Below are a few favorite citations culled from Ilya Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz. Please also see my other post on the subject, Laz Roitshvantz's Russia.
"She can claim such early Party adherence that it makes you dizzy to think of it. Just look at those eyes! What relentless determination lurks there!"
"It was not his surname that ruined Laz. A sigh was to blame. Or perhaps not a sign, perhaps the economic system, or the heat wave, or even some high-level problem."
"For how could old Hershanovich claim to be a craft worker (self-employed)? What did he produce? Nothing but circumcisions of innocent little boys, at three rubles a-piece."
"That fellow Schatzman stared at me ten minutes without blinking, either he means to marry you or he wants to get me beyond the Artic Circle."
"Time is not money. Time is more than money. You have robbed me, and consequently the workers' State as a whole, of five valuable minutes."
"In the old synagogue school I was taught the Talmus. Of course, that is all deception, and since then I have read the ABC of Communism from one cover to the other."
"Surely you don't really think that I, Lazar Roitshvantz, who have survived eight different regimes, do not know so simple a thing?"
"From the standpoint of eugenics, a marriage consumated in a graveyard is likely to produce abnormal offspring."
"I will even promise never to sigh again and to devote the rest of my not unlimited life to the Chinese Question."
"Laz knew very well what had ruined him in court, and he had now solemnly sworn to himself in future to reduce thought to a minimum."
"As we say in Gomel, there can even be honor in spitting."
"I am a victim just like Beilis, except that America took Beilis' part, but who's going to take mine? Nobody."
"Not to lead lesser men into temptation, Chebyshev only wore his English suits in the home behind tightly closed shutters."
"Before the Revolution I occupied myself exclusively with Roman Law. That's quite a bit different from planting cabbages."
"How is a man like me going to earn his living, a simpleton, a naive Russian, amid all this impudent Jewish confraternity. How, I ask you!"
"Your wisecracks are not to my taste. They are tiresome and middle-class."
"But my vision beheld those eyes, and in a flass all my class-consciousness evaporated."
"...he was not really human flesh, he was nothing but elevated thought."
"...though you and I are both good Marxists, we are, pardon me, also real human beings..."
"You have just not got a glimmering of the most elementary dialectics."
"I have had six different domicilary visits about those accursed trousers, and if anything saved me in the end it was having a pure red past."
"...I am merely a non-established addressee."
"Will you claim to be as clever as Trotsky?"
"It's good pre-war stuff, and it has withstood eight very assorted regimes."
"Laz was quite clear that when the imperialists of Paris wriggled their feet, that was merely the death spasms of corpses already in a state of putrefaction."
"..I am a Party candidate without a stain on my name..."
"...you are interested in diseased pleasures, erotic excesses, the scum thrown up by the NEP policy."
"I am devoted to the resplendent ideal, and I am wriggling my way towards it."
"...instead of stupid sturgeon we have before us men like Kant and together with him are 1,071 other criminals."
"There you have it," he cried, triumphantly, "typical rose-water of a petty-bourgeois superstructure."
"Like a mangy sheep you should drive from your presence any man who sinks so low as to substitute love skilly like that for iron materialism."
"In the shrubberies were couples totally divested of Party, locked in kisses."
"And where is it written that I have the right to purchase the happiness of the whole of complex mankind with old Hersch's life?"
"Laz could not have lived a day here by his scissors. He was saved by his brilliant dialectics."
"Well, and what do you feed your rabbits on?"...Nothing but official imagination," he said.
"Roitshvantz, you lie as if you were not human, you might be a newspaper."
"I am not a divinity. I do clerical work."
"When all was said and done, dear Fanny was fruit of a reactionary tree..."
"Now explain exactly who you really are!"..."Very simple. If you're the foundation, I'm the superstructure."
"I can carve anything up from the Marxist angle."
""I am just coming to the end of the sixth volume of a Marxist critique of a variety of configurations." In some this excited respectful alarm, in others, envy."
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Laz Roitshvant's Russia
Ilya Ehrenburg published his rollicking satire, The Storm Life of Laz Roitshvantz, in 1928. The novel, st in the Russia, Poland, Britain, Italy, and France, serves as a useful antidote to biographies and histories of Europe in the period, and the Soviet Union in particular. What did Soviet intellectuals know about their society a decade after the October Revolution? If Joshua Rubenstein's meticulously-researched biography, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg, is any guide, even ostensibly loyal Soviet intellectuals were often deeply unsettled by the Soviet experiment. But perhaps Rubenstein's book doesn't go far enough. If you read Ehrenburg's prose, you get a devastating if satirical portrait of a delusional police state bent on the intrusive subjugation of its monitored, overregulated, and distrusted citizens. Of course, The Stormy Life was written and published prior to Collectivization and the Great Terror, but Ehrenburg's portrait of Russia at the end of the New Economic Policy is already deeply pessimistic about the world's first experiment in socialist government. Ehrenburg's Russia is a land of censorship, propaganda, suspicion, surveillance, bigotry, and empty ideological jargon. The protagonist, an apolitical Jew, butts up against the state with darkly comic results.
Laz Roitshvantz's tragedy is that he has somehow remained human in an utterly inhuman environment. Roitshvantz's individualism crashes repeatedly against the rock of Soviet totalitarianism. Time and again, Roitshvantz is confronted by inhumane Soviet officials, institutions, and ideological assumptions. Soviet officials are depicted as cruel, anti-Semitic obscurantists. Soviet institutions are portrayed as irrational, unnatural, and inefficient, but also impersonal if not diabolical. Worst of all, Soviet ideology hampers Soviet citizens from living productive or happy lives. Ehrenburg's Russia sometimes seems to move from traditional satire toward dystopian science fiction. Although filled with jokes, Laz Roitshvantz's adventures in the Soviet Union show that Soviet citizens routinely suffered from Soviet assumptions about good government. For Ehrenburg in the 1920s, Bolshevik ideology was, paradoxically, both crassly materialistic, and absurdly Utopian. The Soviet creed was seemingly tailor-made to undermine the human spirit. Dostoyevsky once said that if God did not exist, everything would be permitted. Similarly, Ehrenburg seems to be arguing that Marxism as a faith permits everything, including class prejudice, censorship, empty ritualism, arbitrary justice, arcane and scholastic ideological debates, Party bureaucracy, and meaningless sloganeering.
Roitshvantz's humanity ultimately lands him in jail. His run-in with Soviet authorities is of course predicated on a satire which is at least partly softened by extending the ridicule to a number of other countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and to some extent, America. Ehrenburg's barbs against the Soviet Union are also mitigated by attacks on the White Russian diaspora, which is portrayed as insular, militaristic, archaic, and vengeful. Ehrenburg's critique of Soviet life is also set against a larger critique of European civilization as a whole. For Ehrenburg sees Soviet anti-Semitism as a variation on a common European theme. If the Soviet Russians and Ukrainians are anti-Semitic, so too are the Poles, Germans, Exiled Russians, and French. Ehrenburg's decision to compare Judaism with Marxism is also intriguing. If the Jews continued to faithfully practice a set of empty rituals, weren't the communists guilty of doing exactly the same thing? When all was said and done, Eherenburg didn't see the difference between the Talmud and Bukharin's ABC of Communism.
The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz is a wonderfully witty book and deserves a wider readership. Although the book sometimes can sometimes stray from satire to didacticism, its central comedy of adventure reminds one of Saul Bellow. When Laz Roitshvantz tries to sell his share of the communist utopia, it also demonstrates kinship with Gogol's Dead Souls. Alas, Laz's adventures really reveals that interwar European intellectuals were able to forsee a future which was far darker than anything even Gogol could have imagined.
Laz Roitshvantz's tragedy is that he has somehow remained human in an utterly inhuman environment. Roitshvantz's individualism crashes repeatedly against the rock of Soviet totalitarianism. Time and again, Roitshvantz is confronted by inhumane Soviet officials, institutions, and ideological assumptions. Soviet officials are depicted as cruel, anti-Semitic obscurantists. Soviet institutions are portrayed as irrational, unnatural, and inefficient, but also impersonal if not diabolical. Worst of all, Soviet ideology hampers Soviet citizens from living productive or happy lives. Ehrenburg's Russia sometimes seems to move from traditional satire toward dystopian science fiction. Although filled with jokes, Laz Roitshvantz's adventures in the Soviet Union show that Soviet citizens routinely suffered from Soviet assumptions about good government. For Ehrenburg in the 1920s, Bolshevik ideology was, paradoxically, both crassly materialistic, and absurdly Utopian. The Soviet creed was seemingly tailor-made to undermine the human spirit. Dostoyevsky once said that if God did not exist, everything would be permitted. Similarly, Ehrenburg seems to be arguing that Marxism as a faith permits everything, including class prejudice, censorship, empty ritualism, arbitrary justice, arcane and scholastic ideological debates, Party bureaucracy, and meaningless sloganeering.
Roitshvantz's humanity ultimately lands him in jail. His run-in with Soviet authorities is of course predicated on a satire which is at least partly softened by extending the ridicule to a number of other countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and to some extent, America. Ehrenburg's barbs against the Soviet Union are also mitigated by attacks on the White Russian diaspora, which is portrayed as insular, militaristic, archaic, and vengeful. Ehrenburg's critique of Soviet life is also set against a larger critique of European civilization as a whole. For Ehrenburg sees Soviet anti-Semitism as a variation on a common European theme. If the Soviet Russians and Ukrainians are anti-Semitic, so too are the Poles, Germans, Exiled Russians, and French. Ehrenburg's decision to compare Judaism with Marxism is also intriguing. If the Jews continued to faithfully practice a set of empty rituals, weren't the communists guilty of doing exactly the same thing? When all was said and done, Eherenburg didn't see the difference between the Talmud and Bukharin's ABC of Communism.
The Stormy Life of Laz Roitshvantz is a wonderfully witty book and deserves a wider readership. Although the book sometimes can sometimes stray from satire to didacticism, its central comedy of adventure reminds one of Saul Bellow. When Laz Roitshvantz tries to sell his share of the communist utopia, it also demonstrates kinship with Gogol's Dead Souls. Alas, Laz's adventures really reveals that interwar European intellectuals were able to forsee a future which was far darker than anything even Gogol could have imagined.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Berdyaev's Russian Revolution
Nikolai Berdyaev book, The Russian Idea, provides readers with a wonderful survey of the Russian revolutionary tradition. Its central thesis, that the Russians are an almost inherently millenarian or eschatologically-minded people, and therefore naturally produce social conflagrations that prefigure religious apocalpyse, is ultimately unconvincing. Notwithstanding, the long-standing tradition of fixating on the myriad characteristics of the "Russian Soul," Berdyaev's attempt to assign unique properties to the Russian people is anything but scientific or even rational. Ironically, by tracing the history of Russian exceptionalism in such detail, Berdyaev highlights the fact that his theory of Russian messianism is in some respects merely the latest chapter in a flawed intellectual tradition. If the Russians were victims of certain strands of Enlightened thinking, they certainly weren't alone in their victimhood. Even so, Berdyaev's intellectual and theological perspectives on the Russian Revolution remain thought-provoking. Certainly the Russian Revolution bears striking similarities to a religious awkening. Shouldn't we be skeptical of any overtly atheistic political phenomenon in a religion-soaked land?
Berdyaev's attempt to synthesize religion and atheism is intriguing. What, ultimately, is the difference between a militant, evengelical atheist and a militant, evengelical Christian? Can anything as all-emcompassing and explosive as a revolution be devoid of religious content? Over and over again, Berdyaev asks us to consider the relationship between religion and its antithesis, socialist or anarchic atheism, in the annals of revolutionary activity. Were outraged members of the materialist or even nihilist intelligentsia more or less spiritual than the members of the Orthodox clergy who practiced empty rituals while defending absolutism? Didn't Russian communism express at least some vital elements of the Christian agenda, including brotherhood and radical, otherworldly, justice? Berdyaev's central question is this: why do we find it necessary to take revolutionaries at their word by accepting the false premise that revolution springs from purely materialist considerations? Shouldn't intellectual history be taken seriously? Shouldn't religion and philosophy be incorporated into our understanding of the revolutionary dynamic?Although Berdyaev's book isn't free from muddled assertions about the essential and unchanging Russian personality, his book makes important contributions to our understanding of both Russia and the Russian Revolution. If nothing else, Berdyaev's investigation into the broad currents of nineteenth century religious and philosophical history, remind us that one can't study the Bolshevik Revolution without studying Russia. That is to say, one cannot understand 1917 without delving deep into the history of Russian ideas. Of course, the reverse is also true: one can't study Russia without studying revolution. For Russia has always been on the brink of apocaylpse, witness the Pugachev Rebellion and the aborted Decembrist revolt and the 1905 Revolution. What is 1917 if not a link in a long, unbroken chain of revolutionary events or at least potential events. But perhaps this isn't a pecularity of Russian history. Perhaps all societies stand on the brink of apolaypse. What is modern European Civilization if not a chain of revolutionary moments such as 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905, 1917, 1968, and 1989? And shouldn't even these moments be seen as the visible peaks of partially submerged volcanos of revolutionary ferment waiting to erupt?
Berdyaev's attempt to synthesize religion and atheism is intriguing. What, ultimately, is the difference between a militant, evengelical atheist and a militant, evengelical Christian? Can anything as all-emcompassing and explosive as a revolution be devoid of religious content? Over and over again, Berdyaev asks us to consider the relationship between religion and its antithesis, socialist or anarchic atheism, in the annals of revolutionary activity. Were outraged members of the materialist or even nihilist intelligentsia more or less spiritual than the members of the Orthodox clergy who practiced empty rituals while defending absolutism? Didn't Russian communism express at least some vital elements of the Christian agenda, including brotherhood and radical, otherworldly, justice? Berdyaev's central question is this: why do we find it necessary to take revolutionaries at their word by accepting the false premise that revolution springs from purely materialist considerations? Shouldn't intellectual history be taken seriously? Shouldn't religion and philosophy be incorporated into our understanding of the revolutionary dynamic?Although Berdyaev's book isn't free from muddled assertions about the essential and unchanging Russian personality, his book makes important contributions to our understanding of both Russia and the Russian Revolution. If nothing else, Berdyaev's investigation into the broad currents of nineteenth century religious and philosophical history, remind us that one can't study the Bolshevik Revolution without studying Russia. That is to say, one cannot understand 1917 without delving deep into the history of Russian ideas. Of course, the reverse is also true: one can't study Russia without studying revolution. For Russia has always been on the brink of apocaylpse, witness the Pugachev Rebellion and the aborted Decembrist revolt and the 1905 Revolution. What is 1917 if not a link in a long, unbroken chain of revolutionary events or at least potential events. But perhaps this isn't a pecularity of Russian history. Perhaps all societies stand on the brink of apolaypse. What is modern European Civilization if not a chain of revolutionary moments such as 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1905, 1917, 1968, and 1989? And shouldn't even these moments be seen as the visible peaks of partially submerged volcanos of revolutionary ferment waiting to erupt?
Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Identity, Revolution, and History
Below are some choice phrases culled from my first reading of Nikolai Berdyaev's famous treatise on the Russian revolutionary tradition, The Russian Idea.
Russian Identity
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev: "Russia is not to be understood by intellectual processes. You cannot take her measurements with a common yardstick, she has a form and stature of her own: you can only believe in Russia."
Berdyaev citing Khomyakov: "The Russians are a people in the highest degree polarized: they are a conglomeration of a contradictions."
"The unexpected is always to be expected from them. They are as a people capable in the highest degree of inspiring both intense love and violent hatred. As a people the Russians have a dusturbing effect upon the peoples of the West."
"The Russian people is not purely European and it is not purely Asiatic."
"In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia."
"Russia was never an aristocratic country in the Western sense, and equally there was no bourgeois."
"The burning oneself alive, as an exploit in religion, is a Russian national phenomenon…"
"That the Russians have a leaning to debauchery and to anarchy with a loss of discipline is well known."
"Messianic consciousness is more characteristic of the Russians than of any other people except the Jews."
Berdyaev citing Pushkin upon completion of Gogol's Dead Souls: "Oh, Lord, how wretched our Russia is."
"The Russian emotional bent for revolution was the outcome of the unbearableness of the actual conditions in which they lived, of their wrongness, and their ugliness."
Berdyaev citing Chaadav: "At the present time we constitute a gap in the moral order of the world."
Berdyaev citing Chaadav: "Looking at us it might be said that the general law of mankind had been abrogated so far as we are concerned."
Berdyaev citing Pechorin: "How sweet is is to hate one's native land, and eagerly to await its annihilation."
"The vocation of Russia presents itself as connected with the fact that the Russian people are the most humble people in the world. But there exists among that peopler a pride in their humility."
"Among the Russians and it may be among the Russians only, there exists a doubt about the righteousness of punishment."
"It is the property of the Russian people to indulge in philosophy."
"The vocation of Russia is a world vocation."
"Russia alone lives not for herself, but for thought…"
"The Russian people are a people of the future; they will decide questions which the West has not yet the strength to decide, which it does not even pose in their full depth."
"The Russian has a greater capacity for enduring suffering than the man of the West, and at the same time he is especially sensitive to suffering; he is more sympathetic than the Western man."
"Spengler described Russia very acutely and very well when he said that it is an "apocalyptic revolt against antiquity.""
"Among the Russians there is always a thirst for another world; there is always discontent with that which is."
"An eschatological bent is native to the Russian soul."
"Russia took shape in grevious historical circumstances; the Russian land was surrounded by enemies; it was made use of by the evil forces of history."
"Russian
Characteristics of Russian History
"Interruption is a characteristic of Russian history. Contrary to the opinion of the Slavophils the last thing it is is organic."
"The very manner of life of the landowning nobility was a thing incomprehensible to the people."
"The history of the Russian people is one of the most poignantly painful of histories."
"The development of Russia has been catastrophic."
"The State grew strong, the people grew weak, as Kluchevsky says."
"Among us the Intelligentsia could not live in the present; it lived in the future and sometimes in the past."
"In the second half of the century the Intelligentsia, keyed up to a revolutionary frame of mind, was obliged to lead an existence which was almost heroic…"
"There was no Renaissance among us…"
On the Nature of the Revolution
"History is not only traditional and it is not only guardianship; a lack of basis has a basis of its own; revolution is part of the flow of history."
"The Russian Intelligentsia…endeavored to find a way out of the unbearable sadness of Russian reality into an ideal reality. This ideal reality was either the Russia before Peter's the, or the West, or the coming Revolution."
"[Herzen]…regarded Hegel's philosophy as the algebra of revolution."
Berdyaev citing Belinksy: "I am beginning to love mankind in the manner of Marat. To make the smallest part of it happy I think I would exterminate the rest of it with fire and sword."
"The makers of the French Revolution lived by the up-to-date ideas of the time, the ideas of J.J. Rousseau, of the eighteenth century philosophy of the Enlightenment. Those who made the Russian Revolution lived by the ideas of Chernishevsky, Plekhanov, by a materialist and utilitarian philosophy, by an outworn and tendentious literature; they were not interested in Dostoyevsku, Tolstoy, Solovyov; they knew nothing of the new movements of Western culture."
The real content disappeared from the official phrase: "Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people;" such has an expression had become insincere and false.
"In the Russian communist revolution it was not the actual proletariat of experience which was in control but the idea of the proletariat, the myth of the proletariat."
"Followers of Lenin exalted the revolutionary will and regarded the world as plastic and fit for any changes you like..."
"There is in communism its own truth and its own falsehood."
"To the Russian Intelligentsia of the left the Revolution has always been both a religion and a philosophy."
"The Russian Revolution awakened and unfettered the enormous powers of the Russian people."
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev:
"The abyss now yawns across the path we tread
With all its terrors and its gloomy mist.
Between the gulf and us no barriers exist
And hence to us the night is filled with dread."
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev:
"O! rouse not sleeping storms,
Beneath us quivering chaos moves."
Berdyaev citing Lermontov:
"The day will come, for Russia that dark day
When the Tsar's diadem will fall, and they,
Rabble who loved him once, will love no more,
And many will subsist on death and gore."
Berdyaev citing Blok:
"Wild passions are let loose
'Neath the yoke of the crescent moon.
I see over Russia afar,
A broad and gentle fire."
Berdyaev citing Blok:
:A sphink is Russia; sorrow and joy embrace
Her both; and she is darkly drenched in gore"
Other
"It was a particularity of Herzen that truth presented itself to him as sad."
"It is astonishing that the Christian writer Gogol was the least humane of Russian writers, the least humane in the most humane of all literatures."
Russian Identity
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev: "Russia is not to be understood by intellectual processes. You cannot take her measurements with a common yardstick, she has a form and stature of her own: you can only believe in Russia."
Berdyaev citing Khomyakov: "The Russians are a people in the highest degree polarized: they are a conglomeration of a contradictions."
"The unexpected is always to be expected from them. They are as a people capable in the highest degree of inspiring both intense love and violent hatred. As a people the Russians have a dusturbing effect upon the peoples of the West."
"The Russian people is not purely European and it is not purely Asiatic."
"In the Russian soul there is a sort of immensity, a vagueness, a predilection for the infinite, such as is suggested by the great plain of Russia."
"Russia was never an aristocratic country in the Western sense, and equally there was no bourgeois."
"The burning oneself alive, as an exploit in religion, is a Russian national phenomenon…"
"That the Russians have a leaning to debauchery and to anarchy with a loss of discipline is well known."
"Messianic consciousness is more characteristic of the Russians than of any other people except the Jews."
Berdyaev citing Pushkin upon completion of Gogol's Dead Souls: "Oh, Lord, how wretched our Russia is."
"The Russian emotional bent for revolution was the outcome of the unbearableness of the actual conditions in which they lived, of their wrongness, and their ugliness."
Berdyaev citing Chaadav: "At the present time we constitute a gap in the moral order of the world."
Berdyaev citing Chaadav: "Looking at us it might be said that the general law of mankind had been abrogated so far as we are concerned."
Berdyaev citing Pechorin: "How sweet is is to hate one's native land, and eagerly to await its annihilation."
"The vocation of Russia presents itself as connected with the fact that the Russian people are the most humble people in the world. But there exists among that peopler a pride in their humility."
"Among the Russians and it may be among the Russians only, there exists a doubt about the righteousness of punishment."
"It is the property of the Russian people to indulge in philosophy."
"The vocation of Russia is a world vocation."
"Russia alone lives not for herself, but for thought…"
"The Russian people are a people of the future; they will decide questions which the West has not yet the strength to decide, which it does not even pose in their full depth."
"The Russian has a greater capacity for enduring suffering than the man of the West, and at the same time he is especially sensitive to suffering; he is more sympathetic than the Western man."
"Spengler described Russia very acutely and very well when he said that it is an "apocalyptic revolt against antiquity.""
"Among the Russians there is always a thirst for another world; there is always discontent with that which is."
"An eschatological bent is native to the Russian soul."
"Russia took shape in grevious historical circumstances; the Russian land was surrounded by enemies; it was made use of by the evil forces of history."
"Russian
Characteristics of Russian History
"Interruption is a characteristic of Russian history. Contrary to the opinion of the Slavophils the last thing it is is organic."
"The very manner of life of the landowning nobility was a thing incomprehensible to the people."
"The history of the Russian people is one of the most poignantly painful of histories."
"The development of Russia has been catastrophic."
"The State grew strong, the people grew weak, as Kluchevsky says."
"Among us the Intelligentsia could not live in the present; it lived in the future and sometimes in the past."
"In the second half of the century the Intelligentsia, keyed up to a revolutionary frame of mind, was obliged to lead an existence which was almost heroic…"
"There was no Renaissance among us…"
On the Nature of the Revolution
"History is not only traditional and it is not only guardianship; a lack of basis has a basis of its own; revolution is part of the flow of history."
"The Russian Intelligentsia…endeavored to find a way out of the unbearable sadness of Russian reality into an ideal reality. This ideal reality was either the Russia before Peter's the, or the West, or the coming Revolution."
"[Herzen]…regarded Hegel's philosophy as the algebra of revolution."
Berdyaev citing Belinksy: "I am beginning to love mankind in the manner of Marat. To make the smallest part of it happy I think I would exterminate the rest of it with fire and sword."
"The makers of the French Revolution lived by the up-to-date ideas of the time, the ideas of J.J. Rousseau, of the eighteenth century philosophy of the Enlightenment. Those who made the Russian Revolution lived by the ideas of Chernishevsky, Plekhanov, by a materialist and utilitarian philosophy, by an outworn and tendentious literature; they were not interested in Dostoyevsku, Tolstoy, Solovyov; they knew nothing of the new movements of Western culture."
The real content disappeared from the official phrase: "Orthodoxy, autocracy and the people;" such has an expression had become insincere and false.
"In the Russian communist revolution it was not the actual proletariat of experience which was in control but the idea of the proletariat, the myth of the proletariat."
"Followers of Lenin exalted the revolutionary will and regarded the world as plastic and fit for any changes you like..."
"There is in communism its own truth and its own falsehood."
"To the Russian Intelligentsia of the left the Revolution has always been both a religion and a philosophy."
"The Russian Revolution awakened and unfettered the enormous powers of the Russian people."
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev:
"The abyss now yawns across the path we tread
With all its terrors and its gloomy mist.
Between the gulf and us no barriers exist
And hence to us the night is filled with dread."
Berdyaev citing Tyutchev:
"O! rouse not sleeping storms,
Beneath us quivering chaos moves."
Berdyaev citing Lermontov:
"The day will come, for Russia that dark day
When the Tsar's diadem will fall, and they,
Rabble who loved him once, will love no more,
And many will subsist on death and gore."
Berdyaev citing Blok:
"Wild passions are let loose
'Neath the yoke of the crescent moon.
I see over Russia afar,
A broad and gentle fire."
Berdyaev citing Blok:
:A sphink is Russia; sorrow and joy embrace
Her both; and she is darkly drenched in gore"
Other
"It was a particularity of Herzen that truth presented itself to him as sad."
"It is astonishing that the Christian writer Gogol was the least humane of Russian writers, the least humane in the most humane of all literatures."
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Antony Beevor's The Mystery of Olga Chekhova
A friend of mine once confessed to me that he loved to play the "lottery game" as opposed to playing the lottery itself. That is to say, this friend liked to imagine what he would do if he won a million dollars. Up until that time I had naively imagined this game of fantasy to be something that I had personally discovered. What is the source of our passion for this kind of counter factual activity? Is the "lottery game" a form of unhealthy escapism or does it actually propel us to investigate his core values? What would we do if time and money didn't prevent us from living the life we really want, deep down? Is it only money that prevents us from taking a different kind of job? Do we really want to be free of work altogether? The answers to these and similar fanciful questions can be revealing. For me one Russian history equivalent of the "lottery game" is to imagine the survival of a figure of nineteenth century Russia into the twentieth century. What would Pushkin or Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Chekhov or Turgenev have made of the Russian Revolution? How would liberal sympathy for Russia's oppressed masses have been translated when confronted with street violence, civil war, and purges? Of course, most if not all nineteenth century writers did wrestle with revolutionary ideas as well as events, and at least a few "nineteenth century" men and women actually lived long enough into the twentieth century to see the 1905 Revolution first hand. But we can't ultimately know how Tolstoy would have reacted to the lived experience of Bolshevik insurrection and Bolshevik government. On the other hand, Tolstoy's family did encounter real revolution, so we can get at least a glimpse of what Tolstoy himself might have thought about the communist experiment. So too did Chekhov's family encounter the world's first communist government.
The best overall treatment of these way aristocratic families--Tolstoys and Nabokovs and Bunins included--suffered at the hands of the Reds is provided by Douglas Smith's wonderful new book, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. But although Smith's book deserves the scholarly attention it is already getting, Antony Beevor's smaller book, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, deserves some attention as well. To be sure, the Chekhov/Knipper family was not an aristrocratic clan. However, the Chekhovs and Knippers, representatives of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, came to embody Russia's creative aristocracy. Their ambiguous position between Old Russia and New Russia is tantalizing to say the least. On the one hand, the Moscow Art Theatre symbolized Russia's enduring claim to greatness even in the midst of economic and political confusion. If the West had doubts about the Bolsheviks, let them remember that Russia had only recently invented some of Europe's most prized expressions of modernity. On the other hand, the Moscow Art Theatre had been a product of the bourgeois, not proletarian, imagination. How valuable any cultural institution be if it predated the proletarian revolution of 1917?
Ultimately, Antony Beevor devotes his book to one Chekhov/Knipper in particular, Anton Chekhov's niece, Olga Chekhova. Fascinatingly, Olga left the Soviet Union and soon emerged as a film star in Wiemar, and then Nazi, Germany. Olga's strange career tells us a great deal about how extraordinarily difficult it could be to bridge the gap between nineteenth and twentieth century Russia, and nineteenth and twentieth century Europe in general. For Olga, who traded on her uncle's fame in order to establish her bona fides in the Central and Western Europe industry, ultimately found it necessary or perhaps desirable to become a Soviet "sleeper" spy even as she attended celebrity events with Hitler, Goebbels, and other high-ranking Nazi officials. At one point, Stalin and Beria were apparently intent on using her to help assassinate Hitler. Of course, the niece's precarious life choices don't really tell us what Anton Chekhov would have thought about either the Soviets or the Nazis, but the fact that his cultural heirs were obligated to weave their way between two of modernity's greatest monsters, Hitler and Stalin, tells us something dreadful about how degraded European culture had become since the Moscow Art Theatre first opened its doors in 1898.
The best overall treatment of these way aristocratic families--Tolstoys and Nabokovs and Bunins included--suffered at the hands of the Reds is provided by Douglas Smith's wonderful new book, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy. But although Smith's book deserves the scholarly attention it is already getting, Antony Beevor's smaller book, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, deserves some attention as well. To be sure, the Chekhov/Knipper family was not an aristrocratic clan. However, the Chekhovs and Knippers, representatives of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, came to embody Russia's creative aristocracy. Their ambiguous position between Old Russia and New Russia is tantalizing to say the least. On the one hand, the Moscow Art Theatre symbolized Russia's enduring claim to greatness even in the midst of economic and political confusion. If the West had doubts about the Bolsheviks, let them remember that Russia had only recently invented some of Europe's most prized expressions of modernity. On the other hand, the Moscow Art Theatre had been a product of the bourgeois, not proletarian, imagination. How valuable any cultural institution be if it predated the proletarian revolution of 1917?
Ultimately, Antony Beevor devotes his book to one Chekhov/Knipper in particular, Anton Chekhov's niece, Olga Chekhova. Fascinatingly, Olga left the Soviet Union and soon emerged as a film star in Wiemar, and then Nazi, Germany. Olga's strange career tells us a great deal about how extraordinarily difficult it could be to bridge the gap between nineteenth and twentieth century Russia, and nineteenth and twentieth century Europe in general. For Olga, who traded on her uncle's fame in order to establish her bona fides in the Central and Western Europe industry, ultimately found it necessary or perhaps desirable to become a Soviet "sleeper" spy even as she attended celebrity events with Hitler, Goebbels, and other high-ranking Nazi officials. At one point, Stalin and Beria were apparently intent on using her to help assassinate Hitler. Of course, the niece's precarious life choices don't really tell us what Anton Chekhov would have thought about either the Soviets or the Nazis, but the fact that his cultural heirs were obligated to weave their way between two of modernity's greatest monsters, Hitler and Stalin, tells us something dreadful about how degraded European culture had become since the Moscow Art Theatre first opened its doors in 1898.
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.”
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Boris Pilnyak's The Naked Year
Boris Pilnyak's The Naked Year is a short, elliptical novel depicting the first year of the Revolution. Pinyak depicts the Revolution in its natural habitat, that is to say, in rural or small-town Russia rather than in urban St. Petersburg or Moscow. Although Marx believed that the proletariat constituted the truly revolutionary class, Russia's savage fury was, first and foremost, a peasant affair. This was, after all, where the vast majority of Russia's people lived and worked and suffered. For generations, peasants had been ruthlessly exploited by a small landowning class, so when the tsar's authority waned, the peasants grabbed land and often brutally suppressed anybody even remotely connected to the rural status quo. Pilnyak, who was initially well-received by at least some Bolshevik cultural authorities, seems to capture some vital component of the Bolshevik's conception of the revolutionary process. The landowning class must expire in order to prepare the way for a bright proletarian future. If representatives of the old order die gracefully, as they do in The Naked Year, so much the better. After all, beauty, or at least sublime beauty, hurts! If revolutionary trends confused and confounded members of the gentry or their allies, this was only to be expected. Tragedy--the the laments of a dying class--are, after all, the surest sign that the Revolution was real. Like the landowners in Chekhov, or the brave heroes of Last of the Mahicans, the truest sign of historical change is pitiful expiration.
If Pilnyak's depiction of the revolutionary dynamic is commensurate with the logic of Marxist ideology, his depiction of revolution as a phenonmenon is compelling. For Pilnyak presents the Revolution of 1917 as something more than the sum of its parts. According to Pilnyak, the Revolution can't be broken down into a series of events or a mass of details. The Revolution is an image or symbol or myth rather than a storyline or or economic event. But if this is so, how should we interpret the myth of the Revolution? First, and foremost, Pilnyak's characters seem to recognize that the Revolution isn't, primarily, a Bolshevik phenomenon. Although the Bolsheviks are referenced on many occasions in The Naked Year, they are clearly overshadowed by the awesome dynamism and scope of Russia's great upheaval. The Naked Year is, therefore, nothing less than a Russian phenomenon. In what sense is it Russian? Pilnyak's characters recognize that the social cataclysm cuts the Russians off from neighboring peoples, especially the European ones. Whether this isolation is a sign of desperation or hope isn't entirely resolved, but the point is that the Revolution reflects if not shapes Russia's very identity vis-a-vis other nations. Moreover, The Naked Year reminds Russian inhabitants of their ties to the past and their hopes for a uniquely Russian future. Revolution functions like some kind of cosmic black hole, pulling the past and the future into its gaping maw. The laws of time are bent by the gravitational pull of the Revolution's density and energy. And why not? If the Revolution has animated the peasants, men and women whose folklore largely alludes even the Orthodox Church, why shouldn't it dredge up something from Russia's most distant past?
The myth of Revolution extends beyond national identity and time. The Revolution is a vortex around which everything and everyone in Russia swirls. It demolishes some classes, lifts up other ones, and alters all human relations. Its extreme violence underscores its impersonal nature. While some may regret losses associated with violent revolt, the image of a new age somehow makes all individual lamentations seem inappropriate, out of place, irrelevant.
Below are a few quotes from The Naked Year:
"Among the house, the shop, the Bible, the thrashings, his wife, Mashuka--forty years passed."
"...in the forest flared up the red fires of the manor houses..."
"I am dying because I cannot live without vodka.
Citizens and comrades of the new dawn!--when a
class has outlived itself--death to it! better it should
go away by itself.
I am dying at the new dawn!"
"In the town it's town-like, like any other town."
"a sign of the times--leather people in leather jackets (Bolsheviks!), --all the same size, each one a leather beauty, each one strong."
"Russia agains the whole world? In Russia isn't there hunger, sedition and murder?--and there will be for twenty years!...Swear--you'll learn the secret!..."
"Twenty years from now there will be a saviour. Russia will cross breed with a strange nation."
"In this house his youth was spent, which always seemed immeasurably bright and clear--and is now cut off by the gloom of the Revolution."
"Everything is done for! But what kind of truth has come upon the earth!"
"They called us vultures, but dead bodies are called carcasses when they're skinned!"
"I've done some vile things, I've raped young girls, exorted money, beaten my father. Do you blame me, Gleb?" "I cannot. I cannot judge," answers Gleb, hurriedly."
"..if such a war could take place in Europe, then is it not the aspen stake to all European bowler hat CULTURE?"
"--was our Revolution not a May storm?--and weren't they March flood waters which washed away the scab of two centuries?"
"Russia, you say? --but Russia--is fiction, a mirage, because Russia is the Caucasus, the Ukraine and Moldavia."
"..our government was formed out of a fear of institutionalized government--they ran away from institutionalized government as from the plague! So there! And then when authority arrived, they rebelled, split up into sects, ran away to the Don, to the Ukraine, to the Yaik."
"And the Revolution set Russia against Europe."
"But revolutions were unnecessary for popular rebellion--alien. Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian turth--by genuine Russians."
"Do you hear the revolution howling--like a witch in a blizzard!"
"Prince Boris does not drink from glasses when he's on a bender."
"I'm twenty-eight. I've still got some living to do. Anyone who's alive must go." "Go where?" "To the Revolution. These days won't come again."
"I've been all around the world, and nowhere is there a countwy [sic] like Wussia [sic]."
"Let the trains in Russia come to a halt--surely there's beauty in a burning torch, hunger, sickness?"
"Somehwere there is Europe, Marx, scientific socialism, but here beliefs which are a thousand years old are preserved."
"Natalys spoke about the scorching heat, about the Revolution, about the days: with all her blood she felt, accepted the Revolution, wanted to create it..."
If Pilnyak's depiction of the revolutionary dynamic is commensurate with the logic of Marxist ideology, his depiction of revolution as a phenonmenon is compelling. For Pilnyak presents the Revolution of 1917 as something more than the sum of its parts. According to Pilnyak, the Revolution can't be broken down into a series of events or a mass of details. The Revolution is an image or symbol or myth rather than a storyline or or economic event. But if this is so, how should we interpret the myth of the Revolution? First, and foremost, Pilnyak's characters seem to recognize that the Revolution isn't, primarily, a Bolshevik phenomenon. Although the Bolsheviks are referenced on many occasions in The Naked Year, they are clearly overshadowed by the awesome dynamism and scope of Russia's great upheaval. The Naked Year is, therefore, nothing less than a Russian phenomenon. In what sense is it Russian? Pilnyak's characters recognize that the social cataclysm cuts the Russians off from neighboring peoples, especially the European ones. Whether this isolation is a sign of desperation or hope isn't entirely resolved, but the point is that the Revolution reflects if not shapes Russia's very identity vis-a-vis other nations. Moreover, The Naked Year reminds Russian inhabitants of their ties to the past and their hopes for a uniquely Russian future. Revolution functions like some kind of cosmic black hole, pulling the past and the future into its gaping maw. The laws of time are bent by the gravitational pull of the Revolution's density and energy. And why not? If the Revolution has animated the peasants, men and women whose folklore largely alludes even the Orthodox Church, why shouldn't it dredge up something from Russia's most distant past?
The myth of Revolution extends beyond national identity and time. The Revolution is a vortex around which everything and everyone in Russia swirls. It demolishes some classes, lifts up other ones, and alters all human relations. Its extreme violence underscores its impersonal nature. While some may regret losses associated with violent revolt, the image of a new age somehow makes all individual lamentations seem inappropriate, out of place, irrelevant.
Below are a few quotes from The Naked Year:
"Among the house, the shop, the Bible, the thrashings, his wife, Mashuka--forty years passed."
"...in the forest flared up the red fires of the manor houses..."
"I am dying because I cannot live without vodka.
Citizens and comrades of the new dawn!--when a
class has outlived itself--death to it! better it should
go away by itself.
I am dying at the new dawn!"
"In the town it's town-like, like any other town."
"a sign of the times--leather people in leather jackets (Bolsheviks!), --all the same size, each one a leather beauty, each one strong."
"Russia agains the whole world? In Russia isn't there hunger, sedition and murder?--and there will be for twenty years!...Swear--you'll learn the secret!..."
"Twenty years from now there will be a saviour. Russia will cross breed with a strange nation."
"In this house his youth was spent, which always seemed immeasurably bright and clear--and is now cut off by the gloom of the Revolution."
"Everything is done for! But what kind of truth has come upon the earth!"
"They called us vultures, but dead bodies are called carcasses when they're skinned!"
"I've done some vile things, I've raped young girls, exorted money, beaten my father. Do you blame me, Gleb?" "I cannot. I cannot judge," answers Gleb, hurriedly."
"..if such a war could take place in Europe, then is it not the aspen stake to all European bowler hat CULTURE?"
"--was our Revolution not a May storm?--and weren't they March flood waters which washed away the scab of two centuries?"
"Russia, you say? --but Russia--is fiction, a mirage, because Russia is the Caucasus, the Ukraine and Moldavia."
"..our government was formed out of a fear of institutionalized government--they ran away from institutionalized government as from the plague! So there! And then when authority arrived, they rebelled, split up into sects, ran away to the Don, to the Ukraine, to the Yaik."
"And the Revolution set Russia against Europe."
"But revolutions were unnecessary for popular rebellion--alien. Popular rebellion is the seizing of power and creation of their own genuine Russian turth--by genuine Russians."
"Do you hear the revolution howling--like a witch in a blizzard!"
"Prince Boris does not drink from glasses when he's on a bender."
"I'm twenty-eight. I've still got some living to do. Anyone who's alive must go." "Go where?" "To the Revolution. These days won't come again."
"I've been all around the world, and nowhere is there a countwy [sic] like Wussia [sic]."
"Let the trains in Russia come to a halt--surely there's beauty in a burning torch, hunger, sickness?"
"Somehwere there is Europe, Marx, scientific socialism, but here beliefs which are a thousand years old are preserved."
"Natalys spoke about the scorching heat, about the Revolution, about the days: with all her blood she felt, accepted the Revolution, wanted to create it..."
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