So, I’m going to start with an apology for dropping the ball on Friday. Life …
Anyway, on to the fun. Tonight, we examine the Russian character through literature. This is one of my secret passions. I love Russian Literature. Stories of troikas and wolves, fairy tales of witches and ghosts, musings on the nature of the state and bureaucracy, and reflections of war. The Russian canon is full of great stories.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn probably has more relevance to today’s political climate on the international stage and domestically here in the US. But I am highlighting two works of the 19th Century for illumination and examination. To see the future through the lens of the past.
Ivan Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons during the transition from an agrarian aristocracy to a more modern world run by bureaucrats and intellectuals. Fathers and Sons takes that generational change and focuses it through a student’s return to the family farm. As with most such situations, generational differences are forefront in the narrative. The father’s world of servants and serfs is contrasted with youthful nihilism.
The book’s charms are many, beginning with the fact that it’s a Russian novel, but short.
It was Fathers and Sons that introduced me to the power of specificity. The moment the servant on the first page is pinned as a “man of the advanced modern generation” because of his “single turquoise ear-ring … dyed pomaded hair and … mincing gait,” I knew that details, rather than drama, would move the narrative forward. This wouldn’t be a story with sweeping generalizations or rambling asides. They’d be replaced by a “large speckled hen who strutted gravely about” and the “smell of warm rye bread.”
Dennis Covington at the American Scholar
The novel itself marks a turning point in Russian Literature. The old guard preferred sweeping epics spanning generations that allowed for long passages of stream of consciousness philosophical reflection. Turgenev here turns the focus inward while examining the nature of love and family.
Nikolai Gogol also addressed the change in society during the 19th Century. With Dead Souls, he looks back at the feudal system of serfdom through the lens of the emerging middle class. The title comes from a term used by the feudal system to organize and categorize their serfs as property. A man was said to own so many souls, similar in intention to the term heads of cattle. The central story revolves around a man trying to collect names of dead serfs for a pittance and thus create an imaginary cadre of serfs to prove his status, however illegitimate the means.
It could be described as a linguistic phantasmagoria - full of people and things with a hallucinatory reality that rushes into the surreal. Nabokov, in a great, dogmatic essay on it, saw the book as a phenomenon of a peculiar "life-generating syntax", in which Gogol's sentences called up a world which could be capriciously developed or abandoned. Gogol called Dead Souls a "poem", and in some ways the English work it is nearest to is The Canterbury Tales, where rhyme and rhythm add to, even create, the satisfactory unexpectedness of the detail of people and things.
The novel is a poem, in a uniquely Russian way. The language is the same as the preceding generations but the meaning and intent have been irrevocably altered by modernization. Gogol addresses this evolution as much through his words as what they are describing. To truly understand this book, it must be experienced. I don’t have the words to describe that experience for you. The novel is also unique as it is a rare instance of a picaresque novel in Russian Literature. The book is a wry commentary on the Russian character and economic structure, both the old and the emerging.
Late Night Viewing Binge
Start here at Wikipedia and take your pick. Filmmakers have been mining the Russian greats for a long time. There are several Annas Karenina of varying levels of satisfaction. This version starring Sophie Marceau is particularly good in my opinion. And as a bonus the score features some of the great Russian composers, another area where the particular Russian flair speaks to me.
Another particularly good adaptation is Akira Kurosawa's The Idiot, moving the setting to Japan but retaining all of the meaning and emotion behind the original work. The film stands as a testament to the universality of Dostoyevsky’s work.
Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita between 1928 and 1940 yet the novel was not published until 1967. The story concerns a visit by the devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union.
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from your humble diarist:
The Lone Apple ’splains the Gorsuch situation concisely in If Democrats fail to fight Gorsuch, they look weak and share the blame for future decisions by David Akadjian.
greenbird found the evidence in Trump presented German leader Angela Merkel a printed 'invoice' for what he thinks they owe Nato by Hunter.
now if we could just get some more kossack nominations ...
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For the film buff, check out Russian Ark, which is filmed in the Hermitage. The film is a single 96 minute shot. It is quite a film.