REFLECTIONS FOR COLLEGE LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION 2018: “Polyphonous Atemporality: Dual PostColonialism in Nick Joaquin’s Short Stories”

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Nick Joaquin: Polyphonous Atemporality: Dual Post-Colonialism in Nick Joaquin’s Short Stories.

Reflections for the College Language Association 2018 Conference

Chicago, Illinois

B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz, Ph. D.

Master Instructor,  Russian

Howard University

The transition from colonialism to post-colonialism in the twentieth century raises soe curious questions to the populations left behind in the lands formerly classified as colonial holdings, such as Latin America and the Philippines. Among the most interesting:

a. How do we evaluate the cultural influence of colonial powers on the populations left behind?

b. How do we evaluate the cultural and historical shifts brought forth by the colonial past?

Nick Joaquin provides an interesting case study for these two questions in Philippine literature. He wrote both critical-theoretical articles on the nature of Philippine history and culture, as well as creative fiction that created a vision of colonial influence on Philippine culture as a case of polyphonous atemporality, where multiple cultural influences caused a cultural reality unmoored from standard unlinear temporal ideas.

My presentation will look at one of Nick Joaqun’s theoretical concepts, the way that colonial languages can be used as tools to reflect historical cultural transitions. This concept, combined with an application of the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, when applied to his creative writings, reveal how he manages to create a polyphonous atemporal narrative, where his characters negotiate through different colonial cultural constructs to reflect on contemporary hybrid Filipino reality.

I, NICK JOAQUIN’S WRITINGS

Nick Joaqui’s anthology Culture and History

Nick Joaquin wrote extensively on the issue of culture and colonialism. His essay “Culture as History,” in particular, presented his view on how to negotiate Philippine contemporary culture with its colonial past. He differentiated among Asian, Spanish, and English colonial legacies. He makes various provocative observations,

I. Colonial legacies, which have been absorbed by the Philippines, have become tools in the progress of Filipino culture.

“Here would be no need to save national pride, since this would be purely Philippine History: the Filipino at stage center; with the alien intervenor himself counting as one of the tools with which we acted and to which we reacted. Even Christianity can be included among these tools, not in any derogatory sense but in the McLuhan meaning when he says that clothing, money, the house and the road are tools and that all such tools are “media of communication.” Thus we could solve the problem that most irks us about this epoch: the presence of the alien intruder, who would then be reduced, not without honor, to the role of medium. “

II. The Philippines become a place where the conflict between East and West play out in ways that echo Slavic debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles.

“This is recognized even by those who deny it, as when they assert that 1521 marked a deviation from what might have been our true history; or when they fume that we were Christianized at the cost of our “Asian” soul; or when they argue that if the Philippines had only been completely converted to Islam by the 16th century, the Philippines were already Buddhist, or Taoist, or Hinduist, or Confucianist, or Shintoist, the West would have conquered us in vain, because, being already formed by the media of the great civilizations of the East, we would be in little danger of deviating from the Asian form.

If it be true indeed that we were Westernized to the cost of our Asian soul, then the blame must fall, not on the West, but on Asia.”

III. A dual cultural process emerges, polyphonous atemporality.

“Our problem is in the process, or rather, in history as becoming, for what we cannot accept is that we became Filipino any more than we accept that we became Asian. (If you are of Asia, then you are Asian, period.) Even if we do recognize that a double process was in movement during the colonial era, one process tending to Asianize us and the other to Westernize us, we do so only to discriminate between them and to aver that the former produced what may be called our pancit and lumpia culture, which can be accepted as Philippine because it was Asian, and the other produced our adobo and pan de sal culture, which is Creole and therefore to be rejected as corruption. From a practical existential viewpoint, either process seems as Filipino as the other, and both to be now a single culture in which they cannot be distinguished apart, being too interfused with each other and with everything else in the culture,..”

Nick Joaquín, “Culture as History,” Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming. Metro Manila: Solar Publishing Corporation, 1988 1-26

English comes to occupy a special place among colonial languages, since, in his eyes, it is only that literariness as such truly emerges as a tradition in Philippine writing.

“Our fictionists in English are, in fact, the very first group of Filipino writers to be read simply for the sake of reading, or, rather, for the pleasure, the delight, of reading.”

Joaquin, Nick. “THE FILIPINO AS ENGLISH FICTIONIST.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, vol. 6, no. 3, 1978 Pg. 121-122

These comments seem to harmonize in a curious manner with Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, разноречие.

“Literary language – both spoken and written – although it is unitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract, linguistic markers, it itself stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry meaning… Thus, at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epoch of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages.””

Mikhail Baktin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 288,,291

Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Holquist, Michael, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996

Putting these all together, we can start detecting the emergence of an intentional polyphonous atemporality in Nick Joaquin’s fictional writing, My analysis will focus on the short story “May Day Eve,” which is available in his recently published Penguin anthology, but which is also available via JSTOR from:

Joaquin, Nick. “May Day Eve.” The Transatlantic Review, No. 5 (December 1960), pp. 26-35

“May Day Eve” is a short story populated by multiple points of view and multiple timelines. This multi-voiced, heteroglot in the Bakhtinian sense, and multi-temporal narrative reflects the co-existence of what Joaquin sees as the three main cultures that constitute the Filipino tradition: indigenous Philippine, Spanish Catholic conquista, and English. While Spanish and indigenous ideologies fight for domination in this cultural space, it is the bending of English stylistic and grammar rules that become the main tool for displaying the, in the case of his story, literally magic effect of the polyphonous ideologies that play off of each other like so many musical cords, that constitute Filipino awareness.

The story revolves around a legend presented by the oldest woman we see in the story, old Anastasia.

“And it was May again, said the old Anastasia. It was the first day of May and witches were abroad in the night, she said – for it was a night of divination, a night of lovers, and those who cared might peer in a mirror and would there behold the face of whoever it was they were fated to marry, said the old Anastasia as she hobbled about picking up the piled crinolines and folding up shawls and raking slippers to a corner while the girls, climbing into the four great poster-beds that overwhelmed the room, began shrieking with terror, scrambling over each other and imploring the old woman not to frighten them. ‘Enough, enough, Anastasia! We want to sleep!’

‘Go scare the boys instead, you old witch!’

‘She is not a witch, she is a maga. She was born on Christmas Eve!’

‘St. Anastasia, virgin and martyr.’

‘Huh? Impossible! She has conquered seven husbands! Are you a virgin, Anastasia?’

‘No, but I am seven times a martyr because of you girls.’”

Nick Joaquin, “May Day Eve” The Transatlantic Review, No. 5 (December 1960), pp. 27

Here we see some of the more common features of Joaquin’s style. Sentences related to dialogue delivery prove consistently short. However, those focusing on descriptive passages tend to blur the rules of normative style and grammar by running on to amazing lengths. The tense play of competing ideologies, much like the tense relationship among second or sixth notes in a chord, manifests itself in the flow of these not safe for grammar school English sentences. In this passage, for instance, Anastasia carries out the rational legal functions of a European nanny, while conveying to her charges the old traditions of pre-Christian Philippines.

“‘Let her prophesy, let her prophesy! Whom will I marry, old gypsy? Come, tell me.’

‘You may learn in a mirror if you are not afraid.’

‘I am not afraid, I will go!’ cried the young cousin Agueda, jumping up in bed.

‘Girls, girls – we are making too much noise! My mother will hear and will come and pinch us all. Agueda, lie down! And you, Anastasia, I command you to shut your mouth and go away.’

‘Your mother told me to stay here all night, my grand lady!’

‘And I will not lie down!’ cried the rebellious Agueda, leaping to the floor. ‘Stay, old woman. Tell me what I have to do.’

‘Tell her! Tell her!’ chimed the other girls.

The old woman dropped the clothes she had gathered and approached and fixed her eyes on the girl. ‘You must take a candle,’ she instructed, ‘ and go into a room that is dark and that has a mirror in it and you must be alone in the room. Go up to the mirror and close your eyes and say:

“Mirror, mirror,

Show to me

Him whose woman

I will Ье!”

As we get carried away by the unexpected twist to the fairy tale formula “mirror, mirror, on the wall” we also see the confused presence of possibly Christian, possibly pagan verb “prophesy,” In this case the maga gitana reveals the magic space of the mirror.

This mirror, and the text surrounding the mirror, inhabits s space occupied by what Slavic ethnographers called dvodverie, cultural practices derived by the simultaneous manifestation of dual ideological systems. Anastasia is considered a saint for having been born on Christmas Day and surviving seven husbands, but at the same time she is the maga opening the magic boundary of the mirror on May 1.

The mirror, in turn, becomes a spot that bends time and space, and thus marks the effects of the cohabitation of both belief systems. The mirror literally becomes a place of reflection on the present, the past, and the future. The ritual in front of the mirror repeats itself four times in the course of the text, the first with young Agueda, the second with old Agueda relating the story to her daughter, then with young Don Badoy Montiya, Agueda’s eventual husband, repeating his version of the ritual, and then old Don Badoy reflecting on Agueda’s passing.

Each of these repetitions displays one of Joaquin’s most distinctive stylistic features: the unannounced, instantaneous temporal shift.

“The mother’s lips curled. ‘Yes, he did! But, alas see them at that time. All I could see were his flashing eyes, his curly hair and moustaches.’
‘And did he speak to you, Mama ? ‘
‘Yes . . d. Yes, he spoke to me,’ said Doña Agueda, and bowing her greying head, she wept.
‘Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one,’ he had said, smiling at her in the mirror and stepping back to give her a low mocking bow. She had whirled around and glared at him and he had burst into laughter.
‘But I remember you!’ he cried. ‘You are Agueda, whom Inleft a mere infant and came home to find a tremendous beauty, and I danced a waltz with you but you would not give me the polka.’
‘Let me pass,’ she muttered fiercely, for he was barring her way.
‘But I want to dance the polka with you, fair one,’ he said.
So they stood before the mirror; their panting breath the only sound in the dark room; the candle shining between them and flinging their shadows to the wall. And young Badoy Montiya (who had crept home very drunk to pass out quietly in bed)
suddenly found himself cold sober and very much awake and ready for anything. His eyes sparkled and the scar in his face gleamed scarlet.”

The presence of practices that reflect the existence of a Philippine presence of двоеверие (dvoeverie), the marked presence of the performance of a specifically West European form of masculinity, as reflected in desirability being directly proportional with European education — don Badoy had just returned from study in Europe, Agueda’s higher space in society being reflected in her mastery of multiple European dances such as the waltz and the polka, all of these prove fruitless in the attempt to match these social coequals. Their final cultural compatibility derives from their ability to execute the old, pre-Christian ritual in front of the mirror.

WHEN A JOURNALIST GETS TO TELL A FULL STORY: ANNE GARRELS’S PUTIN’S RUSSIA: A JOURNEY INTO THE REAL RUSSIA

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Those of us who entered the Slavic studies field in the Soviet era “grew up” with an understanding of two things: it would be hard, and we would have to question every little bit of information presented to us. The 1990s, with its period of “transition” and political change, raised a new generation that came to take for granted easy access to the Soviet Union – multi-entry visas? Really? – and a moderately diversifying atmosphere, with the growth of “normal” businesses and numerous missionaries in our first year Russian classrooms.

As we started to feel like our innate skepticism and cultural skills that emphasized the realistically paranoid – as in, yes, they were really watching you paranoid – were an instrument for the history books, Vladimir Putin took over. The skills of the dinosaurs in our field became necessary for proper study of Russia once again.

One of the respected reporters from the Soviet period has published a memoir/study of Russia, Putin Country: A Journey Into the Real Russia (New York: Picador 2016).The skills developed over decades of working with television and radio news –she was the voice that narrated Gorbachev’s coup for me when I was in Greenville, South Carolina, for instance – have combined with mastery of essential history and an in-depth understanding of Putin’s government and resulted in an amazingly accessible story of why Putin enjoys the support he has in Russia. This is a great, gripping narrative, that goes down as nicely as National Public Radio with your morning coffee, except that it goes on for 227 pages. This is one report that is not going to get cut short for the local traffic report.

ANNE GARRELS’S A JOURNEY INTO THE REAL RUSSIA

ANNE GARRELS’S PUTIN’S RUSSIA: A JOURNEY INTO THE REAL RUSSIA

She signed my copy. #FANGIRL

She signed my copy. #FANGIRL

Then she was charming to my Howard University students. Made the ten hour drive to Ohio State University and the Midwest Slavic Conference totally worth it. #BISONSLAVISTS #BIGGERFANGIRL!

Then she was charming to my Howard University students. Made the ten hour drive to Ohio State University and the Midwest Slavic Conference totally worth it. #BISONSLAVISTS #BIGGERFANGIRL!

Ms. Garrels follows the narrative strategy of using an individual example to humanize data that would easily overwhelm even the most ardent data fiend if presented as a spreadsheet. Each chapter represents one subsection of the Russian population: “A Gay Life,” “The Believers,” “Freedom of Speech,” and “Nuclear Nightmare,” among others. For each group, Ms. Garrels tells of her relationship with a member of each subpopulation, and how their lives have changed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Again and again Ms. Garrels point ways in which the 1990s proved a difficult, traumatizing period for Russian society at large.

The true charm – and value –of this narrative is the way in which she shows the drastic difference between the capital cities – Moscow and Saint Petersburg – and the provinces, and how critical the difference between these two types of cities was to the rise of Putin. Her story of how she settled on Chaliabinsk, a formerly closed city close to a still closed nuclear city, is engaging in and of itself. The years of research on site and outside allows her to weave what would be otherwise overwhelming amounts of historical data as a natural part of the experience of each of her subjects. She makes the rise of Putinism, with the increasing limitations it places on civil liberties across the board understandable, and at times almost logical. Most importantly, she clarifies the extent to which the cultural and economic trauma of the 1990s still haunts Russian politics.

This is the perfect book for the Russia head who wants to show that skeptical aunt why Russia is still a subject worthy of serious interest. Or the Puerto Rican family that at times wonders why one would vote for study abroad in Leningrad instead of Barcelona.

A BOOK REVIEW: RED STAR TALES: A CENTURY OF RUSSIAN AND SOVIET SCIENCE FICTION

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One of the benefits of academia is that every now and then you get what is called a “desk copy,” a copy of a publication for you to review for your classes. Most desk copies come as direct requests to the publisher because I am about to have all my students invest on their book for my class. This semester, for instance, I will be ordering Plutopia, by Kate Brown – which is an awesome, awesome historical narrative for those interested in the intersection of urban planning and scientific development.

Sometimes, however, the desk copy just comes to you out of the Book Loving Gods. Such is the case with Red Star Tales: A Century of Soviet Science Fiction. I got the book in the fall at my office mailbox. I remember looking with excitement at the box and saying: “Yay! Desk copy! But which?” I had made sure to assign documents available through my students’ online library access, so a hard desk copy was an unexpected treat. Love of just about any kind of reading is one of the prerequisites of an academic career in the humanities. This was a case of the Book Loving Gods feeding me to the proper algorithm at Russian Life Books and, voila, at my desk was a copy of this nice little anthology of Russian science fiction.

According to the book’s publication notes, Red Star Tales: A Century of Soviet Science Fiction resulted from a crowd-funding Kickstarter campaign to help defray the publishing costs of the first run of the book. This is a sad commentary on the state of general publishing these days. This anthology is a great contribution for those who want a broader exposure to science fiction – readers like me, who were raised on the Hitchhiker’s Guide, C. S. Lewis and Doctor Who. Short stories constitute the majority of the anthology, which made it highly digestible in the hour to hour and a half chunks of time I could devote to attentive reading during the school year. The idea that this volume did not benefit from the push of a more traditional publishing house and its publicity resources concerns and saddens me. To draw a parallel, as President Barack Obama stated in White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2016 about the general state of journalism: “As you know, “Spotlight” is a film, a movie about investigative journalists with the resources and the autonomy to chase down the truth and hold the powerful accountable. Best fantasy film since Star Wars.”( http://time.com/4313618/white-house-correspondents-dinner-2016-president-obama-jokes-transcript-full/) It is truly regrettable that more general subject publishing houses should delegate translations, especially translations of genres such as science fiction, to the realm of self-funded publishing.

So… A group of driven translators gets together an agrees to get together an anthology of Russian and Soviet science fiction. (Side note: Sounds like the result of a third pint at ASEEES). Said translators get a few more buddies, a publishing house – in this case Russian Life Books – and a few more buddies to work as editors and social media gurus for the Kickestarter side of things. At least, I imagine that is how it generally happened. The result is a really enjoyable volume of wide ranging stories, covering 1892 to 1992.

Clearly, the more evident market for this collection would be a Russian/Soviet literature survey or a comparative literature course. This collection, however, does rank fairly high on what I would call the airplane/summer beach reading quotient. Read: would this make the two hours before boarding a plane, or an afternoon at the beach or such summer vacation destination enjoyable? The answer is yes, quite so. I am, in fact, thinking of having my tweener son, who has started reading other C. S. Lewis texts, to promise not to wreck the book and have him read it for summer vacation.

The anthology displays an interesting evolution of what I call “narrative technology” in my survey classes. The stories demonstrate the evolution of narrative voice seen in Russian literature throughout the twentieth century. The first interesting feature of the collection is the inclusion of a couple of Valerii Briusov stories, particularly “Rebellion of the Machines.” Students of Russian literature generally encounter Valerii Briusov as one of the founders of the Russian Symbolist movement. The presence of a work from 1908 that should strike fear in my heart of a wireless telephone and a microwave in 2016 really speaks of the universality of art and of a disturbingly accurate level of prescience as far as to how technology would evolve in the future. Mikhail Ancharov’s “Soda-Sun,” written in 1961, is one of the longer selections and displays the narrative leisurely pace of mainstream socialist realist stories. It features a Central Asian locale to represent the exotic other – in this, a Kazakh village. Interwoven with generalized jargon laden language is a meme worthy tidbit: “We look for salvation in endless quests, nut endless questing is endless hunger…” “The Exam,” by Sergei Drugal, from 1979, includes Syntax the cat, and a test that ends up with a placement as a preschool teacher. “Jubilee 200,” by Kir Bulychev, written in 1985, seems to steal a page from the Planet of the Apes series, but ends with a delightfully engaging plot twist. Sergei Lukyanenko’s “My Dad’s an Antibiotic” seems to draw a criticism of contemporary Russian politics.

However, the more charming of the stories is an excerpt from the story “Doorinda” by Daliya Truskinovskaya, from 1990. The story features a newly single mother, Ksenya, somehow ends up with a magic door that transports her wherever she can envision. The fragment has the heavy scent of Bulgakov’s Margarita to it, as she transports herself from place to place and comes back to turn the whole experience into a fairy tale, like Margarita with the little boy upstairs from Latunsky’s studio.

A few of the stories, like “Doorinda” and “Professor Dowell’s Head” feature female point of views which prove an interesting change from the technological jargon that seems to overpopulate the male narrative voices. While these seem to err on the side of hyper-feminized stereotype, in the context of the entire collection they prove refreshing changes of what I term narrative technology. This is a refreshing change from standard Russian classic novelistic fare – sorry, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev, we sometimes need a break from you! Toss it in your summer bag/gym bag/soccer practice/honor bang hangout bag and enjoy the trip to different realms of the universe. You will even enjoy contemplating switching your vision with your hearing and vice versa!

Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction. Yvonne Howell, ed. Montpellier: RIS Publications, 2015. Available through https://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Tales-Century-Russian-ebook/dp/B016C3KATY

 

One Research Day…

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One of the problems of living next to one of the richest, most vibrant research communities in the country is actually carving out the time to take advantage of its resources. Spring break is such a time. The very things that help support my career here – my position as Master Instructor (Senior Lecturer at other institutions in the United States) and my family responsibilities make it very complicated to actually carve out a solid block for my own personal research. (Overwhelmed; Work, Love, Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte is a great primer on these challenges). However, I did take one day to work on independent research. And it reminded me why it is that research in D. C. pretty much tops research everywhere else – sorry Boston, Saint Petersburg and Moscow!

Morning was spent at my favorite reading spot: Library of Congress. The last few years, as my teaching responsibilities have multiplied, my ability to read for myself has shrunk. I do not get to read deep as often as I would like – shshsh! don’t tell my students! – but this morning got me to looking at primary and secondary documents related to a presentation on Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba that I will reading at Midwest Slavic in a few weeks.

Lesson re-learned this day: proper materials and proper technological support can turn what would otherwise be a two to three week project into a one morning project.

In front of the Library of Congress, my favorite place in Washington D. C. Never mind the Supreme Court is next door and the Capitol right across the street.

In front of the Library of Congress, my favorite place in Washington D. C. Never mind the Supreme Court is next door and the Capitol right across the street.

Lunch was spent with an old friend at a pub down by the White House, across the street from the Department of Treasury building. It was wonderful not to have to worry about a children’s menu, as I sped past families enjoying the DC-ness of DC during spring break.

However, the highlight of the day was going to the Woodrow Wilson Center for a presentation co-sponsored by the Kennan Institute: “The Maisky Diary: The Wartime Revelations of Stalin’s Man in London,” held on Tuesday, March 15.

Gabriel Gorodetsky is Quonam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. The presentation focused on the diaries of Ivan Mikhailovich Maiskii, Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom for the majority of the Stalin period. Professor Gorodetsky has worked on the publication of Maiskii’s diaries for a lot of years. Maiskii’s story tends to deviate from the regular narrative old school Sovietologists have internalized. A former Menshevik, he rose up the diplomatic ranks and survived in part because of the contacts he cultivated through a lifestyle that normal Marxists might qualify as bourgeois decadent. What proves even more amazing was that the diaries survived as classified documents until the end of the Soviet era. They shed light in part on the way that the image of the Soviet Union evolved within the ranks of the British ruling class as the Nazi regime rose to power. And somehow Maiskii managed to survive.

Professor Gorodetsky at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Another book into my must read collection.

Professor Gorodetsky at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Another book into my must read collection.

I regret my father has already passed on – this sounds like the kind of narrative he would enjoy. Diaries of this kind, in particular, play an integral part in illuminating the complicated dynamics of the Stalinist regime. The level of repressions and censorship of the period really makes scholars of the humanities and social sciences much more like archaeologists. It is vital because, as the character of Eliza in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton asks, “…And when my time is up/Have I done enough?    COMPANY: Will they tell my story?…” This is the kind of book that can help us contemplate the danger of the mix of charisma, authoritarian – or in Stalin’s case, totalitarian – instincts, a well-defined nationalist ideology, and a willingness to make violence against civil society by purging it of “opportunist elements…”

The end of the day... Even barely missed WAMTAmageddon!

The end of the day… Even barely missed WAMTAmageddon!

What the Debate Over a History Textbook Can Tell Us About the Conflict in Ukraine.

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The last month or so has been taken over by various global conflicts that seem to repeat some of the most vexing foreign policy challenges of the 1980s: the conflict in the Middle East, particularly the Gaza region, and Russian relations with its East European neighbors. Those interested in international relations find their attentions divided between these two regions due to two sadly violent events taking place simultaneously: the military conflict between Israel and Gaza, and the shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines passenger plane over Ukraine, where about 300 people died. This brings forth the question of how do international relations and international security stakeholders react to long lasting conflicts that feature the messy combination of ethnic and national disputes over limited geographical boundaries.  This entry will focus on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and try to look at how the debate over the development of a history textbook for Russian elementary schools can illuminate the reasons behind the violent evolution of Putinism in the border between Russia and Ukraine. The connection between the debate over a history book and the debate over the land in Eastern Ukraine may not seem evident at first. However, the way the debate over the textbook evolved points helped to illuminate Putin’s view regarding Russia’s historical condition has facilitated the escalation of tensions in the Ukrainian territory.

This story, as most stories about the current state of Russia, starts with the Soviet period and how it developed school curricula. The United States for the most part leaves textbook choice selection to the discretion of the individual school districts. Under the Soviet Union, Russia developed a nationally centralized curriculum. The 1988 literature readers for fourth and fifth grade mirror each other in their structure.  They progress in a roughly chronological order. The first section features traditional folk tales. The second section contains adaptations of folk tales written by Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin. The third section contains samples of nineteenth century literature. Works by Soviet writers focusing on the evolution of the new Soviet society round out the last section. Each section includes an essay focusing on a particular aspect of the section’s reading, be it plot, character development, or a comparison of prosaic and poetic language. The readers present a unified heroic narrative of the evolution of Russia. It also includes stories that feature young children as heroes, be it as Young Pioneers of as witnesses of heroic military struggle. It sends a message to the young ten to twelve year old audience that they are part of the heroic mission of Russia, particularly Russia as the leading republic within the Soviet Union.

Fourth Grade Russian Literature Reader for the Russian Federation, academic year 1988

Fifth Grade Russian Literature Reader for the Russian Federation, Year 1988. Notice the positioning of the young boy, presumably the fifth grader, and his encounter with the heroic Soviet soldier from what could be interpreted to be the heroic first half of the twentieth century.

 

Russia has maintained the policy of using centrally produced textbooks in the post-Soviet era. What has proved particularly curious is the high profile the central government has given to the development of national textbooks, particularly the development of a new Russian history school. January 16, 2014 featured a meeting of the committee charged with developing the new history textbook.  Some of the professionals who participated come from fields traditionally related to curriculum development: the minister for education and science, various members of the Russian Duma’s education committees,  history teachers from the K-12 realm, the head of the history department at Moscow State University, as well as faculty members from several other Russian institutions of higher learning. Some of the participants, however, prove a curious addition to what one would expect to be a pedagogical task force. The head editor for the Russian History television channel and the Archimandrite of the Sretensky Male Monastery formed part of the textbook development committee. While some argument could be made for the possible interest in the History channel’s view of how media can influence the development of  history curriculum, the presence of the archimandrite begs the question of how the Russian government views issues regarding the separation of church and state when it comes to curriculum development.

Outside of the issues of the curious composition of the curriculum committee, there is also the fact that Vladimir Putin actively charged them with the design of the new textbook. The transcript of the meeting on January 16 shows Putin defending what he sees as a need for unified treatment of Russian history within the national curriculum.

Концепция, которая доработана и уже принята, насколько я понимаю, должна лечь в основу и целой линейки учебников и методических пособий.

Сразу в этой связи хотел бы сказать, что единые подходы к преподаванию истории совсем не означают казённое, официозное, идеологизированное единомыслие. Речь совершенно о другом: о единой логике преподавания истории, о понимании неразрывности и взаимосвязи всех этапов развития нашего государства и нашей государственности, о том, что самые драматические, неоднозначные события – это неотъемлемая часть нашего прошлого. И при всей разности оценок, мнений мы должны относиться к ним с уважением, потому что это жизнь нашего народа, это жизнь наших предков, а отечественная история – основа нашей национальной идентичности, культурно-исторического кода.[1]

The Kremlin provided an official English translation of this statement that gives a general idea of what Putin stated, but which also makes some unfortunate word choices in trying to convey some interesting Russian concepts.

The concept, which has been finalised and adopted, as far as I know, should form the basis for an entire set of textbooks and study guides.

I would like to begin by saying that coordinating our approach to the study of national history does not mean formal, official, ideology-driven single-mindedness. We are talking about something different: a single logic in teaching history, an understanding of the inseparability and interconnectedness between all stages in the development of our state and statehood, the fact that the most dramatic and ambiguous periods are an inseparable part of our past. There is a wide range of assessments and views on these issues and we should respect them, because this concerns the life of our nation and of our predecessors, and our history is the basis of our national identity, our cultural and historic code.[2]

I would like to focus on the first sentence of the second paragraph of the quote. Here, Putin defends the need for a unified presentation of Russian history while trying to address the fear of Soviet styled censorship of uncomfortable historic periods, such as the Stalinist period from 1928 to 1952. «Сразу в этой связи хотел бы сказать, что единые подходы к преподаванию истории совсем не означают казённое, официозное, идеологизированное единомыслие.» The Kremlin provided the following translation: “I would like to begin by saying that coordinating our approach to the study of national history does not mean formal, official, ideology-driven single-mindedness.” While the Russian original really does sound as mind-numbingly bogged down in jargon as the English translation, there is a significant problem with how they translate one phrase: казённое, официозное, идеологизированное единомыслие.  Kазённое means bureaucratic, related to the state – governmental. Oфициозное means something not official but that conveys the government point of view. Идеологизированное means to idealize, in the sense of imagining something as better than what it is. Eдиномыслие refers to someone who thinks the same as some other person, but not in the sense that unanimity conveys that idea. Thus, the phrase should read closer to: “First off, I would like to say in relation to this that a common approach to the teaching of history does not mean governmentally driven idealized concurrence.”

Putin looks to standardize the presentation of history while uplifting those areas he finds most positive, and without over-emphasizing negative events. While he does not mention it explicitly, it seems like he is looking to figure out a way to minimize the negative side of the Soviet period, particularly the Stalinist purges. He also sees this history curriculum as a possible way to unify a country that saw itself in such disarray during the last decade of the twentieth century.

So what, pray tell, does this have to do with Putin’s reaction to events in the Ukraine? First, it shows a consistency to how Putin views the nature and role of the Russian state in a post-Soviet world. Ever since his inaugural address in December 31, 1999, Putin has emphasized again and again that he sees a strong, centralized state structure as an integral part of the Russian nation. He also has pushed for a vision of Russian history as one uninterrupted unbroken process, instead of several periods broken by radical change. [3]

If one starts with that understanding of Putin’s world view, one can understand why he would see it as necessary to assert Russia’s influence in regions that have historically been considered to fall under Russia’s sphere of influence. Ukraine occupies a particular spot in this equation due to the flowing nature of the Russian borders during the nineteenth and twentieth century. The issue of the Crimean peninsula highlights this complex set of issues. Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 through a declaration by the Politburo of less than a page in length. This did not matter from a security standpoint during the Soviet period, since the Ukraine belonged within the confines of the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, it provided a point of tension due to its high percentage of ethnic Russians and the nature of its transfer to Ukraine. One of the main challenges Putin has faced since 2000 is managing the tricky calculus of ethnic and civic tensions that have emerged in the borders of post-Soviet Russia. The United States press has generally paid attention to the tensions in the Central Asian regions of Russia, where Muslim national groups have presented a challenge to the Russia’s centralized federal structure. Its position on the Eastern region of Russia – read: its geographical location in the non-European regions of Russia – have meant that European and North American governments have not reacted in a particularly strong way to Russian governmental and military activity. However, Putin’s expansion beyond Russia’s Western European rational-legal post-Soviet borders have agitated European and American governments that for the most part viewed the issues of post-Soviet borders settled in 1991-1992.

Putin’s view of Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence in the Western region of Russia and Eastern Europe complicates important aspects of relations with an increasingly interconnected European region. Most significant is the growing dependence of Europe on Russian gas, and the Soviet legacy of Eastern European reliance on gas from Russia. Simply stated: if Eastern Europe sees its pipeline to Russia cut off then they will find themselves facing a really cold winter. Phrases that have become clichés such as “energy independence” and “renewable energy sources” take on a much more real dimension.  Russia’s increasing level of trade with Europe also proves challenging. Trade, however, still has some Soviet legacies, so the percentage of Russian trade with Europe is still much larger than the percentage of European trade with Europe. Read: if trade levels go down, Russia gets more affected than Europe.

Finally, this highlights American foreign policy’s continuing difficulty in dealing with the other “N” word: “Nationalism.” Nationalism, in Putin’s view, is important in creating a strong Russian state. It, however, causes great problems when conflicting claims to one territory occur, particularly when the claims are framed in terms of “Slavic” or “Russian” essentialist terms. Put in really explicit terms: does Ukraine really have a claim to Ukrainian right to exist if it is nothing but a descendant of an original Russian ethnic territory? Ukraine’s attempts at closer ties to Western Europe – read: independent of great Mother and Father Russia – becomes a real threat to Russian national sovereignty within its ideally constructed territories.  Ethnicity, nationality, and statehood then become the volatile mess that we witnessed in Central Asia before and in Ukraine today.

 

[1] Встреча с авторами концепции нового учебника истории. 16 января 2014 года, 15:45, Москва, Кремль. http://www.kremlin.ru/news/20071

[2]“Meeting with designers of a new concept for a school textbook on Russian history.” http://eng.kremlin.ru/news/6536

[3] Vladimir Putin. “The Modern Russia: Economic and Social Problems.” Vital Speeches of the Day. February 1, 2000. pp. 231-236 and Meeting of Council for Interethnic Relations http://www.eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/5017.

 

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Before LinkedIn or Google Plus, There Were the Pins…

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“Leningrad – The Bronze Horseman” printed under a relief of the Bronze Horseman, the statue representing Peter the Great. I saw this across the river from my bus stop at the university.

Oh, the Places  You’ll Go! Before LinkedIn or Google Plus, There Were the Pins…

A lot of times we remember the rivalry of the Cold War. We remember the 1980 boycott, Reagan’s meetings with Gorbachev, and the way Sovietologists scoured every syllable of Pravda for hidden political meaning.

As a student during Perestroika, however, there was a lot of cool excitement about studying Russian and going to the Soviet Union. Nerdy, bookworm, we were the Big Bang Theory Crowd before the Big Bang Theory Crowd came around. Nirvana of Sovietology in that period was finally achieving acceptance to a study abroad program in Russia. There were basically two programs that dominated the environment back then: Council of International Educational Exchange, CIEE, based in Leningrad, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian program in Moscow. I ended up in Leningrad. I was much more interested in the cultural aspects of Russian studies – music, and especially literature. Or rather, Russian Literature. Especially Russian Poetry. I wanted to see the city of Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Akhmatova.

One fun aspect of study abroad in Russia was trading pins. Little lapel pins. If done properly, you would end up with your coat covered in pins demonstrating various things. First were pins that showed scenes from the city where you stayed. You also would buy pins you could trade. Also, you would get pins as presents from people you met. It was a way to show first degree relationship in the day when there was no LinkedIn or Google plus.

So, last summer, my mother hands me a box to bring with me. She had been cleaning out a part of the house and ran into one of my college “memory boxes.” I opened it and inside – still in an old Soviet frozen strawberry bag – was my old collection of Soviet pins.

Besides the plain nostalgia it brought for a younger, more optimistic self, finding the pins served as a visual reminder of how sophisticated mass produced Soviet culture actually was. It allowed for a standardized way to represent localized experiences. Pins represented well known local attractions, historical events, and political pride.

Pins could be classified under general categories. Most common were the pins that showed local pride. These pins showed monuments or iconic images of a given place. I spent my time in Leningrad in 1988, so the bulk of my collection ha mostly to do with the mythology of the city of Leningrad, particularly with Leningrad as the cradle of the Bolshevik Revolution

 

Captions: “Embankments of the Neva: Leningrad.” Vintage: @1988. The university is located on the embankment of the Neva River.

 

Leningrad

A pin that has “Leningrad” printed under an image of the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva River.

 

There also were pins designed to reflect pride in the Soviet Union’s revolutionary past, and their political uniqueness.

Caption reads “Always ready.” Image of Vladimir Ilich Lenin with s Soviet star as the background.

 

Pin with the caption “V. I. Lenin.” Image of Vladimir Ilich Lenin with a background of the Soviet flag.

 

Pin in honor of the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or as we know it from its acronym, KPSS.

 

Lenin. Just Lenin.

 

There were pins to mark holidays, anniversaries, and other special occasions.

 

Pin celebrating the millennium of the Christianization of Rus’.

 

 

May 1, International Workers’ Day.

 

Another May 1 pin. This holiday was big.

Happy New Year!

 

Elochka gori! Happy New Year!

 

March 8. International Women’s Day. Everything was International.

 

May 9. Day of the Victory of the Great Patriotic War, also known as World War II. I think this is my favorite pin.

Caption reads: “Glory to the Soviet Army.” Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolt.

Another pin celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

 

Celebrating 70 years of the Soviet Revolution. I like the white enamel finish effect.

 

We did not go, but we still ended up with cute souvenirs from the 1980 Olympics. Even in 1988.

Moscow. 1980. Swimming.

 

Then there were the city pins you would get as you traveled, or that you would exchange when you met people from different cities.

 

Caption says: “Moscow, Capital of Our Motherland.” I went there.

 

Riga. I went there. It was beautiful.

 

Odessa. I turned 21 there. It was beautiful.

 

Izhevsk. I had a pen pal from there. We met at Brown when their delegation visited us. I saw her again in Moscow.

 

Clearly I met somebody from Vladimir. Just cannot remember who for the life of me.

 

A historical castle from Tver’. Never went there.

 

Tallin. My roommate went. Wish I had had a chance to go.

Minsk. The most changed city we visited.

 

What do you remember when you revisit these kinds of symbols? First, you remember how ubiquitous these pins were. You remember how you could not get away from Lenin, no matter where you were. Always, everywhere. Statues. Pictures. Posters. You remember how self-conscious the Soviets were of making sure everyone had one consistent vision of what constituted Soviet history. How they always, always emphasized the heroic, and everyone seemed blissfully ignorant of the ugly, like Stalin. How actually cool the visual representations of revolutionary Soviet culture actually were.

You also wonder. Even if these pins were made for mass consumption, the amount of attention placed to the aesthetic quality of the pins. Even almost thirty years and an extreme camera close-up cannot take away from the stunning visual quality of some of these pins.

And last, but not least, you always left thinking you brought too many with you. But now I wish I had saved more.

AUTOMATISM, ART AND SUMMER VACATION II…

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One of the problems with teaching is that you cannot quite get away from nagging problems so you can focus on research and writing. In this case, the three main problems have been related to late implementation of fall semester assignments. So… Problem #1: Since I was assigned my courses late, and the textbook manager went on a well-deserved (and I mean that seriously, without irony) vacation, I still have to order my textbooks, so I have not been able to finish my syllabi for next semester. Problem #2: I was assigned my courses late, so I have yet to finish my syllabi. Problem #3: I am still dealing with next semester, when next semester is supposed to be already planned and done. This gets in the way of drawing full benefit of enjoying the full effect of summer defamiliarization – остранение. As I mentioned in a previous blog, there is a need to disconnect from the familiar to recognize the full complexity of the structures of the familiar.  In the academic setting, what a lot of professionals do not realize is that a good academic tends to fulfill three full time jobs. The first, and usually most visible, is teaching and promoting knowledge among students. The second is defined as service, where the academic serves on committees that help administer the university – usually in the form of committees or special programming on campus. The third, and usually most complicated, falls under the heading of “research.” Research often includes outside sources of funding for their work. Research usually culminates in various forms of publications, where the academic shares their knowledge with the public at large. This includes publishing articles, books, traveling off-site to conduct research, and presenting at conferences. If you keep track, that tends to amount to two and half to three times the workload of a mainstream nine to five job.

The biggest challenge tends to be fulfilling the research part of this equation. Research, by its very nature, tends to be a solitary endeavor, demanding monastic practices bordering at times on the obsessive. In the humanities, this tends to require substantial travel to libraries, archives, and historical sites to gather all necessary materials. Summer, in short, is not an unexpected vacation bonus time, but rather a frantic race to finish research before mid-July and August, when most archives shut down for the summer, and then finishing anything from a twenty page article to a two to three hundred page book manuscript before orientation starts, in some cases as early as mid-August. Untethering from campus and the cacophony of demands found there proves vitally important for what most of us consider the most important part of our jobs: the dissemination of knowledge.

This year I have taken my traditional trip to the Midwest. I am also engaging in a trip to a Dominican retreat center in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. The idea is to contemplate – yes, in that deep and religious manner. Many students fail to understand how self-consciously our moral beliefs tend to help shape our research. The small community of gulag scholars, for instance, are frantically trying to collect interviews with surviving prisoners – and prison guards and administrators – to try and provide a record to explain the reasons why people agreed to help operate these prison camps. At the core of much of humanities research is recording the memory of human experience, while at the same time we analyze the way we construct out memory. Why do we see certain acts as positive and ethical in one context, yet immoral and unethical in other? We, indeed, actively engage in deconstructing social myths, but in critically sound manner. Understanding the core of the foundations of our theology and ideology allows us to understand how better to engage with our current surroundings at all levels: interpersonal, ideological and ecological.

Displacing ourselves from our regular environments to find materials not readily available in our home institutions is the most important aspect of our summer estrangement. Many researchers take a few weeks to visit libraries such as the Library of Congress, or archives that contain primary materials for their research. At the same time, we as researchers can take time to place our materials within a greater historical and cultural context.

Sometimes, exposure to different places can also allow the researcher to think in a different way about their topic. Among the places I have visited this summer, the two that have struck my analytical mind the most was my visit to George Washington’s winter headquarters in New Jersey and Fort Nisqually in Tacoma, Washington. In both cases, the original pretext for the visit were completely touristic. The visits provided me with the opportunity to visit some examples of pre-modern architecture. In the case of Washington’s headquarters, the eighteenth century domestic architecture proved surprisingly flexible to the needs of the young nation’s military leadership. In these early years of the twenty-first century, one would be hard pressed to imagine a regular home suiting the needs of a large detachment of military officers, particularly officers as high ranking as Washington and his officers.

Washington’s winter headquarters, New Jersey.

George Washington slept here!

 

George Washington wrote here…

 

Alexander Hamilton maybe slept here…

The visit to George Washington’s headquarters was juxtaposed with a visit shortly thereafter to the John Deere Pavillion in Moline, Illinois. It is meant to be a hands-off tourist attraction to feature John Deere’s amazing technology. It actually also makes it possible to envision the changes in the definitions of rural agricultural culture since World War II. The tractor below runs around a quarter of a million dollars, and is used to farm thousands of acres at once.

Between New Jersey and the Pacific Northwest, there was the Midwest trip, with the trip to the John Deere Pavillion, an excellent hands on museum of agricultural technology..

 

In the case of Fort Nisqually, one gets to realize how labor intensive life even during the middle of the nineteenth century was. The visit to Fort Nisqually contrasted nicely to the presence of the Washington state ferries, which many Tacoma and Seattle residents take for granted but which produces a sense of awe even among those who used to live in King County in a former life.  The juxtaposition of mid-twentieth century technology with the reconstruction of life from the bare beginning of the modern era, combined with the post-modern transformation of downtown Seattle all came together to create this visual narrative of the nature of modernity and change in the last century.

 

The visit to Fort Nisqually impressed even more because it exists in the middle of the most developed area of Washington state, King and Pierce counties.

Post-modern downtown Seattle.

 

Bremerton, Washington, at night, from the ferry.

 

A Washington state ferry…

The opportunity to view such contrasts in such a short period of time, and to feel the drastic contrasts in a three dimensional manner, allow one to better understand descriptive moments in literature. It also allows one to identify great literature. Great literature allows one to feel the structure without being there, brings out the stony without having to travel three thousand miles. Understanding how a stone – or in this case, a ferry or a really big piece of seaweed – can allow the reader to get over the initial stage of unbelief.

What truly struck the greatest visual chord was the area surrounding the Saint Benedict Dominican Retreat Center in Mackenzie Bridge, Oregon. The area was surrounded by a huge national park. It is also possible to walk to deposits of volcanic rock not too far from the center.

 

The falls go with Makcenzie River, Oregon…

The chapel at Saint Benedict’s Retreat Center…

The chapel.. The interior is made with local wood, giving a new meaning to the term “locally sourced…”

 

As Shklovskii noted: “If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us…”  Separating ourselves from our normal surroundings becomes critical to developing new ways to contextualize our normal surroundings, to explaining what is it that allows our everyday surroundings to become “automatic.”

CONFERENCE PALOOZA #2: LASA 2013 Washington DC

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So, the end of spring brings out the big academic conferences like mushrooms during a damp April rain. In a bit of symbolic justice, the District of Columbia is experiencing its first heat wave with the arrival of the Latin American Studies Association Congress – in honor of what is possibly the largest gathering of tropical Latino/Latin American intellectuals in the United States. I have come to catch up on Latino studies, make some contacts with Cubanists, and get ready to pop out a book proposal by the end of the summer.

First thing about DC Big Academic Conferences – everybody comes. You can feel the nervous sweat of the ABDs as they try to figure out what topics will lead to The Interview and The Job. There are people like me, who need to figure out what to do with our academic life. Then there are the tenured, who see this as a chance to hear one or two new things and have drinks with buddies they have known for decades.

The second thing about DC Big Academic Conferences – they do not come cheap. Parking at the conference hotel for the day is $32. I chose this the second day because I want to go to the evening reception, which starts at 10pm. (Insert your favorite quizzical emoticon here.) 10pm, which a very Latino time for a party, is rough for a middle aged academic who had to wake up before 6am to get here on time. Otherwise, it is $14 for parking and metro, or $199 for the conference hotel for the night.

Then, there is the need to dress in layers. It is 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but less than 70 degrees inside. Layers are critical, because you are not spending $30 for lunch in the hotel when you are (not) on a per diem and you can get lunch for less than $11 if you just walk right outside of the hotel. The ability to survive the change in temperature is vital to keeping costs under control.

Most striking about the Latin American Studies Association national congress, as opposed to the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies national conference — coming up in Boston this November — woo whoo! — is the fact that here I see me. One of the charms of Soviet studies is the ability to keep that vaunted critical personal distance from the object of study. No such pretense here. I have attended a couple of Puerto Rican panels. The first was on Carlos Fuentes – yeah, I know, not Boricua, but the panel was fielded by UPR Rio Piedras folk. Boricuas with Ph. D.s still strike me as moderately Martian.  The other panel I attended was on development policies on the island during the first half of the twentieth century. That one was weird. One of the papers mentioned the activities at Ramey Base before it was decommissioned. The other panels I attended were on Cuban studies.

Except for the Friday 5pm panel. That one, I have to say, was a special treat. I met Jorge Volpi in person. Jorge Volpi is a Mexican writer who is part of this post-Macondo group called the “Crack Movement.” He has written, and writes, a lot. He writes a lot in that post-modern ironic way of writing, and he keeps a blog. In Spanish. Yeah, I know, hegemonic English is not the way to access the beauty of this language. Fortunately for those Spanish impaired, a lot of his works have already come out in English translation. You can look in your local library for In Search of Klingsor, Season of Ash, and In Spite of the Dark Silence.

Jorge Volpi and B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz after his presentation at LASA 2013, Washington DC.

I have to say one of the things that really really frustrates me after attending these conferences is the way a lot of these scholars lead a life ready to drop everything, grab that passport and go. Maybe it comes from being a Sovietologist, and knowing that Russia as a scholar is not the most user friendly place in the universe, and that getting the blasted visa is but the beginning of your research troubles, but still, to bounce around like that without worrying about you home security system or how to deal with your syllabus for next semester. Also, this year I am really feeling that sense of four heavy undergraduate courses eating up all your time.

And I did not buy one single book. Now that one is one for the records. A great conference, all in all.

When They Beat Up on You, or How Much More Painful I Am Cuba’s Fate Was…

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So, the last few months I have been busy working on the research side of my portfolio. First, there has been the cascade of end of the year conferences. Actually, April has really been a Conference-palooza, starting with Howard University’s Women Ambassador Conference , where I got to do an extemporaneous presentation on Capitol Hill – that was cool. Then I attended Georgetown University’s The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations, where I hung out with about two dozen scholars for three days of fellowship and discussion of the best way to scientifically exterminate you political opposition. That was cool, in a nerdy sort of way, if you get into the topic of highly efficient concentration camps.

Meantime, back at the ranch, I have been completing a research paper on Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba,  this completely stunning Soviet film from 1964-1965, filmed on site in Cuba, co-authored by Evgenii Evtshenko, and filmed by Sergei Urusevskii. The thing is a thing of visual beauty. The opening sequence features this fly-over over coastal Cuba that is just spectacular. Then it moves from the shore to Habana, where you see the decadent capitalists hanging out by the side of a hotel pool. The camera literally goes from the side of the pool into the water and up and above.

English language critics have had a hard time figuring out what to say about this film. Rotten Tomatoes, one of the most widely read popular film review sites, gives it a 100 rating, describing it as “an unabashed exercise in cinema stylistics.” Cuban critics generally  ignored it.

Harshest of all, however, were the Soviet critics. The highly respected granddaddy of Soviet film journal, Ikusstvo Kino, [i]dedicated a long article in its March 1965 issue – 13 pages to be exact, which by Soviet standards for this journal was monumental. The critics were simply ruthless in their review of this movie. The article describes how the public had awaited the release of the film with “great interest” this film about the Cuban people, the Cuban revolution, the Cuban heroism. Yes, hyperbole about Cuba was the order of the day in this article. A. Golovnia, a professor in VGIK, the leading Soviet film school,  talks about how Kaltozov and his cinematographer, Uruevskii, used the film as a means to explore new forms and means to represent revolutionary pathos, revolutionary poetics. Now, for those not initiated into Soviet official speak of the 1960s, being accused of innovation was, well, bad. Golovnia describes how the film is harmed by an excess of virtuosity.

Iu. Kun, a producer, accuses the film of “poetic estrangement,” directly making a reference to Eikhenbaum’s and Shklovsky’s formalist theory – again, a bad thing for 1960s Soviet Russia. S. Poluianov, a camera operator, found the form overbearing. “I had the feeling that clarity, cleanliness, and simplicity had gotten lost somewhere… I learned nothing about the people of Cuba”[ii] One has to keep in mind the Soviet art had a really really strong explicit didactic streak in it – if one did not find an explicit historic – read Marxist – storyline, as defined by the standards of Soviet socialist realism, the work was seen as unfit and valueless. As if that was not enough, he gave the ultimate negative review: he found the film “boring.” Because sitting through a dozen sittings of Pudovkin’s a Mother’s water dripping scene was not enough to drive one to the nearest bottle of vodka.

G. Krapalov, a critic, accused the film of being a hybrid of naturalism and formalism – again, cloaked negative reviews in the highly ideological Marxist-Leninist canon. Saddest of all, however, was G. Chukhrai’s review. Grigorii Chukhrai directed the other great Soviet war film, Ballad of a Soldier. If anyone should have an understanding of the use of cinematography, it should be the director who gave us probably the most famous upside down tank scene in film history. Instead, he described how the film left him with a feeling of disappointment, offense, and exhaustion, a feeling of complete “protest against the film.”

As Slavists, we tend to avoid the extremely extreme pieces of party propaganda, except in small amounts. Soviet propaganda is well constructed, consistent, constant in its guiding principles, and extremely repetitive. Your eyes can just glaze over with the consistent repetition of the same slogans and clichés. This article, however, populated by the voices of some of the best respected members of the 1960s film community, really makes it clear how the members of the cultural elite were so finely attuned to the demands of the party to present an ideologically consistent image of the regime.  These highly negative reviews shows how homogenous and monotonous accepted visual interpretations of the revolution abroad had become by the Khrushchev period. The Marxist-Leninist approach to visual representation had become so ingrained by that point in that, in spite of the fact that a lot of these directors had survived the Stalinist period and understood how lucky they were to simply survive that period alive, let alone with an influential job in the cultural field, they would turn immediately against  a work that did not feature one easily identifiable socialist realist protagonist for the length of the film. Most importantly, it shows how what we could term the middle layer of party operatives worked almost independently to perpetuate totalitarian practices within the cultural sphere, and that is a sad sight to behold.

 

[i] “Ia, Kuba.” Iskusstvo kino. No. 3, March 1965, pgs. 24-37. All translations from this article are my own.

[ii] Iskusstvo kino, 27

First Love and the Conventions of Plot

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In today’s post-modern, hyper-deconstructed, energetically hyphenated age of literary criticism, it may seem curiously old-fashioned to ponder plot conventions for different types of narratives. A historically sensitive analysis of certain types of plot narratives, however, can point to elements that writers find consistently appealing and constantly effective. In this case, a critical analysis of the plot formula for First Love can point to some of the compelling aspects of the novel as a modern and post-modern device.  In the interest of working with a manageable amount of data, this comparison will encompass Ivan Turgenev’s narrative, “First Love,” from 1860, Joyce Carol Oates First Love: A Gothic Tale, from  1996, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, from 2011. [i] While The Marriage Plot does not deal exclusively with the plot structure for first love, it is a self-conscious narrative about all narratives that take on the topic of young love.

The first curiosity about the plot pattern for first love is the season when it occurs: it is first and foremost a narrative of summer loving – yes, feel free to enter your favorite Grease reference here.[ii] The narrative starts with the season of the year reflecting the chronological status of the narrator/main character. The narrator is in the threshold adolescent stage, at the beginning of their reproductive cycles. In Turgenev’s narrative, the narrator channels his sixteen year old persona. In Oates’s First Love, her narrator channels her eleven year-old self. The narrators narrate of the experience of first love as a past event, an experience that allowed them to figure out the societal constraints that would control their future selection of a spouse.

These narratives prove curiously didactic in nature, as the conclusion of these tales emphasize not the triumph of emotion and sentimentality, but rather the way that social relations turn a supposedly romantic endeavor into a lesson of how to pick a proper spouse. The presence of an implied spouse, something like Booth’s implied narrator, haunts all of these narratives, imbuing the narrator’s voice with an effect similar to science fiction’s ubiquitous temporal paradox, where characters from the future come in to document past events yet cannot get involved in them for fear of affecting a fixed future timeline, or in this case a fixed unstated narrative line. Turgenev’s “First Love” is actually the main narrator’s recollection of his first romantic experience as a middle aged man. Joyce Carol Oates’s narrator, while not clearly specifying from what future reality records her experience, speaks as the knowledgeable narrator from the future.

The idea of summer as a transition period from childhood to adulthood has proven one of those narrative conventions that authors have used over the centuries. Yes, at times this literary fixation with summer as the time of young love has become at times a painfully overworked cliché – reference again the opening sequence of the musical Grease. However, talented writers have saved this convention from banishment into the trite and overused clearance rack of the bookstore. The emergence of youthful desire has merged with the elemental aspects of summer, particularly the easy access to the outdoors caused by the heat, to reflect the vegetative state of reproductive ardor seen in the world around them.

One thing that has struck me when reading these narratives is how much more sense they make if one has actually physically experienced the difference between summer heat and winter snow. People from the Caribbean, for instance, can take for granted a perpetual state of vegetative reproduction, with year-round access to a variety of fruits as the standard, as well as the need to constantly upgrade you beach wardrobe every six months. This type of body lacks the physical reaction to an environment that for over half of the year can prove too cold for external activity. Summer vacation becomes particularly valued because it coincides with the time of year when you can readily step outside of the house with little forethought put to what you wear or what you need to bring with you. The body feels the difference between the intense tightening of the muscles that occurs during freezing cold weather, and the immense relaxation of muscles that occurs in warm weather. In Russian literature, the knowledge that summer is just intensely short plays an important part in this awareness of first love – a brief, fleeting moment, comparable to the life cycle of a lightning bug. In Joy Carol Oates’s case, the presence of summer weather serves as a plot device that helps lead the main character into the unexpected relationship she eventually shares with her cousin. (Yes, this is putting a G rated spin on an R rated topic!) As the seasons once again turn from winter into seemingly sudden summer in the Mid-Atlantic region, as I watch my female students change into curve revealing garments, as I watch myself ponder if I can get away with a skirt for a day, as I find my eyes itching from all the blooms, it becomes almost inevitable to wonder what new revelations will come with the next summer narrative awaiting on my shelf.

 

[i] For the purposes of bibliography, I will be referring to the  Constance Garnett translation of Ivan Turgenev’s “First Love,” http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/turgenev/ivan/first/index.html, First Love: A Gothic Tale, by Joyce Carol Oates, New York: The Ecco Press, 1996, and The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

[ii] Grease, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Randal Kleiser, director, 1977.