Tolstoy Refresher

This past week I plunged into several Tolstoy books.  I re-read Tolstoy's infamous Kreutzer Sonata, and read his What is Art? and The Cossacks for the first time.  The Kreutzer Sonata starts slowly, with the characters making relatively lazy--and sometimes philosophical--observations about women, but Tolstoy's talent emerges as he describes his protagonist's murderous jealousy.  Reading the book, one almost wishes Tolstoy had written his own Crime and Punishment to set along side Dostoevsky's version. Tolstoy's What is Art? demonstrates Tolstoy's ability to produce great work in multiple genres.  For this nonfiction investigation into aesthetics is very well researched and reasoned, and demonstrates the author's versatility as a thinker. In the book, Tolstoy draws upon his knowledge of German and French, to produce a survey of the field of aesthetics.  He also proves that he has a firm grasp on the history of the Church and European history in general.  In The Cossacks, Tolstoy seems to foreshadow some of the magic of War and Peace, since his ostensible adventure tale is filled with powerful insights into every day life, and wonderful "small" and "slow" moments and conversations between ordinary people. 

Anna Karenina

In the last several weeks I've launched an assault on Leo Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina. So far, I'm only 200 or so pages in.  I last read the book almost thirty years ago, and consequently remember almost nothing of my experience with the book.  To support my reading, I viewed the Tom Stoppard movie adaption of the book.  Starring Keira Knightly, the movie is competent but seems to suggest that Tolstoy's books don't really belong on the screen.  With apologies to Greto Garbo, who starred in an early version of the book, no screen version can do justice to the internal debates that constitute so much of the novel's style and substance. 

Stoppard's main innovation in this version of Anna Karenina is that he avoids any pretense of realism by relying on an overtly theatrical mise en scene. While there's nothing wrong with converting the book into a play, it often seems as if this technique is primarily employed to avoid the cost of staging large-scale scenes.  As for the character of Anna Karenina, the new movie version seems to suggest that a lot of her power resides in her physical beauty.  Certainly her lines don't suggest any undue curiosity about the complexity of her life journey.  On the other hand, Jude Law is brilliant as Karnenin. He's dignified, reserved, proud, wounded, and cold--everything Tolstoy seemed to have meant him to be. 

The book itself is going well.  On the negative side, I sometimes wonder what makes the book so beloved.  Unlike the grandeur of the Napoleonic context of War and Peace, Anna Karenina sometimes revolves around an almost intentionally ordinary adultery scandal. On the other hand, Tolstoy does demonstrate an uncanny ability to appreciate both the strengths and the weakness of all of his characters.  As I move further through the novel, the villains seem less and less villainous, and the heroes seem less and less heroic.  That is to say, while Vronsky is somewhat spoiled and immature, he's also capable of behaving with courage and gallantry.  Conversely, while Count Karenin is awkward and off-putting, he exhibits many excellent qualities, including self-control.  But even Kitty's scorned lover, Levin, turns out to be something less than the hero one expects him to be. He's hard-working, loyal, and romantic, but he also lacks many of the wonderful traits of his fun-loving and tactful friend, Prince "Stiva."

To be sure, I'll post again on Anna Karenina as I get deeper into the novel.  But Gary Saul Morson's work of criticism, Anna Karenina in Our Time:  Seeing More Wisely, suggests that my early impressions of the book are not entirely original.  Morson argues that Tolstoy's genius lies in the fact that he often intentionally veers into long descriptions of mundane topics in order to make a philosophical point:  that life isn't made up of a series of meaningful plot points.  Reading 200 pages of Anna Karenina involves one in several narrative dead ends.  For instance, there's no really compelling need for the reader to spend so much time on the details of a hunt, race, or ball. Morson maintains that Tolstoy's decision to spend time on these ostensible plot detours is intentional.  He wants to depict life as it is, as a canvas filled out by as many blank or empty spaces as colorful ones. Of course, Tolstoy has the power to hold our attention even when he's depicting the quotidian details of life.  This is why many people enjoy the society scenes in War and Peace as much as they do the description of the battle of Borodino.   But Morson argues that we become really enthralled with Tolstoy's great works when the blank spots on the canvas convince us that we are finally seeing life "as it really is," with all its highs and lows, and all its detours and dead ends.

Tolstoy's Resurrection

When preparing to read the book, Resurrection, I read some of the reader comments on Amazon. 
I think one reader said that the book helped him to understand the Russian Revolution. I think what he meant was that Tolstoy's depiction of a woman caught up in the courts (and later the prison system), helped him to understand just how bloated, corrupt, and alienating the Russian bureaucracy could be in the late 19th or early 20th century.   At any rate, Tolstoy's Resurrection is also a nice synthesis between the first and second phases of Tolstoy's writing career.  Although the book is overtly Christian, and has a clear didactic purpose, its treatment of the protagonist is nuanced, humane, empathetic, and complex.  Like all of the characters in Tolstoy's best novels, Resurrection's protagonist is filled with complicated, many-layered emotional and intellectual responses to every major decision he confronts.  Didactic or not, Resurrection allows us to understand how even the simplest moral choices turn out to be Matryoshka dolls, filled with other, increasingly intricate moral dilemmas.  More than anything, Tolstoy's Resurrection reminds that his turn toward Christian writing should not be regarded as a descent from the stylistic heights of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.  Like any of his other earlier books, Resurrection is powerfully written, the product of sustained and serious thinking. 

Karl Scholgel and Me

Last week I went to Los Angeles to attend a conference about student success.  Before and after the conference, I toured the city and some of its near neighbors, including Hollywood, Santa Monica, Malibu, Oceanside, and Santa Barbara.  Readers of this blog won't be surprised to hear that the author, who lived briefly in Southern California about twenty-three years ago, quickly became entangled in what Abraham Lincoln once called the "mystic chords of memory."  Everywhere I turned I discovered a new memory, a new association, a new reminder of my former lives.  The experience wasn't unpleasant but I felt like a snorkeler who treads over the surface of a vast, deep ocean, only occasionally peering down into the depths to discover magnificent but dark and vaguely threatening shapes moving about on the ocean floor.  One can't help but think of Marcel Proust, who merely sipped a cup of tea before getting hit by a tidal wave of recollections.  Everywhere I looked in the City of Angels unleashed new bubbles of memory from the depths of my previously unconscious mind.

While in Hollywood, I visited my old place of work on Sunset Boulevard.  I remember how excited I was on the day of my interview for that job.  Not knowing anything at all about Southern California, I only knew that I was going to be interviewed by somebody in the film industry on one of the most famous streets in America.  Driving from Santa Monica, I soon found myself on the border between Bel Air and Beverly Hills, and couldn't believe my good fortune.  The street gently rolled between a series of magnificent mansions until finally emptying out a stretch of Hollywood that featured cafes, giant billboards, a famous Tower Records store, and storied corporate headquarters.  Even then, I knew my future was bright:  I had a beautiful girlfriend, a sunny commute, and now, I felt sure, a spectacularly glamorous job.  Little did I know that Sunset Boulevard, like life itself, has a dark side.

My job, it turned out, was in a dark, seedy corner of Hollywood.  At the corner of Sunset and LaBrea, my new employer looked out at the historic Seventh Veil strip club which was regularly patrolled by crack addicts, whores, and various Bukowsky lowlifes--"pimps and magicians," as Joseph Brodsky might have written.  The job itself was worse than its environs, sheer hell:  my introduction to the unrelenting awfulness of working life.  A post-production studio, I soon learned, was a collection of small, dark edit bays and related mechanical rooms.   My particular post-production studio was worse than that, a random assortment of decaying, dishevelled buildings.  And I worked in the worst part of this bad place, in a small, windowless room called "the vault," which was literally surrounded by steel bars in order to protect the company's vast collection of films and VHS tapes.  

My job, and the job of my equally unfortunate friend, Mitch, was to act as video and film archivists, finding specific versions of a film whenever the technicians were asked to format or otherwise alter some version of a film or tape.  At the bottom of the food chain, Mitch and I envied everyone, except perhaps for the shipping clerks, the couriers who not infrequently turned out to be former child stars or other Hollywood riffraff, and the guy who sat in the company's warehouse on the other side of town,  disturbed only two times a day by my visits to collect tapes.

The tragedy of the place wasn't merely in the dark, thankless, underpaid work.  Putting stickers on tapes, and going blind from searching for the endlessly misplaced stock, wasn't the worst thing in the world.  No, the tragedy of the place was that it was located in Hollywood, and half of the employees had come here in the hopes of becoming actors, cinematographers, and directors.  One colleague, Shawn, wanted to be a director.  Once he told Mitch and me that his mother had sent a high school VHS film he had produced to Steven Spielberg with a note, explaining that her son was a protege and deserved Spielberg's patronage.  The only thing sadder than this, I felt, was the actual VHS film, a bleak, nostalgic "music video" of his former high school sweetheart twirling about a park to the accompaniment of Shawn's crude camera effects.  The homely, red-headed receptionist aspired to be an actress.  One of the video technicians had a distant cousin who helped to produce the show, the Simpsons, and so he naturally assumed he'd be offered a job on staff at any moment.  In Hollywood, everyone had come to the city for the same reason:  they wanted to strike it big.  

But like Proust, my mind wanders.  Driving around the city, every spot seems to trigger some volcanic eruption from the past.   I only lived in Los Angeles for about a year, but in that year a thousand things happened, or so it would seem from the volume of memories that overwhelmed me on my short visit.  

In twelve short months I lived in Santa Monica, Westwood, and the edge of Beverly Hills, worked in Beverly Hills and Burbank, volunteered on a federal senate campaign, worked for a UCLA professor, babysat, saw movies, strolled the Third Street Promenade, went dancing, bore witness (if only from the comfort of a Westwood chair) to the L.A. riots, smoked weed for the first time, saw movie stars walking around town (once a roommate reported that he partied with Gary Coleman, who allegedly wore a purple cape and surrounded himself with women--the image stuck with me), traveled across the state, visited Tijuana for the first time, spent New Year's Eve in Vegas, flew to Missouri to see an old friend, traveled up the 101 all the way to Vancouver and back again, hosted friends and family, got a dog, moved in with a girlfriend, got dumped by a girlfriend, rode a horse, spent time at Disneyland, toured Venice Beach and Marina Del Ray and Pacific Palisades, applied to graduate schools, interviewed for countless jobs (at a congressman's district office, at a congressman's campaign office, at an assemblywoman's district office, at the Israeli lobby's office, at the State Department, at the L.A. City Treasurer's Office), and yes, dear Soviet Roulette fans, read Tolstoy's War and Peace--all of it, every page--although I was sometimes sorely tempted to skip the domestic scenes in favor of those which were set in the Napoleonic Wars.  (For what's worth, I remember thinking that there were two types of people in this world, those who wanted to read about Natasha, and those who preferred to read about Napoleon.)

What should the reader make of this surfeit of memory?  What's the connection to Soviet history?  I can scarcely find any.  But on my recent trip, I stopped into a Hollywood bookstore and bought Karl Scholgel's Moscow 1937.  This book takes a synchronic rather than a diachronic look at the events of 1937.   That is to say, the author tries to look at a constellation of overlapping events rather than a line up of incidents.  At first I wondered what the difference in approaches might look like, or mean.   But then I thought about my own experience in Los Angeles.  In many ways my life in 1991-1992 wasn't connected to my life in either 1990 or my life in 1993.  I wasn't the same before or after L.A.

In fact, when you visit Southern California you instantly understand how and why a piece of history can't always be understood in relationship to that period of time which precedes it or succeeds it. I remember the first time I landed in L.A.  The plants weren't the same, the girls weren't the same, the weather wasn't the same, the homes weren't the same, the geography wan't same, the work wasn't the same.  My job was a case in point.  In Chicago or Washington, D.C., your boss was generally older, more educated, and better dressed than you.  In L.A. the reverse was true:  you expected your boss to wear horrible Hawaiian print shirts, swear constantly, and eventually reveal that he had dropped out of high school in his junior year of high school.  I remember one such boss who called my colleagues and I into a conference room to give us his best rendition of a motivational speech.  "This firm is like a family.  I want you all to know that.  However, if you f##k up you'll be fired.  It's that simple."  

At any rate, I suspect that Russia in 1937 wasn't quite the same as Russia in any other year.  It's certainly possible to explain the year of the purges by referring to Lenin's brutal philosophy of politics.  It's also possible to explain 1937 with reference to Russia's tortured experience with Tsarism and global war.  But these explanations hide something unique about the chaos and terror of the worst years of show trials, purges and gulags.  In fact, Scholgel's tour de horizon of Moscow in 1937 helps us to isolate something rare and terrifying about this moment in time.  And that is that this society at this time was terrified, disorganized, and hovering on the brink of collapse.  Ordinarily, we think of Soviet Russia in 1937 as brutal but efficiently totalitarian, moving the country inexorably toward victory over the NAZIS and global superpower status.  But isolating 1937 from the Soviet Union's glorious short-term future deflects us from the realization that Stalin and his colleagues were desperately trying to manage demographic anarchy, cultural and social change, international isolation, technological vertigo, and colossal economic failure. 

If you look at 1937 as one moment in a long string of moments, you might just miss the main point.  As one moment in a string of moments, 1937 is the year in which Stalin employed terror to consolidate his hold on power as he moved his country toward superpower status.  But viewed without reference to either the past or the future, 1937 was a moment in which Stalin and Bolsheviks in general struggled desperately to remain in power by blaming others for the general disarray of their world.  The Revolution was twenty years old in that year, but it hadn't brought peace, prosperity, security, or even the basic promise of socialism:  planning.  In fact, things were anything but well planned in the age of five year plans.  Nothing was where it was supposed to be;  no one was doing what he was supposed to do;  everything seemed to be falling apart.  There were only two explanations for the chaos:  either socialism wasn't effectively managing modernity, or socialism was being sabotaged.  Stalin, and perhaps Russians to a greater extent than we might like to acknowledge, choose sabotage.  

Fade back to L.A.  The year was 1991.  1991 was like no other year, before or since.  It wasn't the continuation of my high school life;  nor was it an anticipation of my Midwest or East Coast or even Southwestern lives.  It was a year like no other.  

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.