Baldaev and Vasiliev’s Soviets

Every now and then—maybe once a year or so—I read a book that gives me a fleeting case of PhD program dropout remorse syndrome. I like, no, I love, the book, see its value for a broader readership, and begin designing courses and creating syllabi in my head so I can force (okay, attempt to force…) a group of unsuspecting but curious undergraduates to read, appreciate, and love it, too. “Fleeting” means the syndrome usually disappears within a few minutes, after I’ve remembered how much I hate grading, office hours nobody comes to, and academic paperwork. Besides, I have a completely painless outlet for some of those urges: some of you occasionally ask me for book ideas for your courses.

I’m sure you can see where this is going: I read Soviets by Danzig Baldaev and Sergei Vasiliev and would love to put it on someone’s reading list. Soviets is my second book from Fuel, a London-based publisher. The first was Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag, which I called “a deeply disturbing book that documents, through detailed drawings and concise captions, the horrors of the Soviet Gulag system.” Soviets isn’t nearly as disturbing, though many of Baldaev’s dozens of angry caricatures and commentaries on life in Sovietdom are uncomfortable and grotesque, addressing subjects like anti-Semitism, alcoholism, and the Afghan War. Soviets juxtaposes Baldaev’s work with photos by Sergei Vasiliev, a photographer who worked for Vecherny Chelyabinsk. Like Drawings, Soviets is bilingual (this is great for students!), with English-language translations from Polly Gannon and Ast A. Moore.

Soviets covers so much that it’s hard to summarize its value for students of Soviet-era or post-Soviet Russian literature and culture. For someone like me, a life-long learner in the field who lived for an extended period in 1990s Russia, (and admittedly has trouble making it through book-length nonfiction), the broad range of figures in Baldaev’s drawings and Vasiliev’s photos—the former draws everyone from a barfing drunk to a medal-covered Brezhnev, and the latter photographs everyone from soldiers meeting Yuri Gagarin to female prisoners “volunteering” on their day off—goes a long way toward filling in gaps on aspects of Soviet life that I never had a chance to witness or learn about. Things like scientists sorting vegetables in a storage facility or the name Нихухрымухрыниксы (transliterated: Nikhukhrymukhryniksy, which the book calls “a portmanteau of ne khukhry-mukhry (‘not to be sniffed at’) and the Kukryniksy – three satirical cartoonists who signed their work collectively under this name.” Kukryniksy drawings were published in the Soviet magazine Krokodil. “The fifth column,” a term that’s making a comeback these days, also appears in Soviets.

I should add that many of the panels in Soviets include explanatory notes. Randomly opening—this was a fortuitous opening to a particularly rich panel—brings up a page depicting tiny people being emptied into a Belomorkanal cigarette carton by the NKVD and an ashtray bearing the saying “Лес рубят – щепки летят” and holding what looks to be a heap of people. This page includes a reference to poet Osip Mandelstam with a brief note about his life, work, arrest, and death plus a note about Belomorkanal cigarettes, created to commemorate the construction of the canal between the White and Baltic Seas. The saying on the ashtray, by the way, is rendered as “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” which is certainly more familiar and, thus, clearer to casual readers than something more literal, like “If you cut down trees/forests, sawdust flies,” something I’d never really thought much about until sawdust really did fly in my backyard last week on a breezy day.

Many pages of Soviets also contain quotations from works about the Soviet Union that complement the topic in the drawing. The book endeared itself to me even more when I found a quote from The Soviet Union: empire, nation, and system, by Aron Katsenelinboigen, whose course in Soviet geography taught me more about the Soviet system than all my other college courses combined. He’s quoted on a page about alcohol, workers, and payment, noting that workers were sometimes compensated in pure alcohol, measured by the glass. The bibliography in Soviets contains around 30 items. From a to z, they start with Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread and end with Aleksandr Zinovyev’s Homo-Sovieticus.

And then there are Vasiliev’s photos, all black and white, many depicting official parades, sporting events, and workers. They make a beautiful complement to Baldaev’s drawings, particularly because it’s often difficult to decide which angle on Soviet reality feels more realistic. Or absurd. I’m sure part of the reason the spectral double-paged picture of a long, long line for Lenin’s mausoleum on a snowy day particularly struck me: I went to the mausoleum in 1983 and was nearly denied entry because I was wearing sandals. Disrespectfully open sandals. There’s also the contrast of an tubercular inmate who has a Lenin tattoo on his shoulder, and, later in the book, five nude sunbathing women on a roof in Chelyabinsk in 1976. The shadows are lovely. The ethereal photo across from that one shows a woman bathing her son in a small washtub on a roof; it looks like there’s a clothesline, too, and a breeze. It’s 1977.

The Fuel Web site offers some sample pages from Soviets, here. The photographs include the afore-mentioned photo of the line to Lenin’s mausoleum.

Disclaimers: The usual. Thank you very, very much to Fuel for sending me a review copy of Soviets.

Up Next: Yuri Mamleyev’s The Sublimes. Later still, Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard, which I like very, very much but find slow going. Also, Irina Ratushinskaya’s The Odessans. And a trip report on BookExpo America, which is coming up at the end of the month and will feature a day-long program about translated literature.

Book Review Odds & Ends: Volkov, Kharms, et al.

1. You won’t need a deep interest in Daniil Kharms to enjoy a recent London Review of Books article on Matvei Yankelevich’s book of translations, Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Reviewer Tony Wood provides plenty of background on Kharms’s behavioral and literary eccentricities before commenting on Yankelevich’s translations.

One of my previous postings about Kharms includes links to Russian and English versions of his work.

2. Meanwhile, in The New York Times Book Review, Keith Gessen reviews Solomon Volkov’s The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn. Books whose titles promise so much are often a disappointment – War and Peace notwithstanding – and Gessen doesn’t sound thrilled with Volkov’s efforts, despite the book’s seeming completeness and descriptiveness.

Gessen places Volkov’s book in context by questioning the title, reminding readers that 20^th-century Russian cultural history hardly feels magical, thanks to what he calls a “string of exiles, suicides, torture sessions and murders.” Gessen also mentions the tendency for members of Joseph Brodsky’s generation to retreat into the private life they craved during the Soviet period, rendering them “powerless to stop Putin from terrorizing their country.” This is true: I know one person who thinks of himself as being in a sort of personal exile.

3. Finally, recent daily issues of the New York Times have included two other Russia-related reviews: Bill Keller’s take on Timothy J. Colton’s Yeltsin: A Life and Janet Maslin’s unecstatic views of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44.

Life’s a Birch and Then You Die

Reading Daniel Rancour-Laferriere’s The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering sounds like an inherently masochistic act: Can one slim book make a scholarly psychoanalysis of an entire nation and its history and culture? The short answer is Yes. Diagnosis: moral masochism.

Fear not, tender readers. This scholarly book is entertaining, enlightening, and fully accessible to readers without degrees in Freudian analysis or Russian studies. It can also be frustrating, but take off that hair shirt, toss out the hemlock, and settle into a comfortable chair. Rancour-Laferriere’s monograph has lots of relevance to literature, and he includes evidence from folk tales, religion, novels, philosophy, and history to show how and why Russians find ways to abuse themselves, physically and emotionally.

That The Slave Soul of Russia reads easily is its best and worst trait because, at times, the book’s logic is surprisingly thin (see below). I began reading as a convert to Rancour-Laferriere’s thesis that Russians are masochistic. Actually, I think most human beings are masochistic in their own ways, as evidenced by the popularity of expressions like “life’s a bitch and then you die.” Then again, “Life Is Good” has become a popular brand, so it seems the key to happiness involves balancing knowledge of unavoidable realities – e.g. paying taxes and dying – with enough healthy denial to enjoy a book, a glass of wine, and a good night’s sleep. But enough advice.

Who might enjoy Rancour-Laferriere’s book? Readers of Russian literature should like chapters mentioning masochists in Russian books, including Pasternak’s Lara, Pushkin’s Tatiana, and Dostoevsky’s Dmitrii Karamazov. Anthropologists may relish analysis of old Russian sayings and the symbolism of the Russian banya, or bathhouse. Chapters on mothers and male-female relationships should be of interest to gender studiers. And so on… Rancour-Laferriere scours Russian cultural history and finds masochism everywhere, from birth to death.

The range of sources is so broad that it’s inevitable no reader will agree with everything Rancour-Laferriere writes. But it’s tough for me to disagree with his thesis, given the wealth of analogous situations and reasoning I’ve heard expressed in conversations or through contemporary and classic literature, movies, and TV shows.

Still, banya history is one thing, but I’m not sure all Rancour-Laferriere’s evidence trickles down to the modern-day banya. In my experience, sitting, having a day off with friends, and drinking something, be it tea or vodka, is more important than being hit on the back with a birch switch. Not that I ever found the extreme heat or switching painful, though maybe my friends lacked sadistic tendencies or went easy on me because I was a foreigner.

In other spots, Rancour-Laferriere’s lines of reasoning feel incomplete or reductive. I’ve always thought swaddling babies sounded cruel so was glad he covered that topic, but his reason for including a quotation from Tolstoy, writing as if he were a swaddled baby, was weak for a scholarly book: Tolstoy’s tremendous characterizations of adults do not mean we can assume he can accurately describe an infant’s feelings.

I also think Rancour-Laferriere takes his analysis of birches a bit too far. Yes, the birch is called “mother,” but he provides no direct evidence – songs, sayings, or otherwise -- for speculation that certain rituals among maidens that involve chopping or burning birch are sadistic toward the mother or masochistic toward themselves. That said, he admits the meanings of the birch rituals are not always clear and makes sure to use words like “seems” and “possibly.”

So, did I enjoy the book or was it a masochistic experience? I recommend it. There should be something to pique the interest and curiosity -- or ire -- of most readers, and that’s a good thing, given the importance and broadness of the topic. Keep in mind, too, that The Slave Soul of Russia was written in the ‘90s and is a monograph with inherently limited scope. It never purports to explain Russian history or make a broad-reaching definition of the elusive “Russian soul,” only to provide evidence of masochistic tendencies within Russian culture.

Rancour-Laferriere includes personal thoughts on Russian masochism in his conclusion. Mentioning Berdiaev’s writing on Dostoevsky, Rancour-Laferriere confesses he finds it “exhilarating” to observe -- from afar -- Russian hunger for self-destruction and the danger of intoxication with ruin. He follows this admission with one more paragraph:

For me, masochism is part of the very attractiveness and beauty of Russian culture. Where would Tatiana Larina or Dmitrii Karamazov or Anna Karenina be without their masochism? To “cure” them of their masochism would detract considerably from their aesthetic appeal. The beauty of masochism, however, like all beauty, resides in the mind of the beholder.

Finally, I should add that Rancour-Laferriere cites Russian opinion about masochistic tendencies, which I think lends strength to his ideas. I found a recent example of Russian ideas on masochism just last week, in a roundtable discussion from the November 2007 issue of Искусство кино. It contains some very strong statements about Russian attitudes toward Stalin’s Great Terror.

Participant Denis Dragunskii goes so far as to say that some victims of Stalinism may have, subconsciously or mentally, wanted to die. Though he adds that people did not think of themselves as one “megavictim,” they wanted violence for themselves, and he concludes that some people are masochists and that the Russian people (in the singular, as “народ”) can be called a masochist.

Orlando Figes’s “Natasha’s Dance”: Mosh Pit or Mazurka?

Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia attempts, as Russians say, to embrace the unembraceable. Is it possible to reduce Russia’s cultural history and identity to 587 pages? Not really, so Figes reins in his material by embracing only selected topics, including the Decembrists, religion, Eastern influences, and Russians in emigration. He covers literature, fine art, and music, bookending the bulk of his narrative with Peter the Great’s selection of a site for St. Petersburg in 1703 and Igor Stravinskii’s 1962 trip to the USSR.

Natasha’s Dance enjoys enormous popularity, largely because it presupposes no familiarity with Russian history. Figes broadens its appeal by choosing some favorite figures for extended coverage. Some, such as serf singer Praskovia Sheremeteva and exiled Decembrist Sergei Volkonskii, don’t receive much attention among nonspecialists. Other profiles cover more familiar ground: writers Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Nabokov, and composer Dmitrii Shostakovich.

Trying to cover so many people and art forms in so few pages can create writing dilemmas, and Natasha’s Dance ends up a chaotic piece of prose, a mosh pit of Russian culture. The book and I aren’t a close match, tastewise, particularly since I prefer chronological history and felt whipsawed when Figes shifted from century to century to fit his accounts into thematic silos.

The regrettably brief plot summary of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era Master and Margarita, for example, lands not with its contemporaries in the “Russia Through the Soviet Lens” chapter, but toward the end of the “Moscow! Moscow!” chapter because “M&M” is based in Moscow. The next section after “Moscow! Moscow!” is the beginning of a new chapter, “The Peasant Marriage,” which goes back to 1874 to look at народники, or populists.

I also sometimes had the feeling Figes left out crucial material to avoid complicating his theses. The “Descendants of Genghis Khan” chapter, for example, begins with Vasilii Kandinskii’s (Vasily Kandinsky) 1889 anthropological research into paganism in the Komi region. Figes then drops back in time to Mongol horsemen of 1237. He ends the chapter by considering horses in Kandinskii’s paintings as dual shaman and religious symbols and draws in other examples of horses as symbols of Russia’s Asiatic legacy. Fine, but, oddly, Figes doesn’t mention Kandinskii’s depictions of horsemen of the apocalypse, and he ignores much of Kandinskii’s broader significance: his symbolist beliefs about colors and the fluid boundaries between painting and music, expressed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

These and other structural and informational peculiarities are frustrating, as are some of Figes’s grand statements, most of which add only superfluous drama. On page 228, for example: “Like an unsolved riddle, the peasant remained unknown and perhaps unknowable.” There are also rhetorical “burning” questions, like these regarding Russian identity, on page 366, “Were they Europeans or Asians? Were they the subjects of the Tsar or descendants of Genghis Khan?”

This portentous style contrasts sharply with the admirably measured tone of Figes’s The Whisperers, and Natasha’s Dance suffers, perhaps unfairly, because I read The Whisperers first. In The Whisperers Figes writes with restraint and respect as he addresses one aspect of Soviet history, the Stalin-era repression. His neutral tone allows voices from oral history to carry the book, showing the human impact of Joseph Stalin’s excesses against the Soviet population. (My review of The Whisperers.)

On the positive side, the breadth of material in Natasha’s Dance means there should be something new or interesting for most general readers or unmethodical specialists. I found some passages, such as the brief history of early Soviet cinema, entertaining, and I appreciated Figes’s examination of Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a novel about how Decembrism grew out of the War of 1812. Although I thought the summaries of many novels became tedious because they lacked context and/or analysis, I hope they will inspire new readers.

One of the most useful aspects of the book is its end matter: notes, a chronology, and a detailed “Guide to Further Reading.” Figes’s bibliography includes two books that I read in college courses and recommend highly: Nicholas Riasanovsky’s A History of Russia and James Billington’s The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture. I particularly enjoyed the Billington book, which looks at cultural and intellectual history beginning with Kievan Rus’ and ending with a contemplative section on “The Irony of Russian History.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Natasha’s Dance provoked a literary row in Great Britain when Rachel Polonsky published what was evidently a scathing review in the Times Literary Supplement in 2002. I haven’t read it because I couldn’t find it online, but The Complete Review posted an accounting of the matter in 2002. The fuss continued into this week (!) when The Guardian paid damages to Polonsky “after publishing defamatory allegations that her review of a book was motivated by some grudge or professional envy.” (Article.)

Summary: Although I don’t share the enthusiasm of many other readers for Natasha’s Dance, I think it is worth reading as an introduction to selected topics in Russian cultural history. Many figures in Figes’s peripheral vision receive short shrift in a book that, understandably, makes no attempt at balance or comprehensiveness. I can’t blame Figes for wanting to write about what he enjoys – that’s what I do, too – but Natasha’s Dance may disappoint readers looking for chronology or completeness.

Books mentioned in this posting:

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
The Icon and the Axe : An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
A History of Russia: Combined Volume