Snot Libels

After the Kahanate, he no longer had any doubts about what kind of Russia the ZhD would build in place of the old. Willingly or unwillingly, they would end up becoming the oppressors, then reproducing the same old model. Although--it's not the ninth century anymore, after all--maybe they wouldn't try for total annihilation?! But Volokhov was precisely not convinced that they wouldn't try for it. Several times they had already come close to victory--and their decisiveness really frightened him. Actually, if everything could be limited to culture--Volokhov, reluctantly, would have agreed to yield the country; no one was about to ask him anything, but he carried on an unending internal dialogue with an imaginary ZhD opponent. Yes, he said, yes, I would yield it. Take it. In the end, the people, quite possibly, would be better off without it--and more importantly, I'm sure it would recreate it all from nothing, and better. After all, all of our so-called literature, all our Tolstoys and Dostoyevskys, and our diagnosist-agnostic Chekhovs--they're all nothing but the result of the conqueror's sense of guilt towards the conquered, and that is why even their best pages are so wearisome, why it is impossible in Russian prose to breathe in the air after the rain, or to look upon an evening landscape, or to eat a ripe, sun-warmed strawberry, without being tormented by guilt. Let it be. Perhaps the liberated people will write a new poetry on liberated land, the kind that your Pasternak and Mandelstam had barely started writing ... After all, you had almost had your government structure here, you almost renounced the idea of the Kahanate! And what do you start doing first? What our poor Shmelev, whose son was killed by order of your Countrywoman, said in The Sun of the Dead: no, this is no Russian wrath, no Russian method! You could have oppressed, but that would have left the deed half done--there are different kinds of oppression, there is, after all, such a thing as beneficial colonization and acculturation--but you would do something quite different, do not make me, O, do not make me say it out loud! Somehow I just know that oppression would not be enough for you. You will want to rupture the circle, because you have grown tired of always changing places. You will not come to enslave us. You will come so that we would no longer exist at all...

- Dmitrii Bykov, ZhD

Key: ZhD = yids; Kahanate = Israel

Similarly antisemitic rants occupy about a quarter of this massive and noisy novel, which won several awards in Russia in 2006 and made a substantial splash in its (rather inbred) literary world. Unfortunately, even if we do not take this feature of the narrative into consideration, the book is not very good. It is not even halfway decent. Bykov, astonishingly for such a picky critic, is almost entirely deprived of a sense of literary taste: dick jokes, folky stylizations, and hermetically isolated bits of faux-edgy cultural satire crowd all the plot out of the novel, so that we do not really know what happens to the characters even if we somehow, by some miracle, are persuaded to care. In short, ZhD is a monumentally pretentious failure by any reasonable standard.

But what of its antisemitism? (You probably have never heard of the book and don't care about how good it is, but must surely be surprised that a novel which levels anti-Jewish accusations only slightly below the blood-libel level can garner so much praise and attention.) ZhD is centered on the idea that two occupying forces are struggling for Russian territory, and have been for a thousand years, to the detriment of the meek and impotent "native population." The first are the Varangians, who stand in for "siloviki," fascism, authoritarianism, and everything the West associates with Stalinist Russia; the second are the Khazars, i.e. Jews, who stand for liberalism, moral corruption, possessive individualism, and everything the Russians once associated with the decaying capitalist West. (This dichotomy is by now so elderly and tired that it has itself become a subject of satire. Witness Pelevin's latest novel, T: "Some said that Fedor Kuzmich was a simple man of the people, a mouzhik. Others believed that he was once the two-headed Emperor Peter-Paul, but later, after the great spiritual war, he chopped off one head and became a hermit--although which head he had chopped off, the liberal one or the authoritarian one, was kept hidden so as not to tempt the people. The elder taught that Russia was a chunk of ice floating to heaven, on which the yids would light fires and stamp their feet, so the ice would crack and the people would drown while the yids waited alongside in their boats.")

The dubious symmetry involved in this binary conception of Russian history seems to provide Bykov with a get-out-of-jail-free card for the extremism of his views; after all, he can point to an equally caricatured portrayal of Russian authoritarianism and antisemitism for every such instance of his own. Unfortunately for him, the novel does not sustain this strategy. Bykov's fascists are made of the thinnest possible straw, so that not even dyed-in-the-wool Kremlin apologists could possibly recognize themselves in them; the Jews, on the other hand, though much more incoherent, are also more lifelike. Bykov goes so far as to give them the (slightly altered) names of people he doesn't like. (To be fair, one of the fascists has a real-life analogue too.)

The kicker, of course, is that Bykov is himself a Jew, as he once declared on national television. What does this change? As a fairly skeptical-bordering-on-self-hating Jew myself, I can understand the impulse to pick away at the clannishness and whininess of one's own people--but in fact Bykov's work does not do even that particularly well, and it certainly never reaches the bar set by Mandelstam or Woody Allen. Like much literary antisemitism, it is bad literature, not because it is bad politics, but because it is bad satire. (This is why I like Céline despite his career as a Nazi propagandist.) The idea that the Jews are, or have at any historical moment been, the oppressors of Russians--even through such indirect methods as capitalism, revolution, and moral degradation, not to mention outright massacre--is so ludicrous and so pointless, as satire, that it serves no useful literary purpose.

Bykov tries very hard to catch potential objectors on the hook of "political correctness" (even the cover declares the book to be the most politically incorrect novel of the year), and it is hard for a critic that calls him an antisemite not to look like a po-faced try-hard in that light. The moral case against his book is ambiguous enough that it holds little rhetorical value. No; my objection to the garbage that fills this novel is that it is bad writing, and only secondarily that it is ethically suspect. It is hard to say this, but even a book full of screeching yentas and greasy landlords would have been truer to life.

Climate Politics Interlude

Comments on blogs and in the media about the contents of a large number of private emails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, have questioned both the validity of the key findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the integrity of its authors. IPCC WGI condemns the illegal act which led to private emails being posted on the Internet and firmly stands by the findings of the AR4 and by the community of researchers worldwide whose professional standards and careful scientific work over many years have provided the basis for these conclusions.

The key finding of IPCC AR4, “The warming in the climate system is unequivocal [...] “, is based on measurements made by many independent institutions worldwide that demonstrate significant changes on land, in the atmosphere, the ocean and in the ice-covered areas of the Earth. Through further, independent scientific work involving statistical methods and a range of different climate models, these changes have been detected as significant deviations from natural climate variability and have been attributed to the increase of greenhouse gases.

The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide. The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges, many of whom have dedicated their time and effort to develop these findings in teams of Lead Authors within the production of the series of IPCC Assessment Reports during the past 20 years.

- from the IPCC Working Group I Statement on the Stolen East Anglia Climate Emails

Now that the furore over these emails has largely boiled over--taking with it any possibility of a US cap-and-trade bill--it is time to think about what this scandal meant on a deeper level. The emails were, unquestionably, important: they provided climate-change skeptics with apparent evidence of the conspiracy that they had always contended was behind global warming research. The fact that the vast majority of the correspondence appears to be clearly innocent is immaterial. The very circumstances of their release--their "theft" or "leaking," characterizations that have tremendous political implications in our information age--provided the frame that was necessary for their content to be interpreted as sensational.

In other words, the email scandal was first and foremost a problem of media and communication: communication between scientists, between scientists and the public, between the public and influential organs of opinion on both sides. That is why the reaction of the skeptics' opponents has been so disappointing and ineffective--and why I'd like to consider it on this blog. Almost all of the various statements and rebuttals to "Climategate," however qualified their author, have centered on two basic claims: a) stealing the emails was immoral and b) you people don't understand the scientific process; this is how science works, and discussions of data presentation and comments on submitted articles sound arbitrary and conspiratorial because they are in reality comprehensible only by insiders.

Claim a), of course, amounts to little more than spitting into the wind. Practically any scandal that forms as a result of the leakage or exposure of private or classified material gets much of its power and media appeal from the voyeuristic, vaguely transgressive opportunity it provides to look at the private lives of other people or organizations. This private life inevitably proves to be really quite ordinary--but this only makes the need to manufacture the scandal more pressing. It's the hiddenness, not the scandalousness, that attracts media attention; condemning this as immoral is therefore bound to be counterproductive.

But the problems with claim b) are even more serious, because they reveal an unwillingness or inability to understand the roots of climate change skepticism (along with many other phenomena, such as anti-vaccination activism). They are founded in a deep-seated feeling that science is an expertise-driven, inaccessible domain which produces truth only on its own terms and is categorically unwilling to examine or admit to bias and error. Though the skeptics are probably wrong, this view is not too far from the truth. Responses like claim b), of course, only strengthen opposition founded on such beliefs: any appeal that rests on the internal standards of the scientific community is, to the skeptic, an argument against the infallibility of scientific knowledge.

As a aspiring historian of science--I mean this in a self-deprecating kind of way--I would have recommended a diametrically opposite tack. The email leaks do not need to be defended against or indignantly condemned. Rather, they present the general public with a glimpse into how science is really made, by living people with problems that need to be solved, with communication mishaps and professional aspirations. A university department, these emails show, is not so different from any other workplace. The results it produces should be looked at in the same way. If the mythos of the expert community is destroyed, it is that much harder for the rhetorical stance of the skeptics to gain ground. But first, of course, the problem must be seen as a rhetorical one. As long as "anti-skeptics" cling to their obsession with scientific consensus and consensually-generated facts, scandals like Climategate will continue to cripple their political advocacy.

Chaadaev's Revenge

"No, of course, you're a beautiful flower in politics, really a unique one," said Leva, and Sasha winced at the "flowers," though, of course, without taking much offense. "But what do you want? You know, I'm willing to admit that I was on your side for a long time, as long as you were equally distant from the 'left' and the 'right,' from the patriots and from the liberals. It seemed to me that you has come in order to create a new soil to replace the old, which had lost its fertility, which had lost everything."

"Except the graves," said Sasha.

"Yes, yes, except the graves," Leva agreed, and kept going further, chasing his train of thought. "But lately it has seemed to me that you are slipping...well, let's say, into fascism [черносотенство]. No? I'm not talking about Riga, of course--those pigs [полицаи] won't settle down, they needed to be put in their place a long time ago. And of course, I'm not saying that you're going to start 'killing the kikes'--there's no reason, thank God, to expect that from you. But you give off this sense that you can't crawl out of the dogmas of these ancient, worthless ideologies, which have floated over the country for all of Russian history, starting from... well, from Basil III or Ivan the Terrible--and right down to the Bolsheviks--bringing nothing but blood and chaos in their wake."

"So where did this country come from, if.... blood and chaos...?" "Chaos" whistled through Sasha's tooth.

"It is molded from this blood and this chaos, that is clear, Sasha, and history repeats itself every hundred years, it goes in circles, first there is a bloody frost, then a snotty spring thaw, then chaos, then a bloody frost... And so on..."

"Well, let it be, I don't care," Sasha admitted candidly.

"What do you mean, you don't care?" Leva was sincerely astonished. "What are you all for, then? What are you doing? You want another bloody frost? You personally--can you formulate your own idea?"

Sasha shrugged his shoulders.

"You see," Leva kept at it, "I want to see futuristic anthropology in the 'Soiuzniki', and you just keep talking about some boring old 'national future.'"

- Zakhar Prilepin, San'kia (2008)

San'kia is one of the most successful recent examples of that traditional Russian genre, the political novel of ideas. It concerns a young member of a political party called the "Union of Creators," which is based on the real-life National Bolsheviks--who, despite the name, are neither especially communist nor especially fascist. All of the standard elements of the genre are present: terrorism, hesitations about terrorism, long and heated discussions of Russia's historical past and its destiny. Whether the parallels are intentional or not, the book reads like a modern-day Petersburg or The Possessed--and the reader could not be faulted for expecting even the plot structure to be similar.

What makes the novel stand out is that it is, in fact, not similar. In contrast to the relatively coherent protagonists of other political novels, Sasha does not win his verbal battles or even make a passable effort at doing so. Over and over again, the novel pits him against educated opponents who make nuanced arguments and take his ideas seriously; over and over again, their arguments reduce him to incoherence. Even stranger is the fact that Sasha is a sympathetic protagonist, not a satirical strawman or a comic figure of fun. So why does Prilepin force his hero to undergo so much rhetorical humiliation?

It is my sense that the gesture is a deliberate one, and Prilepin's attempt to revisit this old genre is itself an argument about the power of politics in the new Russia. In contrast to almost all of the best-known examples of this kind of book, San'kia ends with an honest-to-god, guns-and-government-buildings attempt at a revolution. Direct action without ideas, within the limits of the novel, leads to something being done; ideas, especially nuanced ones, lead to irrelevance or accommodation. It would still be wrong, however, to see him as an advocate of the former approach: the book's ending gives us a sense of profound uneasiness and nothing even resembling hope.

"A pox on both your houses" is not an uncommon message in this kind of book, but it almost always carries with it the implication that some other approach holds the key to the contradiction: Dostoyevskian Slavophilia, perhaps, or single-mindedly efficient labor for the good à la Turgenev. Prilepin offers nothing of the kind. The efforts of his main character and his various antagonists are presented as both bleakly pointless and inevitable. Prilepin's world--the world of late-'00s Russia, where the intelligentsia has disappeared and the regime is as cruel and stupid as its enemies--is a place of such profound exhaustion that even renewed vigor seems senseless.

Prilepin, strangely enough, is himself a National Bolshevik and an advocate for the same liberal free-press parliamentary-democratic values that seem to have so little effect in his novel. His inability to make a case for his beliefs in his own novel suggests that the exhaustion is deeper than this one book--that if he had tried any other approach, it would have seemed out of step with the times. Ideas are out of favor; events can get no lasting grip; the authorities wear the crown uneasily but remain as stable as ever. What space will there be in any foreseeable future for another of those political novels? What can be written when nothing happens and nothing is thought?

Genre Be Damned

It was already getting dark when Ostasha blew out his piece of splinter in front of the tabernacle, left, and closed the crooked door of the chapel behind him. He sailed past the Rocks of St. George toward the isthmus of the peninsula on which Utkinsk Town stood. At the Utkinsk government harbor there was always a milling crowd of foreign and ignorant people, and so Ostasha was wary of simply leaving the boat ashore and walking to the church. He dragged the boat to an inn, where coachmen were already going to sleep under their carts, made arrangements with the owner and lifted the boat onto the hayloft. He saw the men poke their straw-covered heads out from under their carts, following the fine, light boat with their eyes, and gave the watchman another groat. Then he headed for the church.

The church stood on a former serf homestead. Once upon a time, the church in Utkinsk Town had belonged to the Old Believers, but a group of townsmen, led by the runaway strelets and choir singer Fedka Inozemtsev, took the baptism of fire inside of it. The state authorities built a new temple on the ruined site, in the Nikonian heresy, so the townspeople wouldn't immolate themselves anymore. And the fortress in the Town was built a long time ago, under the Stroganovs, to defend against Bashkirs and Tatars. Today, all that was left of the fortress were two squat and craggy crooked towers, with leaky roofs and collapsed crowns. The towers were linked by a belt of rotten stockade, which had come apart like splayed fingers, leaning over the shallow and muddy ditch of the former moat. Ostasha regarded the ruins with curiosity, comparing them to the factory fortresses, which were built very differently: with sconces and bastions, with fleches and rows of fachines along the tops of the walls, without any towers at all. The town ruins smelled like must, untrodden forests, Ermak in his eagled chainmail fit for a Tsar; the factory fortresses--like fresh iron, switches, and soldiers.

- Aleksei Ivanov, The Gold of the Rebellion, or Down the River of Narrows (2007)

It is difficult to figure out just what one ought to expect from a 700-page historical novel about late-eighteenth-century river drivers in the Urals. The first possibility, probably the worst, is that it will turn out be a Zolaesque exposé of state oppression, evil landlords, and heroically independent mountain folk. The second, not too far distant, is that it will turn out to be some kind of à-clef allegory of something political or other. The third, at least marginally tolerable, is that it will be a Forrest-Gump-style novel-as-theme-park, in which the main character meets all the important people and sees all the important events of his age.

Thankfully, and puzzlingly, Ivanov's The Gold of the Rebellion is none of these things. It features no politics, and state actors of any kind are so marginal to the story that they seem totally powerless. No oppressions are harped upon, no scores settled, no lectures read. The main character never leaves the Urals, and, but for the constant haunting presence of the dead Emelian Pugachev, exists completely out of time. I do not think the year is even mentioned. In short, this historical novel takes its genre so seriously that it ignores all of its treacherous conventions--and leaves even the historian helpless. It is even more impressive that Ivanov's historical and field-specific vocabulary is so vast and precise as to make him seem almost like a refugee from his own book.

The plot meanders along the river Chusovaia, where historically independent Old Believer river-drivers captain huge barges that carry iron from mountain mines to the west. The protagonist is a young man who wants to clear his dead father's name of the charge of stealing the hidden treasury of Emelian Pugachev, who had been executed several years before. A fairly banal premise--but the ensuing story is so tightly wound and yet so broad and organic that it barely resembles a novel at all. When ghosts and ghouls of various setting-appropriate kinds begin to appear in the narrative, it feels like a matter of course--which is astounding, since for a historical novel lapsing into fantasy is usually the greatest sin. (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn't count.)

Yet for all that--and it should be clear that I consider The Gold of the Rebellion a masterpiece--the book is not all that interesting to read. The author has attempted, and achieved, a strange sort of marriage between a rickety off-the-shelf historical-novel narrative structure and a boisterous, living historical world which threatens to extend far beyond the limits of the text. The result is that neither spouse is adequate to the other: the structure is too thin to hold the world together, and the world is too well-developed to make the structure look useful. It is difficult to escape the feeling that the author knew how unsatisfactory the thing was and didn't care: the book could survive on its own terms. And, by and large, he was right. What is interestingness, really, when you have entire chapters devoted to Vogul ritual practices? The book willy-nilly ends up making its own genre.

Isn't This Life?

"What do you need? A handkerchief, maybe. Come on, wouldn't you like to live like this?" Oblomov asked, "Well? Isn't this life?"
"And you would want to live like this your whole life?" Stolz asked.
"Until I'm old and gray, until I die. This is life!"
"No, this isn't life!"
"What do you mean, it isn't? What's missing? Just think, you wouldn't see a single pale, suffering face, no worries, no questions about the Senate, about the stock market, about shares, about reports, about ministerial receptions, about ranks, about per diem raises. And all conversations would be to your taste! You'd never need to move from your apartments--that alone should count for something! How is that not life?"
That isn't life!" Stolz repeated stubbornly.
"Well, what is it, then?"
"It's..." (Stolz reflected for a while, searching for the right word to call it.) "Some kind of... Oblomovism," he said at last.
"O-blo-movism," said Iliia Iliich slowly, surprised by this strange word and pronouncing it syllable by syllable. "Ob-lo-mov-ism!" He regarded Stolz strangely and closely. "What is the ideal of life for you, then? What is not Oblomovism?" he said shyly, without conviction. "Isn't everyone trying to achieve the same thing? Spare me!" he added more energetically, "Isn't the goal of all your running around, your passions, wars, trade, and politics the cultivation of serenity, the striving for that ideal lost paradise?"
"Even your utopia is Oblomovist," Stolz objected.
- Goncharov, Oblomov

I've spent the last week or two unintentionally avoiding writing, stuffing myself full of shashlik and beer, and decomposing in the Moscow heat. It has been a good time to think about Oblomov and Oblomovism. After all, the trick to Oblomovism is not that one has to have precisely the same kinds of food, sleep, and social relationships as he did--that would make the project impossible--but rather that anything one does should be oriented toward the achievement of complete satiety and stasis. For whatever reason, the Oblomovist Imperative takes hold of me on a pretty regular basis, so I can see in advance just what kind of stasis it's going to be.

Oblomov, on the face of it, is unkind to the Oblomovist. We are told repeatedly how the protagonist is wasting his life, we see his relationships and ambitions fall apart, we see him taken advantage of by unscrupulous associates. It seems almost as if every time he begins to enjoy life, and says as much to somebody else, the narrative must hasten to cut him off from pleasure and fulfillment. Oblomov's friend, the industrious Stolz, receives no comparable treatment. Goncharov seems to derive almost physical satisfaction from describing just how good Stolz is at everything--and how bad Oblomov is at the same things.

It is not hard to see the other possibility, that the seeming preeminence of Stolz is a kind of Cervantesian wink designed to conceal the author's true opinions. Everything works out well for Oblomov. He achieves stasis and satiety (although he, of course, eventually dies from it.) Oblomov's meals are mouthwatering, despite their lack of intellectually-redeeming value. What's more, all the running around, career-making, service-pursuing, and networking that everyone else in the novel does is painted consistently as unpleasant and annoying.

The lesson seems to be that if you're not as good at life as Stolz is, then you might as well be a good Oblomov. He may be useless, but at least he has a kind and generous soul, which cannot be said for most of the characters in the novel. That's a pretty predictable message, but it gets Goncharov into trouble--for his novel is not so much intended as a morality tale (at least if we take the author at his word) as a rallying cry for Russians to shed the protective shelter of Oblomovism and become capable men like Stolz. Paradoxically, then, the most obvious against-the-grain reading of the novel ends up endorsing a more sentimental and uncritical position than the narrator's explicit statements in the text.

Through my beer and shashlik-befuddled eyes, I can arrive at only one compelling interpretation of the novel: that Oblomov's death was a good thing, because Oblomovism is a science of life whose natural telos is death. A successful Oblomovist would erase the feeling of change and time (which is founded, on the novel's terms, upon a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the present) completely, thus shortening the space between death and the present to a pinpoint. The novel's shortest section comes between Oblomov's complete loss of dissatisfaction and his death--and yet the time it covers seems to be longer than any other. The implication is a bleak one. Few can aspire to be Stolzes, but everyone can dream of being an Oblomov; what then?