Monthly Archives: May 2012

A Rock Star Sighting and More about the Nature of Writing…

Posted on by

Wednesday, May 23, 2012, the Kennan Institute held an event titled “The National Conversation: Putin’s Return & The U.S.-Russian Reset.” Michael Van Dusen, Executive Vice President and COO, Wilson Center, opened the event by remarking how Putin’s reelection had not proved that remarkable. What did prove remarkable was the protests that have taken place following the elections, which have been mostly peaceful. At this point, Sam Donaldson, ABC News correspondent and current President of the Wilson Council, made a cameo appearance, offering his seat to one of the ladies in the overflow crowd.

Following Van Dusen, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser, delivered a keynote speech. In his speech, he spoke about asymmetries of objective and subjective realities. Putin holds historical and international ambitions and resentments for Russia. He sees the United States as capitalizing on the unfortunate event of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He commented at length on Putin’s designation of the fall of the Soviet Union as the greatest calamity of the twentieth century, seemingly forgetting about various events such as the Second World War and the Stalinist repressions. Furthermore, Putin must be aware that the Russian economy is highly unbalanced, which led to inequalities of wealth that have not created a favorable political position for Russia.

Brzezinski started to discuss the feasibility of what he sees as Putin’s remedy for Russia’s complicated political and economic position: a Eurasian Union, comparable to the European Union in structure but hopefully devoid of the European Union’s tensions.  At this point, Brzezinski pointed out that the problem with Putin’s proposal for a Eurasian Union is that no candidates currently yearn for membership in such a Union. The idea lacks appeal to countries that should be natural candidates for such a union, like the Ukraine. Furthermore, Russia faces tensions from several of its neighbors, like Georgia. Meantime, the United States enjoys support from other countries. The United States has found ways to muster coalitions together, a skill which Putin seems to lack at this timed.

These are some examples that show the ways in which asymmetry of objective and subjective reality affects United States-Russia relations. One way in which the reset has helped is that it has allowed for expansion of involvement.

Brzezinski finished his speech by commenting his opinion that Putin may be a political anachronism. He wonders just how much historical depth is there in his regime. He found Putin’s style reminiscent of Mussolini’s, particularly after viewing Putin’s inauguration. The really emerging political actor in Russia is the new middle class which is asserting itself with increasing confidence. One positive outcome of this Putin/Medvedev period is that individual fear is gone for the first time in Russian history. The sense of political jeopardy is now minimal. This does not mean there is not some level of risk of arrest, for instance, but nothing close to the level of political violence characteristic of the Soviet period. Putinism, Brzezinski concluded, with all its asymmetries, is not enduring.

Outside of the substance behind the talk, this part of the event was the academic equivalent of a rock star concert. Zbigniew Brzezinski was involved in so many high level foreign policy decisions that it is hard to imagine our world without his hand in a lot of the major events that have defined the end of the twentieth century. Among the major foreign policy events during his term of office included the normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China (and the severing of ties with the Republic of China); the signing of the second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II); the brokering of the Camp David Accords; the transition of Iran from an important U.S. client state to an anti-Western Islamic Republic, encouraging dissidents in Eastern Europe and emphasizing certain human rights in order to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union; the financing of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there and the arming of these rebels to counter the Soviet invasion; and the signing of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties relinquishing overt U.S. control of the Panama Canal after 1999. Want some fries with that?

After Brzezinski’s keynote address, the event opened up as a discussion among Mr. Brzezinski,  David Kramer, President of Freedom House; Nina Khrushcheva, Professor, Graduate Program of International Affairs at The New School; and Blair Ruble, Director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. Susan Glasser, editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine moderated this part of the event. Blair Ruble, the always gracious and insightful director of the Kennan Institute, commented that Russia’s main weakness at this time was the Russian state’s inability to master modern statescraft.  David Kramer then commented that Putin is a hostage to his own corrupt and rotting system, which is a mix of arrogance and paranoia. Nina Khrushcheva remarked that Putin has outlived his potential, and that his system is dysfunctional. Brzezinski jumped in to comment that Putin’s power still relies on intimidation, the army, oligarchs, and the secret police, which gives him continuity but no social enthusiasm for his programs.

The discussants further noted how Putin’s reliance on loyalty has become a weakness, in that he cannot trust people outside of Moscow. Dr. Ruble also commented how Stalin’s legacy cannot be grasped by Americans.

All in all, this was a very stimulating hour and a half of contemplation on the current state of the Russian government, and the implications of Putin’s return to power. And it always is real pleasures to listen to Dr. Ruble go into policy wonk mode. He has that rare mix of breadth and depth of knowledge and experience in the subject area, and a real gift to phrase in a way that is accessible to the general public.

What has proved remarkable in all of the different presentations I have attended during the period leading up to the Russian elections this year, as well as Putin’s re-assumption of the office of President, is the universal skepticism with which his reelection has been met. In spite of some indicators that the Reset Policy started by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has had some measurable positive outcomes at the foreign policy level,[i] people remain very skeptic about his ability to create enthusiasm domestically among the emerging professional middle class. Journalists also face increasing limitations on their ability to report the news in an accurate manner. It will be interesting to see how this new Putin period plays out.

 

 

The other book to which I have returned, now that the madness of correcting finals has finished, is Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Chukovskaia, in her book «В лаборатории редактора,» In page 256, she observes how Samuil Marshak, editor-in-chief of the children’s literature section where she worked, demanded that children’s literature – «вся!» “all of it!”—should be a work of art. The editor’s office should become a place where the fruitful encounter between new material and tradition should take place.[ii] Editing can only be fruitful when it is a work carried in unison with the author. The editor who proves incapable of identifying the feelings and artistic goals of their author is a serious threat to the author’s work.[iii] She equates the whole editing process to an orchestral piece, which must be carefully directed so that all the plays interact in the prerequisite harmonic fashion.

«Да, так и в литературе: терпеливо наклопенные, тонько подмеченные мелочи обогащают воспрятие читателя лишь в том случае, если они вызваны к жизни, подтиняты на поверхность чуством и вся сила чуства служит познанию избранного художника объекта…»[iv]

“And so it is in literature: the patiently accumulated, delicately noted details enrich the reader’s perception only in such cases when they are called to life, lifted to the surface by feelings, and the full force of these feeling serves the interpretation of the subject chosen by the artist…”

The responsibility of mentoring new forms of writing falls particularly on the editor of a young, inexperienced author, who may not himself recognize where his strengths are. Young, inexperienced writers, complain Chukovskaia, often fall into the  banalities, clichés, and thus extinguishes the possibility of fresh material and fresh new thought.

One seeming throw-away comment that Chukovskaia makes when speaking about editors is about the nature of tradition. “To say ‘high tradition’ is to say nothing. There are many traditions in literature. Which of them should be recognized as ‘high’ and ripe for innovation, and which have outlived their time…?”[v]

Most of us read necessary reading on a regular basis. We read the newspaper to catch up with the news, to get the latest sports scores, to catch up with Wall Street. Some of us read to fulfill specific needs: programmers read user guides to fix some software bug, diplomats read briefings and dispatches, students read textbooks. Perhaps those of us who attempt to provide readers with materials need to more carefully pay attention to the artistic side of our craft. Innovation is not simply a concept that exists in the field of computer development these days…x

 

 

 

[i] See Ambassador McFaul’s notes to his speech to the Higher School of Economics, http://photos.state.gov/libraries/russia/231771/PDFs/ResetSlides-HSE.pdf

[ii] Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская, «В лаборатории редактора.» Арханьгелск: АОА «ИПП» «Правда севера», 2005, 256

[iii] pg. 144

[iv] pg. 193

[v] pg. 262

About Putin’s Inauguration and More on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky

Posted on by

Before I get to my main topic, I wanted to provide a link to the Russian Channel 1 footage of Putin’s inauguration.

http://www.1tv.ru/news/social/206393

Do not be intimidated by the fact that it is the Russian television channel – language matters little in this exercise in semiotic analysis. Just let the footage run. You will be able to tell fairly clearly when Medvedev arrives at the Kremlin, when Putin arrives at the Kremlin, and when Putin takes his oath of office.  Later in this entry I will also provide links to articles in English that will provide more details about the setting, in case my kind reader would like to learn more about the setting of Putin’s inauguration.

For reference, think about the spectacle put together for Obama’s inauguration back in January 2009. Washington’s metro system had record ridership, and the city was overrun with people who wanted to share in the experience. It was so cold that Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma “lip-synched” their performances.[i] Everyone remembers it was cold because everyone stood outside to witness the event.

Meantime, if you look at the footage of Putin’s inauguration, one is struck by the feeling of claustrophobia of the ceremony within the Kremlin’s main palace. The presence of soldiers dressed in uniforms that seem out of the Napoleonic period adds to the sense that this was not a ceremony designed for the Russian public, but for the select few oligarchs who got invited to this private event.  The ornate nature of the interiors –Putin was inaugurated in the Kremlin’s St. Andrew’s Hall, the former throne room of the tsars, which stands in stark contrast to the Stalinist monumentalist marble foyer from which Putin departed in Moscow’s White House – really gives the whole even an imperial air which is very missing from the United States’ more populist inaugural celebration.[ii]

Even more disturbing are the aerial shots taken when Putin and Medvedev were driving to the Kremlin palace for the actual inauguration. It seems like Moscow is a ghost city, with no one but the Napoleonic period honor guard standing outside the palace to greet the President/Prime Minister and the Prime Minister/President. Pay attention at the points between 16:30 and 23:50. That is six minutes of Putin driving in a caravan through hundreds of abandoned blocks in one of the largest cities in the world. In the United States, you would have the sidewalks overrun with people trying to get a glimpse of the caravan.  Moscow, in contrast, looks like a ghost town.

The eerie absence of people stands in stark contrast to the apparent activity that occurred the day before the inauguration. The Huffington Post, among the more mainstream online news sources, noted how over 120 people were detained as opposition protests drew more than 20,000 people into Moscow the day before the inauguration. [iii]

This leaves one wondering about the nature of political change in Russia since the end of the Soviet Union.  Specialists tend to agree that Russia has evolved into a strange form of parliamentary oligarchy. The emerging protest movement, which has mobilized the younger emerging middle class in ways never seen in Russia, presents a particular challenge. Will Putin find a way to allow for an increasingly diverse range of political actors to gain equal access to the political processes in Russia? Or will Putin turn to a more “stereotypical” authoritarian mode of governance?

The wonder of living in Washington, D. C., is that we have so many people actually interested in this topic that you can expect that I will have more to say on this topic later this month. ….

________________________________________________

Which brings us back to the previous topic of Bakhtin. I know, this constitutes some of the horrible writing that I try to battle in my classroom. There really is no graceful way to transition between Russian politics and Dostoevsky – what am I saying? Dostoevsky was the man (cheesy cliché, check!) when it came to trying to work out political and philosophical questions in artistic form. This is what made him Bakhtin’s favorite novelistic writer. There – transitional link with Putin’s ornate, traditional coronation –er, inauguration – established.

Going  back to Bakhtin’s essays on Dostoevsky, in his chapter  «Основная особенность творчества Достоевкого и её освещение в критической литературе», “Fundamental Features of Dostoevsky’s Work and Its Manifestation in Critical Literature, ” Bakhtin points out that what most characterizes Dostoevsky’s literature is that it has no genetic or causal categories. Rather, he saw details in the world around him, gradations in significance and meaning.  In chapter two, “Dostoevsky’s Characters,” Bakhtin observes how:

«Не только действительность самого героя, но и окружающий его мир и быт вовлекаются в процесс самого знания, переводятся из авторского кругозора в кругозор героя.»

“Not only the reality of the hero himself, but also his surrounding world and reality become part of the very process of knowledge, change from the author’s point of view to the character’s own…” [iv]

These characteristics come through in one of Dostoevsky’s shorter works, Notes from the Underground. If you want to follow along, you can access an online version courtesy of the University of Virginia library system: (Side note: if you like the collection of texts in this site and you live in Virginia, do not forget to write to your legislator and let them know the University of Virginia, and its library system, rock!)

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengD.browse.html

Now that we have a unified source to reference, we can start by taking a second and being impressed by Constance Garnett. Constance Garnett lived at the turn of the twentieth century and single-handedly brought classic nineteenth-century Russian literature to the English speaking world. While new translations of a lot of these works have emerged in the last thirty years, when I was starting my studies in Russian literature the Garnett translations were the only translations we used. And she was a woman. And she translated over seventy one volumes of literature. I have not even written one whole volume of literature in my life, I cannot even imagine how she managed to work her way through so much material.[v]

Now that credit has been given where credit is due, let us go back to the actual text. The story is a strange little narrative of a man who finds himself quickly losing any and all hold on reality.  He starts by revealing his former experience as a low level government bureaucrat – in clear homage to Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The narrator is not a pleasant person – he starts by admitting he is a “spiteful man” at least four times within the first two pages.

This man contemplates the world around him. The narrator goes through a list of traditional motivators to action or interaction in life. He tried falling in love, but ended up suffering. People in general, he believes, go through life fooling themselves as far as to their motivations and actions. In contemplating the nature of action, he comes to a moment that displays Bakhtin’s claim of Dostoevsky’s ability to display gradation of thought and consciousness where others may not see any gradation at all.

“…You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all “direct” persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and you know that is the chief thing. To begin to act, you know, you must first have your mind completely at ease and no trace of doubt left in it. Why, how am I, for example to set my mind at rest?…”[vi]

The answer, in this case, is that trying to set one’s mind at rest is nothing but a foolish endeavor. Free will is a hard concept to accept when seemingly physical and rational laws, such as the mathematical law the two times two makes four, rule the world – “without my will.”

Those who decide to assert their free will end up suffering in Dostoevsky’s world.  Dostoevsky’s narrators peel away layer after layer of motivation for each and every character in his books – from his frustrated male heroes to his virtuous female heroines. He makes passing references (or as my students would say, he pays homage) to major figures in nineteenth century Russian literature. Notes from the Underground intentionally echoes Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, as well as reference Turgenev’s hero, Bazarov, from Fathers and Sons. He also creates a hero that directly opposes Nikolai Chernychevsky’s Rakhmetov, from What Is to be Done? All of these heroes try to manifest their intellectual, personal and political agency, and all of them fail in one way or the other. The richness of the narrator’s discourse, as well as the discourse it carries on with the different type of literary heroes that have populated nineteenth century Russian literature, is one of the ways that Dostoevsky manages to change the author’s point of view to the character’s point of view.

Why do we find it so hard to understand Dostoevsky’s Underground Man? In part it derives from a certain sense of philosophy that strikes us as fatalistic. You English language reader came into the tradition of Russian literature fairly late in the nineteenth century, thanks to Constance Garnett’s herculean translation work. At the same time, English language readers read more popular magazine serials such as Charles Dicken’s novels, which somehow always managed to provide his main hero with a relatively positive ending, or with Jane Austen, whose heroines managed to find their mate in spite of whatever prejudice they bore at the beginning of their work. A novel that so explicitly focused on the ideas of free will and the consequences of intellectual and political agency differed in the way it approached the topics of political and philosophical discourse. Russian literature does not provide any easy options for social change, while one could surmise from a work by Dickens that if society came together as an organic whole it could at least seriously ameliorate the effects of the tenements and slums that had emerged as a result of the early industrial revolution. The thought that one would end underground because of the inability to exert free will in a politically or economically significant way went against the grain of the more positive, rational legal trend inherited from nineteenth century English language literature. If one accepts the existence of Horatio Alger, then the Underground Man is the result of lack of will, rather than lack of existential possibility for action.

 

[i] Michele Salcedo. “Inauguration Music – Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma – Wasn’t Live But Recorded.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/22/inauguration-musicians_n_160216.html

[ii] Mikhail Aristov, “Benefit, Honor, Glory”, Voice of America, May 6, 2012 http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_06/73978542/. See also  Svetlana Kalmykova, “Putin: I’ll do my best to measure up to people’s expectations,” Voice of America, May 7, 2012, http://english.ruvr.ru/2012_05_07/74070146/.

[iii] Lynn Berry “Vladimir Putin Sworn In For Third Term As Russia’s President.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/vladimir-putin-sworn-in-russia-president_n_1494084.html

[iv] М. М. Бахтин «Бахтин под маской: Маска четвёртая: Проблемы творчества Достоевского.» Алконост: 1994, 40-41 Translation my own.

[v] Once again, Wikipedia is not my favorite source in general, but for this general type of information it more than first the bill. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Garnett

[vi]http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/modeng/modengD.browse.html For more commentary regarding the critical reception of the book you can go to: http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/novels/UGMan/ugman.html

Bakhtin and Dostoevsky…

Posted on by

Just listen to the name: Bakhtin. The –kh-, by the way, sounds like the “h” sound that Ernie the Muppet from Sesame Street makes when he laughs. If you are going to write what amounts to a nerdy fan letter to an author who has been dead since 1975, it helps that said author has the kind of name that belies the gravitas of his oeuvre.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н) wrote the kind of serious literary criticism that makes you know that you are engaging in no holds barred, honest to goodness, heavy duty intellectual pursuit. I remember when I first heard about Bakhtin in graduate school. We were introduced to two of his main concepts – chronotope, the intersectin of time and art, and the picaresque hero. The term “picaresque” comes from the sixteenth century Spanish narrative El lazarillo de Tormes. Bakhtin took the image of the underclass rascal who uses his wits to gain upward social mobility and applies it to novels at large. I always found his preference for French Renaissance, rather than Spanish narratives, when discussing this term rather disconcerting. His development of the concept, however, proved very useful.  There is, simply told, an intellectual world before Bakhtin and an intellectual world after Bakhtin. He wrote about ideas in a way that illuminated the relations between the real world and the world of creative prose. Never mind that he packed it in the form of linguistically scintillating neologisms, such as dialogic, heteroglossia, and chronotope, among others.

Bakhtin also gained the academic equivalent of “street credibility” through the extremes he endured to write his theory. Bakhtin’s works “came of age” during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era. He lived a challenging professional life, and taught in a wide range of institutions. [i] His works were hard to come by, since he found himself teaching far away from the intellectual centers of (then) Leningrad and Moscow, and since his works were considered controversial during his time. This only added to the cache of clandestine Soviet writing that made Russian literature such a heady affair during the Soviet period.

Bakhtin took the time to explain the origins of literary forms – both as descendants from earlier forms and as originators of new forms. Which brings me – finally! – to the reading for the week. I have been skimming – for skimming is all one can do when closing the books on a four course load teaching semester – Bakhtin’s writings on Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, by himself, is another one of those Russian writers whose every piece of writing tries to challenge a reader’s conception of the world. His Grand Inquisitor, for instance, is still one of the most exhilarating treatments of free will.

Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as what best be described as a “founding innovator.” The way that he took previously existing structures and metaphors and integrated them with specific philosophical content turned the novel into what Bakhtin considerd the most advanced literary form.

“Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He created an essentially new novelistic genre. Therefore , his work cannot be fit into any kind of frame, does not obey any of the hiistorico-literary schemes, which we have become accustomed to attribute to the European form of the novel. In his works, a hero appears whose voice is constructed like the voice of the very author in a novel of the normal type, and not like the voice of his hero. The hero’s voice regarding himself or his world carries as much weight as the normal authorial word…” [ii]

One of the Dostoevskian heroes that Bakhtin analyzes is the one derived from Gogol’s works. One only need to compare Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to see both Gogol’s influence on Dostoevsky, and how Dostoevsky could take what had by his lifetime become a classic literary figure and innovate the figure into a new generation, if that is not too egregious a rhetorical sin to express. Dostoevsky adapted Gogol’s grotesque characters and gave them a greater level of philosophical and moral depth, leading to his take on the Nietzschean superman in Crime and Punishment in the form of Raskolnikov.

Granted, Dostoevsky’s literature does not easily merit the adjective of “pretty.” If you want seductively pretty prose, look to Nabokov, who is constantly trying to show how rhetorical beauty and rot a moral soul from within. Dostoevsky’s universe leaves you unnerved as you wonder if there is any real beauty left in the world. His endings always prove reassuring in that they point to the face that morality can reappear even in the most unlikely souls. It does leave you wondering how out of place society can be if it can morally disorient people with such ease. All of this and more is reflected in Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s contribution to world literature, and why he sees him as the novelistic author above all other novelistic author.

 

[i] I usually try to avoid Wikipedia as a reference, but in this case the information is so general, and truth is stranger than fiction in Bakhtin’s case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakhtin

[ii] М. М. Бахтин «Бахтин под маской: Маска четвёртая: Проблемы творчества Достоевского.» Алконост: 1994 p. 7 Translation my own.