Bertolt Brecht

Although the playwright Bertolt Brecht wasn't Russian, the life and art of this important German playwright help to illuminate many of the twentieth century themes that help to shape the Soviet political and cultural experience from the early 1920s right through to the 1950s. Coming of age as a playwright in the early years of the Weimar Republic, Brecht quickly became immersed in radical politics.  He also quickly became a cultural figure of international importance. Brecht lived and worked in Denmark, Finland, America, and East Germany, and always remained in contact with leading directors, writers, and musicians from multiple nations.  Over time, Brecht became one of the most influential theorists of radical, didactic, and revolutionary theater.  Bruce Book's collection of essays on Brecht, entitled Brecht in Exile, illustrates the impact of Brecht on global culture. Specific chapters in Cook's book deal with Brecht's often turbulent relationships with Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Kurt Weil, and Fritz Lang.  While critical of Brecht's sometimes self-centered personality, and unconvinced that Brecht's theories of political theater actually influenced his masterpieces, Cook's book demonstrates that the best international art of this period of exile was often a product of a dynamic if contentious dialog between democratic and communist systems of thought.  Of course, if one reads only Cook, one might not get the true measure of Brecht's genius.

To read Brecht's diaries from the period of 1920-1922, one sees a young man vitality, poetic talent, and vast creative energy.  The plays themselves offer the ultimate testimony to Brecht's fertile imagination and powerful drammaturgical impulse. Jungle of Cities, for instance, is an elliptical but nevertheless profound treatise on tragic love in the midst of interpersonal struggle and class conflict. This Chicago story of underworld despair is both morbidly funny and existentially depressing.  As its title Chicago, Brecht envisions capitalist Chicago as a squalid place of exploitation, prostitution, thuggery, and gangland conflict.  Unlike the kinder flat lands that surround Chicago, the city itself is a "cold place."  In Chicago, people learn that "in its natural state human skin is too thin for this world." 

Set in Finland, Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti's setting is slightly more appeal than that of Jungle of Cities, but once again it is a location filled with exploitation and bitterness.  Bruce Book's essays on Brecht imply that Brecht never quite found a way to integrate Marxism with theater.  But Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti in particular seems to demonstrte that Brecht really did find ways to lend theatricality to capitalist exploitation.  For Puntila exploits Matti in extremely comical ways, and Matti resists this exploitation in similarly funny ways.  Neither landowner nor wage slave loses his humanity to impersonal economic forces, but both the fate of both characters is shaped by the logic of the economy.

Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished

Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished doesn't offer any startlingly new insights into the history of early Bolshevism. In fact, Gerwarth's brief account of Lenin's circuitous return to St. Petersburg, subsequent labors to overthrow the Provisional Government, and painful if strategic decision to bring about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, is remarkably free of original historiographical interpretation.  However, the book does place the Russian Revolution into a useful historical context by reviewing the extent of chaos that overwhelmed Europe at the End of World War I.  Gerwarth's argument is not that the experience of total war brutalized human beings as some historians have previously argued.  For the British and French did not experience any particularly virulent disruption of their national political culture after the end of the war.  Rather, Gerwarth argues that the experience of loss in Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe led to instability, revolution, and violence on an unprecedented scale in the so-called interwar years.

Gerwarth's thesis is not perhaps new.  But he does offer a shift in emphasis away from the Treaty of Versailles' allegedly misguided war guilt clause, territorial adjustments, and massive reparation payments.  For Gerwarth, the temporary eclipse of the German and Russian Empires, and the complete collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, led to immediate and cataclysmic repercussions for the people who occupied these now furiously contested multi-ethnic, multicultural spaces. Losing the Great War meant losing any semblance of political peace.  At the conclusion of the Great War, Germany endured both a socialist revolution and a failed communist revolution.  Perhaps more importantly, Germany became a space of dark fantasies of political and biological revenge against both internal and external foes.  But disorder also descended upon Eastern and Central Europe.  Most interestingly, the Ottomans managed to partially overturn their loser status by defeating the Greek army and expelling foreign powers from Anatolia.  Uniquely, Italy properly belonged in the victor category, but managed to experience the war as a loser, since it suffered mightily from the conflict and emerged from the war with few clear political gains.  Gerwarth's implicit contention is that this experience of loss in Italy contributed to its willingness to embrace violence in the interwar years, both in its internal politics and in its foreign policy. 

What does all this mean for students of Russian history?  Probably that the tragedies of Soviet history remain firmly linked to the tragedy of the First World War, and that tragedy is twofold:  First, that it took so many lives;  and Second, that it created a power vacuum and therefore failed to end.  Gerwarth makes one interesting if highly controversial insight about Russia's impact on Germany history.  According to Gerwarth, the collapse of the Whites in the Russian Civil War led many profoundly antisemitic Russian emigres to flee to Germany.  These antisemitic Whites then helped to interpret Judaism to German nationalists.  According to Gerwarth, embittered Nazis leaders and other right wing thinkers already blamed Jews for what they perceived as the depredations of international capitalism.  Traditional German antisemitism led them to associate Judaism with banking and international finance.  But the virulently anti-Semitic Russian emigres soon taught people like Hitler to blame the Jews for Communism too.  Of course, the Civil War had created something of an anti-Semitic feedback loop:  when Whites attacked Jews for allegedly aligning themselves with the Bolsheviks, Jews increasingly sometimes turned to the Bolsheviks as their best hope of avoiding further pogroms.  The idea that White Russians contributed to Nazi anti-Antisemitism is an intriguing one, but it seems unfair or even dangerous to even slightly shift the blame for the origins of the Holocaust to Russia, which suffered so much from Nazi invasion and contributed so much to Nazi Germany's eventually downfall. 

Lydia Chukovskaya's Sofia Petrovna

The American poet, short-story writer, and humorist once derided a Hollywood film mogul who asked her to give people the happy endings they so desperately wanted.  Parker’s wry response to the mogul was that billions of people had lived on planet Earth, but not one of them had ever experienced a “happy ending.”  

Tolstoy seems to have anticipated Parker’s point about the human lifecycle with his short but powerful work of fiction, The Death of Ivan Illiviach.  With apologies for spoiling the end of the book, Tolstoy’s eponymous hero does little more in the book then slowly and grudgingly accept the fact of his own morality.  Tolstoy’s message seems to be that we all go to great lengths to avoid thinking about death, the one experience common to us all. 

In way, Tolstoy’s book reminded me of the brilliant conclusion of the popular American television series, Six Feet Under.  In this series,--and again, apologies for ruining the series if you have not already read it--the screenwriters appropriately ended a series about funeral home workers by ruthlessly exposing us to the deaths of every single one of the shows characters.  Whether the character died two weeks after the temporal conclusion of the previous episode, or fifty years after that conclusion, the show allows us to see everyone leave this mortal coil. The shocking part of the series’ conclusion, is threefold:  first, the series’ characters die—all of them, without exception; second, their deaths are unanticipated; third, their deaths foreshadow our own.

The Death of Ivan Iliviach exposes us to this kind of truth:  we live, we suffer, and we die.  But it took Soviet authors to add one more truth to this morbid plot structure.  In Lydia Chukovskaya’s short novel, Sofia Petrovna, the protagonist slowly, begrudgingly comes to the realization that the Soviet state may be author of universal—or nearly universal—death.   

At the outset of the book, Sofia Petrovna has made her peace with the Soviet regime.  Although she had enjoyed a comfortable, bourgeois pre-war existence, the October Revolution had overturned social norms and, more immediately, forced her to share her large apartment with a number of working class families.  Notwithstanding the loss of many rooms in her old apartment, Sofia Petrovna had taken a job as a typist at a prestigious publishing house, and advanced there through hard work and considerable precision.  Additionally, Petrovna’s son, a model Soviet citizen, had played by the rules of the new society and done exceedingly well in the process.  Educated as an engineer, Sofia Petrovna’s son believed in socialist ideals and dedicated his extraordinary intelligence to advancing the industrial capability of the Worker’s Paradise. 

Over time, the inevitable truth about Soviet power emerges, as Sofia Petrovna’s boss, son, and close friend all suffer from State violence.  Like Tolstoy’s hero, who resists the notion that his comfortable life could be drawing to a close for not apparently good reason, Sofia Petrovna resists the realization that the government she once supported could arbitrarily imprison not only her son, but also the thousands of other ordinary Soviet citizens from all walks of life she encounters as she attempts render her son aid through an overwhelmed, heartless, and even malevolent, judicial system.  The difference between Tolstoy’s hero and Chukovskaya’s heroine is only this:  Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna seems so overwhelmed by the knowledge of the State’s malevolence that she seemingly allows herself to escape into madness. With her friend dead, her old job surrendered, and neighbors conspiring against her, Sofia Petrovna invents a story of redemption:  in this alternative reality, the Soviet State acknowledges its gross judicial error, releases her son, and allows him to return to the service of a just society.   

The escapism of Sofia Petrovna is not quite as heroic as the stoicism of Ivan Ilivianch.  But can we begrudge Sofia?  At her funeral, a friend of the famously morbid Dorothy Parker suggested that she wouldn’t have been adverse to a little escapism herself.  To paraphrase, the orator said that Dorothy wouldn’t have liked the formality of her funeral ceremony.  In fact, the speaker continued, had she had her way, Dorothy would have preferred not to be at her funeral at all. 

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

Andrea Pitzer's The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov isn't quite as fugitive, subtle, or revolutionary as its name suggests.  The book is well-researched, and well-written, and offers readers an excellent overview of many of the political themes that Nabokov directly or indirectly addresses in his large oeuvre. However, the book isn't really offering readers an especially novel interpretation of the author's general perspectives on politics.  In any event, reading Pitzer's treatments of Nabokov's life and major works reminds one of the extraordinary way in which a single life can touched by multiple historical tragedies. For Nabokov's life was overturned by the Russian Revolution, and his subsequent exile was disrupted by the rise of fascism in Germany.  In the end, Nabokov and his Jewish wife barely Germany's invasion of France in 1940, but Pitzer notes how his experience with authoritarianism and antisemitism permeated many of his books, including his English-language ones.  By and large, Nabokov chose to remain aloof from politics, but his support for Russian liberalism, and virulent hatred for communism were always well-known.  In fact, Nabokov's growing disgust for Edmund Wilson's socialist sympathies helped to dissolve a long and productive intellectual dialog.  Perhaps the most original aspect of Pitzer's book is to place Nabokov's aesthetic and political life along side those of Solzhenitsyn.  Both writers were of course famous anti-communist Russian exiles who spent time in America and had at least some connection to Switzerland.  However, comparing the two greater writers reminds the reader that only one of them placed his political and moral opinions at the forefront of his literary project. For while Solzhenitsyn wrote about Soviet authoritarianism in The Gulag Archipelago, The Cancer Ward, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and various other fictional and nonfictional works, Nabokov attacked his Soviet enemies only obliquely in his novels.  Which author had the greater work on moral and aesthetic history remains to be seen.  Certainly Nabokov he had no business conflating the political with the literary.  But the author dismisses these objections, insisting that Nabokov's worldview is encapsulated in his fiction.  Thus, if Nabokov had a secret history at all, it was primarily a secret he kept from himself.  This may of course explain his vociferous opposition to psychotherapy. 

Mikhail Zoshchenko's The Galosh and Other Stories

Zoshchenko was once immensely popular with the Soviet people.  It's easy to see why.  His stories are short, easily digestible, endlessly inventive, and funny.  More than this, Zoshchenko's stories allowed Soviet citizens the opportunity to laugh at the absurdity of dozens of dimensions of everyday Soviet life.  Zoshchenko's stories make fun of both the bourgeoisie and the unthinking proletariat who bore such visceral animosity toward this declining class.  Indeed, Zoshchenko's stories are filled with characters who don't quite know how to treat formerly middle class or aristocratic men and women. While the atavistic class elements aren't given a lot of dignity, Zoshchenko's workers seem to confront their class enemies with a great deal of awkwardness, insecurity, unnecessary anger, and even guilt.  The stories are in many ways the best way to measure the depth of the transformation taking place in Russian during the 1920s.  Somewhat paradoxically, Zoshchenko's sketches show both that traditional Russian life was being rapidly overturned, and that revolutionary change was often transitory, superficial, and skin-deep.  Thus, the new Russians had different words, different governmental structures, and different belief systems.  But they still suffered from perennial Russian problems, including housing shortages, bribery, gender insecurity, and stupidity.  In once read a review of Tolstoy's book about the pre-revolutionary judiciary and prison system.  The reviewer claimed that Tolstoy's catalog of ancien corruption and brutality and shown him why the Revolution had occurred.  Zoshchenko's stories are similarly revealing about the post-revolutionary years.  They reveal just how much was still being worked out by everyday Russians who didn't quite know what the Revolution man for their everyday lives.  After Revolution, how were you supposed to date, play, think, pray, eat, live, or even talk?  Whatever was happening in elite Soviet circles, ordinary Soviet citizens had to continuously decide the meaning of revolution for themselves, from one day to the next.  After the Revolution, was a wife suppose to keep cooking all of the family meals? Was it okay to date a formerly wealthy person? Was it okay to accept the authority of others in the workplace?  Was it okay to keep believeing in God? Zoshchenko's stories address dozens of these questions, but most importantly, they addressed one central question:  After the Revolution, what was funny? 

Below are some snippets from The Galosh and Other Stories:

"Bribery.... The word alone drives me mad with indignation..."

"The times are over when people could just be shoved in broad daylight.  We've been shoved enough."

"He was rich.  Home comforts, and a wardrobe, and chests full of goods...he even had two samovars."

"I'm telling you:  If you, you old fart, go to Labourers' Gardens at seven o'clock in the evening on Saturday the twenty-ninth of July, then you'll see with your own eyes what a roving butterfly your spouse is.  Wake up, you old fart.  Respectfully yours, An anonymous friend."

"So, you see, I polished the floors, say, on a Monday, and on Saturday the Revolution took place." 

"It was in the theater that she exposed the full extent of her ideology."

"And suddenly she walked over to the plate in her decadent way, grabbed a cream cake, and chomped away on it."

"I suddenly felt some bourgeois embarrassment."

"I used to take a skeptical attitude towards the abilities of dogs.  But not now, now I fear and respect dogs."

"Kind people, class-conscious citizens!" he said.  "Tie me up.  "I," he said, "collected money for the water, but I spent that money on myself."

"She wasn't pretty of course, this lady, but I wasn't looking at her exterior, I was looking at her interior."

"You can go and croak," he said, "and don't count on the aid of science."

"The most fashionable word you could possibly find these days is, of course, electrification."

"And next day to her some bourgeois bastard was leaning over to her and whispering in her inner ear."

"Out the window with the lot of it:  the cooker, the saucepans, the washtub.. Let the woman know freedom... She's got the same rights as me."

"You can't imagine how much better off we are for this change.  It's brought nothing but advantages, clear profit!"

"This Russian's a hard language, my dear citizens.  A disaster, it's so hard."

"I haven't got a very good imagination.  That's why I don't like wasting my previous life-blood on some non-existent made-up stuff. I know, dear reader, that life is much more important than literature."

"Firewood--said the man--is precious stuff... You can even give firewood as a birthday present."

"You can't give firewood away as a present, this isn't 1919, you know."

"Citizens, you ask me whether I was ever an actor.  Well, I was.  I've played in a theater.  I've been entangled in that art."

"Productivity, he said, that foundation-stone of Soviet life, is improving."

"They say, comrades, that the bathhouses in America are totally excellent."

"But where's a naked man to keep tickets?  I'll tell you where, no where.  He hasn't got any pockets.  It's all stomach and legs."

"This isn't the tsarist regime, You can't just go round whacking people with tubs." 

"I won't say what street it's on.  I can't afford to.  Because then when I next go there they'll bash my brains out with a tub, and that would be the end of a politically conscious, thoughtful citizen."

"And people talk about civilization and education!  For example, now they use these new diesel locomotives to pull trains.  But then they allow totally uncivilized behavior in the carriages."

Linor Goralik's Found Life

I have been impressed with many of the new titles in Columbia University's new series of Russian translations.  See, for instance, my posts on Platonov's Fourteen Little Huts and Other Plays as well as my posts on Iliazd's Rapture.  Thus is came as no surprise to me that Columbia University Press' book by Linor Goralik, entitled Found Life, would be almost equally good.  The book is a collection of the modern author's richly creative and varied productions, and includes poems, stories, and comics, as well as a play and an interview.  This post will dwell on Goralik's collection of extremely short sketches of modern Russian life.  Although her short prose is apparently fictional, they somehow closely resemble Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's project of recognizing ordinary, everyday Russian speech as a form of literature.  Although Goralik's short prose is apparently highly polished or outright fictional representations of overheard speech, it somehow seems like an oral history of the present moment.

To be sure Goralik's short prose doesn't reach the emotional depth or historical significance of Alexievich's work on Chernobyl, Chechnya, the Soviet experience, or World War II.  Goralik's work is a form of oral history sans history, if such a thing is possible. To my mind, the project of recording the tragedy of quotidian life via banal speech patterns is extraordinarily captivating.  For good or evil, it reminds me of what television producers and audiences alike realized not so long ago:  one needs neither actors, nor scripts, to produce well-acted, and well-descriptive television.  But like reality television, one wonders if authors such as Goralik will reach the limits of this genre in the near future.  If Duchamp's toilet seat was art, everything else could be considered art too.  It's a revolutionary moment, but it doesn't last all that long.  Sooner or later, the experiment is over. With respect to reality television, the conventions of the new art form remain:  the camera shakes, the actors try to say unpredictable things, and the content appears to be as frivolous as ever.  But over time, the audiences become increasingly sophisticated, and demand well-crafted "spontaneous" moments and actors with enough training to really pass themselves off as "amateurs."  In any event, we must appreciate the artistic moment while it lasts, and celebrate authors such as Goralik who have produced such startlingly revealing--if almost overbearingly light--archives of the present.

Some snippets from Goralik's short prose pieces:

[Speaking of Jackie Kennedy].  "If I were as much as love as she was, I would have work those gloves for the rest of my life.  I mean, well, probably I'd go crazy first then I'd be a crazy old lad wearing gloves with President Kennedy's blood on them.  And I'd call them 'John."  Both of 'em.  Or maybe one John and the other one Robert."

"...the wife comes home and the cat smells like someone else's perfume."

"...so just imagine you're looking at a copy of 1950s Amateur Erotica and inside, on like page ten, there's your mom covering up her left breast with a hand mixer.  Sure, there's really nothing wrong with that. But some book to get as a present, right?"

"Anya, you know, her mom abandoned her too, but not like how you abandoned me..."

"I just don't want to be a girl, I just don't want to, I don't.  The good thing is at least I lost my virginity.  At least that's done, thank God."

"You know, he did ballet as a kid, then worked for the KGB, so, like basically a real inspired dude."

"And his mama bitch slaps him, screaming:  'What did I tell you--never admit to anything!!!"

"...when he loved me I was never jealous, but when he didn't love me--I got jealous."

"So he bought like five pounds of meat and went around his neighborhood that night and switched out all the Jesuses with, like hams...It was super conceptual, really great.  Not like just sitting at home with the family, smiling like dumbasses."

"Because real life just doesn't produce tragedies of that magnitude."  

"...he ate one hot dog and left. I mean, tell me, Lena, do I need this?"

"...she's got strawberry yogurt inside instead of blood... And then in a year she'll give birth to a kid with Pyle's syndrome.  And that, Pasha, is what you call God's plan."

"... I don't like people like that.  She makes three thousand bucks in a month, but her cat craps in that seventy-ruble Soviet litter."

"...she is a weak, cowardly, clingy, totally incompetent, very difficult, very unhappy woman.  And we should feel sorry for her and not talk shit."

"What difference does it make how it all ended?  The important thing is how it started, you know?"

"...They were saying the worst shit about you behind your back!  That you're pregnant, married, and you have a three-year-old!  Can you believe it?  The bastards!"

"... I'll tell you a story that is totally St. Petersburg.  I don't know why Petersburg, I mean it happened in Prague, but it's really just so Petersburg."  

"...we have a family tradition--doing idiotic deeds for absolutely no personal benefit."

"...I don't go to class reunions so as not to fall into pride...Like, the majority of them are living these lives, like, even Google isn't looking for them."  

"I showed  my knife right away, it was that kind of conversation."

"You'll be thirty-two next year.  If a man still has questions at thirty-two, he's an idiot, a waste of space, he doesn't deserve to live, no one can live like that."  

Tristram Hunt's Marx's General

Tristram Hunt's biography of Friedrich Engels, Marx's General, provides readers with an excellent introduction to the evolution of socialism in the 19th century.  Indeed, Engels repeatedly found himself at the very epicenter of European and even global history.  He was, of course, a student of German philosophy at its zenith, and was well-versed in the work of almost every philosophical giant of the early nineteenth century, including Hegel and Feuerbach.  What is more, Engels was an extremely successful industrialist in Manchester at precisely in time when Manchester's mills were conquering every market they encountered.  Most importantly, Engels was both also a famously trenchant social critic and an active revolutionary who participated in the revolutionary events of 1848 and tried to offer support for a variety of other social and political upheavals right up until his death in the 1890s.

As a biographer, Hunt seems most intrigued by the way that Engels was able to balance his bourgeois (and almost aristocratic) existence even as he plotted to destroy capitalism.  On the one hand, Engels worked faithfully for the family firm and revealed in aristocratic activities such as fox hunting.  On the other hand, he authored the Condition of the Working Class in England, coauthored The Communist Manifesto and other influential socialist texts, and worked tirelessly to promote working class revolutionary politics.

From the perspective of Russian history, Hunt sometimes seems to argue that Engels' is only indirectly relevant.  After all, Marx and Engels seldom focused on Russia in their work.  Nor could either man have predicted that a communist revolution would first be successful in the relatively backward economic conditions of Russia.  Indeed, if the Russian Revolution was at least partly the product of a very long history of intellectual ferment in the West, Hunt argues that Marx and Engels bears very little, or perhaps no, responsibility for Bolshevik or Stalinist totalitarianism.  According to Hunt, Marx and Engels' produced essentially humane works of criticism, and the political positions they supported, including feminism, the North's war against slavery in the United States, and government involvement in social welfare programs, have very little in common with post-World War I experiments in state coercion.  Seen in the light Engels' long life of revolutionary thought, Hunt argued that the Russian Revolution and its aftermath have very little in common with twentieth century state brutality.

Of course, Hunt's book is ultimately a biography. So while it touches upon all of Engels' many contributions to what has become known as Marxism, it does not offer a very meaningful perspective on the impact of his ideas on totalitarianism as a system of thought.  We can perhaps accept the fact that Marx and Engels were humane figures who passionately believed that capitalism could be improved upon, without necessarily accepting the fact that their belief systems did not have some deeply troubling if unintended consequences.