tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73974066494212556682018-10-12T10:16:05.343+02:00Russia, Past and PresentUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1633125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-12243856687726772782018-08-02T21:46:00.004+02:002018-08-02T21:46:38.938+02:00Zoshchenko, satirist of the Soviet Union<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">AS ANYONE who has tried (and failed) to crack a joke in a foreign language knows, humour is the marker of linguistic mastery. The only thing harder than cracking jokes may be translating them. Perhaps this is why Mikhail Zoshchenko remains a lesser-known Russian writer among English-language readers, despite being one of the Soviet Union’s most beloved humorists, a satirist in the best traditions of Gogol. Boris Dralyuk’s new translation of “Sentimental Tales”, a collection of Zoshchenko’s stories from the 1920s, is a delight that brings the author’s wit to life.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Zoshchenko’s writing career began in the wake of the Russian revolution, following stints in the army during the first world war and on the side of the Red Army in the Russian civil war. He became popular during the 1920s for tales that tackled the contradictions of everyday life during the short-lived liberalism of the New Economic Policy. As Mr Dralyuk notes in his introduction, Zoshchenko “hid behind so many masks that it was impossible to determine whom, exactly, he was mocking.” His contemporaries wondered whose “side” he was on.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Zoshchenko writes around, rather than about the revolution. He observes the minute miseries of the individual life that transcend collective traumas. “As for the limp—which is, anyhow, hardly noticeable—that’s just a sore foot,” he writes of one of his heroes. “It dates back to the tsarist era.” He notes the wild swings of fortune that shift the structure of society: a former landowner is reduced to begging “thanks to the new democratic way of life,” he deadpans. And he never loses sight of the enduring traits of human nature, which—pace Marxist ideology—remain resistant to changes in material conditions. What results is less a dystopia than a cutting send up of the promised utopia. “And will it really be that wondrous, this future life? That’s another question,” he muses. “For the sake of his own peace of mind, the author chooses to believe that this future life will be just as full of nonsense and rubbish as the one we’re living.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Such scepticism proved prescient with respect to his own fate. The turn to the official aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism in the 1930s forced Zoshchenko into creative compromises, such as participating in a hagiographic book about the construction of the White Sea Canal by Gulag labourers. Though he survived the Stalinist terror himself, he fell foul of the authorities in 1946, and was expelled from the Soviet Writer’s Union. He was rehabilitated only after Stalin’s death—but upset the party again by proclaiming his innocence in an appearance before foreign students a year later. Zoshchenko’s literary output never recovered from the persecution, and he died impoverished and depressed. Yet after his death, reprints of his early works flew off the shelves—an ending fitting of one of his tales, which often leave the reader uncertain whether to chuckle helplessly at life’s cruel absurdity or succumb to its ineffable sadness.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more<a href="https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/08/04/zoshchenko-satirist-of-the-soviet-union"> >>></a></span><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-17266342132138474232018-05-16T21:50:00.002+02:002018-05-16T21:50:20.279+02:00“The Idiot” savant - On Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Idiot.J<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">ust 150 years ago, Dostoevsky sent his publisher the first chapters of what was to become his strangest novel. As countless puzzled critics have observed, The Idiot violates every critical norm and yet somehow manages to achieve real greatness. Joseph Frank, the author of the definitive biography of Dostoevsky and one of his most astute critics, observed that it is easy enough to enumerate shortcomings but “more difficult to explain why the novel triumphs so effortlessly over all the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure.” The Idiot brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Picture Dostoevsky in 1867. With his bride, Anna Grigorievna, he resided abroad, not for pleasure but to escape—just barely— being thrown into debtors’ prison. To pay his fare, Dostoevsky procured an advance from his publisher Katkov for a novel to be serialized in Katkov’s influential journal, The Russian Messenger. But the money was almost gone by the time Dostoevsky left Russia, for the very reason he found himself in financial straits in the first place. Generously but imprudently, he had continued to support the ne’er-do-well son of his first wife while also maintaining the family of his late brother. Anna Grigorievna complained that her sister-in-law lived better than she did. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In her memoirs, Anna Grigorievna described how, exasperated by her husband’s absent-minded generosity, she disguised herself as a beggar, got a handout from her oblivious husband, and confronted him with the donation. When she married Dostoevsky, she thought he had overcome his gambling addiction, but abroad he could not resist roulette, and, of course, always lost. They pawned her dowry, then their clothing. In one letter Dostoevsky begged Katkov for another advance, saying they would otherwise be forced to pawn their linen. It sounds like exaggeration, but he wrote to a friend confessing that he had understated the case, because he could not bring himself to say that they had already pawned it. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In such conditions, the novel Dostoevsky was working on, to be called The Idiot, did not progress well. Five times, the couple was forced to move when landlords would extend no more credit. Dostoevsky was plagued by epileptic seizures, incapacitating him for days. When Anna Grigorievna went into labor with their daughter Sonya, he suffered an attack, and it was hours before she could rouse him to go for a midwife. When the baby died, he experienced guilt as well as grief because, he believed, if they had been in Russia, Sonya would have survived. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dostoevsky simply had to produce a novel, but refused to cheapen his work. “Worst of all I fear mediocrity,” he wrote to his niece. “I assure you the novel could have been satisfactory,” he explained to his friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, “but I got incredibly fed up with it precisely because of the fact that it was satisfactory and not absolutely good.” At last he abandoned his drafts. Nothing mattered more than artistic integrity. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dostoevsky resolved to start over with a new premise. The old Idiot dealt with a rogue who committed crime after crime, including rape and arson, but eventually found Christ and goodness. The problem was that Dostoevsky could not make the conversion psychologically convincing, and he was unwilling just to assert it. As it happened, at this very time, Tolstoy was serializing War and Peace in The Russian Messenger—has any publisher been so fortunate as Katkov?—and Tolstoy’s hero Prince Andrei does come to love his enemy in a way that is believable beyond doubt. No novel had ever achieved this feat before, and only one more would do so: Tolstoy’s next work, Anna Karenina. All the more galling, religion was Dostoevsky’s specialty, and so Tolstoy had beaten him at his own game. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dostoevsky wondered: what if he were to begin with an Idiot who was already a perfect Christian soul? Suppose the novel should ask not whether the Christian ideal is possible but whether it is desirable? Without supernatural powers, would a true Christian do more harm than good in a world of real people with damaged—Dostoevskian—souls? </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dostoevsky proposed “to portray a perfectly beautiful man.” He could think of only three novelists who had tried: Cervantes succeeded with Don Quixote and Dickens with Pickwick, but only by making them ridiculous, rather than psychologically deep. Hugo’s Jean Valjean (in Les Misérables) captures our imagination not by his realistically portrayed inner life but by his prolonged suffering. None of these books tested the Christian ideal itself. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Why might a true Christian cause harm? Plutarch recounts how Aristides the Just would help the illiterate record their votes for the person to be ostracized from Athens each year. Someone once asked him to write down “Aristides.” Since the man was illiterate, Aristides could have written down anything, but performed the task honestly. When he asked why the man wanted to ostracize Aristides, he replied: “Simply because: I am sick and tired of hearing him called ‘the Just.’ ” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">People tend to hate their moral superiors. That is why tabloids delight in reporting their lapses. When someone is better than we are, when we have shown our vileness in the face of their goodness, or when we suffer guilt for injuring them unjustly, our lost self-respect often provokes us to behave still worse. We hate them for having been the occasion of our suffering, and we want to change the rules of the game by violating them all the more. In The Brothers Karamazov, the loathsome Fyodor Pavlovich, asked why he hates a particular person, replies “with his shameless impudence: ‘I’ll tell you. He has never done me any harm, but I once played a nasty trick on him, and I’ve never forgiven him for it.’ ” Innocence can be so provoking! When guilt is mild, we may resolve to improve, but when it is acute, we often make ourselves worse, and then still worse, in an endless cycle.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/5/the-idiot-savant-9753">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-51592280724236096482018-02-13T19:20:00.003+01:002018-02-13T19:20:50.073+01:00The Enthralling, Anxious World of Vladimir Nabokov’s Dreams<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dreams are boring. On the list of tedious conversation topics, they fall somewhere between the five-day forecast and golf. As for writing about them, even Henry James, who’s seldom accused of playing to the cheap seats, had a rule: “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” I can remember when I accepted that my own unconscious was not a fount of fascination—I’d dreamed, at length and in detail, of owning an iPhone that charged really, really fast.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How unfair it is, then, that Vladimir Nabokov can show up, decades after his death, with a store of dreams more lush and enthralling than many waking lives. In 1964, living in opulence at Switzerland’s Montreux Palace Hotel, Nabokov began to keep a dream diary of a sort, dutifully inscribing his memories on index cards at his bedside in rubber-banded stacks. These cards, and Nabokov’s efforts to parse them, are the foundation of “Insomniac Dreams,” a recently published chronicle of the author’s oneiric experiments, edited by Gennady Barabtarlo, a professor at the University of Missouri.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nabokov’s ambitions weren’t interpretive. He “held nothing but contempt for Freud’s crude oneirology,” Barabtarlo explains, and in tracking his dreams he wasn’t turning his gaze inward. For him, the mystery was outside—far outside. Nabokov had been reading deeply into serialism, a philosophy positing that time is reversible. The theory came from J. W. Dunne, a British engineer and armchair philosopher who, in 1927, published “An Experiment with Time,” arguing, in part, that our dreams afforded us rare access to a higher order of time. Was it possible that we were glimpsing snatches of the future in our dreams—that what we wrote off as déjà vu was actually a leap into the metaphysical ether? Dunne himself claimed to have had no fewer than eight precognitive dreams, including one in which he foresaw a headline about a volcanic eruption.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If all of this sounds too batty for a man of faculties, consider that Dunne’s “An Experiment with Time” had gained currency among a number of other writers, including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley. Its path to Nabokov is unclear, but, however it came to him, in its pages he recognized a fellow-traveller. (The author had his mystical side, Barabtarlo notes, “and the notion of metaphysical interfusion with, even intervention into, one’s life was very close to him.”) Consider, too, that, by 1964, when he began keeping his dream diary, Nabokov was barely sleeping at all. At sixty-five, he had an enlarged prostate that exacerbated his lifelong insomnia. He described episodes of “hopelessness and nervous urination,” his sleep punctured as often as nine times a night by “toilet interruptions.” In extremis, he turned to powerful sedatives and hypnotics, but even with these he struggled to make it through the night. In the depths of sleeplessness, mired in a somnolent fog, who among us wouldn’t feel a little oracular?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To detect precognition, Dunne laid out an exacting regimen for recording one’s dreams. Nabokov decided to follow it scrupulously, and almost instantly he found himself brimming with precognitive powers. On the second night, he dreamed of a clock set at half past ten; the next day, he came across the very same time in Dunne’s book. That’s nice, but it’s not volcanic-eruption nice. A few nights later, he saw a more “incontestable success” while dreaming about a museum: “I was absent-mindedly eating exhibits on the table—bricks of crumbly stuff which I had apparently taken for some kind of dusty insipid pastry but which were actually samples of rare soils.” Afterward, watching French television, he came across a program discussing soil samples in Senegal. Eureka! He had eaten the dirt of a future time.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And yet Nabokov didn’t seem to linger on his victory or its metaphysical ramifications. Though he kept up his index-card routine for eighty nights, he drifted from Dunne’s method. Rather than flagging his dreams for their precognitive potential, he began to find patterns among them, breaking them into categories: nostalgic or erotic, shaped by current events or professional anxieties. Apart from a dry spell he referred to as “dream constipation,” Nabokov was a prodigious dreamer, his mind a wellspring of trenchant, tender, and perturbing images that he recounts with verve. An old Cambridge classmate “gloomily consumes a thick red steak, holding it rather daintily, the nails of his long fingers glisten[ing] with cherry-red varnish.” A cryptic caller “wonders how I knew she was Russian. I answer dream-logically that only Russian women speak so loud on the phone.” There are capers: in one, Nabokov and his son, Dmitri, “are trying to track down a repulsive plump little boy who has killed another child—perhaps his sister.” And there are intimations of mortality: “A tremendous very black larch paradoxically posing as a Christmas tree completely stripped of its toys, tinsel, and lights, appeared in its abstract starkness as the emblem of permanent dissolution.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are also butterflies. Nabokov was a skillful lepidopterist, and he’d taken up residence in Montreux in part because it sat at the foot of the Alps, where rare species fluttered. He had a recurring nightmare of “finding myself in the haunts of interesting butterflies without my butterfly net and being reduced to capturing and messing up a rarity with my fingers.” In an ominous instance, a butterfly “eyes me in conscious agony as I try to kill it by pinching its thick thorax—very tenacious of life. Finally slip it into a Morocco case—old, red, zippered.” On another night, Nabokov lashes into a stranger with the “light metal, vulcanized handle” of his butterfly net. The stranger lives.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-vladimir-nabokov-saw-in-his-dreams">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-67197221216080800242018-01-23T19:15:00.001+01:002018-01-23T19:15:29.411+01:00The Horror, the Horror - Isaac Babel<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">On January 17, 1940, Stalin approved the sentences of 346 prominent people, including the dramaturge Vsevolod Meyerhold, the former NKVD (secret police) chief Nikolai Yezhov, and the writer Isaac Babel. All were shot. Babel had been arrested on May 15, 1939, in the middle of the night, and, the story goes, he remarked to an NKVD officer: “So, I guess you don’t get much sleep, do you?”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Grim wit was Babel’s trademark. He is best known for a cycle of short stories entitled Red Cavalry, a fictionalized account of his experiences as a Bolshevik war correspondent with a Cossack regiment during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920. Lionel Trilling, who introduced Babel to the English-speaking world, recognized these stories as the masterpiece of Soviet literature.1 Some of Babel’s other stories, especially his Odessa tales, also impressed Trilling and have remained favorites. They offer a tragicomic portrait of Odessa’s large Jewish community, with its rabbis, sensitive schoolboys, and, improbably, a Jewish gangster whose adventures combine epic heroism with a trickster’s ingenuity. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How did a young man “with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart,” as he describes himself in one story, wind up in a regiment of Cossacks, known for their extreme brutality, violent masculinity, and hatred of Jews? Born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1894, Babel, who received a traditional Jewish education, was steeped in the polyglot, multicultural communities of Odessa, where he acquired fluency in Hebrew, Yiddish, and French, as well as Russian. In one story, he describes how Odessa Jews were obsessed with turning their sons into great violinists, like Mischa Elman or Jascha Heifetz; but Babel, who concealed copies of Turgenev on his music stand, preferred the traditional Russian view of literature as the most important thing in the world. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Influenced by Maupassant, he wrote his first stories in French, but as he recalls in his autobiographical tale “My First Honorarium,” he was inhibited by his belief that “it was pointless to write worse than Lev Tolstoy.” With Tolstoy, he told an interviewer, “the electric charge went from the earth, through the hands, straight to the paper, with no insulation, quite mercilessly stripping off any and all outer layers with a sense of truth…both transparent and beautiful.” But it was not Tolstoy’s incomparable realism and transparent style that Babel would cultivate. It was his ability to strip away all life’s accidents and reveal its “essence.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In his tale “Childhood. At Grandmother’s,” the young Babel learns to see everything around him—streets, shop windows, stones—“in a special way…and I was quite certain that I could see in them what was most important, mysterious, what we grown-ups call the essence of things.” He discovered in his grandfather a man who “was ruled by an inextinguishable search for knowledge and for life.” His grandmother told him not to trust anyone, but to acquire all human knowledge: “You must know everything,” she demanded, and with these words she shaped “my destiny, and her solemn covenant presses firmly—and forevermore—upon my weak little shoulders.” That destiny, as he conceived it, was to become “the [Russian] literary Messiah, awaited in vain for so long.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To see into the essence of things requires experience. In one autobiographical tale, a proofreader rebukes Babel for not knowing the natural world: “And you dare to write! A person who doesn’t live in nature, as a stone or an animal lives in nature, will never write two worthwhile lines in his entire life.” But it was human beings, in all their beauty and loathsomeness, he most wanted to know. In 1915, he moved to St. Petersburg and wrote some stories that impressed Maxim Gorky, who published Babel’s work in his newspaper New Life, until the Bolsheviks shut it down. As Babel recalled, Gorky advised him to go into the world and acquire real experience. Over the next few years, Babel served as a soldier on the Romanian front and may even have worked for the nascent Cheka (secret police) before becoming a war correspondent.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There could hardly have been a more grotesque pairing than a sensitive Jewish intellectual with a brutal Cossack regiment. For Trilling, this contrast constitutes the central theme of Red Cavalry, and it is certainly important. But something else is going on. The author approaches the world as an anthropologist, a disinterested spectator recording the odd customs of Cossacks, Jews, Poles, priests, Hasidic rebbes, camp whores, and every sort of perpetrator or victim of extreme violence. Observing his own reactions as if they were someone else’s, or placing himself in dangerous situations in order to monitor his own emotions, he treats himself as just another specimen of the human condition. In his story “My First Goose,” he wonders at his own taste for violence and its intimate link with sexuality. He has to know everything. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But what is the morality of looking at human suffering from outside, as a scientist examines specimens? That, too, is a theme of these stories and of Babel’s work in general. In her memoir Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam describes Babel as a risk-taker, willing to do anything, however dangerous or morally questionable, to learn about unexpected situations and strange people. Babel listened with more intensity than anyone she had ever met, while everything about him “gave an impression of all-consuming curiosity—the way he held his head, his mouth, his chin, and particularly his eyes…. Babel’s main driving force was the unbridled curiosity with which he scrutinized life and people.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Babel even seemed to enjoy risk itself. During the great purges, he had an affair with the NKVD chief Yezhov’s wife. Instead of living in apartment buildings for writers, he chose a house where foreigners stayed. “Who in his right mind would have lived in the same house as foreigners?” Mandelstam asked, since any contact with foreigners was a likely death sentence. She also reports that Babel spent a lot of time with “militiamen,” a euphemism for NKVD agents. Mandelstam’s husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, asked Babel why he was so drawn to such company: “Was it a desire to see what it was like in the exclusive store where the merchandise was death?” Babel replied: “I just like to have a whiff and see what it smells like.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One might suppose that Yezhov had Babel arrested for sleeping with his wife, but in fact he was arrested after Yezhov fell, apparently because it was routine to incarcerate anyone associated with an enemy of the people. Under interrogation, which almost always involved torture, Babel implicated other cultural figures—not as spies, but for the views they actually held, which no one but a totalitarian would find objectionable. Sergei Eisenstein, according to Babel, had remarked that under current conditions gifted individuals could not fully realize their talents, while the writer Ilya Ehrenburg complained that “the continuing wave of arrests forced all Soviet citizens to break off any relations with foreigners.” As was not uncommon, Babel’s confession was bloodstained.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The narrator of Red Cavalry—the war correspondent Vasily Lyutov, the pseudonym Babel himself had used among the Cossacks—observes everyone anthropologically, even his fellow Jews, as if they were a strange tribe. In the opening story, “Crossing the Zbruch,” he is quartered with a poor Jewish family, consisting of a pregnant woman, a man with a covered head asleep against the wall, and two “scraggy necked Jews” who hop about “monkey-fashion.” As if he were disgusted by contact with Jews, Lyutov describes finding in the room assigned to him “turned-out wardrobes…scraps of women’s fur coats on the floor, human excrement, and shards of the hidden dishware Jews use once a year—at Easter.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/isaac-babel-horror-the-horror/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-58009303689838801492018-01-22T19:40:00.000+01:002018-01-22T19:40:04.638+01:00Léon Bakst and the Writer: of the Russian Silver Age<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A prominent artist of the Silver Age of Russian culture, Léon (Lev Samoilovich) Bakst was also a notable figure in the literary community of his time. He was acquainted with, or a friend of many writers and poets whose portraits he painted and whose books he illustrated.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lev Samoilovich was familiar not only with the classics but with the latest literary works, too. He explained his literary tastes in a 1903 letter to his fiancee Lyubov Grishchenko, daughter of the collector and patron of the arts Pavel Tretyakov: “I hate Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy; I love Gogol, Pushkin, A. [Alexei] Tolstoy, Lermontov, Goncharov, Chekhov, Verlain[e], Musset, Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens, Bret Hart, Daudet...”[1] Bakst wrote about his first meeting with Anton Chekhov: “Once, as I dropped in on A. Kanaev, in his dimly-lit study on Troitskaya Street, I saw him talking with a fair-haired man of medium height, whom I took for a student by virtue of his costume and the unruly mop of hair over his forehead. I liked his grey, serious eyes and the childish, delicate smile on his round, ‘Russian-looking’ face. Kanaev introduced me with a grin: ‘Your staunch admirer, the future artist Bakst who, for now, has learned four of your short stories by heart.’”[2]</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bakst would retain his admiration for Chekhov throughout his life. One of his favourite writers, with whom he was personally acquainted, was Alexei Tolstoy, whose lithographic portrait Bakst created in 1909. The portrait was printed in “Apollo” magazine, which employed many prominent artists and writers of the Silver Age. Bakst’s friends frequently asked him to design covers for their collections of poems or short stories: such requests produced the book cover for Sergei Gorodetsky’s collection of poems “Perun” (St. Petersburg, 1907), the frontispiece for Konstantin Balmont’s “Ancient Calls” (St. Petersburg, 1906), the cover for Maximilian Voloshin’s “Anno mundi argentis” (Moscow, 1906), and the frontispiece for Alexander Blok’s “A Snow Mask” (St. Petersburg, 1907). As chief illustrator at “Mir iskusstva” (World of Art) magazine, Bakst created not only the periodical’s image and cover, but also headpieces, vignettes and tailpieces for the works of Vasily Rozanov, Konstantin Balmont and Nikolai Minsky.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bakst became acquainted with a considerable number of writers from the mid-1890s onwards, when he joined Alexandre Benois’ informal community of artists and writers, the group which later produced the magazine “World of Art”. Zinaida Gippius wrote: “I called this club ‘the Diaghilev coterie’, and that title had a particular meaning. The magazine would have hardly materialized had it not been for Diaghilev. Without his energy and... authoritativeness. Diaghilev was a natural-born dictator. When we became acquainted with the members of the group (long before the magazine started), it consisted of the following individuals from Diaghilev’s circle: first, Diaghilev’s cousin Dmitry Filosofov, then Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, Walter Nouvel and Alfred Nurok... The ‘World of Art’ editorial office then was housed in Diaghilev’s apartment. Its guests were carefully selected. It seems to me that they were the then artistic and literary ‘cream of society’ - one way or another - proponents of aestheticism, neo-aestheticism.” [3]</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 1900 the magazine printed Gippius’s article “Celebration in the Name of Death”,[4] and the same issue also featured her lithographic portrait by Léon Bakst.[5] She liked the portrait and decided to enlist Bakst’s services for designing her book of poems which was then being prepared by Scorpion publishing house. Overwhelmed by numerous assignments, the artist did not fulfill his promise. Bakst himself remembered in a letter: “There has been a bit of a scandal on account of the cover for Zinochka Merezhkovskaya’s book of poems. She and her husband asked the book’s publisher Valery Bryusov to take a look at the cover before the release. Bryusov replied with an impolitely phrased letter saying that he had assigned the cover to me and he considers me the sort of artist whom he can trust, with his eyes shut, to paint all that I might fancy. Merezhkovsky felt insulted, saying he was just curious, not checking anything. And the thing was that Zinochka simply wanted to have an idle chat, scrutinize her profile, give me all sorts of nonsensical advice, etc. So I decided simply to drop her, Zinochka, out of the picture and make do, quite simply, with an (antique) naked wench, but couldn’t finish even that on time and sent him (Bryusov) a cable that I was quitting.”[6]</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The story had its continuation. It was at that time that Bryusov decided to publish a literary periodical, “Vesy” (Libra). He asked Bakst for help, to which Bakst replied: “Please consider me as an employee of ‘Vesy’. I will gladly do the cover, first, because the name is interesting and stirs the illustrator’s artistic imagination, and second, because I feel guilty towards you for the failure with the Gippius-Merezhk. tomes.”[7] </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bakst worked very carefully, producing not only a sketch for the magazine’s cover but also developing the idea at a further stage, going into every detail of the process of production of the magazine. In December 1903 he wrote to Bryusov: “I’ve received your sketches and the one among them I fancy most is No. 1 - greyish-purple; green could be okay if you make it richer in tone. If only you knew how much time and energy we at ‘World of Art’ expend looking for the right colour for every new issue’s cover!”[8] Ultimately, every new issue’s cover had a similar design but a different colour. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The partnership of the poet and the painter was not always so successful, however. A sorry fate awaited the cover for the almanac “Northern Flowers” which Bakst designed in the spring of 1903. The artist asked, “If possible, keep the book’s format in line with the cover, do not shrink its size - it will look more beautiful and stylish.”[9] Bryusov liked the design. However, suddenly he sent a letter with apologies: “The censors did not approve your design. Absurd, but that’s a fact! This happened shortly before the publication date. What could be done? We decided to insert an old print into your frame. Sure enough, I gave an order to remove your name from the cover. Don’t get angry with us. There was nothing we could do.”[10]</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This story provoked anger in literary and artistic circles, and the artist told his fiancee about it: “The censors in Moscow disapproved of my cover for the ‘Scorpion’ almanac. Writers in Moscow are fuming over it; they had to cut a fragment and insert someone else’s (old) drawing into mine. The result: pele-mele [higgledy-piggledy]. But the back of the book carries an explanation.”[11] Fortunately, the sketch of the cover has survived, giving us the chance to rehabilitate Bakst. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But strange and sometimes funny things happened not only with book covers. His friendship with Zinaida Gippius would be tested more than once. In the summer of 1904 the artist, working on Diaghilev’s portrait, temporarily made his home in the “World of Art” editorial office. Not long before that Bakst had married and was now feeling depressed because his beloved had left him for a vacation in Finland. He was eager to go to his country home but Diaghilev would not let him, demanding that he finish the portrait. One morning the Merezhkovskys visited the editorial office, to find Bakst just out of bed. Soon Dmitry Merezhkovsky left to go about his business, and Zinaida stayed, in her own words, “just so, because out of sheer laziness I didn’t want to rise from the chair. Least of all I expected an undressed Bakst to suddenly begin telling me about his ‘undying affection’ and love! So strange! Now again...”[12] </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">However, the poet did not distinguish between the artist’s words about a great LOVE, of which she was herself a preacher, and her habit of having numerous suitors at her feet. In need of sympathy, Bakst wanted to get his feelings off his chest, give expression to his love and longing for his wife who was absent. But Gippius believed she was the object of the artist’s yearning and included this episode in her “Journal of Love Affairs”. Although she noted: “On that day, on my way home from the editorial office, I thought: here is a person in whose company I’m bound to experience gaffes all the time because even if he felt something for me, he. was just lying at my ‘feet’. His tenderness hasn’t risen higher than my legs. He doesn’t need my head, my heart he doesn’t understand, while he found my legs admirable. C’est tout.”[13] An intelligent and sober-minded woman, Gippius formed a clear view of the situation: it was not by chance that her portrait created by Bakst in 1906 featured her legs prominently (she approved of the work).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Gippius unintentionally contributed to the development of the painter’s literary talent. She later reminisced: “We decided once (when Bakst dropped by) to write a short story and set about the business right away. Bakst proposed the theme, and since it was very amusing, after some deliberation we decided to write it in French. The piece came out quite well: it was called ‘La cle’ [The Key].”[14] Not everybody was benignly disposed to Bakst’s literary endeavours. The poet Mikhail Kuzmin, in his diary for 1908, spoke of them quite disparagingly: “[Bakst] was nice and muddle-headed, and read his opus: a piece of crap, of course.”[15] Kuzmin and Bakst, meanwhile, were getting along just fine; it was just that the poet had more appreciation of his acquaintance’s artistic talents. In December 1906 Bakst wrote to his wife: “Today the poet Kuzmin called on me, asking to make a book cover for his poems. I’m going to spend this evening at his place, the guests - V. Ivanov, Remizov, Somov, M. Voloshin, etc. There will be a reading of new pieces.”[16] In fact, the writers and artists mentioned were part of the “in crowd” of writers and artists, to which Bakst also belonged.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="http://www.tretyakovgallerymagazine.com/articles/2-2017-55/leon-bakst-and-writer-russian-silver-age">>>></a></span><br /><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-61708907799782087562018-01-18T16:14:00.003+01:002018-01-18T16:14:54.643+01:00Gorbachev: His Life and Times by William Taubman<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">If Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, the same holds true for its most famous living citizen, Mikhail Gorbachev. From March 1985 to December 1991 he was under an unrelenting national and international spotlight as the Soviet Union’s leader. He wrote several autobiographical books while in power and has written more since retirement. At least a dozen associates have published memoirs in which he features prominently. Yet in spite of all this scrutiny, key questions about the man who did more than any other to change Europe and the world in the last half of the 20th century remain without clear answers.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">How did a secret reformist get chosen by deeply conservative elders to be their country’s next leader? Gorbachev felt his country needed fundamental change, so why did he not quickly develop a programme of political and economic action once he had secured the top job? Why did he fail to foresee the rise of nationalist unrest that eventually led to the Soviet Union’s fragmentation? Why did he consent to Germany’s reunification inside Nato without demanding anything in return, except cash to pay for Soviet troops’ rehousing?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">William Taubman, a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, who won a Pulitzer prize for his biography of Khrushchev, has done a phenomenal amount of research into Gorbachev’s career, including interviews with the man himself. He relies heavily on accounts by the closest aides, in particular the sparky diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, which reveals Gorbachev’s bewildering volatility of mood as well as his intellectual contradictions. But Taubman concludes he has to leave many questions about Gorbachev unresolved. Here is a man who confided to Chernyaev in 1987 that “we’ve made a mess of socialism: nothing is left of it”, yet took time off during crises to reread Lenin’s speeches in the conviction that he could learn lessons from 70 years earlier on how to strengthen socialism in today’s context. Or take Gorbachev’s attitude to the Communist party when its cadres became increasingly vocal in resisting change by 1990. His aides were urging him to leave the party and found a social democratic alliance to compete and take its place. “I can’t let this lousy rabid dog off the leash. If I do, all this huge structure will be turned against me,” he told them, using the foul language to which he often descended in moments of anger or despair.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Gorbachev’s biggest contribution was to provide Russians with freedom of speech and a multi-party democracy. Internationally, it was not to have used force to retain control of eastern Europe when its ruling Communist parties started to lose their grip. Behind this strategy lay a kind of Russian isolationism that ran counter to decades of Soviet internationalism. One might expect such a dramatic shift to have been preceded by long debate. Yet Gorbachev and his colleagues hardly ever discussed it. On the day after the Berlin Wall fell, Gorbachev did not even call the politburo into session, although he found time to send messages to US President George Bush, Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand, saying the East German leaders had taken the right decision. He was equally relaxed about the fall of communism elsewhere in the region.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One reason was that Gorbachev was preoccupied and overwhelmed with domestic crises within the Soviet Union. What had started as a revolution from above had become a revolution from below, with street protests and revolts breaking out all over. This provoked massive resistance from conservatives in the Soviet Communist party. Gorbachev was buffeted by pressures on all sides. Taubman’s approach to this tumultuous story is chronological and Kremlin-oriented. While this means that his fast-paced narrative leaps about, accurately reflecting Gorbachev’s tactical zigzagging, it leaves insufficient space for describing the context of daily life for Soviet citizens and the mounting disillusionment with reform that led many Russians to view Gorbachev as an agent of destruction. It also means the book lacks an explanation for basic issues.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To name just a few: why did shops have such massive food shortages? How come the black market became so pervasive? What went wrong with the effort to allow the development of private enterprise and small business under the guise of co-operatives? The book jumps from crisis to crisis just as Gorbachev’s daily agenda did, but readers would have benefited from some thematic chapters looking at key topics with the advantage of scholarly hindsight, such as the role of the mass media in hastening change, or Gorbachev’s clumsy handling of Baltic nationalism, or why (a question of renewed significance since 2014) a majority of people in eastern Ukraine, and even in Crimea, voted for independence and a break from Moscow in 1991. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In a volume as comprehensive as this, it may seem cavalier to query points of emphasis. But Taubman’s section on the Afghan war is unnecessarily short. Gorbachev’s internationally negotiated withdrawal of Soviet troops while ensuring that Afghanistan’s ruling group under Mohammad Najibullah remained in power for a further three years was not a humiliation but a qualified success. It brought relief to thousands of Soviet families who feared their sons would be conscripted and killed but, like other Gorbachev accomplishments, won little gratitude from Soviet citizens. The chapter on the hardliners’ coup that put Gorbachev under arrest in his Crimean villa in August 1991 gets a mere 17 pages in a very long book. Yet it includes a surprisingly large number of paragraphs of speculation on whether Gorbachev was somehow complicit and only pretended to be detained (a claim that the plotters produced in their defence once the coup had failed).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/11/gorbachev-his-life-and-times-by-william-taubman-review-the-mysteries-remain">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-51263386845802115772017-12-28T11:34:00.002+01:002017-12-28T11:34:28.083+01:00The great error - The bookishness of Bolsheviks<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">What more fitting monument to a millenarian movement could there be than a thousand-page “saga”? Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion that constitutes just one of his thirty-three chapters, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Slezkine is by no means the first person to draw the analogy between the Bolsheviks and sectarians (Lenin himself is reported to have taken an interest in the Münster Anabaptists and Cromwell’s Puritans as he pondered Russia’s revolutionary potential in the early twentieth century), but no one before him has extracted such analytical mileage from it. This intellectual framework allows him to explain the Bolsheviks’ striving to bring self and society, individual and history, into perfect alignment; their relentless study and exegesis of their own version of scripture (Marx and Engels, later Lenin); their jealous guarding of their purity and integrity; and their embrace of violence, which was a welcome sign of the apocalyptic confrontation that would herald the “Real Day”. Like other sects, the Bolsheviks had an intense, even incestuous, small-group cohesion born of initial persecution: they bonded fiercely and permanently in the prisons, places of exile and underground discussion circles where they first encountered one another. Like other millenarians, many of them seemed to relish the heat of battle more than the fruits of victory. Combat and violence provided a more immediate purpose than the future utopia, the outlines of which remained hazy and contested. Here, Slezkine suggests, the Bolsheviks had something in common with their founding fathers: Marx and Engels were more eloquent and informative on the irreconcilable contradictions and coming crisis of capitalism than on the future shape of communism. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There were, however, some crucial differences between the Bolsheviks and all previous sectarians. The main one was the vast power they obtained at a relatively early stage of their collective existence, which brought with it an unusual degree of insecurity. As Slezkine puts it, they were the only apocalyptic sect that had ever taken over an “existing heathen empire”: they ruled over the population of the former Russian Empire, which was overwhelmingly ignorant of or unreceptive to their teachings. This required a proselytizing effort unparalleled in history; and when persuasion failed, coercion would have to follow, along with the isolation, exclusion and even extermination of the unconverted. Apocalypse – in the form of the destruction of the old regime and the ensuing civil war – occurred much sooner than even Lenin could have expected. When it failed to deliver paradise, and indeed forced all sorts of regrettable compromises with petit-bourgeois reality, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the prophecy had not been fulfilled..</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Slezkine paints the 1920s, the era of the New Economic Policy, as the time of the Bolsheviks’ “Great Disappointment”. The first years after the civil war were haunted by apprehensions of contamination by the class enemy, emasculation and materialism. The quintessential bogey of NEP culture was a frivolously attired bourgeoise bearing chocolate. For a while the Bolsheviks could maintain their revolutionary elan by wearing leather jackets or military tunics and leading a peripatetic existence as they hopped from one party mission to the next. But sooner or later, almost all of them donned suits, acquired families (sometimes more than one), accumulated possessions, put down roots. They seem not to have been excessively troubled by the contrast between their own living conditions and the less luxurious dwellings and rations of the surrounding Muscovites, let alone the plight of the millions they drove into starvation during the collectivization campaign. But some rhetorical ingenuity was required. Summer jaunts to the Crimea, for example, were routinely justified as necessary to cure chronic ailments or nervous disorders.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Another important distinctive feature of the Bolsheviks as sectarians was that their large-scale attempt at a reformation took place in a post-Romantic age. This meant that the individual self required an exceptionally high degree of maintenance: even after they were converted and incorporated, Bolsheviks continued to ask themselves, and each other, a great many questions about the revolutionary’s conduct and motives. As they did so, the written word was their greatest friend. They wrote voluminously: The House of Government would be unthinkable without the corpus of letters and diaries that this group of people managed to leave behind, despite the depredations of the late 1930s. Above all, Slezkine’s subjects read incessantly. Besides Marx, the “Pamirs” of world literature got most of their attention: Cervantes, Goethe, Tolstoy, with honourable mentions for Heine, Romain Rolland and various others. For the Bolsheviks, scripture was not a single book but a whole library. No wonder that “father’s study” was the main fixed point in the nomenklatura apartment, and that the in-house carpenters were kept busy making shelves. The Bolsheviks’ aim, in the motto of Yakov Sverdlov, the future mastermind of the party apparatus, was to “put books to the test of life, and life to the test of books”. It seems that neither life nor books emerged unscathed from the encounter. In 1911, when Sverdlov wrote from pre-trial detention to his pregnant common-law wife, he earnestly used War and Peace as a guide to childbirth. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The intense bookishness of the upper echelons of Bolshevism permeates Slezkine’s work, which draws to great effect not only on first-person documents of the time but also on fictional distillations or sublimations of the revolutionary cause. The Bolsheviks’ acceptance, at times even relish, of apocalyptic violence was not suppressed or concealed by the literary fraternity: it was on display in civil war novels such as Alexander Serafimovich’s canonical The Iron Flood (Zheleznyi potok, 1924). Conversely, nowhere are the apprehensions and nightmares of the NEP period rawer than in the fiction of the 1920s. The tensions of the Bolshevik project are most poignantly expressed in works whose narrators and protagonists desperately want to believe, set out to chronicle the building of socialism, but remain, to quote the title of one Andrei Platonov story, “doubting Makars”. Whether they are novelists or diarists, Slezkine’s authors are often allowed to speak for themselves: sources are quoted at length, sometimes several paragraphs at a time. Bolshevism, he implies, was a text as well as a political project. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The House of Government is both an inquiry into the historical sociology of religion and an exercise in literary-cultural excavation and recreation. But it is also, as the title suggests, a fine-grained history of a very particular place: the enormous residential complex for the Bolshevik elite that went up on the south bank of the Moscow River, almost opposite the Kremlin, during the first five-year plan (1928–32). The House of Government contained more than 500 spacious apartments as well as extensive leisure and service facilities. The dimensions were generous and the specification high: 11-foot ceilings, granite panelling, marble steps, ceramic tiles. Slezkine has conducted prodigious research into the building and its inhabitants, drawing on the relevant institutional repositories but also soliciting documents from family archives and conducting a series of interviews in the late 1990s with surviving descendants of the Old Bolsheviks. This material would sustain a very fine book on its own. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The House was not just a perk of office but a powerful statement. It stood on an island formed by the Moscow River on one side and the Vodootvodnyi (drainage) canal on the other. Its very location made tangible the struggle with the “old” world. Before the Revolution, this was known as a swampy district, and “swamp” was a convenient metaphor for the old social order that would be swept away by the “flood” of revolution. The completion of this nomenklatura citadel would serve as a high-profile demonstration of the triumph of socialist construction. Here was a monument to Soviet permanence – and the best spot in town to watch the symbolic obliteration of the old world through the detonation of the Christ the Saviour cathedral in December 1931.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But in fact the House of Government was an equivocal place from the moment its plans were approved. In architectural terms, it was not an unambiguous statement of the newness of the new world but rather a blend of constructivism and neoclassicism. It took inspiration from bourgeois New York apartment living rather than anything particularly socialist. The House was fortunate in that “infantile leftism” went into remission halfway through its construction, which meant it could be hailed as a model building rather than a betrayal of utopian ambitions. There had always been muttering about the inordinate cost, which outran the original estimate by a factor of ten. Ultimately, however, money for the project was no object, as the government was always able to grant itself credits to build its own home. The more enduring problem was that the House did not constitute the symbolic break with the past that its initiators had intended. By 1934, Lazar Kaganovich declared that it could not after all serve as a model for the future, because “its composition is a bit too heavy”. Nor did the building’s internal design have obvious revolutionary credentials. Far from challenging the ancient institution of the family, the House entrenched it at the heart of the Soviet elite. Worse still, the families in question were far from neat and cellular: the typical Old Bolshevik household was complex and three-generational, as party potentates gathered their extended families and other dependants around them. There was little in the way of collective life beyond the unit of the single-apartment clan. By the standards of many Western apartment blocks, the House was distinctly lacking in communal spirit and routine socializing. A Bolshevik’s apartment, it turned out, was his castle. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Admittedly, the Bolshevik men were usually out at work or roving the country in search of construction projects or enemies of the people. The permanent element was the women and (especially) the children. Slezkine provides a rich ethnography of Soviet elite life in the 1930s, showing just how fulfilled the “happy Soviet childhood” was in this milieu. Like their fathers and mothers before them, the offspring of the nomenklatura read voraciously, formed close intellectual friendships and had a blissful sense of purpose in life. Unlike their parents, they did not even have to go to prison or sit through Siberian exile to enjoy these blessings. As usual, the consummation of life came in writing. Slezkine spends almost thirty pages on the extraordinary teenager Lyova (Lev) Fedotov, artist, musician, collector and above all chronicler. In a thoroughly Tolstoyan attempt to fuse living and writing, Lyova went so far as to produce a hundred-page diary entry on a single day. Slezkine sums up his endeavour in a characteristically striking metaphor: “He wrote as he read, and he read as he wrote, and he lived through what he read and wrote in an ever-tightening dog-chase-tail race for the fullness of time and limitless self-awareness”.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Before long, of course, some of the Bolshevik children did in fact experience prison and exile as their parents were arrested and disgraced. After an ethnographic lull in its treatment of the House of Government routine in the 1930s, the book builds to an inevitable climax in the Great Terror. As Slezkine tells it, the phone call with news of Sergei Kirov’s murder in December 1934 “changed everything”: without this event, which triggered an ever-widening search for the culprits and an avalanche of accusations and denunciations, the Bolshevik elite might have stabilized itself. Here the theorist in Slezkine takes a back seat to the storyteller: unexpected phone calls are a wonderful plot device, but the book has already shown that the bloodletting of the 1930s was far from surprising given the Bolsheviks’ longstanding fear of infiltration and stigmatization of dissent, however deeply buried. The reader may have been beguiled into the pastoral mode by Slezkine’s account of the domesticity, dachas and rest homes of the House residents in the early 1930s, but this apparently timeless “normality” was in fact nothing of the sort. If we follow the logic of Slezkine’s “sectarian” analysis, what followed was perhaps the least unexpected witch-hunt in history. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/house-of-government-slezkine/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-68832954050001295812017-12-23T12:48:00.001+01:002017-12-23T12:48:31.567+01:00The Nutcracker (1989) Bolsoi Ballet & Orchestra <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="344" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0UgYqcagmzg" width="459"></iframe> <br /><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Nutcracker </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">on a story by E.T.A.Hoffman </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Bolsoi Theatre Orchestra </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Conductor: Aleksandr Kopilov</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Performed by the Bolsoi Ballet at the Bolsoi Theatre, Moscow 1989</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Choreography by Yuri Grigorovich</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Original choreography by Lev Ivanov</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Clara: Natalya Arkhipova</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nutcracker prince: Irek Mukhamedov</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Drosselmeyer: Turi Vetrov</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-6654859054515598692017-12-22T17:54:00.001+01:002017-12-22T17:54:33.417+01:00Pushkin's pride: how the Russian literary giant paid tribute to his African ancestry<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For Russians, Alexander Pushkin inhabits a space beyond taste, where nationalism has given subjective art the patina of fact. He is the undisputed father of their literature in the way Shakespeare is for Brits. Given the insular nature of contemporary Russian politics, it might be hard to imagine that the creator of Eugene Onegin was not only a proponent of multiculturalism and global exchange but an example of it: Pushkin was mixed race, and proud of his African ancestry. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">His great-grandfather, Ibrahim Petrovich Gannibal, was probably born in what is now Cameroon in 1696. Gannibal was kidnapped as a child and taken to Constantinople, where, in one of those confounding literary footnotes, one of Tolstoy’s ancestors “rescued” him (this is Pushkin’s own word – vïruchiv – in a 1824 note) and presented him to Peter the Great. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Gannibal exchanged one form of servitude for another, but as page, godson and exotic court favourite to the emperor, his new life was much more glamorous. Following a military education in France, he rose to the nobility and died a general-in-chief with hundreds of serfs: a black aristocrat with white indentured servants in 18th-century northern Europe. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pushkin attempted to fathom his forebear’s life in an uncompleted historical novel he began in 1827, The Moor of Peter the Great. In the fragment, which draws on the author’s own experience of prejudice, Ibrahim finds himself admired by many women in France, but “this curiosity, though hidden behind an appearance of benevolence, offended his self-esteem”. He envies “people whom nobody noticed, regarding their insignificance as happiness”. He expects “mockery”. And when he falls, it is for Countess D, who “received Ibrahim courteously, but with no special attention. This flattered him.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Simply and engagingly written – it is easy to imagine it developing into a rollick – the fragment is nevertheless extremely subtle. The irony can be Austenian in its suppleness, as when Pushkin imagines the Countess finding “something appealing in that curly head, black amidst the powdered wigs in her drawing room”, or explores Ibrahim’s own prejudice about the sexual motives of the women around him. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This ambiguity was central to Pushkin’s identity. Sometimes he used his African heritage to position himself as a Byronic outsider hero, as when speaking of “my Africa”, in Onegin, as if he’d been there. He called American slaves “my brothers” while owning Russian slaves of his own and insisting – as Nabokov’s translation of his 1830 poem My Genealogy has it – Gannibal was: “The emperor’s bosom friend, not a slave.” At other times, he reproduced stereotypes of the day, as when he pictures Ibrahim with “jealously [beginning] to seethe in his African blood” – a trope that society gossips applied to Pushkin himself after his tragic duel.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/dec/19/pushkins-pride-how-the-russian-literary-giant-paid-tribute-to-his-african-ancestry">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-12222874903117288822017-12-11T13:08:00.001+01:002017-12-11T13:08:21.843+01:00Why Stalin Starved Ukraine<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">History is a battleground, perennially fought over, endlessly contested. Nowhere does this aphorism hold true more than in Russia. A majority of Russians recently voted Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world history (followed, naturally, by current President Vladimir Putin). No longer the monster of the gulags and purges that killed millions, Stalin now looms in the national consciousness as the giant who defeated the Nazis in World War II. Meanwhile, not only has Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine’s eastern regions, its military adventurism has also extended to Syria. Putin, who once described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, looks determined to avenge the humiliations of Russia’s post-Soviet implosion. Integral to this endeavor is not just to flex the country’s geopolitical might in the present but to re-write its past.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is this point that makes the historiography of the USSR—a subject worthy of deep study in itself—so relevant today. Pulitzer-prize winning historian Anne Applebaum is one of the world’s pre-eminent chroniclers of the crimes of the Soviet Union. Her previous works, notably Gulag: A History, which detailed the horrors of the Soviet prison system, and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, which analyzed the USSR’s imposition of communism in Eastern Europe, have played their part in bringing to light the full extent of Soviet oppression. Her new book Red Famine—a masterpiece of scholarship, a ground-breaking history, and a heart-wrenching story—turns to the horrors of Soviet policy in Ukraine, specifically Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine from 1932 to 1933. Such was the famine’s devastation that Ukrainian émigré publications coined a new word to describe its barbarity: “Holodomor,” a combination of the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At least 5 million people died from starvation in the Soviet Union between 1931 and 1934—including 3.9 million Ukrainians. And, despite the contentions of certain historians of the Soviet Union, Applebaum argues that these deaths were no accident. As she notes at the beginning of the book, “The Soviet Union’s disastrous decision to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms; the eviction of “kulaks,” the wealthier peasants, from their homes; the chaos that followed”—these policies were “all ultimately the responsibility of Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moreover, they were—along with the persecution of intellectuals and officials who had even the flimsiest connection to Ukrainian nationalism—part of a systematic assault not just on Ukraine, but on the very idea of Ukraine.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Collectivization of the farmlands of Ukraine began in 1929. Stalin wanted the country, with its hugely fertile black soil, to be the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. He wanted to feed the important party officials and to export its grain abroad to fund his vast industrialization projects. It was an unmitigated disaster. Farmers were no longer paid for their produce but worked according to a ration system based on their productivity. In reality it made them beholden to the party, which, controlling their finances, was able to control all aspects of their lives. And they were no longer able to buy food. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/145953/stalin-starved-ukraine">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-49375820879313821462017-11-20T18:24:00.000+01:002017-11-20T18:24:04.985+01:00Vladimir Nabokov's dream diary reveals experiments with 'backwards timeflow'<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A 1964 diary in which Vladimir Nabokov recorded more than 50 of his dreams – ranging from the erotic to the violent to the surreal – is about to be published for the first time.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"> “Intensely erotic dream. Blood on sheet,” the novelist writes on 13 December 1964. “End of dream: my sister O, strangely young and languorous … Then stand near a window, sighing, half-seeing view, brooding over the possible consequence of incest.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Another entry sees him recording a dream in which he is dancing with his wife Vera. “Her open dress, oddly speckled and summery. A man kisses her in passing. I clutch him by the head and bang his face with such vicious force against the wall that he almost gets meat-hooked, on some fixtures on the wall (gleaming metal suggestive of ship). Detaches himself with face all bloody and stumbles away.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The author, who struggled with insomnia all his life, began the dream diary after reading the British philosopher John Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, in which he advances a theory that dreams can sometimes be inspired by future events. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to the Nabokov expert Gennady Barabtarlo, a professor of literature at the University of Missouri who has compiled and edited the diary, Nabokov’s experiment “followed the pedantic guidelines he found in the singularly rum and once very influential little book by John Dunne, an eccentric British philosopher of genius”. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“The chief object was to prove that in dreamland, that twilight zone between material and spiritual realms, timeflow goes backwards as it were, from effect to cause,” said Barabtarlo. “To give a rough example: the evening paper brings the news that in New York a Muslim ploughed into a crowd in a lorry. You vaguely remember your dream last night and check the record: indeed, you saw yourself on a tricycle hurtling downhill trying desperately, but failing, to avoid hitting a girl you knew in college. According to Dunne’s theory, it wasn’t your dream that previewed the actual event but the reverse – it was that horrific event that led to your dreaming that dream the night before. Nabokov was keenly interested in this theory and its ramifications and set out to put it to trial in that 1964 experiment.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For a period of 80 days, the author of Lolita wrote down everything he could remember of his dreams as soon as he woke up, amassing 118 index cards recording 64 dreams. The text is reproduced in the book Insomniac Dreams, alongside material placing the experiment in the context of his life and writing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/17/vladimir-nabokovs-dream-diary-reveals-experiments-with-backwards-timeflow">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-78986753205710296932017-11-02T19:10:00.003+01:002017-11-02T19:10:55.499+01:00Writing Poetry Under Stalin: Samizdat And Memorization<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At first, Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, worked on her poem in the usual way. She always composed by hand, writing out the lines on paper; then she would make corrections and perhaps read the lines aloud to see if they sounded right. Normally, she would produce a fair copy and send it to a magazine, or put it aside until a whole cycle of poems had emerged and then approach a book publisher. Before the Great War, she had published several volumes in this way, to great acclaim. She had become a celebrated poet in Russia while still in her early twenties, a dashing figure with her long shawls, black hair, and a bearing that betrayed her aristocratic heritage. In Paris, she had made the acquaintance of Amedeo Modigliani, a painter already confident of his future success, and he had fallen for her. Modigliani produced several drawings and paintings of the young Akhmatova that captured the elegant lines and distinct features of the poet whom critics would soon call the Russian Sappho.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Akhmatova held on to one of Modigliani’s drawings and gave it pride of place above her bed, but the time of her Paris triumph was long past. No thought of publication crossed her mind now, in the middle of the 1930s, as she was composing her new poem. The state would simply not allow it. Ever since Martin Luther had demonstrated what could be done with print, authorities had been trying to control publishers and authors. Permission had long been required for many publishing projects, forcing the likes of Cervantes to apply for a royal license. But licenses could be circumvented, as Franklin knew when he published a Bible without one, and books could be printed abroad and copies smuggled back into censored territory, as Marx and Engels found. Only in the 20th century was control over print finally within the reach of the state, at least some states. Equipped with centralized power, totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany commanded guns and manpower, but they also relied on a large bureaucratic apparatus to keep track of their citizens. Innumerable dossiers were created, processed, and stored. Bureaucracy, first developed 5,000 years earlier with the invention of writing, had become an all-encompassing force. Anna Akhmatova never engaged in any political activity, and yet her police file grew to some 900 pages.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Knowing that the state would not allow her poem to appear in print did not deter Akhmatova from writing it, even in these dangerous times. After a leading functionary was assassinated in 1934, arrests and executions had become a daily occurrence. No one was safe from Genrikh Yagoda, the head of Stalin’s secret police, who arrested potential rivals of Stalin, old comrades, anyone who might harbor thoughts of opposition or who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yagoda also dragged prisoners who had been tortured to confess their sins in show trials that spread fear across the entire population. When Yagoda himself was arrested, people became even more frightened: If even the head of the secret police was not safe, then truly no one was. Yagoda was swiftly replaced with someone even worse, Nikolai Yezhov, who oversaw the deadliest period of the Great Purge, until he, too, followed the fate of his predecessor. Throughout this period, Akhmatova knew that she was at great risk of arrest. Ever since her former husband had been executed on fabricated charges, she had been on the radar screen of the security forces. Their son had also been arrested, released, arrested again, and tortured. At any moment, the secret police might come and search her apartment, and a single line of poetry, the wrong line of poetry, would be reason enough to land her in front of a firing squad. This was why she memorized each section of the poem as soon as she had finished it, and then burned the paper on which it had been written.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Akhmatova was particularly exposed because the Soviet Union was a totalitarian state with a keen interest in poetry. Akhmatova’s early fame came from the time before the Russian Revolution, which meant that she was now suspect as a writer from another era, even though she had never been a traditionalist. Together with her first husband and a group of like-minded young artists, she had founded a movement, Acmeism, that sought to do away with the heavy symbolist poetry of the turn of the century and replace it with more simplicity and clarity (the word “Acmeism” might have been inspired by Akhmatova’s name). In the heady days after the revolution, this relatively modest movement with its relatively modest manifesto was quickly overtaken by more radical movements such as Futurism, which wanted to do away with the past entirely and quickly flooded the market with increasingly shrill pronouncements. (One of the differences between the older Acmeists and the new Futurists happened to be one of paper: The Acmeists used expensive paper, while the Futurists liked their paper cheap and disposable.) The leaders of the Russian Revolution knew only too well that their own revolution had been prepared by underground texts such as The Communist Manifesto and that this text had filtered into the world of art, inspiring revolutionary literary and art movements. Leon Trotsky, the intellectual leader of the Russian Revolution, had found the time to write Literature and Revolution, a book about the new literary movements, in which he attacked Akhmatova, barely 30 years old, as already outdated. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the powerful commissar of education, denounced Akhmatova in similar terms. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin managed to consolidate his power by forcing Trotsky into exile, but he retained Trotsky’s interest in poetic affairs and kept track of Anna Akhmatova’s doings (Akhmatova was not the only poet he read; one of his favorite writers was Walt Whitman). Being the object of Stalin’s attention could cut both ways. When Akhmatova’s son was arrested in 1935, Akhmatova was able to write to Stalin directly and plead for her son’s life. To her own surprise, her son was released. But for the most part, Stalin’s interest severely restricted her ability to write and publish. Worse than a state indifferent to poetry, it turned out, was one obsessed with it. </span><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“At any moment, the secret police might come and search her apartment, and a single line of poetry, the wrong line of poetry, would be reason enough to land her in front of a firing squad.” </span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">For a poet like Akhmatova, poetry was dangerous, but also necessary; it enabled her to channel the sadness, fear, and desperation of an entire people. She called her new poem Requiem. It didn’t tell a straightforward story. The Stalin years were too overwhelming, too confusing, too disjointed. Instead, Akhmatova offered snapshots, a few lines of dialogue here, a remembered incident there, reduced to a sentence or an image that would turn history into a matter of minutely crafted moments. The most telling passage spoke of women, mothers and wives, who gathered every day outside a prison, waiting to learn whether their loved ones had been executed or exiled. “I’d like to remember them all by name,” Akhmatova wrote about these women, “But the list has been confiscated and is nowhere to / be found.” The evolving poem was safe as long as Akhmatova memorized each section and immediately burned it, but it would survive only as long as she herself survived. In order for the poem to live, it needed to be shared, carried in the minds of others. Cautiously Akhmatova summoned her closest friends, no more than a dozen women, and read the poem to them over and over until they knew it by heart. Perhaps this was how Sappho had taught her poems to groups of female friends more than two thousand years ago. But Sappho had not lived in fear of writing down her lines. Scraps of her poems, recorded on brittle papyrus, have come down through the ages, bearing witness to her extraordinary imagination and the durability of writing. Such writing, even on papyrus, was not something the Russian Sappho could risk. Forced to learn her poetry by heart, Akhmatova and her female friends had to make do without the skills of singers from oral cultures. Those professionals had trained their memories to hold long narratives as well as set pieces, but they also knew that they could adapt this memorized material to new circumstances. Akhmatova, by contrast, didn’t want her friends to change a single word. She had composed her poem on paper, worrying over each phrase, and now insisted on the precision typical of a literary writer. Her friends were expected to remember Requiem exactly as she had written it. The irony of her position as a poet living in a highly literate society who was forced to resort to memorization didn’t escape Akhmatova. She called her situation “pre-Gutenberg” and declared, sarcastically, “We live according to the slogan ‘Down with Gutenberg.’</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In 1962, Akhmatova found herself reciting Requiem to a younger Russian writer who was about to test the limits imposed on published literature in the Soviet Union. Stalin had been dead for several years, and the worst of the purges were over. After an internal power struggle, Khrushchev had won the upper hand and had begun to distance himself from Stalin’s most extreme crimes. The period was called the Thaw, and it allowed an influential literary editor to write to Khrushchev on Akhmatova’s behalf, suggesting that she be rehabilitated after so many years of enforced silence and exclusion. Once again, the head of state had to decide what to do with Russia’s Sappho. Khrushchev agreed that Akhmatova was no longer a threat and might even be given a minor place in the Soviet literary universe. For the first time in decades, Akhmatova could write with the hope of publication.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Even under these new circumstances, however, Requiem was too risqué to be published, which was why Akhmatova was reciting it to the younger Russian writer from memory. The writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, didn’t know Requiem, but he did know some of her other poems from a publication system called samizdat, the Russian word for “self-publishing.” While the safest method for composing secret poems under Stalin was to commit them to memory, after Stalin’s death an underground method of self-publishing had emerged as an alternative. The tools were not printing presses, which were difficult to acquire in a totalitarian state—samizdat was still pre-Gutenberg, as Akhmatova had called the era—but it used another mechanical instrument, barely 100 years old, relatively cheap, and more difficult to control: a typewriter. With the aid of carbon paper, a single typewriting session could produce around ten copies, which would then be passed on to other readers, who might in turn duplicate the text secretly and give it to more readers still.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Samizdat started after Stalin’s death with the poetry of Akhmatova and a few others. Poems were short, the most compressed way of capturing the helplessness and terror that had seeped into every corner of Soviet life. In the beginning, these unauthorized, handmade poems circulated among groups of friends, each group barely larger than the one to whom Akhmatova had whispered her poems in the ’30s. But during the Thaw following Stalin’s death, samizdat became bolder. Copies circulated more widely and more people dared to read them. People might be allowed to keep a text for only one day, reading it greedily on their own or to friends all night before passing it on to the next group. The process was primitive, labor-intensive, and limited in reach, but it was a beginning. Soon, samizdat expanded from poetry to essays, political writings, and even novels, especially from abroad, all typed on cheap paper, without covers, unbound, strewn with errors, and often divided into loose chapters so that several people could read a work simultaneously. As samizdat increased, the method of duplication improved, with professional samizdat typists aiding the literary underground while also supplementing their income.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="http://lithub.com/writing-poetry-under-stalin-samizdat-and-memorization/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-74237522478805478532017-10-19T15:58:00.003+02:002017-10-19T15:58:51.095+02:00Solzhenitsyn’s cathedrals<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In Russia, history is too important to leave to the historians. Great novelists must show how people actually lived through events and reveal their moral significance. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained in his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, literature transmits “condensed and irrefutable human experience” in a form that “defies distortion and falsehood. Thus literature . . . preserves and protects a nation’s soul.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, focuses on the great turning point of Russian, indeed world, history: the Russian Revolution.1 Just a century ago, that upheaval and the Bolshevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in the Soviet Union alone. Solzhenitsyn, who spent the years 1945 to 1953 as a prisoner in the labor camp system known as the Gulag archipelago, devoted his life to showing just what happened so it could not be forgotten. One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, Stalin supposedly remarked, but Solzhenitsyn makes us envision life after ruined life. He aimed to shake the conscience of the world, and he succeeded, at least for a time. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In taking literature so seriously, Solzhenitsyn claimed the mantle of a “Russian writer,” which, as all Russians understand, means much more than a writer who happens to be Russian. It is a status less comparable to “American writer” than to “Hebrew prophet.” “Hasn’t it always been understood,” asks one of Solzhenitsyn’s characters, “that a major writer in our country . . . is a sort of second government?” In Russia, Boris Pasternak explained, “a book is a squarish chunk of hot, smoking conscience—and nothing else!” Russians sometimes speak as if a nation exists in order to produce great literature: that is how it fulfills its appointed task of supplying its distinctive wisdom to humanity.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like the church to a believer, Russian literature claims an author’s first loyalty. When the writer Vladimir Korolenko, who was half Ukrainian, was asked his nationality, he famously replied: “My homeland is Russian literature.” In her 2015 Nobel Prize address, Svetlana Alexievich echoed Korolenko by claiming three homelands: her mother’s Ukraine, her father’s Belarus, and—“Russia’s great culture, without which I cannot imagine myself.” By culture she meant, above all, literature. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Solzhenitsyn was of course aware that, even in Russia, not all writers take literature so seriously and many regard his views as hopelessly unsophisticated. He recalls that in the early twentieth century, the Russian avant-garde called for “the destruction of the Racines, the Murillos, and the Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls.’ ” Still worse, “the classics of Russian literature . . . were to be thrown overboard from the ship of modernity.’ ” With such manifestoes the avant-garde prepared the way for the Revolution, and, when it happened, were at first accepted “as faithful allies” and given “power to administrate over culture” until they, too, were thrown overboard. For Solzhenitsyn, a great writer cannot be frivolous, still less a moral relativist, but must believe in and serve goodness and truth.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Naturally, Solzhenitsyn expressed contempt for postmodernism, especially when it infected Russians. After the Gulag, he asks, how can anyone believe that evil is a mere social construct? Such writers betray their tradition: “Yes, they say, Communist doctrines were a great lie; but then again, absolute truths do not exist anyhow . . . . Nor is it worthwhile to strive for some kind of higher meaning.” And so, “in one sweeping gesture of vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality and sought the truth—is dismissed as worthless . . . . it has once again become fashionable in Russia to ridicule, debunk, and toss overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion toward all human beings, and especially toward those who suffer.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Among Solzhenitsyn’s many works, two great “cathedrals,” as one critic has called them, stand out, one incredibly long, and the other still longer. His masterpiece is surely the first cathedral, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. I suspect that only three post-Revolutionary Russian prose works will survive as world classics: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. For that matter, Gulag may be the most significant literary work produced anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gulag is literary without being fictional. Indeed, part of its value lies in its bringing to life the real stories of so many ordinary people. When I first began to read it, I feared that a long list of outrages would rapidly prove boring, but to my surprise I could not put the book down. How does Solzhenitsyn manage to sustain our interest? To begin with, as with Gibbon, readers respond to the author’s brilliantly ironic voice, which has a thousand registers. Sometimes it surprises us with a brief comment on a single mendacious word. It seems that prisoners packed as tightly as possible were transported through the city in brightly painted vehicles labeled “Meat.” “It would have been more accurate to say ‘bones,’ ” Solzhenitsyn observes. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017/10/solzhenitsyns-cathedrals-8955">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-26228628793411489602017-10-03T16:20:00.000+02:002017-10-03T16:20:07.396+02:00Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">My landlord in the early 1960s, a Mr Nikolysyn, was a survivor of the Holodomor (‘killing by hunger’), the famine that Stalin’s policy of collectivisation and grain requisition inflicted on Ukraine, leading to the death from starvation of at least five million peasants and the imprisonment of millions of resisters in the Gulag. But Mr Nikolysyn didn’t blame Stalin or even the Russians: he identified his oppressors as communist Jews avenging the pogroms. When the Nazis invaded, he, like many Ukrainians, happily joined the SS to exact revenge. He was a kindly man, tolerating my pet hare stripping his wallpaper while he read his copy of the newspaper for Ukrainian SS veterans that circulated freely in Britain then, but he was as traumatised as all the survivors of the Holodomor.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Until recently, historians ignored the Ukrainian famine of 1932–3. Accounts compiled in the 1950s by Ukrainians living in Canada were discounted as nationalist propaganda, even though a few Western journalists, such as Gareth Jones, Malcolm Muggeridge and the Austrian communist Nikolaus Basseches, had at the time of the famine printed reports of a catastrophe in the Ukrainian countryside. It was Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) that, despite the closure of Soviet archives to researchers, first gave plausible estimates of the number of casualties. In 1988 the Commission on the Ukrainian Famine reported to the US Congress: ‘Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932–1933.’ Since then the famine has generally been recognised as a horror equal to the Great Terror to which Stalin subjected the urban population.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The 1990s, the decade in which Russian (and Ukrainian) archives spilled out documents, saw the publication of The Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside, four volumes of official and eyewitness reports and even letters from dying peasants (until the mid-1930s Soviet post offices still accepted letters sent by Ukrainians to émigré relatives – presumably because the replies brought hard currency that the authorities could confiscate). The release of archival material was followed by the publication of moving accounts written by survivors and the despicable correspondence between Stalin and his henchmen, particularly Kaganovich and Molotov, who were clearly aware of every aspect of what they were doing, except for the stupidity of the enterprise, which was to attempt to sell the peasants’ grain for foreign machinery and turn the dispossessed peasants into industrial helots.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Genocides usually have their own logic: to get rid of surplus populations that cannot be deported; to take over aboriginal land for immigrant cultivation; to unite a nation by scapegoating a particular class, race or religion. Stalin’s logic, however, is unfathomable. In the early 1930s, grain fetched too low a price for the purchase of the latest technology. Far more logical, perhaps, was slave labour in the Gulag, producing gold, nickel and diamonds to pay for American machinery. In any case, the confiscation of food was inefficient: piles of grain rotted in open fields before it could be shipped to the docks; emaciated peasants lacked the strength to build steelworks in the Urals. The only clear motives for what was perpetrated were hatred of Ukraine and the peasants, and the search for a pretext to purge any Party official prepared to stand up to Stalin’s orders. Ukraine had fought for independence during the Civil War; while generally sympathetic to socialism, its peasantry wanted to hang on to individual ownership of land. Stalin had, in fact, good reason to fear Ukraine, because of the sympathy much of its population had with Poland. Poland under Józef Piłsudski was a formidable enemy of Soviet communism and energetically supported émigrés, Ukrainian or Georgian, willing to resist it. The head of OGPU (the secret police), Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, like Lenin and Trotsky, despised the peasantry even more than he hated the bourgeoisie: as a law student, Menzhinsky had in 1898 written a dissertation denouncing the Russian peasantry as ‘one of the major brakes on Russia’s agricultural development’.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anne Applebaum has written an exhaustive, authoritative and eloquent book. She deals with questions that have hitherto lacked unequivocal answers. First, what basis in the past did the famine of 1932–3 have? Second, in what ways was Ukraine singled out? Third, does the term ‘genocide’ apply to the famine? Taking the first question, Applebaum traces the continuum of suffering and fear that began in 1918 during the Civil War, as armies raged across Ukraine, each taking its toll on the peasantry. The terrible famine of 1921–2 on the Volga (which affected more Russians than Ukrainians) might have killed as many as the famine in 1932–3 had it not been alleviated by international (largely American) relief agencies. Even with the advent of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, the peasantry never felt quite secure; by 1927 requisitions were turning the first shortages into hunger and fear. In 1929–30 collectivisation provoked peasant rebellions (often violent enough to lead to the capture of whole towns). The authorities in turn escalated the violence, sending army units to join OGPU agents. Ukrainian communist officials who baulked at the confiscation of anything edible, including seed corn, were replaced or purged. By 1932 there was no prospect of relief. The year 1934 was ‘better’ only because there were millions fewer mouths to feed. How many millions fewer is hard to establish: the increase in infant mortality and the numbers of the ‘unborn’ are unquantifiable.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The question of whether Ukraine was deliberately targeted is complex. There were contradictions: for instance, in the Kuban, the wheat lands between the River Don and the foothills of the Caucasus, Ukrainian peasants were singled out for survival, while their Cossack neighbours were deported or burned to death in locked buildings. Along the lower Volga, Russian and Ukrainian peasants suffered alike. Elsewhere in the USSR the famine may have been worse than in Ukraine, but the records are scanty. Kazakh nomads died more quickly once their animals had been slaughtered than peasants who could for a while eat grass, roots and dead horses, then human corpses and their children. While this was going on, Stalin imported wheat from Canada via Vladivostok to save peasants (both Russian and Ukrainian) in Siberia.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Applebaum links the atrocious killing in Ukraine to a general suspicion of Ukrainian nationalism. Within the USSR as a whole, minority languages were often preserved. Although any talented intellectual might be shot for ‘bourgeois nationalist sentiments’, official doctrine stated that every ethnic group should have a culture, ‘national in form’ if ‘socialist in content’, meaning that an alphabet would be devised, elementary Marxist texts would be translated into the local language, folklore would be collected and the language would be taught in primary schools. Minority languages of the kind that might have died out in the USA, Australia or Brazil were given a lifeline in the USSR. But not Ukrainian. In the 1930s, its use, hitherto encouraged, was suppressed in cities such as Kharkiv or Odessa, where Russian overwhelmed Ukrainian in administration and culture. As in tsarist times, the Ukrainian language’s very existence was questioned. Ukrainian was vulnerable because Russian and Ukrainian are more or less mutually intelligible and because Ukrainian had previously taken on different literary forms in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, Czechoslovak and Russian areas, and consequently lacked unity. Many a Russian novel has dialogue in which Ukrainian speakers are treated as congenital Mrs Malaprops. Thus, Ukrainians, unlike Uzbeks or Georgians, can rightly complain of cultural genocide.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Applebaum bravely deals with the third question, that of genocide, by rejecting it. Stalin’s crime against humanity had as collateral damage the extermination of a substantial number of Ukrainians. The term ‘genocide’ was devised in 1944 specifically to define Hitler’s murder of the Jews, but since then has been used more broadly. Some Irish historians define the Irish potato famine of 1842–5 as genocidal: British callousness towards the Irish peasantry – banning the importation of corn, while exporting Irish meat and butter – may not have been intended to kill a million peasants, but the consequences should have been foreseen and prevented. Likewise, Bengali historians define the deaths of two million Bengalis from starvation and disease as genocide, because the British must have known that confiscating rice and destroying all means of transporting food were lethal. But genocide, if it is to retain its distinctive meaning, requires a primary intention. The German murder of the Herero, the British extermination of the Tasmanians and Hitler’s killing of eastern Europe’s Jews rank as genocide. The Holodomor (like the even worse famine in China in the 1960s that Mao allowed to happen) was a crime against humanity.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/emptying-the-bread-basket">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-84311648199445815492017-09-26T21:45:00.001+02:002017-09-26T21:45:11.758+02:00The Radical Hopes of the Russian Revolution<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Step into a respectable American bookstore today, and you’re likely to find a reflection of America’s version of the twentieth century. German and Russian history currently dominate history sections, but in very specific forms. Books like Andrew Lownie’s Stalin’s Englishman, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Martin Kitchen’s Speer: Hitler’s Architect, Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin—some old, some new, many written for popular audiences—move between the century’s titanic mass-murderers, their motley henchmen, and their masses of victims. Holocaust history often provides a thematic accent and an explicit connection to the present, as with Snyder’s Black Earth: Holocaust as History and Warning. Taken together, these books seem to remind us that any account of the twentieth century that does not emphasize authoritarianism will be complicit in creating a new wave of victims.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One hundred years after the world’s first socialist revolution, many accounts of the Russian Revolution fit into this narrative. From its beginnings, powers in Europe and the United States tried to cast the revolution as a minority coup. Sympathizers were criminalized and hunted, while its enemies in Russia were given military and financial support. Across a wide spectrum—from anti-Semitic fascists to liberal intellectuals to even non-communist leftists—the narrative set in that Bolshevism, the ideology of the victors of October 1917, was radically alien to European thought and politics—a pathology born of Russian barbarism, a threat to Western civilization. Its emblematic figures, Lenin in particular, were cast as cynical manipulators, totalitarian fanatics. Such narratives were ratified in 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall was seen by many as closing the book on the Bolshevik experiment and, with it, any future challenge to capitalism. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Yet there may be more to learn from the radical hopes of 1917, as we weather an era of sclerotic politics, restive masses, and ecological crisis. Both Tariq Ali’s new biography of Lenin and novelist China Miéville’s October reject the idea that the October revolution was bound to lead to terror and authoritarianism. “For a long time during the last century,” Ali writes, “those who honored Lenin largely ignored him.” His book aims to rescue Lenin from both liberal caricature and Soviet hagiography by recovering the realism and dynamism of his political thought. Meanwhile Miéville’s literary retelling—made to feel like a novel, but scrupulously sourced to real events—captures the vertigo of 1917’s encounter between massive historical forces, plunging us back into the heart of a far-reaching social upheaval, in which time flowed backward and forward even as it marched inexorably forward toward a future that was radically unknown. Like the “degradation” that followed it, the nature of the revolution was not “written in any stars.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Both Ali and Miéville sense that our flattened, calcified versions of the revolutionary past have something to do with the absence of political imagination and emancipatory hope in the present. “Today’s dominant ideology and the power structures it defends are so hostile to the social and liberation struggles of the last century,” Ali writes, “that a recovery of as much historical and political memory as is feasible becomes an act of resistance.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ali writes with an eager haste, as if history’s timid awakening from a long, reactionary slumber has rendered him impatient to tell old stories anew. He frequently denounces academics for draining the vitality from revolutionary history, sometimes gratuitously. (Academic historians have asked similar questions: as Dan Edelstein, a historian of the French Revolution, put it in a 2012 article: “Do We Want a Revolution Without Revolution?”) Instead of academic debate, The Dilemmas of Lenin emphasizes the primary sources: letters, memories, political articles, and even poems from the actors in the Russian revolutionary drama themselves. In the process of revisiting these sources, Ali recovers a much-needed moral clarity about the history of European socialism. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That clarity is sharpest in his portrait of a nineteenth century soaked in the blood of the European working class. The rise of the workers’ movement was punctuated by frequent brutalization and defeat at the hands of states that would later hold themselves up as the champions of liberal democracy. In a sweeping section on the rise of working-class internationalism, world socialism, and European imperialism, Ali rediscovers the moral heroism of workers in Lancashire, for instance, who pressured the British Empire out of intervening on the side of the slaveholders in the American Civil War despite the fact that the absence of American cotton meant prolonged unemployment. In 1872, the Parisian working class organized itself to defend their city against Otto von Bismarck as the leaders of France went into hiding. As the European proletariat found itself alone against the most heavily weaponized engines of greed and violence in human history, revolution became a universal dream for a society of equality and peace. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/144891/radical-hopes-russian-revolution">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-21078992032658558282017-09-13T17:12:00.000+02:002017-09-13T17:12:25.608+02:00Svetlana Zakharova and Roberto Bolle in Swan Lake<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e6xhKxDGWqo" width="480"></iframe> <br />Svetlana Zakharova and Roberto Bolle <br />Bourmeister production of Swan LakeUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-13009159043905103222017-09-09T18:12:00.001+02:002017-09-09T18:12:12.419+02:00Gorbachev: His Life and Times<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is one of the paradoxes of Soviet history that Mikhail Gorbachev, who did more than any other Kremlin leader to show his ‘personal’ side to a watching world, has eluded his biographers. Nobody before William Taubman has achieved an in-depth psychological portrait. Political accounts have been two a penny; economic and ideological studies have come at a discount. But what made Gorbachev tick, as a man and a leader, has always been hooded in speculation. Taubman has dedicated a dozen years to gathering first-hand evidence from the man himself. This cannot have been an easy task. When I met Gorbachev in the early 1990s I ruined my brief chance of getting him to open up by mentioning that I was doing research on Lenin. Gorbachev instantly closed down what he sensed might be an indelicate conversation. Taubman, by contrast, has gained Gorbachev’s full cooperation, even though the man himself warned him, ‘Gorbachev is hard to understand.’</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Leaders who speak of themselves in the third person often turn out to be egotists of the first degree. Julius Caesar exhibited this linguistic trick to rhapsodise about his war against the Gauls. Leon Trotsky found that it enabled him to commandeer the historical spotlight without committing the sin of direct self-eulogy. But neither Caesar nor Trotsky presented himself as an enigma. Perhaps it is Gorbachev’s way of consoling himself in old age, living as he does in a Russia that seems unimpressed with the freedoms that he provided and has unhappy memories of the economic collapse over which he presided. While Germans continue to fete him as the statesman who reunited their nation, Russians cannot forget the mess that he left behind when the USSR fell apart in 1991.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Taubman admires Gorbachev and has relished the challenge of solving the many riddles of his career. He has not confined himself to Gorbachev’s career in Moscow but has fossicked in the Stavropol region in the northern Caucasus, where Gorbachev grew up and began his political life, listening to the stories that surviving acquaintances can tell him. The result is a highly readable, reliable and accurate work, one that will be used by all future generations of historians.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Gorbachev was a human rocket launched from a small village in southern Russia into the skies of Soviet power and global politics. Born in 1931, he had a tough childhood. He witnessed the German military occupation during the Second World War and had to labour hard on a collective farm while his father was away at the front. Bright and energetic, he worked diligently at school and benefited from an educational system that rewarded industry, helping him secure a place as a law student at the prestigious Moscow State University. There he met the love of his life, Raisa, and it is a merit of this biography that it gives us a credible account of that remarkable woman. Strikingly elegant, she was endowed with an even stronger will than her husband, but despite rumours to the contrary she fell in line with the path he chose to tread. She was his invaluable political confidante. On graduating, the Gorbachevs went back to Stavropol, where Mikhail rose fast within the Communist Party hierarchy.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Taubman has delved productively into this period, turning not only to Gorbachev himself but also to those he worked with, including an inveterate detractor, Viktor Kaznacheyev. Gorbachev could be a demanding comrade, and he stood up to those superiors who offended his dignity. Stavropol regional party secretary Leonid Yefremov accused him of ‘getting too big for his boots’ after Gorbachev criticised his preferred candidates for local promotion. Gorbachev shouted back at him ‘almost at the top of [his] voice’ that he ‘rejected the charge’. If his opinion was not shown respect, he wanted to know what the point was of attending party meetings.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">His cheekiness was forgiven by both Yefremov and the Politburo chieftains who jetted in from Moscow every summer on their way to the southern holiday resorts. By the time he became Stavropol’s regional party secretary, Gorbachev was well placed to impress visiting leaders, which was how he became a protégé of KGB chairman Yuri Andropov. Taubman persuaded Gorbachev to speak about Andropov and the encouragement that he gave him as a young apparatchik who had to handle the chieftains: ‘Listen, you’re the host here, so you take the initiative in leading the conversation.’ Eventually Gorbachev was promoted to the Central Committee Secretariat under party leader Leonid Brezhnev, whose decline in health he witnessed up close. Protected by Andropov, who became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1982 after Brezhnev’s death, and by his successor, Konstantin Chernenko, Gorbachev himself succeeded to the post in 1985 and introduced reforms that he believed would prove the inherent superiority of communism over capitalism. Measures of democratisation and decentralisation crashed like an avalanche upon the creaking Soviet order.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By 1990 the USSR was being overwhelmed by economic crises. In the previous two years Gorbachev had won global acclaim for signing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the USA, withdrawing his armed forces from Afghanistan and permitting the decommunisation of eastern Europe. Not since mid-1917 had Russia enjoyed such a degree of internal freedom. But the situation caught up with him and his policies. His own appointees to high office turned against him and in August 1991 backed a military coup led by individuals opposed to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Their treachery was foiled by Gorbachev’s radical ex-communist adversary Boris Yeltsin, who rescued him. But by December, Yeltsin had decided to declare the disestablishment of the USSR and to dispatch Gorbachev into retirement.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In charting this history, Taubman follows a route of analysis that was well marked even during Gorbachev’s years in high office. But whereas he examines Reagan’s weakness as an international negotiator, he omits consideration of how Gorbachev in 1986–7 came close to blowing the opportunity to end the Cold War. At the Reykjavik summit of October 1986 and for months afterwards Gorbachev insisted that Reagan had to accept the entirety of his package of disarmament proposals if the American president wanted a deal. This was ill-judged brinkmanship, and the book contains little mention of the pressure that the Politburo, including Gorbachev’s friend Eduard Shevardnadze and his ageing foe Andrei Gromyko, successfully put on Gorbachev to untie his package and pursue his peace agenda on a more piecemeal basis. Another gap lies in the discussion of Gorbachev’s economic thinking. Gorbachev seriously thought that if he reversed Stalin’s collectivisation of Soviet agriculture and broke up the appalling collective farm system, the human carnage would be as bad as the mayhem of the early 1930s – a gross misjudgement. For what it is worth, I believe that the key to understanding Gorbachev can be found in his myopic comprehension of the chemistry of Soviet communism. He had not learned the lesson that if the Politburo pulled out one or more elements from the existing compound, such an experiment would destroy the USSR. In that regard, conservative communists like Gromyko and moderate communist reformers like Yegor Ligachev were more clear-sighted than he was. But unlike them, Gorbachev could at least appreciate that an unreformed or merely semi-reformed USSR could never compete with the multiple achievements of the advanced West. He benefited from access to critical Western literature, some of it Marxist, that circulated in the innermost circle of the Soviet leadership. He also drew on his experiences on several privileged foreign trips to Canada and western Europe. He became convinced that fundamental change had to happen, and he had the brains, guts and charisma to attempt it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more<a href="https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-last-comrade"> >>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-16713654526378263762017-07-21T18:09:00.003+02:002017-07-21T18:09:44.618+02:00Svetlana Alexievich: ‘After communism we thought everything would be fine. But people don’t understand freedom’<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In conversations with Svetlana Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable listening than she is talking. That’s hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In today’s Russia, Alexievich’s work is a Rorschach test for political beliefs: among the beleaguered, liberal opposition, she is frequently seen as the conscience of the nation, a uniquely incisive commentator on the disappointments and complexities of the post-Soviet condition. Mainstream opinion sees her as a turncoat whose books degrade Russia and Russians.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">When I meet her in a cosy basement café in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an amphitheatre of imposing, late-Soviet apartment blocks, she has just returned from a book tour of South Korea, and is about to embark on a trip to Moscow. “It’s tiring to have the attention on yourself; I want to closet myself away and start writing properly again,” she says, looking visibly wearied by the travel and spotlight. Alexievich reluctantly agreed to deliver a talk about a book she wrote more than three decades ago, The Unwomanly Face of War, which has been republished in a new English translation this month. It was written in the early 1980s, and for many years she could not find a publisher, but during the soul-searching of the late-Soviet perestroika period, it tapped into the zeitgeist of reflection and critical thinking, and was published in a print run of 2m, briefly turning Alexievich into a household name. Later, the merciless flashlight Alexievich shone on to the Soviet war experience became less welcome in Russia. Since the Nobel win, her work has found a new international audience, giving her a second stint of fame 30 years after the first.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The original inspiration for the book was an article Alexievich read in the local Minsk press during the 1970s, about a retirement party for the accountant at a local car factory, a decorated sniper who had killed 75 Germans during the war. After that first interview, she began to seek out female war veterans across the Soviet Union. A million Soviet women served at the front, but they were absent from the official war narrative. “Before this book, the only female character in our war literature was the nurse who improved the life of some heroic lieutenant,” she says. “But these women were steeped in the filth of war as deeply as the men.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It took a long time, Alexievich concedes, to get the women to stop speaking in rehearsed platitudes. Many were embarrassed about the reality of their war memories. “They would say, ‘OK, we’ll tell you, but you have to write it differently, more heroically.’” After a frank interview with a woman who served as the medical assistant to a tank battalion, Alexievich recounts, she sent the transcript as promised and received a package through the post in response, full of newspaper clippings about wartime feats and most of the interview text crossed out in pen. “More than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human being,” Alexievich writes. “One’s own truth, driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The book touches on topics that were taboo during the Soviet period and have once again been excised from Putin’s Russia: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe, the executions of deserters and the psychological effects of war for years to come. Her subjects recall sweaty nightmares, grinding teeth, short tempers and an inability to see forests without thinking of twisted bodies in shallow graves.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In modern Russia, Putin has turned the war victory into a national building block of almost religious significance, and questioning the black-and-white history of glorious victory is considered heresy. This makes the testimony of the women in Alexievich’s book, most of whom are now dead, feel all the more important today. There is no lack of heroism in the book; the feats and the bravery and the enormous burden that fell on the shoulders of these women shine from every page. But she does not erase the horror from the story, either. In the end, the book is a far more powerful testament to the extraordinary price paid by the Soviet people to defeat Nazi Germany than the sight of intercontinental missiles rolling across Red Square on 9 May, or the endless bombastic war films shown on Russian television.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich wrote books that dealt with the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan, two tragedies that accompanied the death throes of the Soviet Union, both of them simultaneously causes and symptoms of its impending collapse.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">More recently, she published the doorstop-sized Second-Hand Time, which reads as a requiem for the Soviet era. It chronicles the shock and the existential void that characterised the 1990s after the Soviet Union disintegrated, and helps explain the appeal of Putin’s promises to bring pride back to a wounded, post-imperial nation.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">‘Nobody thought the Soviet Union would collapse, it was a shock for everyone,” she says. Everyone had to adapt to a new and painful reality as the rules, behavioural codes and everyday language of the Soviet experience dissolved almost overnight. Taken together, Alexievich’s books remain perhaps the single most impressive document of the late Soviet Union and its aftermath. Alexievich became a harsh critic of Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of newly independent Belarus. She left the country “as a protest”, and spent 11 years living in exile in various European countries, returning only a few years ago. “When you’re on the barricades, all you can see is a target, not a human, which is what a writer should see. From the point of view of art, the butcher and the victim are equal as people. You need to see the people.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Lukashenko has made it clear he is no fan of Alexievich’s work, and while the Nobel prize has given her some security, her books have not been published in Belarus, and she is de facto banned from making public appearances. As a writer of Ukrainian and Belarusian heritage, but who writes essentially about the whole post-Soviet space, she is confused about modern Russia. She is unsure whether to say “we” or “they” when she speaks about Russians. Where she is more certain is in her opinions of Putin and the current political climate. “We thought we’d leave communism behind and everything would turn out fine. But it turns out you can’t leave this and become free, because these people don’t understand what freedom is.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">She has repeatedly criticised the Russian annexation of Crimea and intervention in east Ukraine, which has led to a falling-out with many Russian friends, she says. She never quite knows how conversations will go when she visits Moscow. She recalls a recent visit when she entered the apartment of an old acquaintance: “I had just walked in the door and taken my coat off, when she sits me down and says, ‘Svetochka, so that everything is clear, let me just say that Crimea isn’t ours.’ It’s like a password! ‘Thank God,’ I told her.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">During her trip to Moscow, she gives a talk at Gogol Centre, an edgy theatre space known for its outspoken director and controversial productions. The lecture is rambling and in places barely coherent, but receives multiple rounds of applause from an audience eager to display their liberalism and disdain for Putin’s militarism. The questions are mainly gushing odes to her work. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/21/svetlana-alexievich-interview">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-7488108814434054392017-07-13T23:28:00.003+02:002017-07-13T23:28:56.753+02:00Was British spy Somerset Maugham sent to kill Lenin?<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The author of Theatre, and The Razor’s Edge was an agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service during World War I, and he was entrusted with a secret mission to Russia, the true nature of which remains a mystery even 100 years later.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The trip to Russia in 1917 was not Maugham’s first experience as a secret agent for British Intelligence. By then he had already worked a couple of years for what later would be known as MI-6. After his first mission in Switzerland in 1915 he wanted to quit for personal reasons – he had divorced and his male lover had been sent out of Britain. However, according to one of his biographers, Maugham was intrigued by the life of a secret agent because he liked pulling strings from behind the scenes. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nevertheless, when he was approached with the chance to go to Russia, he was uncertain. As he recalled afterwards, he thought that he didn't have the right qualities for the task. In the end, the desire “to see the country of Tolstoi, Dostoievski and Chekov” outweighed any doubts, and he accepted. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">According to what is known about his Russian mission, Maugham was given a very daunting task. As he put it himself, he was supposed “to devise a scheme that would keep Russia in the war and prevent the Bolsheviks, supported by the Central Powers, from seizing power.” By that time the war was unpopular in Russia, and the Bolsheviks demanded immediate peace, which was a main slogan in their propaganda campaign.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maugham was given financial resources to fulfill the mission, around 21,000 pounds sterling, which today equals about $300 000. There were also several people of Czech origin at his disposal working as liaison officers. There was the hope that Maugham could somehow mobilize and rely upon thousands of Czechoslovakian soldiers who at that time were stranded in Russia. In fact, the following year those units would become one of the main military forces to challenge the new Soviet regime. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maugham managed to establish contacts with Alexander Kerensky, the Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government. Every week Maugham entertained him and his cabinet ministers in one of the finest restaurants in Petrograd, Medved' (The Bear), plying them with much vodka and caviar. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Maugham soon became disillusioned with Russia, however. “The endless talk when action was needed, the vacillations, the apathy when apathy could only result in destruction, the high-flown protestations, the insincerity and half-heartedness that I found everywhere sickened me with Russia and the Russians,” he recalled later.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There was one man, however, whom Maugham liked a lot. Boris Savinkov was one of the leaders of a terrorist organization in pre-revolutionary Russia who in 1917 worked for the government. Maugham described his as “one of the most extraordinary men” he ever met. Savinkov had no sympathy towards the Bolsheviks and had no illusion about the resolve of their leader, Vladimir Lenin. Savinkov allegedly said that “either Lenin will stand me up in front of a wall and shoot me, or I shall stand him in front of a wall and shoot him.” </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.rbth.com/arts/history/2017/07/13/was-british-spy-somerset-maugham-sent-to-kill-lenin_800942">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-19804127527253839012017-06-24T18:03:00.000+02:002017-06-24T18:03:05.355+02:00Darkness of a drawer - Mikhail Bulgakov<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One of the most revealing episodes in J. A. E. Curtis’s Mikhail Bulgakov, in the Reaktion Books Critical Lives series, itself concerns the writing of a “critical life”. In 1932–3, Bulgakov, a man devoted to the theatre, wrote a brief novelized biography of Molière. The book was commissioned for the hallowed Russian series Lives of Remarkable People, but like much of Bulgakov’s work from the 1920s and 30s, it would not see the light of day until decades after his death in 1940. As usual, the Soviet author had taken a thoroughly un-Soviet approach to the topic, presenting Molière as an individual genius – rather than as a product of his era and class – and fitting the facts of his life into a fictional frame. In his rejection, the series editor explained Bulgakov’s error: “You have placed between Molière and the reader some sort of imaginary storyteller. If, instead of this casual young man in an old-fashioned coat, who from time to time lights or puts out the candles, you had given us a serious Soviet historian, he would have been able to tell us many interesting things about Molière, and about his times”.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This incident captures a central tragedy of Bulgakov’s life: almost all his efforts to win official acceptance, if not approval, were stymied by his inability to produce – and at times even deduce – what was asked of him. The fate that befell the seemingly innocuous Molière biography also befell a number of his plays, including The Last Days, about Alexander Pushkin – timed to coincide with the 1937 commemoration of the centenary of the poet’s death – and Batum (1939), about Stalin’s youth. The Bulgakovs were informed that Batum “received a harshly negative review up there (in the Central Committee, probably)” for making fiction out of a romanticized Stalin; it was also seen as “representing a wish to build bridges and to improve attitudes towards [the author]”. Yelena Bulgakova “indignantly repudiated these latter suggestions”, Curtis writes, “although it is hard to believe that this was not to some extent what had motivated Bulgakov in agreeing to take on this project”. In the 1930s, any Soviet author who craved an audience needed approval “up there” – and Bulgakov certainly craved an audience.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After all, it was largely literary ambition that led the conservative medical doctor, who was born to a bourgeois family in Kiev in 1891, to remain in Soviet Russia after the end of the Civil War. We get a keen sense of this ambition from Bulgakov’s letter to his cousin, sent in 1921 from Vladikavkaz, where he first began to regard himself as a professional writer: “At night I sometimes read over the stories I’ve published previously (in newspapers! in newspapers!), and I think: where is my volume of collected works? Where is my reputation? Where are the wasted years?” It is painful to consider how little he would be able to boast of after another nineteen years of back-breaking literary labour: one volume of fiction; journal clippings of feuilletons, short stories, novellas, and part of his novel White Guard (1925); as well as a handful of staged plays – many of which were quickly banned. If Bulgakov had harboured some hope of publishing White Guard and his brilliant novella The Heart of a Dog in the 1920s, and of seeing more of his plays staged in the early 30s, towards the end of his life he knew that his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, was doomed to “the darkness of a drawer”.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Through it all, Bulgakov could cling to one extraordinary success, The Day of the Turbins. Based on White Guard, the play premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926 and was only taken off in 1941, after nearly a thousand performances. And yet, this success too was not unqualified. Turbins had first been removed from the stage in 1929, in response to vicious attacks in the press. It was restored three years later, after intervention from Stalin himself, who clearly took a personal interest in Bulgakov. One of the great merits of Curtis’s book is the sensitivity with which she chronicles Bulgakov’s awkward negotiation with power, contextualizing his multiple letters to Stalin, which prompted a single “astonishing phone call” from the General Secretary in 1930, and his controversial final play.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more<a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mikhail-bulgakov-dralyuk/"> >>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-65543153104180370492017-06-07T19:25:00.001+02:002017-06-07T19:25:10.837+02:00Pushkin for president<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The critic Apollon Grigoriev proved to be prophetic when he claimed in 1854 that “Pushkin is our everything”. Nowadays, Pushkin’s face stares out from vodka labels and advertising slogans, his monumental figure dominates public squares in Russia’s major cities, his words in millions of copies of endless editions cram libraries, and his name belongs to numerous cities. At the celebrations of the bicentenary of his birth in 1999 no fewer than thirty-four Alexander Sergeeviches marched as a contingent. How all this came about and what it means is the subject of Stephanie Sandler’s authoritative study. Based on a thorough knowledge of the writer and his cultural legacy, Commemorating Pushkin combines literary criticism, history and cultural history as it traces the impact of the phenomenon both on individual writers and Russia’s cultural institutions.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Although his untimely death laid the basis for the influential myth that Russian poets are doomed to be political victims, Pushkin’s popularity and status as a cultural icon began in the late Imperial period. From the 1880s, when Dostoevsky proclaimed the poet a pan-Slavic genius, Pushkin’s standing became inseparable from the state of the nation and its culture. This was particularly true during the Revolutions that began and ended Soviet power. In the post-1917 period, anniversaries of all kinds, including Pushkin’s death, birth and first arrival in Odessa, were seized on as occasions for public ritual. No fewer than five state-sponsored national celebrations mark the chronicle of the Soviet Union, and Sandler’s chapter on these events from the Bolsheviks to Perestroika provides a gripping history.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pushkin was not an obvious choice as the national writer of the Soviet state.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Immediately after the Revolution he ranked fourth in popularity behind other writers such as Tolstoy. In the transitional period of the 1920s he was deemed to be suspect because of his class origins. Debaters in Vladikavkaz were uncertain whether he was a bourgeois or counter-revolutionary. By the time of the 1937 jubilee such uncertainty had disappeared. Pushkin outranked all other authors put together; one journal reported that every fifth book in a Soviet library was by Pushkin.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The Bolsheviks’ early need for cultural legitimation began with crude assertions like that of Comrade Sosnovsky who observed that Lenin resembled Pushkin, “in his simplicity, optimism, love for nature, and respect for the common people”. The creation of a Soviet Pushkin became a national issue with the celebration of 1924, which officially linked the cult of the poet to the foundation of a new order. Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education, predicted that Pushkin “will live as an instance of the present and as a great teacher of the new life”. Images as well as words shaped public affection and taste. Early Russian and Soviet cinema were unthinkable without plots drawn from Pushkin’s writings and from his life. In 1937, against the backdrop of the Terror, Stalin and the state-run literary organizations mobilized a huge cultural apparatus for the centennial jubilee of Pushkin’s death. Marked by thousands of lectures and presentations across urban and rural Russia, in schools, factories and farms, the festivals and ritual provided a veneer of optimism and progress under which the traumas inflicted by the Terror occurred.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While the State boasted that unprecedented love for Pushkin was a measure of the widespread literacy achieved in the Soviet period, the cult of the writer was an instrument of ideological conformity. The Central Committee of the Communist Party hailed Pushkin as the creator of virtually everything Russian, and his portrait hung alongside pictures of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and members of the Politburo during the Moscow parades. Busts of Stalin and Pushkin shared an alcove in the vestibule of the poet’s flat in Leningrad.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Official commemoration is only one part of the story. After 1917, numerous writers and scholars in Russia, and among the emigre communities, saw in Pushkin the best of Russian literature and culture that had to be preserved from Soviet contamination. For some of Russia’s greatest poets the elaboration of a private Pushkin as an interlocutor and complex symbol of continuity with the pre-Revolutionary world became an essential part of their creativity. Anna Akhmatova, whose youth was spent in Tsarskoe Selo, where Pushkin went to school, felt an intimate bond with the poet, strengthened by their parallel fates as political victims of the regimes under which they lived. Akhmatova saw in Pushkin’s life a great creative mystery that she explored in a series of scholarly articles. Marina Tsvetaeva, in her stunning essays “My Pushkin” and “Pushkin and Pugachev”, and her cycle “Verses to Pushkin”, created her own myth of an endlessly creative, resolute, playful, profound figure that at times is a mirror to her own self-image. The exquisitely bilious Vladislav Khodasevich, an emigre contemporary of Nabokov and one of his favourite poets, saw the Revolution as a catastrophic rupture; yet he worked to save Pushkin from the new cultural wreckage by producing a refined body of scholarly studies in the formalist manner.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/pushkin-for-president/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-2352903094517237872017-05-20T19:42:00.000+02:002017-05-20T19:42:01.015+02:00Lovers and Children: On Marina Tsvetaeva’s “Letter to the Amazon”<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“LOVE IN ITSELF is childhood. Lovers are children. Children do not have children,” the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva writes in her Letter to the Amazon. “One cannot live off love,” she continues. “The one thing that survives love is the child.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">While Tsvetaeva’s adult life was riven by tragedy, she maintained a childlike capacity for love. She had passionate epistolary romances with two other legendary poets of her time, Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. She also kept up a lively, often revelatory correspondence with fellow exiles, patrons, literary protégés, scholars, intellectuals, and potential lovers. A case in point is a letter from 1932, addressed from Paris — where Tsvetaeva was living as an impoverished émigré — to Natalie Barney, a glamorous heiress to an American railroad fortune. Translated by A’Dora Phillips and Gaëlle Cogan as Letter to the Amazon, it is exemplary of Tsvetaeva’s intense epistolary style. Vacillating between confrontation and seduction, it poses a challenge to Barney, a champion of romantic and sexual partnerships between women. Women lovers cannot have children together, Tsvetaeva says — that is “the only weak point, the only assailable point, the only breach in the perfect entity of two women who love one another.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The theme of same-sex partnership was the focus of Plato’s most famous dialogue on love, the Symposium, in which the comedian Aristophanes tells a myth about original humans, split in half by the angry gods. The initial violent fission causes each of us to look for the other half to make us whole again. While most original humans were androgynous (man-woman), some were composed of two women, and others of two men. In Aristophanes’s view, this explains why some of us can only recover our original wholeness in same-sex unions. Socrates, as usual, makes a more radical claim. He believes that our erotic pursuits are driven by the fundamental human desire — to possess the good forever. While most heterosexual unions tend to satisfy this desire biologically — by producing little versions of us, mortal beings with a limited lifespan — the best forms of union result in more lasting and more beautiful progeny, such as acts of heroism, works of art, and laws. These children are more worth having, Socrates says, because they satisfy their parents’ desire for immortality more fully, and they do so regardless of their parents’ sex or age. Wouldn’t each of us prefer to father or mother the Iliad or the US Constitution, rather than a regular human child? Isn’t there something passive about letting our erotic impulses be channeled into sex and childbearing, the defaults set by our animal nature?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Tsvetaeva’s argument in her essay — that a loving relationship between two partners can only be brought to completion by a child — should strike the seasoned readers of her writings as surprising. In her other writings, Tsvetaeva had always insisted that, insofar as she is a poet, she has the right to “shake off” the natural givens, including her own female body. Nature has no absolute authority: its claims on us should be questioned, resisted. Yet in concluding Letter to the Amazon, Tsvetaeva brings in nature to bolster her argument: “Nature says: no. In forbidding it to us, she protects herself. God, in forbidding us something, does so out of love; nature, in forbidding us, does so out of love for herself, out of hate for all that is not her.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To put it bluntly, nature is selfish. It does not care about us, our reasons and motivations, our love and our integrity. Human nature, she suggests, anticipating Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (1976) by four decades, only cares about reproducing more instances of itself. But if that is the case, then why should we heed nature? Tsvetaeva’s answer is that young women do so “without thinking, by pure and triple vital instinct — youth, perpetuation, womb.” Our instincts, in other words, are sufficiently powerful to disrupt some of our most cherished projects and deepest commitments. Hence, Tsvetaeva positions same-sex love as an affront to nature.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It is a strange thing for Tsvetaeva to write. She had had open, intimate relations with women. Her “The Girlfriend,” a cycle of 17 poems dedicated to her lover, fellow poet Sophia Parnok, contains some of the most breathtaking love poetry in the Russian language. Yet here, in her Letter, she dismisses love between women, and her case is compelling. What makes it compelling is the psychological mini-drama Tsvetaeva stages between two lovers — the Younger and the Older. She lets us glimpse a series of episodes, as if through a crack in a door, during the course of which the Older Lover recognizes the Younger’s increasingly articulated desire for a child, for “a little you to love,” and distances herself from her restless beloved, pushing her to leave. From the plausible description of a particular mini-drama, Tsvetaeva draws a generalizing conclusion: similar tensions plague all instances of romantic and erotic love between women. Yet this move could be merely a provocation. Barney was wealthy and well connected, a potential patron. Far from wanting to alienate her, Tsvetaeva’s thinly veiled confessional tone suggests that she intended to tease the woman she called “the Amazon” and “my female brother.” She wanted to get Barney to respond. The notion that Tsvetaeva’s argument is a seduction, and the mini-drama a form of bait, is further supported by the Letter’s opening paragraphs. Tsvetaeva describes an ability to resist nature as a form of achievement: </span><br /><blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Renouncement — a motivation? Yes, because controlling a force requires an infinitely more bitter effort than unleashing it — which requires no effort at all. In this sense all natural activity is passive, while all willed passivity is active (effusion — endurance, repression — action). Which is more difficult: to hold a horse back or to let it run? And, given that we are the horse held back — which is harder: to be restrained or to allow our strength free rein? […] Each time I give up, I feel a tremor within. It is me — the earth that quakes. Renouncement? Struggle petrified.</span></blockquote><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Nature cannot be disciplined completely — it will keep breaking through, and sometimes it may win. Instead of going along with its controlling force, we must strive to cultivate self-mastery. It is our own nature, after all, that rebels against the ends we set for ourselves. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lovers-and-children-on-marina-tsvetaevas-letter-to-the-amazon/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-14655765353672011092017-05-19T17:03:00.000+02:002017-05-19T17:03:10.636+02:00China Miéville’s take on the Russian Revolution is wonderfully dated<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most curious. China Miéville is best known as an imaginative and entertaining writer of ‘weird’ (his word) science fiction and magic realism. October is a narrative history of the two 1917 revolutions in Russia, written from an ultra-left perspective — with a novelist’s eye for a good story and colourful characters. So it’s an examination of why the communist experiment failed miserably — at the cost of much blood — that is also wonderfully well written: smart, witty and full of fresh insight. But it can also read like an A-level essay, regurgitated from textbooks. Weird indeed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was brought up on similar Marxist histories that were sympathetic to the revolution and took its idealism as a given: the revolutionaries’ hearts were in the right place, even if ‘mistakes’ (a murderous purge or a bread queue) occurred. But — with a very few Hobsbawmite or Trotskyite exceptions — nothing like Miéville’s book has appeared from mainstream publishers in English for around 40 years. So it’s nostalgic to read once again an account that starts from the premise that the revolutions in Russia — which irrevocably changed the world — were in essence and intent a good thing. As Miéville puts it: </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It was an epic adventure… of hopes, betrayals, unlikely coincidences, war and intrigue and bravery and cowardice and foolishness, farce, derring-do, tragedy; of epochal ambitions and change… But barring the occasional descent into Marxist-Leninist jargon — ‘revolutionary defencism’ gets several mentions — when Miéville gets to the action he writes a sparkling narrative: fair, accurate and surprisingly nuanced. It is much more lively than most books on the subject produced in the last two generations — especially about the revolutions outside Petrograd and Moscow, which are often ignored. You can take his analysis with a pinch of Siberian salt; but this is an exciting account of the revolutionary moment — particularly of the Bolshevik putsch in October 1917. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Its assessment of the main players — Lenin, Trotsky, Kerensky, Stalin and the Romanovs — can be predictable and trite. But it is superb on some of the lesser figures — long-forgotten militant revolutionaries who once had their 15 minutes of fame, such as Shelma Asnin, from a machine-gun regiment — a ‘dark-bearded former thief who dressed like a gothic cowboy… wide-brimmed hat, guns and all’. Such vividly drawn personalities, Miéville asserts, made the revolution — which seems to contradict the Marxist idea that it is the broad sweep of economic and social forces that create history and not individuals. But let’s not cavil: just enjoy reading about them. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">And Miéville isn’t wrong about everything. On the whole, historians have been far too kind to Tsar Nicholas II, mainly because of the grisly manner of his own and his family’s death. But he was a hopeless ruler, who resorted to mass murder, and did as much as anyone — Lenin included — to bring about a bloody socialist revolution in Russia. He deserves his place in history’s dustbin, and this book gets him right. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Though Miéville is on the romantic left, he is shrewd and under no illusions about where and when things went wrong after the revolution — a debate that has occupied socialists for the best part of a century. His last few well-argued and elegiac pages could — weirdly — almost have been written by Robert Conquest. Unlike his hero Trotsky, Miéville doesn’t simply blame Stalin for all the failures of communism. It is painful for him, but he clearly sees the rot setting in immediately after ‘Glorious October’, when the Bolsheviks, with ‘their inability to resist executions’, believed they could build a brave new world at the point of a gun.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Still, Miéville consoles himself that next time it will be different; and, a true believer, he is convinced that there will be a next time. The struggle goes on, and the new dawn will come: ‘Twilight, even remembered twilight, is better than no light at all and need not always to be followed by night,’ he writes — a classic Marxist formulation.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Naive? Deluded? Probably. But even in democracies, as we are seeing today, the far right and the far left are often a hair’s breadth apart. So what might happen in semi-democracies, when the populists’ simplistic, xenophobic, economically illiterate policies fail? It is ghastly to contemplate who they will blame as enemies of the people. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/china-mievilles-take-on-the-russian-revolution-is-wonderfully-dated/">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-27721005622021508732017-05-16T19:48:00.001+02:002017-05-16T19:48:23.501+02:00Glazunov Symphony no. 2 in F sharp minor <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zvT8D4tMML0" width="480"></iframe> <br /><br />Glazunov’s Symphony no 2 was dedicated to the memory of Liszt. It is clearly Russian with a vital spirit and is nationalistic. The Andante movement reflects this composer’s interest in the Orient as it did for many composers. The whole work is magnificently scored and despite some writers’ adverse and ill-judged comments on the finale, it is a tremendous piece. 1 Andante maestoso Allegro 2 Andante 3 Allgro vivace 4 Intrada Andantino sostenuto Finale Allegro The USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra Gennadi RozhdestvenskyUnknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7397406649421255668.post-68805228019655311522017-05-10T18:01:00.002+02:002017-05-10T18:01:34.985+02:00At the Firing Squad: The Radical Works of a Young Dostoevsky<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky was about to die.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The nightmare started when the police burst into his apartment and dragged him away in the middle of the night, along with the rest of the Petrashevsky Circle. This was a group made up of artists and thinkers who discussed radical ideas together, such as equality and justice, and occasionally read books. Madmen, clearly. To be fair, the tsar, Nicholas I, had a right to be worried about revolution. The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and it was obvious throughout the world that something was happening. In addition to earlier revolutions in America and France, revolutionary ideas were spreading like a virus around the world through art, literature, philosophy, science, and more. To the younger generation and Russians who suffered most under the current regime, it was exhilarating. For those like Nicholas I, whose power depended on the established order, it was terrifying.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So these revolutionaries, most barely in their 20s, were hauled off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, a prison that contained some of Russia’s most vicious criminals. After months of isolation broken up by the occasional interrogation, Dostoevsky and the rest were condemned to death by firing squad.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">They were marched into the cold. A priest allowed each man to kiss a cross. Then shrouds were draped over their heads, which did nothing to drown out the soul-crushing sound of soldiers raising their rifles as their commander cried out ONE!…TWO!…</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">WAIT! someone cried. The tsar had changed his mind — the prisoners would be spared!</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dostoevsky and the rest had been victims of a hilarious prank Nicholas I sometimes played on prisoners, staging mock-executions before sending them off to Siberia. When the condemned men heard they had been “saved” by their benevolent tsar, some immediately lost their minds. But not Dostoevsky. He held on and endured two brutal years in a Siberian prison, before enduring another two brutal years in the army. His life wasn’t exactly easy after that. But in large part because of all that suffering, he would grow into the author of such classics as Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and more.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Plenty of readers know about the later, mature Dostoevsky, but far fewer know about the young man he once was, the one who thought he was moments away from execution. His presence in front of a firing squad may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Dostoevsky’s later writing, in which he was a ferocious opponent of the young generation’s revolutionary ideas, and an equally ferocious defender of the tsar’s authority and the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s no exaggeration to say that Dostoevsky felt the very soul of Russia was at stake. Ivan Turgenev, in his short novel Fathers and Sons, coined the word “nihilists” for these young radicals, who seemed hell bent on smashing the existing society and replacing it with one founded on values inimical to people like Dostoevsky. They were an existential threat to the nation and they are presented as such throughout all of Dostoevsky’s later works. Sometimes their ideas are the focus of his attacks, like in Notes from Underground, which is essentially a rebuttal to the socialist arguments made in What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, (a book that, more than any other, inspired those who would later instigate the Russian Revolution). Other times, the youth of Russia are the explicit enemy. The plot of Demons was directly inspired by the murder of a Russian at the hands of a group not all that different from the Petrashevsky Circle. In fact, Dostoevsky later acknowledged in his Diary of a Writer that, as a young man, he himself might have been swayed to commit such a horrible act. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Clearly, the post-Siberia Dostoevsky was a different man than the one who faced down that firing squad, to put it mildly. So how do we understand this abrupt transformation? Perhaps the best way is by exploring Dostoevsky’s early major works — Poor Folk, The Double, and Netochka Nezvanova — which offer invaluable insights into just how Dostoevsky became Dostoevsky.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Read more <a href="http://www.themillions.com/2017/05/firing-squad-unique-radical-works-young-dostoevsky.html">>>></a></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0