurely allows his wife to berate the famous actor and director for his presumption.) He also seems to be Plato to Dostoevsky's Aristotle, so it wouldn't be wrong for the group to move its way over to the Gambler or other short Dostoevsky works, would it?

I like Tolstoy for this because he's written so much nonfiction too, so the group could conceivably spend some time on the author's stance on morality, religion, cultural criticism, art, vegetarianism, peace, nonviolence, opposition to the death penalty, and politics. Plus, there's the voluminous Tolstoy memoirs and work by rival family members, Tolstoy cult followers, etc.

At any rate, we plan to have a syllabus so perhaps blog followers will keep up with the readings and respond to blog discussions on the readings in question.

Dickens, Balzac and Das Kapital

I’ve always been fascinated by the Great Books approach to education—fascinated, but not convinced. At one point does it become useful to study primary sources without the benefit and context provided by secondary sources? I’m afraid I sometimes fall into the category of the young man in the film, Barcelona, who tells a friend that he prefers literary criticism to the work it dissects. Sometimes, you're not equipped for the unmediated experience of reading 1000 pages of esoteric language. For this reason, I am not greatly troubled by my unfamiliarity with the Russian language or indeed with a few of the classics of Marxist literature, in German or any other language. However, I suffer an occasional pang of conscience, most particularly about Karl Marx’s masterpiece, Volume I of Das Kapital.



Like others perhaps, I’ve wrestled with the meaning of the Russian Revolution and Communism in general with very little direct contact with Marx’s work, with the exception of that short and easily digestible pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto, and, only recently, the Eighteenth Brumiare of Louis Bonaparte. I remember a high school friend who put me to shame by referring to her own reading of Das Kapital as well as Adam Smith’s the Wealth of Nations. Yet 20 years later, Das Kapital continues to intimidate me.



Two months ago, I pulled a copy of the book from the shelves of a used bookstore, but put it back, convinced that I’d never be able to get through it. Do I seem unusual? Francis Wheen, who wrote a book called Marx’s Das Kapital in the “Books that changed the world” series, doesn’t think so. Apparently, many other people have avoided the book, including politicians (Harold Wilson said the footnotes on page one turned him off) and even committed Marxists. Wheen believes that they are making a big mistake.



According to Wheen, Das Kapital is a work of literature or at least quasi-literature. It’s filled with erudition but it’s also filled with brilliant prose and real aesthetic power. It’s a satire, comedy, farce, Gothic novel, and tragedy all rolled into one. The bourgeoisie and capitalism in general, are alternately portrayed as extraordinarily vigorous protagonists (a la Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air) and monstrously destructive and depraved villains. Das Kapital is, Wheen continues, a sprawling treatise on modern economics, but it’s also a creative and multilayered and open-ended encounter with modernity as embodied in capitalism.

Although Wheen demonstrates that the book didn’t make a large splash upon publication, people did, as we know from the course of Russian history, fall in love it. Das Kapital has as much in common with a work by Tolstoy or Dickens or Balzac or Melville as it does with Ricardo or Adam Smith. The art, I suspect, was more important than the dismal science. If revolutionaries were going to overthrow the old order, they needed something worthy enough to put in its place, and communism as described in Das Kapital fits the bill.



Notwithstanding its critics, which Wheen attempts to refute without necessarily endorsing Marx’s analyses, the book is subtle and its dialectics complex (or slippery?) enough to elude any easy categorization. Like great literature, Wheen says that Das Kapital is rich and difficult and all-encompassing, and therefore the book seldom makes predictions about capitalism that can be easily dismissed or proven wrong. All in all, Wheen thinks the book is worth reading, both because it’s a work of art, and because it remains the best critique of the current economic system ever written.

Lenin: Superhero of the Left

In the 1960s Russia published in English translation a beautiful compendium of Lenin written portraits by famous contemporaries and a few later admirers. Lenin in Profile: World Writers and Artists on Lenin is a work of propaganda and hagiography and yet helps modern readers to get a better sense of the man’s place in global history than almost any other book. Balanced criticism of historical figures is extremely valuable.

However, unbalanced praise can be illuminating too. We know of course that Stalin and Trotsky battled mightily over Lenin’s legacy. But the rest of the world took note of Lenin too. This book contains dozens and dozens of fond reminiscences of Lenin from every corner of the Earth, with names like Gorky, Tolstoy (the socialist author), Reed, and Neruda. However one-sided, the book highlights many of Lenin’s personal strengths, and these include intelligence, persistence, single-mindedness, internationalism, charisma, etc.

A professor of mine once said that in the old days one either grew up with heroes on the right or heroes on the left. In America, a hero on the left was hard to find, but F.D.R. or perhaps Eugene Debs are stand-ins. In Europe, and certainly in the developing world, you knew who was on your side if you thought the status quo was somehow worse than what was likely to replace it in the event of a political cataclysm. You knew that Lenin had opposed World War I, nationalism, anti-Semitism, inequality, exploitation, etc.

The fact that Lenin died early helped to keep his reputation in tact with those on the Left. Stalin could be blamed for everything. Many scholars have helped to erode this book’s positive portrayal of Lenin. I’m thinking of Lesley Chamberlain’s brilliant book about the role Lenin personally played in exiling his leading opponents in the Russian intelligentsia. Lenin was certainly no democrat, and the title of authoritarian seems to rest easily on his head in light of his many decisions. Stalin’s rise can even be attributed to Lenin, who chose him as a lieutenant even if he criticized him in the final year of his life.

But wonders if it’s fair to lay the results of history at the foot of somebody who couldn't have foreseen how a lack of democracy would eventually lead to unprecedented brutality and suffering. Hell, we don’t even blame lovable Harry S. Truman for a decision he actually made to obliterate two Japanese cities with nuclear bombs.

Russian Death

Before Nick starts telling folks that Tolstoy got it wrong when it comes to death, I have to quote from Lidiya Ginzburg's Blockade Diary, which describes the ultimate death scene: the siege of Leningrad during World War II. According to Lidiya, Russians prepared for the German onslaught by reading War and Peace. And this, after they had already been through World War I which, modern critics like Paul Fussell tell us, was supposed to have killed all respect for 19th century portrayals of battlefield heroism. In particular, Lidiya says, people read Tolstoy to find out whether or not they were doing what they were supposed to do in the midst of the hell and horror that was all around them. But props to Tolstoy aside--it says something about a man who was still relevant after the purges--Ginzburg's Blockade Diary is all about the Russian capacity to embrace spectacular ends. Russians' real genius, it seems, was to embrace the fact that they as a people would survive, and that individual catastrophe meant nothing. She didn't find jingoism when Hitler attacked without warning, but the following common sentiment: "Well, one thing is for certain: we're done for." But the "we're" in that sentence refers to those who were talking, not the Russian people as a whole.

Ginburg's Diary is brilliant. Leningrad was the ultimate death. She analyzes the slow death in phrases such as this: "So painful, so fearful was it to touch one another, that in propinquity, at close quarters, it was hard to disdinguish love for hatred--toward those one couldn't leave." Or, referring to the body: "The body advertised its presence through pain and itching.." or "In winter, after people were discovering bone after bone, the alienation of the body proceeded..." And later, realizing people hadn't the strength to sit upright any more, "It turned out, for example, that the vertical posture was by no means inherent in the human body; the conscious will had to hold the body under control; otherwise it would slither away as if it were falling down a cliff..."

Death Scenes

I recently went to a friend's funeral and beforehand I was thinking about Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. It was my first funeral in many years and I expected to experience something like what Tolstoy describes: the mourners go through the motions of grieving but feel a secret sense of satisfaction that it is not they who have died. They are blithely ignorant of the proximity of their own deaths and seek any distraction--in this case cardplaying--to avoid its reality.

This isn't what I felt at all though. The significance of mortality struck me like it never has before. This had something to do with a series of gruesome accounts related by acquiantances of my friend's illness and death. Of course, this made me consider that there is something uniquely Russian about a truly horrifying end, whether in fiction, on the battlefield, or in czarist or soviet prisons.

So I'm wondering what incidents in Russian life and literature best communicate this morbid ability to portray the betrayal of our flesh? Dostoevsky has to be considered the master. But there is a great death scene in The Oblomovs by Saltykov-Schedrin; Tolstoy's own death was fascinating; the death of Dostoevsky's father at the hands of his own peasants was awful; and obviously there are scenes in The Gulag Archipelago that defy all description.

By contrast English and American literature have little to offer: the pathetic death of Little Nell is characteristic of the Anglo-American discomfort with the topic. Does their familiarity with death mean that the Russians are more attuned to the full range of the life cycle, or is it merely the product of an unhinged social system that has produced far too many meaningless deaths? By contrast does our optimistic preoccupation with the future help our democracy function more or less smoothly, or is it a symptom of a deeper inability to engage with life?

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?

Non-Existence

Two days ago I had a brief debate with my co-author about the pros and cons of existence. My friend said he feared non-existence above all else and thought that it would be better to live a life of at least mild suffering than never have existed at all. I disagreed. In fact, the debate arose over the question of abortion rights. This passage from Tolstoy, quoted by his friend and biographer Steiner in Tolstoy the Man, seems to capture my friend's position, and almost (but not quite) convinces me. After bearing witness to his brother's death from consumption he wrote:

"He literally died in my arms. Nothing in my life has made such an impression on me. He was right when he said, "Nothing is worse than death" and when one remembers that is the end of everything, then there is nothing worse than life. Why should one work and worry when nothing of that which was Nikolai Tolstoy nothing remains?... He was beginning to feel his absorption into nothing; and if he found nothing on which to take hold, what shall I find? Much less than he; and assuredly I shall struggle with death as he has struggled. To the last minute he held on to life... [T]he truth which I have discovered in my thirty-two years is, that life is terrible. You write, "Take life as you find it, because you yourself are to blame for the position you find yourself." I take life as I find it, but as soon as man has reached the highest plane of his development, the truth which he loves above everything else is awful. When one comes to see that clearly and plainly, he wakes, and says like my brother, "What is that?"