Shkolvsky on Authentic Love

"Life tailors us for a certain person and laughs when we are drawn to a person unable to love us."

"My fate was completely predetermined. But everything might have been different."

Heidegger and the existentialists have something to teach us about love. Love is linked to authenticity. At first, we fall in love, but in a superficial, inauthentic way. We don't realize how random the process of linking our lives to the lives of others can be. We are attracted to someone and make ourselves believe that we could never have loved anyone else. But this isn't true. We might just as easily have fallen for the charms of a thousand other people. Over time, if we're honest and brave enough to deal with this existential fact, we admit that love is not blind but, worse than that, arbitrary. At first, this knowledge terrifies us: am I really in love with this person in front of me, or did I fall into this state by happenstance? In the end, if we're courageous enough, we accept or even embrace the fact that we can love a woman passionately even in the knowledge that there are fifty-seven other women on E-Harmony who fit our search criteria equally well.

The whole delusion of love reminds one of Heidegger's theory that most of us have never examined the lives we live and therefore live inauthentically. A small subset of the human race eventually awakes to the fact that our truest selves have been artificially constructed, the product of chance rather than choice. Notwithstanding our most cherished desires, we realize upon examination that we inherit our lives rather than make them. In response to this realization of the "given" nature of our personal existential dilemma, we make some effort to outrun or escape fate. We move to other states, adopt artificial music tastes, renounce familial political or religious affiliations, and throw ourselves into relationships that seem, at least initially, to be unwise or surprising--the lifestyle equivalent of wildly waiving one's arms in the air to prove that nothing has been foretold, nothing is preordained. Eventually, the attempt to escape from the arms of fate fails. And we recognize this failure. However, we don't merely return to our original, unexamined lives. We now live these lives bravely and honestly, with the sometimes awkward knowledge that our lives are not purely the product of our own heroic freedom.

Vicktor Shklovsky's epistolary novel, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, touches upon the artificial nature of love. Shlovsky, one of the Soviet Union's best literary theorists, wrote Zoo as testimony to an unrequited love. The book is filled with aphorisms by this master stylist.

I have wound my whole life around you.

I need you you; you know how to bring me out of myself.

Your love may be great, but it's far from joyful.

Foxes have their holes, the prisoner is given a cot, the knife sleeps in the scabbard, but you had nowhere to lay your head.

The Roman soldiers who pierced the hands of Christ are no more guilty than the nails. All the same, the crucified feel much pain.

Sick birds don't like to be watched.

And it is easy to be cruel--one need only not love.

The stag uses its antlers in combat, the nightingale does not sing in vain, but our books avail us nothing. This wound will not heal.

Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life.

When I was not yet thirty and did not yet know loneliness..

I thought Grzhebin cruel for having gulped down so much Russian literature.

...like a rejected suitor who ruins himself buying flowers to turn the room of his unresponsive beloved into a flower shop and who admires this absurdity.

Don't be surprised, Alya, we are all capable of raving--those of us who really live.

There is no harm in loving.

Love Alya, but not your love of her.

When you've wanted a certain dress for a long time, it doesn't pay to buy it--you've memorized it to tatters.

Naturally a thing has only itself to blame if it doesn't know how to become loved.

Here I sit, as much in love as any telegraph operator.

I sit here with my malady; I think about you, about automobiles. (The combination helps.)

We were in a hurry to get life in our clutches. But we lacked the necessary words; we thought you could grasp a woman like a thing--by the handle.

It's better to live all of life to the sound of a guitar.

I just don't care. I know one thing: You won't even put my letter in the basket on the right side of your bed.

For me, Berlin is encircled by your name.

Don't be surprised when I cry out--even when you're not hurting me.

We talked to each other about many things, all of them bitter.

Life is hard for every man who loves a woman or his trade.

She has a porcelain face, with eyelashes so big that they drag down her lids. She can slam them shut, like the doors of safes.

I was bound to be broken while abroad and I found myself a love to do the job.

I lay at your feet like a rug, Alya!

You write about me--for yourself; I write about myself--for you.

This book is being written for you, Alya; writing it is physically painful.

Set my words free, Alya, so they can come to you like dogs to their master and curl up at your feet.

She is the only island for you in your life. From her there is no turning back for you. Only around her does the sea have color.

I want to break into pieces and scatter throughout the city the fact that I love you. If only I knew how!

To live in any real way is painful.

Quit writing about "how, how, how much you love me," because at the third "how much" I think about something else.

And yet, at this moment, an enormous, almost authentic moon is peering into my window.

The past is no more. The circles, rings of love, have receded, moving toward the shore.

If I had owned an extra suit, I would never have come to grief.

The stud (Anatol Kuragin) is not destined for unsuccessful love affairs. His path is strewn with roses; only utter exhaustion can terminate his romances.

I am very sentimental, Alya. That's because I take life seriously.

It seemed to me that, of the two of us, probably only one was human.

It's all a question of "how much." All my letters are about "how much" I love you.

Tunisian Deserter

The Russian Revolution was of course a unique historical event but all revolutions have something in common, if only a certain demonic energy or a natural rhythm or etiology of revolt. Recently a North African friend told me about her indirect experience with contemporary revolution. She said that the Tunisian Revolution signified the overthrow of boredom as much as it signified the triumph of a new type of politics or economics. Under a dictator who rules for decades, one no longer expects that one day will be different than the next. The experience, I imagine, is like living in Phoenix, Arizona: you may well be comfortable with sun and heat, but you can't be anything other than bored when you wake up on a Saturday morning and stroll outside to see a perfectly blue sky. For better or worse, one day is exactly like the next.

So, among other things, revolution represents an end to boredom. Of course, when my Tunisian friend expresses her confidence in the future, and joy about the birth of a new, democratic order in her homeland, I cannot help but to think about how happy almost everybody seemed to be when the Provisional Government first took power in Russia, or indeed how happy almost all Iranians were when the Shah first fled the country. The point, it would seem, is that revolutions are unpredictable, or worse than that: they inevitably degenerate into violence and radicalism. Or do they? We do well to remember that we were all revolutionaries at some point. The British, the French, the Americans, the Latin Americans---what people doesn't owe its allegiance to a revolutionary moment of some sort?

Today I thought about the Tunisian Revolution when watching the 1933 sound film, Deserter. Deserter, set in Hamburg amidst one of the worst strikes in Wiemar Germany's tragic history, attempts to document just how truly international the Bolshevik Revolution was meant to be. In its early sequences we see a poor German worker attempting to steal a prime cut of meat from a bourgeois restaurant table. Caught in the act, he flees the scene, hounded by angry bourgeois citizens and policemen. Faced with either the crowd's justice, or his own bleak plight as a proletarian, he chooses to commit suicide by throwing himself into a busy street. Soon he's nothing more than a bloody stain on the street, an inconvenience to the rich who are forced to pause momentarily in their open-air cars to allow for the clean-up.

The man's act of desperation symbolizes the revolutionary moment in Germany, just as a poor Tunisian man's self-immolation in the face of adversity and corruption symbolized the revolutionary moment there just a few months ago. Like Gladwell's immensely overrated work, The Tipping Point, one struggles to understand just what it is that turns the slings and arrows of everyday dictatorship into something so intolerable that self-immolation begins to seem like a rational act as opposed to the bizarre act of a madman.

Deserter, originally designed to be a product of collaboration between Bolshevik Russia and Social Democrats in Germany, is about a long and grueling German strike at the shipyards. It's the usual story of strike breakers, fat capitalists, and brutal policemen engaged in a conspiracy to keep hard-working proletarians from enjoying the fruit of their own labor. Opposed to the forces of reaction are the customary heroes of labor, including a feisty and beautiful woman who passes out copies of the Red Courier in spite of police harassment. The twist is that one man, the film's hero, "deserts" the cause of the strikers. Underwhelmed by the logic of class struggle or unconvinced that he bears personal responsibility for the victory of the strikers, one man, Karl Renn, abandons the strikers to their fate at the hands of armed police and at least one tank. Ashamed of his failure to do his duty, the strike council decides to send him (as three other workers who are unable to physically help the cause) on a journey to the Soviet Union to accompany a ship the German workers have constructed.

Once in the Soviet Union, Karl quickly realizes that he hasn't fully understand the world in which he lives. In Russia, Karl and the other German workers see an enthusiastic, healthy, and happy Russian citizenry celebrating a Red Army parade and welcoming them to the country. Scenes of Russian industrial power and mechanized processes imply that Karl is caught up with the romance of Russian economic dynamism. In any case, Karl begins to take note of the international nature of the class struggle. Sensing that he has much to learn from the one nation on earth where the proletariat have taken charge of the mechanisms of power, Karl volunteers his technical expertise to work in a Russian factory. Once there, he makes a name for himself by working hard to help his comrades to achieve their difficult production quotas.

It's unnerving to see just how accurately the film propaganda mirrors what actually took place in the Stalin era. Although Karl is ultimately successful in helping his Russian colleagues to increase production by a factor of 350 percent in 30 days, the film seems to suggest just how insane this production goal or similar goals must have been. The diesel factory montage shows pistons moving feverishly, workers scuttling from one section of the factory to another sweat pouring down their faces, and pressure gauge arrows moving excitedly.

The film also features workers who engaged in self-criticism over the pace of work. Capitalist bosses are not necessary in Communist Russia: when the fate of a proletarian nation is at stake, the production quota simply must be met. We know from history, the five year plans were a recipe for industrial confusion and human disaster. If one looks closely at the factory scenes in this film, one can almost sense the tragedy of industrialization under Stalin. In Communist Russia, work was the equivalent of warfare. It mattered not how many people suffered or died to meet the nation's industrial objectives. And if failure occurred--and how could it not in such a frenetic rush?--then saboteurs must be to blame.

Notwithstanding the madness of Russian-style industrialization, Karl is impressed by what he sees. A portrait of Lenin watches over his deliberations about his future and he ultimately returns to Germany as an enthusiastic supporter of the international class struggle with few doubts about the righteousness of his cause or the inevitability of ultimate victory. Karl has seen the future--the Soviet Union--and it works.

Filming the Myth of October

Vsevolod Pudovkin's 1927 silent film, The End of St. Petersburg, is a masterful telling of the central myth of the October Revolution. It begins, where Russia begins, amidst the foil of the new revolutionary order: the dirty, squalid peasant countryside. Here we see poverty, lethargy, a dust storm, a dying mother, field laborers, and a baby who will grow up poor and someday need to move to the city in order to survive.

After getting a glimpse of the sickle, Pudovkin takes us to see the hammer: the factories of St. Peterburg. In the city, we see smoke, hard working, sweating proletarians, and the symbols of late Tsarism, including monumental architecture, the statue of the Bronze Horseman, slum housing for the working class, a bustling stock market, and wealthy and corpulent shareholders.

In old Russia, capitalists are fat and idle, and their markets dynamic but inhuman, methodical, greedy, and impersonal. In contrast, St. Petersburg's workers are strong, hard-working, muscular, and action-oriented. Yet the personal lives of the lives of workers are also circumscribed by poverty, wage slavery, and political oppression. In the tenements, clothes are perpetually drying on the clotheslines, tenement rooms are persistently crowded, dark,[ and windowless, and strike breakers are always at hand to quash labor unrest.

When the rural boy, now turned man, arrives in St. Petersburg looking for work, he's taken in by folk from his village who have migrated to the city previously. Gradually, the naive young man figures out that the system is stacked against ordinary men like him, and that the police, factory owners and bosses, members of the legal caste, and scabs collude to keep working men in brutal circumstances.

The director next takes his audience on a tour de horizon of the First World War, contrasting the enthusiasm of the governing classes with the spectacular suffering of ordinary soldiers. Following Lenin's reasoning, war in general is the product of vampiric capitalist machinations, designed to increase profits while distracting workers from their own class interests.

Eventually, the war leads to the first phase of the Revolution, but the director is completely unsympathetic to the Provisional Government, which maintains the war effort for the benefit of the propertied classes. Scenes of war dead in the flooded trenches are interspersed with scenes of happy bourgeois toasting the fall of the tsar and the rise of the bourgeois phase of the revolution. And Kerensky, leader of the coalition government, is portrayed, not without historical evidence, as something of a clown. He's isolated, attempting to use dramatic rhetoric alone--theater essentially-- to convince soldiers to overrule their own interests to quash the Bolshevik insurrection. They resist the temptation to fire on their brothers and instead march on the Winter Palace.

The movie concludes with the triumph of the revolutionaries, as one woman (apparently the same woman who starred in Pudovkin's Mother) marches through the cold, majestic Winter Palace to find her husband, a worker, soldier, and loyal Communist. The Revolution has transformed this woman who, while originally only immersed in a private struggle to help protect her immediate family, has recently begun to help comrades engaged in revolutionary struggle. And of course the Revolution has transformed ath city itself, which has been reborn as Leningrad. Brief but real historical of Lenin's oratory helps to reinforce his presence in this film which was, according to a writer for the Sense of Cinema, commissioned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Radicalism: It's a Good Thing

Do we get closer or farther from the truth over time? Does time give us the benefit of perspective or the handicap of distance? Revolution in Russia, As Reported by the New York Tribuine and the New York Herald, 1894- 1921, suggests that historiography is overrated. In truth, contemporary American reporters, for all of their ideological and national bias, seem to have gotten the Revolution right on most counts. The American press understood the importance of the Revolution, and also seemed to had a reasonable good grasp of its component parts as they unfolded in real time.

Of course, not until the Civil War came to an end did foreign observers know whether or not the Bolsheviks would ultimately triumph over their diverse opponents, who included socialists, anarchists, tsarists, liberals, Germans, Poles, Japanese, Ukrainian nationalists, and so many others. Even so, they knew who Lenin and Trotsky were, and how they came to power. As Edward Pearlstein's edited volume of New York reporting on the Revolution makes clear, Americans knew that the Bolsheviks were not, as modern historians often suggest, the unlikely beneficiaries of a chaotic and unpredictable situation. Instead, they were the actors who were best suited to the extraordinary times in which Russians found themselves. Although they represented a tiny part of the Russian political spectrum, they had some tremendous political advantages. They were disciplined, organized, well-lead, ruthless, geographically concentrated, and closely allied with the ordinary soldiers and workers who had the power to determine the fate of the Revolution. Or, to put matters differently, in an unrelentingly radical situation, only a radical party could hope to survive.

So, although Lenin's decision to collaborate with the German government in order to arrive in St. Petersburg would ordinarily have severely compromised his political reputation, in turbulent, miserable, war-weary Russia, it was Lenin's ability to articulate a totally novel future for the country that mattered most. Whatever disadvantages Bolsheviks labored under, they wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the past. Most concretely, this meant that Bolsheviks advocated radical land reform and an immediate end to the war. But more generically, this meant that the Bolsheviks could say to the country that they alone understood just how completely the ancien regime had failed. Better to start over with a new and alien political party and economic philosophy, than to adopt any part of the old way of doing business.

Militant Bolshevik Atheists

As mentioned previously, Alexander Yakovlev's diatribe against Bolshevism, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, breaks down the Soviet Union's crimes against humanity in the following categories: the assault on childhood, Jews, intellectuals, fellow travelers, peasants, and the clergy. With respect to the clergy, Yakovlev succinctly outlines his case against the Bolsheviks, a case which is more systematically investigated in another book, The Plot to Kill God.

The attack against the Church was brutal and opened as early as 1918 when forty-seven clergymen in the Yekaterinburg diocese were shot, axed to death, or drowned. As the Civil War raged, scores of Church leaders were murdered, and often in unspeakable ways. Some clergymen were frozen in ice water, others castrated. In some cases, the churchmen were placed into boiling water, burned, strangled, scalped, tied to paddle-wheels, or even crucified, with the naked corpses sometimes being strung up on trees as a gruesome message to other would-be religious leaders. According to Yakovlev, 3,000 priests were killed in 1918 alone, and a great many of these murders occurred with deliberate religious sacrilege. The murders were sometimes spontaneously conceived by local communists, but Lenin directly encouraged the bloodshed, on one occasion asking that a religious holiday celebration be suppressed by violence.

In 1919, the Bolsheviks toyed with the idea of establishing a Red Church, a version of the traditional church that would be loyal to the Communist Party and the goals of the Revolution. But the effort failed, largely because Soviet ideology was so vehemently anti-religious. The assault on religion also took the form of a large-scale confiscation of church property in 1922, which had predictably disastrous consequences for Russia's cultural and historical heritage. In the end, 2.5 billion was stolen from the Church, but the money never went to famine relief as promised. That same year, the Church's patriarch was arrested, allegedly for fomenting rebellion. 32 archbishops and metropolitans were executed in that year. Patriarch Tikhon ultimately died in the purges of 1937.

The Communist Party's war on religion was formalized with the creation of the Union of Militant Atheists as well as the Degliryal society, which presided over actual five-year plans for atheism. The Soviet government also attacked religious bodies--including Islamic and pagan ones--by implementing draconian taxes on religious bodies, and policies related to collectivization, purges, urban planning and building, and ethnic displacement. Famously, the war against religion was relaxed during World War II, although Stalin's end came in the midst of anti-Semitic paranoia. In the 1960s, anti-religious persecution resumed, unaffected by the so-called Thaw.

Rachel Polonsky's Russian Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Everywhere the soul of Onegin

Involuntarily reveals itself,

Whether by a brief word, by a cross

Or by a question mark..." Pushkin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molotov Meets Chekhov

I am not sure when I first decided to go to graduate school to get a master’s degree in history. But it must have happened when I was waiting tables in Washington, D.C.. Perhaps the moment of crisis came when I was so burned out on waiting tables that I actually followed a smug customer out into the street to inquire whether it was on account of poor service that I had been left no tip on a bill of several hundred dollars.

Of course, as a dean of arts and sciences at a community college, I still have occasion to use my experience as a waiter in my day-to-day life. For instance, just yesterday I apologized to an esteemed colleague, a biology faculty member, for not giving her more information about a decision I had made the previous week. What else could I tell her but that I had been “in the weeds”?

At any rate, I did go to graduate school, escaping to Montreal where I hoped to get some semblance of a feeling that I was living the life of an adventurer and expatriate. Once there, I did lead an interesting life, but academically I did very little more than read several hundred books. These books fell into a bifurcated but extremely predictable pattern. First, I read dozens upon dozens of incredibly outdated biographies and memoirs of completely irrelevant British politicians of the 19^th and 20^th century. It’s “ghastly” (to coin a British phrase) to contemplate how similar these books were: everybody went to Eaton and Oxford, adopted one of two (or perhaps three) political philosophies, and then exploited aristocratic and business connections in order to accept a long series of political and diplomatic appointments.

Although I picked up a few wonderful turns of phrase, and still call people “damp squibs” or refer to easy teaching assignments as “rotten boroughs,” I learned very little of substance from my early years in graduate school. However, my autodidactic tendencies extended to another form of biography, that of poets and authors of the twentieth century. So my readings in Castlereagh (“I saw death on the way, he had a face like Castlereagh”), Palmerston, Gladstone, and Disraeli, were closely shadowed by parallel readings in Kerouac, Genet, Gide, Joyce, and Burroughs.

If I had a split personality, I once tried to reconcile these opposing trends by writing a dissertation proposal that rather pretentiously and unrealistically claimed that I would one day apply the tools of literary theory to analyze political rhetoric as if it were the modernist prose of Virginia Woolf. Of course, British political figures were closely aligned to their artistic counterparts: The Bloomsbury Group included John Maynard Keynes, for instance, and he was not without political juice in the Interwar years.

At any rate, the project of unifying my own interest in politics and arts was a failure, which is why I appreciate Rachel Polonsky’s new book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern: Travels in Russian History. Molotov’s Magic Lantern is a strange but pleasant mixture of travel writing, history, literary theory, unbridled Russophilia, and autobiography. The premise of this work of creative nonfiction is that Polonsky, living in Moscow, once gained access to the personal library of Stalin’s evil sidekick and onetime Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Molotov. By gaining this access, reading widely in Russian history and literature, and travelling to cities such as Vologda, Archangel, Ulan Ude, Novgorod, Rostov-on-the-Don, and Taganrog, Polonsky breathes life into the whole sweep of (mostly) modern Russian history, a history that is alive in interlocking and tragic political and literary drama.