Posts tagged russia

I just finished Elif Batuman's delightful, erudite, and hopelessly funny memoir of her love of Russian literature as lived out through seven at-times-harrowing years of comp lit grad school. Elif is a college acquaintance and sometime correspondent of mine, so it's always a double treat to see her writing out in the wider world.

re: language, literature, love, russia, turkey

Nate:

If I didn’t actually believe in my responsibility to tell Americans the truth about Turkey, nevertheless I did feel it was somehow wasteful to study Russian literature instead of Turkish literature. I had repeatedly been told in linguistics classes that all languages were universally complex, to a biologically determined degree. Didn’t that mean that all languages were, objectively speaking, equally interesting? And I already knew Turkish; it had happened without any work, like a gift, and here I was tossing it away to break my head on a bunch of declensions that came effortlessly to anyone who happened to grow up in Russia.

Today, this strikes me as terrible reasoning. I now understand that love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don’t get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on the all the least convenient things—and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that’s the wonderful gift right there.

You can read most of Benjamin's essay at Google Books. The first few pages are all quite good and require no knowledge whatsoever of that Nikolai Leskov fellow.

re: europe, germany, literature, russia, story

Nate:

All this points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

One of the pleasures of being away for two weeks is coming back to several issues of the Economist to read at once. (Yes, I am a geek.) In the issue of 7 August is this remarkable article about the decline of Russia's "intelligentsia." Even by the Economist's high standards it is an unusually penetrating study of cultural change, and a reminder that "soft power" is often more effective than brute force—in this case, effective in restraining criticism of the state. And while the situation in the United States could not be more different in some respects, I still find these closing paragraphs worth pondering: a warning for any movement that seeks to be, in Tim Keller's phrase, "a counterculture for the common good."

re: elites, gestures and postures, power, russia

Andy:

The sense of success and inclusion is harder to resist than the wrath of the state. Carrots are more corrupting than sticks. This phenomenon is powerfully described in Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” (1960). One of its central characters is Viktor, a talented physicist who stoically defends his science in the face of likely arrest, but becomes weak and submissive when Stalin calls him to wish him success. “Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself—but now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies.” . . .

Russia today is much freer than it was for most of the Soviet era. However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, “Nobody has been commanded to lie down—and everyone is already on the ground.” The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin’s pressure. Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian journalist who works for a state TV channel, admits: “There is no person who tells [me] what you can and what you can’t do. It is in the air. If you know what is permitted and what is not, you’re in the right place. If you don’t, you are not.”

I'm always fascinated by discussions (or really just acknowledgements) of the thing-ness of books, that, apart from being texts, they're objects with a feel and smell and a personal, cultural, individual history to them.

re: alexander solzhenitsyn, books, changing the world, horizons of the possible, ink, paper, prisons, russia

Nate:

Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript—the first historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system—before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn’s sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose—not an experience anyone was likely to forget.

Members of that first generation of readers remember who gave the book to them, who else knew about it, and to whom they passed it on. They remember the stories that affected them most—the tales of small children in the camps, or of informers, or of camp guards. They remember what the book felt like—the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night—and with whom they later discussed it.