I have previously reviewed several of the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky's books, including his novels, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, The Third Factory, his works of literary criticism, including Knight's Move, Energy of Delusion, Bowstring, The Hunt for Optimism, and The Hamburg Score, and a memoir, A Sentimental Journey. In the context of so many brilliant books, the short historical work, Life of a Bishop's Assistant, falls a little flat. The publisher has noted that the book is a "re-written" biography of a little-known clerical figure from the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The publisher also notes that it's an example of innovative narrative approach. To my mind, the Shklovsky's approach to biography is certainly original, and his staccato style engaging and humorous. Shklovsky can't help but be clever. And certainly Shklovsky displays his erudition and knowledge of the era on every page. One of the best things about Life of a Bishop's Assistant is that it manages to objectively convey the values of the time even as these values are contrasted with the values of the modern era. The result of the contrast is often comedic. After all, privileged classes, monarchical prerogatives, and purchased benedictions can seem ridiculous to the modern ear. However, aside from reveling in what E.P. Thompson would have called the "enormous condescension of posterity," Shklovsky has toned down his trademark humor, and provided the reader with very little historical context for his story line. So that the book doesn't really succeed either as a work of fiction or as a work of history. In any case, The Life of a Bishop's Assistant does provide readers with insights into clerical life in this period. According to Shklovsky, the leadership at this time was cynical, venal, prone to the use of violence in pursuit of power, and far-removed from the everyday concerns of the Russian people.
Below are a few quotations from the book:
His instruction was brutal. People said that the child needed angelic patience to learn how to spell the word "angel."
Your honor is aware that, in Russia, a man without a rank is almost like a man without a soul.
You must bow before anyone of higher rank and crawl before eminent landowners...
I wish to obtain a rank and position on the basis of mercy rather than merit.
Passek was only interested in horses, his lover, and his illegitimate son.
Potemkin and the Empress herself were both mortal.
"Hence," Mr. Polyansky said, "you with your, without exaggeration, sensitive and boundless soul, cannot portray a heroine or a lover because you have those feelings in your soul. A naturally occurring diamond cannot depict paste."
At that time, Mr. Polyasnky was thirty-eight. He was of unconventional character. And always fell in love with other people's wives.
Consequently, the lover and the husband were separated by a single sheet called Wayward Street.
Bychkov was slightly embarrassed and the police, given their rank's intrinsically coarse nature, were sniggering.
Then, the General took a short rifle off the wall and said:
"Messieurs, I will now butcher you with this rifle butt."
Seeing this, the doctor and police retreated.
It was as if the proceeding came to an end.
"So you never did marry?"
"There are no brides here, the Polish ones don't have dowries."
Dobrynin needed a village for export. He wished to expel the peasants to the Kherson Governorate.
Showing posts with label Viktor Shklovsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viktor Shklovsky. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
Monday, September 24, 2018
Viktor Shklovsky Quotations from The Hamburg Score
Below are some of my favorite quotations from the Hamburg Score.
On Writing
In Hamburg, Bulgakov is down on the mat.
Babel is a lightweight.
Gorky is questionable (often out of form).
Khlebnikov was the champion.
It is not appropriate to start a critical article with: "I opened the book," "I was interested in," "I leafed through," or "I glanced through." You can't start a review of a play by saying: "I walked into the theater and sat down on an armchair."All of this is extremely weak, because you cannot start reading a book without opening it.
They are the writings of an administrator, and not a journalist. And a writing administrator often resembles a theater fireman who sings.
One ought to get rid of the old general's habit of calling people "unknown." If Rodchenko is unknown to Polonsky, that's not a fact of Rodchenko's life, but Polonsky's.
The censor told an acquaintance of mine: "You have a style that's perfectly suitable for cutting."
The editor, having read the works of a poet, said to him: "Your poems are splendid, but I won't publish them--I don't like them..." Then added pensively: "But you know, you somehow remind me of Bakunin."
It is very difficult for a writer to overcome his own manner of writing and to remember.
Here the genre dies from an enlarged heart.
Writers appear in literature variously: With our without introduction.
Writers appearing in literature with introductions, as a general rule, do not have a long life.
On Authors
(I think) I saw a photography of Konstantin Fedin. He was sitting at his desk between Tolstoy's and Gogol's busts.
He was sitting there--getting used to it.
Bunin's entire work is italicized. The descriptions are derived not from objects but from other descriptions.
Being mentored by the Acmeists and Symbolists, Larisa Reisner knew how to see things.
[Babel] was the only one who preserved his stylistic composure during the revolution.
He was not alienated from life. But it did seem to me that Babel, before going to bed, would sign each and every lived day--as if it was a story. The instruments of the man's trade had left their trace on him.
Babel wrote little, but he wrote persistently. It was always the same story--about two Chinese men in a brothel.
A foreigner from Paris, from Paris alone, sans London, Babel saw Russia the way that a French writer attached to Napoleon's army might have seen it.
The significance of Babel's device is in his manner of speaking about stars and gonorrhea in one voice.
Lev Lunts was like grass there had grown in a cleared forest. Fate had freed him from compromises.
Kazin is writing about all of his relatives, one by one.
And even Mayakovsky is imprisoned by his theme: revolution and love that keeps apologizing for coming during revolution.
But I knew Yesenin from before. He was young, handsome, with golden locks, blue eyes, spoke marvelously. Yesenin's trouble was that he wore those felt boots in the city for too long.
People were chided in subordinate clauses, as if in passing.
[Vsevold Ivanov] wasn't afraid of making mistakes because he didn't know most of the rules.
Bon Mots
During their first crusades, they mistook each city for Jerusalem. When, upon entering the city, they would find out that it was not Jerusalem, they would destroy it.
How obscenely long is Grevs's comment!
What a confusing sentence!
And it's ungrammatical. This is how professors write.
Vladimir Durov was telling: "I ordered walruses from abroad to teach them how to cut through mined fences."
"And were you able to?"
"No. I've only been able to teach them how to play on the guitar."
Occasionally they elect a fourteen-year-old male virgin as their priest.
But on the whole, virginity is not respected there.
They beat the writer Svetozarov in one village, as we was travelling on a boat alone from Moscow to Astrakhan , but the children in that same village knew the poems of Vasili Kazin by heart.
One shouldn't be so eloquent in a newspaper.
Chaliapin would say: "Such and such actor keeps coming to my performances. Do you think he's coming to learn something? He's been waiting for a decade now for me to lose my voice."
The man had learned a lot. I don't know if he had lost his former venomousness during that period.
A delegation came to meet Yesenin's father, a peasant. He invited them into his hut. "Tell us about your son!" The old man crossed the room in his felt boots, sat down and began: "It was a dark night. It was raining, pouring like from a bucket..."
There is nothing more deplorable than fate.
If you ask, especially women, in the village what the neighboring village is called, they often don't know. Fate has bound them to the hut with the mooing of the cow.
She packed her life so eagerly, as if she was packing for good and going to another planet.
Mongolia is a wild and joyless beats, even the butterflies sting there.
Film
Cinema with bourgeois themes int he East is a perlustration of the masters' mail.
Revolution
The revolution is a difficult thing for an intellectual. He is jealous of the revolution, as a husband would be jealous of his wife. Doesn't recognize her. Fear her.
It is easier to recognize a revolution aesthetically when she is weak.
Few of us can boast that we have seen the revolution not through a vent window.
"Can you tell me how much I can own and not be considered a kulak?" the short host asked me.
The years had produced cliched recollections. The cliches melded with memory and became heroicized.
We loved before the revolution bound to fate as unhappy Greek sponges bound to the bottom of the sea. You get born, gain strength. Then you accidentally come across a profession and you live like that. And there were many remarkable poets who lived alongside syndonic officials and insurance agents.
Such an interesting thing as human fate is arranged awfully in a capitalist society. And so during the revolution there was no such thing as fate.
We owe our inventions to that time--there was enough wind for all the sails.
Dostoevsky, Jerome K. Jerome (who died recently), and the still restless Merezhkovsky all unanimously declared that socialism is boredom.
I refute that as a witness.
We ignored the bitterness of life and the necessity to fix it and it seems that we were happy. We just didn't have enough carbohydrates and protestins to fortify this kingdom of intellectual freedom under the guns of the "Aurora."
We were moving into the world then as one might move into a new apartment.
On Writing
In Hamburg, Bulgakov is down on the mat.
Babel is a lightweight.
Gorky is questionable (often out of form).
Khlebnikov was the champion.
It is not appropriate to start a critical article with: "I opened the book," "I was interested in," "I leafed through," or "I glanced through." You can't start a review of a play by saying: "I walked into the theater and sat down on an armchair."All of this is extremely weak, because you cannot start reading a book without opening it.
They are the writings of an administrator, and not a journalist. And a writing administrator often resembles a theater fireman who sings.
One ought to get rid of the old general's habit of calling people "unknown." If Rodchenko is unknown to Polonsky, that's not a fact of Rodchenko's life, but Polonsky's.
The censor told an acquaintance of mine: "You have a style that's perfectly suitable for cutting."
The editor, having read the works of a poet, said to him: "Your poems are splendid, but I won't publish them--I don't like them..." Then added pensively: "But you know, you somehow remind me of Bakunin."
It is very difficult for a writer to overcome his own manner of writing and to remember.
Here the genre dies from an enlarged heart.
Writers appear in literature variously: With our without introduction.
Writers appearing in literature with introductions, as a general rule, do not have a long life.
On Authors
(I think) I saw a photography of Konstantin Fedin. He was sitting at his desk between Tolstoy's and Gogol's busts.
He was sitting there--getting used to it.
Bunin's entire work is italicized. The descriptions are derived not from objects but from other descriptions.
Being mentored by the Acmeists and Symbolists, Larisa Reisner knew how to see things.
[Babel] was the only one who preserved his stylistic composure during the revolution.
He was not alienated from life. But it did seem to me that Babel, before going to bed, would sign each and every lived day--as if it was a story. The instruments of the man's trade had left their trace on him.
Babel wrote little, but he wrote persistently. It was always the same story--about two Chinese men in a brothel.
A foreigner from Paris, from Paris alone, sans London, Babel saw Russia the way that a French writer attached to Napoleon's army might have seen it.
The significance of Babel's device is in his manner of speaking about stars and gonorrhea in one voice.
Lev Lunts was like grass there had grown in a cleared forest. Fate had freed him from compromises.
Kazin is writing about all of his relatives, one by one.
And even Mayakovsky is imprisoned by his theme: revolution and love that keeps apologizing for coming during revolution.
But I knew Yesenin from before. He was young, handsome, with golden locks, blue eyes, spoke marvelously. Yesenin's trouble was that he wore those felt boots in the city for too long.
People were chided in subordinate clauses, as if in passing.
[Vsevold Ivanov] wasn't afraid of making mistakes because he didn't know most of the rules.
Bon Mots
During their first crusades, they mistook each city for Jerusalem. When, upon entering the city, they would find out that it was not Jerusalem, they would destroy it.
How obscenely long is Grevs's comment!
What a confusing sentence!
And it's ungrammatical. This is how professors write.
Vladimir Durov was telling: "I ordered walruses from abroad to teach them how to cut through mined fences."
"And were you able to?"
"No. I've only been able to teach them how to play on the guitar."
Occasionally they elect a fourteen-year-old male virgin as their priest.
But on the whole, virginity is not respected there.
They beat the writer Svetozarov in one village, as we was travelling on a boat alone from Moscow to Astrakhan , but the children in that same village knew the poems of Vasili Kazin by heart.
One shouldn't be so eloquent in a newspaper.
Chaliapin would say: "Such and such actor keeps coming to my performances. Do you think he's coming to learn something? He's been waiting for a decade now for me to lose my voice."
The man had learned a lot. I don't know if he had lost his former venomousness during that period.
A delegation came to meet Yesenin's father, a peasant. He invited them into his hut. "Tell us about your son!" The old man crossed the room in his felt boots, sat down and began: "It was a dark night. It was raining, pouring like from a bucket..."
There is nothing more deplorable than fate.
If you ask, especially women, in the village what the neighboring village is called, they often don't know. Fate has bound them to the hut with the mooing of the cow.
She packed her life so eagerly, as if she was packing for good and going to another planet.
Mongolia is a wild and joyless beats, even the butterflies sting there.
Film
Cinema with bourgeois themes int he East is a perlustration of the masters' mail.
Revolution
The revolution is a difficult thing for an intellectual. He is jealous of the revolution, as a husband would be jealous of his wife. Doesn't recognize her. Fear her.
It is easier to recognize a revolution aesthetically when she is weak.
Few of us can boast that we have seen the revolution not through a vent window.
"Can you tell me how much I can own and not be considered a kulak?" the short host asked me.
The years had produced cliched recollections. The cliches melded with memory and became heroicized.
We loved before the revolution bound to fate as unhappy Greek sponges bound to the bottom of the sea. You get born, gain strength. Then you accidentally come across a profession and you live like that. And there were many remarkable poets who lived alongside syndonic officials and insurance agents.
Such an interesting thing as human fate is arranged awfully in a capitalist society. And so during the revolution there was no such thing as fate.
We owe our inventions to that time--there was enough wind for all the sails.
Dostoevsky, Jerome K. Jerome (who died recently), and the still restless Merezhkovsky all unanimously declared that socialism is boredom.
I refute that as a witness.
We ignored the bitterness of life and the necessity to fix it and it seems that we were happy. We just didn't have enough carbohydrates and protestins to fortify this kingdom of intellectual freedom under the guns of the "Aurora."
We were moving into the world then as one might move into a new apartment.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Russophilia and Mortality
Two days ago I came to the sudden and startling realization that I would be reading about Russia for the rest of my life. I have of course already been reading Russian history and literature almost exclusively for the past seven or eight years. But somehow the thought that I would never, ever break the spell of Russia came to me as a shocking revelation. What could it mean to be certain that nothing would ever—indeed could ever--take the place of Russia in my imaginative or quasi-scholarly interior life? In a sense, this epiphany is an adumbration of mortality: when one is young, one often assumes that all learning will one day be meaningful, important, and (supreme conceit) above all, useful. If I take a course in Japanese, I do so because I will some day encounter a Japanese theme in my life, be in a Japanese girlfriend, a Japanese business opportunity, or a inescapable current of Japanese academic, cultural, or educational ideas. For a young person, or a person who at least sees himself or herself as young, life is open-ended and pregnant with possibility. As one grows older, life becomes increasingly scripted. If I take a Japanese course now, I don’t expect that I will actually find a way to build on this knowledge; my potential life as a fluent Japanese-speaker is limited, almost non-existent. If I’ve worked hard at Spanish for about a decade and never mastered that relatively easy project, how likely is it that I will find myself in command of an unfamiliar alphabet and grammar?
To be sure, one’s attitude toward the future isn’t determined by biology. Age is at least partly a matter of attitude. The genius of some chronologically advanced men and women is that they retain a youthful capacity to engage with multiple futures and to remain hopeful that every encounter with new learning will sooner or later prove to be significant. On the other hand, getting old has its advantages. Believing that the future will resemble the past isn’t an entirely misguided or deleterious enterprise. Embracing the idea that “this is all there is,” is the first step to a kind of emotional or even spiritual maturity. If life does have a trajectory, one might do well to study it if only in order to “know thyself.” More concretely, if my future life will continue to resemble my current one, what illusions can divert me from making wise decisions related to living my life as it should be lived? Russophilia has forced me to take Russian poetry seriously; one simply cannot understand Russia without at least accepting the idea that Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Tsetaeva somehow articulate Russia’s essence. We often think of poets’ as expressing the ideals or values of youth. But true poetry seems to hail from a place of pessimistic maturity rather than optimistic youth. Poetry emerges only after a man or woman has fully embraced the idea that life is fleeting, time is finite, and adventure is, at least one some level, fictional. That is to say, a poet knows what priest knows: we’re born, we grow up, we grow old, we die.
Fatalism is a very Russian idea. It’s off-putting to many, but it shouldn’t be entirely repellent. The Russian poet (and I’ll include writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the broad Russian poetic project) merely asks us to live our lives as if we were going to die someday. For some reason, this is remarkably difficult for most of us to do. For my part, I recall reading Tolstoy’s short book, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. As I recall, the book does nothing more than (spoiler alert) describe a man who discovers that he is going to die. It took a Russian, and a Russian genius at that, to tell us the simple truth that people die. Moreover, the book’s streamlined plot ensures that few or no readers can miss the point.
The American equivalent to this revelation can be found in Woody Allen movies, which are of course directly inspired by Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. But I remember the conclusion to the series, Six Feet Under. Of course, this series took up the theme of death by setting up its protagonists as a family of funeral parlor owners. But (second spoiler alert) the series finale, which allowed viewers to witness the chronologically disparate death of every single character on the show, drove home Tolstoy’s point about the ubiquity of death. What does it matter? Why should we focus on the fact that we will someday perish? Although pessimism has its downside, it also allows us to study our lives and weigh our options carefully. At age 43, I’ve begun to study my life, and I’ve determined that nothing would be more profitable than to ensure that my intellectual and spiritual life continues to revolve around Russia, as it has done now for many years. As the Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky says: “God grant that tomorrow be exactly the same as today.”
To be sure, one’s attitude toward the future isn’t determined by biology. Age is at least partly a matter of attitude. The genius of some chronologically advanced men and women is that they retain a youthful capacity to engage with multiple futures and to remain hopeful that every encounter with new learning will sooner or later prove to be significant. On the other hand, getting old has its advantages. Believing that the future will resemble the past isn’t an entirely misguided or deleterious enterprise. Embracing the idea that “this is all there is,” is the first step to a kind of emotional or even spiritual maturity. If life does have a trajectory, one might do well to study it if only in order to “know thyself.” More concretely, if my future life will continue to resemble my current one, what illusions can divert me from making wise decisions related to living my life as it should be lived? Russophilia has forced me to take Russian poetry seriously; one simply cannot understand Russia without at least accepting the idea that Pushkin, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Tsetaeva somehow articulate Russia’s essence. We often think of poets’ as expressing the ideals or values of youth. But true poetry seems to hail from a place of pessimistic maturity rather than optimistic youth. Poetry emerges only after a man or woman has fully embraced the idea that life is fleeting, time is finite, and adventure is, at least one some level, fictional. That is to say, a poet knows what priest knows: we’re born, we grow up, we grow old, we die.
Fatalism is a very Russian idea. It’s off-putting to many, but it shouldn’t be entirely repellent. The Russian poet (and I’ll include writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the broad Russian poetic project) merely asks us to live our lives as if we were going to die someday. For some reason, this is remarkably difficult for most of us to do. For my part, I recall reading Tolstoy’s short book, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. As I recall, the book does nothing more than (spoiler alert) describe a man who discovers that he is going to die. It took a Russian, and a Russian genius at that, to tell us the simple truth that people die. Moreover, the book’s streamlined plot ensures that few or no readers can miss the point.
The American equivalent to this revelation can be found in Woody Allen movies, which are of course directly inspired by Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. But I remember the conclusion to the series, Six Feet Under. Of course, this series took up the theme of death by setting up its protagonists as a family of funeral parlor owners. But (second spoiler alert) the series finale, which allowed viewers to witness the chronologically disparate death of every single character on the show, drove home Tolstoy’s point about the ubiquity of death. What does it matter? Why should we focus on the fact that we will someday perish? Although pessimism has its downside, it also allows us to study our lives and weigh our options carefully. At age 43, I’ve begun to study my life, and I’ve determined that nothing would be more profitable than to ensure that my intellectual and spiritual life continues to revolve around Russia, as it has done now for many years. As the Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky says: “God grant that tomorrow be exactly the same as today.”
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Shklovsky's Revolution
Viktor Shklovsky's memoirs, A Sentimental Journey, cover the author's energetic participation in World War I, the February Revolution, the October Revolution, the Russian campaign in Persia, and the Civil War. Shklovsky's unorthodox approach to autobiography is ironic, poetic, and elliptical. His observations seem to reveal the essence of this revolutionary epoch on both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. The current of clever but understated cynicism that runs through A Sentimental Journey seems to perfectly portray the madness and horror of that extraordinarily fluid period in Russian history. Although Shklovsky, a Social Revolutionary in these years, ostensibly sympathized the Bolsheviks in their contest with the counter-revolutionary forces, his detached, sometimes indirect critique of Bolshevism is ultimately more damning than even Ivan Bunin's memoir of the period, Cursed Days. If this is how a young Leftist intellectual saw Lenin's Party, how much worse must they have been?
Shlovsky on the Nature of Revolution
"You'll see. Our Revolution will save the world."
"Everything was fine. We were all being swept along by a river and the whole of wisdom consisted in yielding to its current."
"I was happy with these crowds. It was like Easter--a joyous, naive, disorderly carnival paradise."
"In general, and Easter mood prevailed; everything was going well and it was believed that this was only the beginning of everything good."
"The streets seethed with impromptu meetings. Private life seemed pallid."
"One soldier said, "I don't want to die." With desperate energy, I spoke about the right of the Revolution to our lives. I didn't despise words then, as I do now."
"The Revolution had engraved its norms on his soul. He was like an Orthodox Christian."
"They hastened to inform me that they were for the commune. What they meant by that I don't know. Perhaps only communal pastures."
"The regiments knew nothing about freedom of speech; they regarded themselves as a single voting entity. Those who opposed the majority were beaten up."
"Why didn't we understand that we can't fight with such crap at the front?"
"Comrades, what are you doing! Is this really the way to fight capitalism? Capitalism has to be fought efficiently."
"If you don't believe that there was a revolution, go and put your hand in the wound. It's wide."
"The laws had been repealed and everything was being revised."
Shklovsky on Suffering
"When I arrived in Moscow on the nineteenth of this month and brought some bread (ten pounds) to a close friend, he began to weep--He wasn't used to bread."
"Hunched over, with mechanical gesture of a tired animal, they picked through the garbage looking for something edible."
"...the others died as quietly and slowly as only the infinitely steadfast human being can died."
"There's a Cossack. In front of him lies a naked baby, abandoned by the Kurds. The Cossack wants to kill it. He hits it once and stopds to think, hits it again and stops to think.
They tell him: "Finish him off."
And he: "I can't. I feel sorry for it."
"The commander, Ivanov by name, defended himself for a long time with a saver before they cut off his head and gave it to the children to play with." (Referring to the Kurdish campaign).
"One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked...Something had left a dead baby at my door. I think it was a complaint."
"...the way the city had grown quiet. Like after an explosion, when it's all over, when everything's blown up. Like a man whose insides have been torn out by an explosion, but he keeps on talking."
"In general, it was a time of local power and local terror. People were killed on the spot."
"There was cholera in St. Pete, but people were't being eaten yet."
"I saw a beggar pull a piece of bread out of his sack and offer it to a cabby's horse. The horse turned it down."
"Once beef was issued. What a fantastic taste it had! It was like the first time you slept with a woman. Something entirely new."
"Our hardships kept piling on; we wore them like clothing."
Shklovsky on the Bolsheviks
"A man should worry less about history and more about his own biography."
"Who are you for--Kaledin, Kornilov or the Bolsheviks?" Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks. However in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, "Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered?" He answered, "I prefer soup."
"The show "Russia" was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat."
"The Bolsheviks were very weak, too, but the ship was listing on their side."
"When the Boksheviks left the front wide open without signing the peace treaty, they were hoping for a miracle, but the man consumed in fire didn't rise from the dead. And the Germans walked through the front door."
"And so some cracked safes, some headed east to joint Wrangel and Denikin, others were shot and still others hated the Bolsheviks with a hatred so salty that it kept them from spoiling."
"And on the horizon, promising to crush us all, loomed the hungry Bolsheviks."
"Bolshevism thrives in foreign climes"
"It was said that the French had a violet ray with which they could blind all the Bolsheviks..It was said that the English had landed in Baku aa heard of apes trained in all the rules of warfare...People held their hands about two feet off the ground to indicate the size of the apes. They said that when Baku was taken, one of these apes was killed and it was buried with a band playing Scottish military music and the Scots cried. That's because the instructors of the ape legions were Scottish."
"His father had died after the October coup. His uncle had shot himself. He left a note: "The damn Bolsheviks."
"It's fantastic how much more stupid a state is than an individual."
"The Bolsheviks entered a Russia that was already sick, but they weren't neutral--no, they were a special kind of organizing bacillus, but of another world and dimension."
"The Bolsheviks held out, are holding out, and will hold out, thanks to the imperfections of the mechanism which they control. However, I am unjust to them. Just as unjust as the deaf man who looks at people dancing and thinks they're insane. The Bolsheviks had their own music."
"And at this moment, with my life in fragments, I stand before the ordered consciousness of the Communists."
"It was like two voids attacking one another. There were no Red and White armies. That's no joke. I saw the war."
"A nation, however, can be organized. The Bolsheviks believed that it's the design that matters, not the building material. They were willing to lose today, to lose biographies, in order to win the stake of history."
"They wanted to organize everything so that the sun would rise on schedule and the weather would be made in their chancellery. It's easy to see how the Bolsheviks made the mistake of mapping out a plan for the whole world on paper.
Shklovsky on Russia
"It was Russian imperialism--what's more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid imperialism."
"Russia was beginning to break down into its primary factors."
"People will ask, how did Russia permit such things to happen?"
Shklovsky's Guide for Living
"It's good to live and sniff the road of life with your snout."
Shlovsky on the Nature of Revolution
"You'll see. Our Revolution will save the world."
"Everything was fine. We were all being swept along by a river and the whole of wisdom consisted in yielding to its current."
"I was happy with these crowds. It was like Easter--a joyous, naive, disorderly carnival paradise."
"In general, and Easter mood prevailed; everything was going well and it was believed that this was only the beginning of everything good."
"The streets seethed with impromptu meetings. Private life seemed pallid."
"One soldier said, "I don't want to die." With desperate energy, I spoke about the right of the Revolution to our lives. I didn't despise words then, as I do now."
"The Revolution had engraved its norms on his soul. He was like an Orthodox Christian."
"They hastened to inform me that they were for the commune. What they meant by that I don't know. Perhaps only communal pastures."
"The regiments knew nothing about freedom of speech; they regarded themselves as a single voting entity. Those who opposed the majority were beaten up."
"Why didn't we understand that we can't fight with such crap at the front?"
"Comrades, what are you doing! Is this really the way to fight capitalism? Capitalism has to be fought efficiently."
"If you don't believe that there was a revolution, go and put your hand in the wound. It's wide."
"The laws had been repealed and everything was being revised."
Shklovsky on Suffering
"When I arrived in Moscow on the nineteenth of this month and brought some bread (ten pounds) to a close friend, he began to weep--He wasn't used to bread."
"Hunched over, with mechanical gesture of a tired animal, they picked through the garbage looking for something edible."
"...the others died as quietly and slowly as only the infinitely steadfast human being can died."
"There's a Cossack. In front of him lies a naked baby, abandoned by the Kurds. The Cossack wants to kill it. He hits it once and stopds to think, hits it again and stops to think.
They tell him: "Finish him off."
And he: "I can't. I feel sorry for it."
"The commander, Ivanov by name, defended himself for a long time with a saver before they cut off his head and gave it to the children to play with." (Referring to the Kurdish campaign).
"One morning when I got up and opened the street door, something soft fell to the side. I stooped down and looked...Something had left a dead baby at my door. I think it was a complaint."
"...the way the city had grown quiet. Like after an explosion, when it's all over, when everything's blown up. Like a man whose insides have been torn out by an explosion, but he keeps on talking."
"In general, it was a time of local power and local terror. People were killed on the spot."
"There was cholera in St. Pete, but people were't being eaten yet."
"I saw a beggar pull a piece of bread out of his sack and offer it to a cabby's horse. The horse turned it down."
"Once beef was issued. What a fantastic taste it had! It was like the first time you slept with a woman. Something entirely new."
"Our hardships kept piling on; we wore them like clothing."
Shklovsky on the Bolsheviks
"A man should worry less about history and more about his own biography."
"Who are you for--Kaledin, Kornilov or the Bolsheviks?" Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks. However in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, "Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered?" He answered, "I prefer soup."
"The show "Russia" was over; everyone was hurrying to get his hat and coat."
"The Bolsheviks were very weak, too, but the ship was listing on their side."
"When the Boksheviks left the front wide open without signing the peace treaty, they were hoping for a miracle, but the man consumed in fire didn't rise from the dead. And the Germans walked through the front door."
"And so some cracked safes, some headed east to joint Wrangel and Denikin, others were shot and still others hated the Bolsheviks with a hatred so salty that it kept them from spoiling."
"And on the horizon, promising to crush us all, loomed the hungry Bolsheviks."
"Bolshevism thrives in foreign climes"
"It was said that the French had a violet ray with which they could blind all the Bolsheviks..It was said that the English had landed in Baku aa heard of apes trained in all the rules of warfare...People held their hands about two feet off the ground to indicate the size of the apes. They said that when Baku was taken, one of these apes was killed and it was buried with a band playing Scottish military music and the Scots cried. That's because the instructors of the ape legions were Scottish."
"His father had died after the October coup. His uncle had shot himself. He left a note: "The damn Bolsheviks."
"It's fantastic how much more stupid a state is than an individual."
"The Bolsheviks entered a Russia that was already sick, but they weren't neutral--no, they were a special kind of organizing bacillus, but of another world and dimension."
"The Bolsheviks held out, are holding out, and will hold out, thanks to the imperfections of the mechanism which they control. However, I am unjust to them. Just as unjust as the deaf man who looks at people dancing and thinks they're insane. The Bolsheviks had their own music."
"And at this moment, with my life in fragments, I stand before the ordered consciousness of the Communists."
"It was like two voids attacking one another. There were no Red and White armies. That's no joke. I saw the war."
"A nation, however, can be organized. The Bolsheviks believed that it's the design that matters, not the building material. They were willing to lose today, to lose biographies, in order to win the stake of history."
"They wanted to organize everything so that the sun would rise on schedule and the weather would be made in their chancellery. It's easy to see how the Bolsheviks made the mistake of mapping out a plan for the whole world on paper.
Shklovsky on Russia
"It was Russian imperialism--what's more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid imperialism."
"Russia was beginning to break down into its primary factors."
"People will ask, how did Russia permit such things to happen?"
Shklovsky's Guide for Living
"It's good to live and sniff the road of life with your snout."
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
The Falseness of Happy Endings
"People often die. We all do. I am warning you. This fact surfaced in literature."
Even in its simplest form, the world is complex. It's plot, and only plot, that pins it down and holds it together. We therefore owe a lot to our storytellers and myth-makers, the writers and novelists who help us to make sense of the chaotic world. We owe almost as much to the literary theorists who help us to make sense of the plot-makers. Thank Viktor Shklovsky, the Soviet novelist and literary theorist who penned The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot in his final years. Shlovsky's treatise on the relationship between plot and creative genius isn't always easy to follow. But it does point the way toward a clearer understanding of the genius of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Cervantes, Pushkin, Boccaccio and others in the Russian and Western Canon.
What, specifically, does Shklovsky have to say about plot? I'm not sure I'm equipped to say. What fascinates me is the way in which Shklovsky sets out to describe creative genius by demonstrating it, exemplifying it. It's as if he wants to tell us that authors such as Tolstoy, the greatest "commander-in-chief of plot," pick up the old but strangely invisible threads of plot and begin to improvise, jazz-like, on the old themes. Tolstoy understands his literary inheritance on a very deep level, but this understanding somehow allows him to transcend it. The result is new avenues to truth, new doors of perception.
Shklovsky explains all this by showing rather than telling his readers that art, even literary criticism, is open-ended, unexpected, lively, and recursive. Shlovsky's writing, like the writing he describes, is brilliant, complex, contradictory, highly original, and intent on the search for meaning rather than its polished presentation.
Here are just a few of his epigrams:
Crossing the sea that is Lev Tolstoy is not an experience that can be explained in brief.
He said that everybody is guilty and then it turned out that nobody was at fault.
Heaven, as Mark Twain guessed, was a boring place. It was overcrowded.
She lived in the land of the happy.
In Hadji Murad, in the Caucacus, the Chechen says: The rope should be long, the speech--short.
He wrote Hadji Murad all his life. He wrote it better each time. More poetically.
Theirs was a compassionate generation. They felt the falseness of happy endings.
But it helped them as much as a funeral service helps a dead man.
Humankind in the multiplicity of its fate is typecast in contradictory ways, that's the chief method of developing a character. The blacksmith in Pushkin (in Dubrovsky) locks the door of a burning house; then the same blacksmith risks his life to save a cat on the roof.
Sancho Panzo used to say how he preferred to hear the answer first and then the riddle.
Russian literature, great literature, doesn't have endings.
According to rumors, even geniuses, more than others, depend on the very traditions they're violating, they depend on the choice of words, the choice of denouements.
There are as many morals as there are stars in the sky.
The infant has no memory. The infant, Tolstoy said, "is used to the eternity."
The history of literature is the history of the search for heroes.
[Tolstoy] points out that the death of one hero transfers are interest to other heroes.
Tolstoy teaches us that events exist before they are discovered.
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