The Russian writer and editor, Mikhail Morgulis, has posed a number of questions concerning the essence of Russian literature. I am eager to hear your opinions?
1. Russian literature has much that is pure, but life has so much that is putrid. Why? Is the same for other nations?
2. The Nobel Prize winner, Iosif Brodsky once said that all “exalted” poetery, “high” literature is spiritual. But it seems to me , that it is not always the case. There are great works, imbued with teh spirit of the Anti-Christ.
What do you think?
3. Some literature is not bad. But it is a fake. Just as some people are not genuine, they are frauds. For we live in a world of imitations, frauds. Just as there are genuine people and fakes. How does one in this life attempt to separate the genuine from the fraudulent? Even when there are real and capable people, and their literature is a fraud. People have learned to imitate almost everything: love, friendship, and yes, literature, too. And the majority of those in the world make use on a daily basis not of the real thing, but of fake imitations, yet don’t know it. Have you had any personal experience with how to distinguish the real from the imitation? Depending on our ability to distinguish between them we will either remain human beings or turn into robots.
What would you tell Mikhail?
Tonight at language table Svetlana told a story that I think is relevent to this discussion. She has a friend who married a 40 year old man when she was 20. Now, 20 years later, her freind has fallen in love with a young handsome man and is in the process of leaving her husband and children to be with him Sound familiar? Anna Karenina
Sveta’s point: (a poor translation from her Russian explanation):
“we think that literature is here *hand motion to the right* and life is here *hand motion to the left* but actually (and this is where my russian filed me) …..*hands link together*”
That doesn’t seem that spiritual to me.
1. I wouldn’t use the terms “pure” and “putrid.” I would instead say that Russian literature so often evokes that which is high and spiritual, while Russian life has so often been made up of suffering, misery, violence, greed, and death. But who’s to say these ideas are mutually exclusive? Where violence and greed and death exist, suffering develops. So now, what we’re left with is a false dichotomy between suffering and spirituality. Suffering, in fact, evokes spirituality! Christ came for the poor, the lonely, the suffering. Suffering is something that we as Americans don’t like to talk about. We call it “depression,” we prescribe drugs, we go to psychologists; but we don’t dive into the misery that is left when violence or death strike. When we loose something, we seek ways to fill that void. But Russian literature is built on the premise that, in a void, you are left with nothing but the spiritual. It is only in that void that one can find God. The pure is built out of the putrid. How else can we look at Dostoevsky?
Hyper-modernist standards of “happiness” try to force us into believing that we all need a high GDP per capita, a long life-expectancy, and a second property in order to achieve the sublime. But all these things, we must understand, are false gods. They pretend to save us from the suffering that goes on everywhere. But the only way to explain a feeling so universal as suffering is by realizing that neither books, nor cars, nor sidewalks, nor paid vacation, nor credit can ever evoke the pure or the sublime. It is only in the absence of these earthly diversions, and in the presence of the putrid that we can see the face of the sublime. God, the pure, the sublime, Infinity, whatever you’d like to call it, can only be comprehended by those who suffer and surrender themselves to that abyss.
In short, without the rot, Russian literature may never have reached the heights it did. There’s no way that Peter the Great’s vision of a modern, rich, European Russia would have given us Dostoevsky. It would have just given us hundreds of other Jane Austens.
2. Stories endowed with the element of the Anti-Christ still seem spiritual to me, because they evoke the putrid. See above for the continuation of this train of thought. But I think Brodsky may have been overstating himself. Certainly, most great literature is focused on the spiritual, but it may be a different kind of spirituality. Moby Dick is certainly not driven by spirituality in a religious sense, but that damn whale represents everything that is unachievable, and the ship’s journey to catch it, through all sorts of trials, represents our futile but irresistible journeys to achieve the unachievable. I would call that spiritual.
3. This is a tough question, because I don’t like my answer. It’s upsetting me. I haven’t been able to find something intrinsically genuine, ever. Everything, everywhere, everyone, most of all me to myself, puts on airs and covers themselves in layers of feelings and tastes and quirks. Rarely, you’ll be in the middle of a real heady conversation and realize “there’s something real here!” And those moments are what we put up with the rest of this “stuff” for.
I think that if someone knew what it is that makes these two differentiable, we’d have every answer we ever needed. Unfortunately, when I say “everything,” I mean really almost everything, including language. In language, seemingly glaring contradictions fly by unnoticed, like absence becoming presence, for example. How does “lack of stature” make any sense? Yet, it’s on the back of my drivers’ license right now. Or in politics. And business. Economics, which is supposed to get us to perfect efficiency and supply, tells us things like “assuming perfect competition,” as if it were a meaningless aside! Well no, actually, we can never have perfect competition, so what exactly does any of this mean? I feel like I would now direct Mr. Morgulis to my blog posting on “Princess Mary” and “The Fatalist,” if he wanted to read a long footnote.
# 3…
If Mikhail wants to feel really dejected, he should turn to Socrates, who explains in Plato’s Republic that everything in our world is imitation. The only genuine Chair is the idea of a chair. Any chair we actually have, like the one you are sitting in, is an imitation of Chair. A picture of a chair is an imitation of an imitation.
Fake literature must be an imitation of real literature, which is an imitation of the idea of literature, but literature broken down further is ideas put into words. So fake literature is 4 times removed from the essence of ideas. If you sparknotes literature, you are 5 times removed.
At a certain point I know I wouldn’t enjoy life if I got carried away deciphering frauds – life probably wouldn’t work without them. I’m not going to refuse conversation just because it isn’t completely “real,” as Gabriel mentioned. Overly analyzing life to distinguish imitation in thoughts may be important for some, but these people will be empty and cold when they realize nothing is left. As long as I can perceive the real love in my life, and use literature as a ladder to higher thought, I’m golden.
What exactly is the Antichrist?
Well, I looked it up:
Scripture teaches Antichrist to be a political, religious, individual, yet to come in the future (as of this writing), who is opposed to God and God’s Christ and God’s church. Although the only places in Scripture the name Antichrist is used are I and II John (I John 2:18,22,4:3, II John 7), the Bible is replete with instruction regarding the reality we call Antichrist. The key passages are Daniel 7, 8, 11; Matthew 24; II Thessalonians 2; and Revelation 13, 17 and 18 — where Antichrist is referred to as a beast, a little horn, a false Christ, that wicked one, and the man of sin.
http://www.prca.org/pamphlets/pamphlet_3.html
This definition of the Antichrist, for me, indicates that we cannot separate the spiritual from the Antichrist. The Antichrist in it of itself is a spiritual concept and if it is present we are forced to challenge our spirituality and think about why the Antichrist is present. I would agree that higher literature does evoke emotions about spirituality and that is why we enjoy it. It appeals to us on a very basic level so that we can reaffirm our personal beliefs.
The notion of the Antichrist as “a man of sin” makes him much more human than the real Christ. Humans are not perfect and no Russian literature or any literature for that matter (that I have read) claims otherwise. If all “higher” literature were about Christ-like figures, I do not think it would have the same effect on the reader. It would act more as a spiritual manifesto or a declaration of how to act as opposed to a reflection of the society.
I agree with the earlier posters that the presence of the spirit of the anti-Christ is good evidence of the “spirituality” of a work of literature; this fact, of course, does not imply spiritual value, but it does show that a work is engaged with the spiritual plane of existence. The opposite of the sacred (to quote Emile Durkheim) is not evil; it is the profane, things of neutral spiritual value.
But then, this may be unfair quibbling over words, as perhaps Brodsky did had in mind, as Mikhail evidently does, a concept like ‘holy.’ I’m not sure, however, that a system of literature could honestly and earnestly apply itself to the holy without coming into contact with the entire realm of the sacred (or spiritual); it would lapse into hagiography, or platitude, or something less than art. It would not even necessarily be a positive development for the writers or readers spiritually or morally.
It is of course a frightening prospect that the Antichrist, or Satan, or any agent of the truest evil should wholly take over literature or life, and there is no reason to laugh at the prospect. But denying the breadth of the spiritual universe seems a poor price to pay for safety from such a danger (which, from any theology acknowledging the goodness and omnipotence of God, seems remote), and when literature lost its honesty it would no longer be worthy of the name.
In a lecture on the psychology of religion, William James describes a painting by Guido Reni of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. He writes: “The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there– that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.”
“Oh God of Abraham, of Isaak and of Jacob,
On your scale of Good and Evil,
Put a plate of warm food.”
This phrase from poet Ilya Kaminsky’s “Musica Humana” came to mind when I thought over the first two questions. Here, Nadezhda Mandelstam is praying for her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, as the evade capture from the authorities, and I think it illustrates the idea throughout Russian Literature that good and evil are irrelevant concepts in life.
You don’t have to study Russia for very long to see what kind of misery and hardship these people have endured, yet in literature evil itself is rarely a character, but more the scenery in which we watch characters live and endure. This is because Russians have a different moral compass than the west does: putrid and pure, or good and evil, do not exist as entities: in the Master and Margarita, the devil is not an evil man, but exists as a necessity to balance the good and evil in life.
Russian literature shows us this over and over again, that good and evil are omnipresent not because of some forces beyond human comprehension but born entirely through human decisions and interactions with each other, because in Christianity people are sinners before god and are therefore predisposed towards these vices. Russian Orthodoxy takes it to the extent that suffering from these evils is a proof of endurance and repentance and will ultimately be forgiven. Thus, Russian Literature is not about trying to cast off the putrid or the evil, because there is nothing that can ever be done to take it away from humanity. Rather, in order to bear this kind of life, Russian Literature offers the solution that love is the ultimate refuge, because it is something that exists on the deeply personal level, hidden from the outside world landscaped by evil, someplace where two can endure together.
Yuri Zhivago would not have survived without Lara, nor Raskolnikov without Sonia, and Margarita even takes “light” over salvation for the Master. Love, the ultimate purity, is needed for balance, and therefore exists eternally with the putrid and the evil. For them and for us, there is no time to be wasted on things that can never change, for who isn’t good and who isn’t evil? Thus, as Nadezhda prays, all that is really needed to get through life is a plate of warm food, and someone to wish it for you.
http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/ilya_kaminsky/musica_humana_live.shtml
#1: Due to Russia’s often troubled history, it is only natural that its literature should contain so much that is pure. It makes sense that when writers face putrid, harsh conditions in life, their works are designed to take readers to an entirely different place. The point of some Russian literature, then, is to present a pure, idealized view of life that so many strive for but probably very few achieve. Literature serves as an escape for many, such that they can temporarily forget their hardships. Most importantly, this phenomenon is present not just in Russian literature but in literature from all time periods from around the world.
We see these pure elements in many of the works we have already studied. Despite Pechorin’s faults in “A Hero of Our Time,” he is clearly an idealized, romanticized character. He is completely free, living the great military life that so many probably yearned for. His character serves as an escape: readers can begin to identify with Pechorin and journey away from their own imperfect lifestyles. Furthermore, in many of Pushkin’s short stories, tales of romance and unexpected twists abound. Not many characters in these stories live a “pure” lifestyle (consider Liza’s antics in “The Amateur Peasant Girl). However, tales of rich people on estates and their romances are sure to appeal to the everyday Russian reader; many of Pushkin’s stories have an unrealistic, fairy-tale like quality to them. Even today in the United States, we often like stories of romance or fantastical stories that transport us from our everyday struggles. These stories, in their purity, contrast greatly from our everyday lives. Thus, Russian literature in the nineteenth century served a similar purpose.
#3
I agree that there is a lot in this world that could be seen as fake but I think that what is fake or genuine is largely based on a person’s perception of that thing. For example, some might see a particular book as being completely fake while another might see it as a great, genuine work. The same can be applied to people. Therefore, what will be seen as genuine or fake by one person is dependent on their past and present experiences. Nothing will be interpreted in the same way by two different people, interpretations are completely subjective and this is part of what makes literature so fascinating so I do not feel that any work of literature can be called completely false. People may find it fake and that can be their opinion but they cannot call it a fake work.
On the subject of “fake” or “imitation” literature…
can it not be said that much of our lives are imitations? As Joyce employed stream of consciousness in his writing, does that make Virginia Woolf a fake because it was not her own? I believe to have this concept of “fake” or putting on something that does not belong to one you have to believe in an ownership of things that are intangible. Joyce doesn’t own his writing style. A dancer doesn’t own all of her movements. Painter’s don’t own the movement of their brushes, and certainly NO ONE owns words. How can literature be faked? I propose that there is no fake literature, for even if one were to attempt to establish that one book was fake, it would then be a book about the fake or about imitation and therefore be something whole and genuine. Much of life is “fake”- people fake emotion, interest, their background… all of it is a part of life. Because literature is a reflection of our lives to me it seems natural that one would find a little bit of imitation within it. How could a writer write only what he knows? We would certainly have a much smaller concept of philosophy, science fiction would not exist at all, historical fiction would be rather dull and sparse, and novels wouldn’t delve into characters in the same way.
Is an imitation of Van Gogh less pleasant to look at? Is a really great cover band not worth listening to on principle? Is Shakespeare cheapened by his borrowed plots and that we don’t know if he wrote everything that exists under his name?
I say no.
I really would like to help you in answering these questions, and although I have visited this post several times and spent a lot of my time pondering these questions (No joke: #3 actually kept me up at night thinking), I’m not sure I have anything to offer. Back as a young lad in Hebrew school, I was taught that a wise man doesn’t talk, but only listens in the presence of a wiser man. I do not have enough experience in life, nor in Russian literature to give you meaningful answers to these questions, and it would be foolish of me to think otherwise. I’m sorry for my uselessness.
Russian literature has much that is pure… hmmm. I suppose that is true. Pure seems kind of impressionistic to me — I’ve always thought Russian literature to be very intricate and psychologically realistic, yet always appealing to a certain “Russian” state of mind that I don’t think reading anything we’ve read I’ve been able to forget about as I read. My professor for Modern British Novel has quoted Tolstoy on several separate occasions, each time the same quote, which went something like “any novel that ends with a wedding is just stupid.” To me, that idea encapsulates what a Russian is, or at least distinguishes it in my mind from a British novel. I find there always to be this sense of the importance of glory and honor in Russian literature, and that sense of glory translates to gloriOUS development of characters, thought processes, relationship tensions… you know what i mean… right? These are good questions. We talk in class about the idea of the American novel and the American hero and it’s clear that those values are not found in Russian lit as much. Today the example in class about the woman and who’s going to use the elevator? — that’s what Russian literature has, that wonky je ne sais quoi logic that all Russians seem to be operating under… at least that’s how it looks to a русский n00b such as myself. The details the authors choose, the minutia of daily life that are suddenly rushed to the surface out of nowhere in some paragraph, the way we can visualize the progression of the Russian author in a way that brings us tantalizingly close to his own writing experience through the tone of his narration before being returned to a scene in some provincial town, always the town of N. The Russians are just somewhere else, and nowhere is it better exemplified than in their literature.
I really don’t have the proverbial grapes to enter a discussion on the Antichrist, but as for fakeness and the like: I mean, monkey see monkey do is a very real thing. And money makes the world go round, that too. You gotta capitalize on a successful model. There’s no patent on genuine sentiment, nor is there one on a good looking piece of fiction. But who cares if it’s fake? I already live my life with the assumption that human beings will without a doubt one day turn into robots. How do you distinguish if something is a fraud or the real deal? Get to know it better. Until then resist the temptation to question the authenticity of every little thing, because that would make for much avoidable grief and subsequent cynicism.
#2
I’m not sure if this is what Brodsky intended when he said that all high literature is spiritual, but, in my mind at least, spirituality can go beyond Christianity. No matter what the topic, I think that all great literature moves something inside of you, makes you reexamine yourself, and helps you to grow as a person. Is this not also Christianity’s goal? The truths expressed in Christianity and in great literature are very different, but I think that they are equally important to hear. The feeling of awe and wonder I have when reading a perfect sentence provides just as much amazement as I would gain from religion.
#1 I think Russian has as much putrid as the pure. It’s all about how you look at things. I don’t look at content in terms of nationality, but in respect to historical and personal contexts. Defining books by the nation they are most associated with only leads to blanket statements that prove to be false.
#2This question is more about spirituality than literature itself. Spirituality regards anything relating to, or affecting the human spirit. Being that the human spirit itself is abstract, the way in which literature regards it cannot be defined by subject matter such as religion or the Anti- Christ. That aside, I do not think that all exalted poetry is spiritual. Take for example, The Sick Rose, by William Blake or, In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound, and my favorite example:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
— William Carlos Williams
#3 I don’t think this prompt is accurate at all. What is “fake” and what is “real” is all relative. We will never actually know what is real because we ourselves are buffered from reality. Life itself is disconnected by language. The closest we can get to what we need, love, or feel is the word we use to describe it. Distinguishing the real then dwindles down to truth (which is yet again another relative term). If a person is “fake” and using an “imitation” of something, there is no way of fully supporting the argument that this is so. The only thing we have to build on is literary criticism and public opinion. These are what best guide us to see the bad and the good in art and yet are often contradictory in their assertions.