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Thread: Russian book club

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    Quote Originally Posted by evince View Post
    he was truly a beautiful human being

    I was him for a short while

    It helped from me intellectually

    It was actually more intense then just reading it

    acting can be like that if you immerse your self truly
    My father once interviewed Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, and Solzhenitsyn once asked to meet with my cousin’s husband. The impression I got from these family stories is that Solzhenitsyn was a complicated individual – a person of fierce integrity, a philosopher of the highest order, but a person who defies all attempts to place him into a box, ideology, or persuasion. Ruthlessly anti-communist, he nonetheless found capitalism almost equally morally depraved and spiritually bankrupt. Solzhenitsyn in some ways is almost a reactionary, a Russian mystic who pines for ideal of Eastern Orthodoxy, spiritual purity, and mysticism. Westerners who thought they could leverage Solzhenitsyn as a pawn, a pro-western mouth piece in their ideological war with the Kremlin were sorely disappointed. Solzehnitsyn is a traditional Russian nationalist, ethical philosopher, and Eastern Orthodox spiritualist in a way that garden-variety westerners can never understand. Your brush with A Day in the Life, gave you insights into the human condition most Americans do not have, in my opinion.

    In this interview, Solzhenitsyn provides the opinion that Capitalism and selfishness – aided and abetted by Protestantism, ultimately leads to spiritual and moral degradation....an interesting take on things>>>

    An Interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

    Pearce: A British journalist recently stated that you believe that Russia has overthrown the evils of communism only to replace them with the evils of capitalism, is that a fair statement of your position and, if so, what do you feel are the worst evils of capitalism?

    Solzhenitsyn: Communist propaganda would sometimes include statements such as "we include almost all the commandments of the Gospel in our ideology". The difference is that the Gospel asks all this to be achieved through love, through self-limitation, but socialism only uses coercion. This is one point. Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive.

    Pearce: Does the fact that modernity makes a virtue out of selfishness constitute one of the keys to its (capitalism’s) enduring success?

    Solzhenitsyn: That's very correct. It does make a virtue out of selfishness and Protestantism made a major contribution to this.

    Pearce: Why Protestantism?

    Solzhenitsyn: Of course, one cannot declare that only my faith is correct and all other faiths are not. Of course God is endlessly multi-dimensional so every religion that exists on earth represents some face, some side of God. One must not have any negative attitude to any religion but nonetheless the depth of understanding God and the depth of applying God's commandments is different in different religions. In this sense we have to admit that Protestantism has brought everything down only to faith.

    Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.



    https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/an-interview-with-alexander-solzhenitsyn.html

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    Circling back to finish reading Gogol’s “Dead Souls”. Thank you, socialist public library!

    Apparently, Gogol has become part of the asymmetric political and national rivalry between Russia and Ukraine. Weaponized literature. The cultural and historical milieu that was transmitted to me by family narrative was of a greater East Slavic federation of Great Russians, White Russians, and Little Russians. Whatever differences there were supposedly outweighed by East Slavic solidarity. That narrative may have been a manifestation of Russian conceit, because the reality of fierce nationalism and grievance is obviously real and palpable.

    - Russia and Ukraine renew rivalry over Nikolai Gogol -
    On 200th anniversary of literary giant Nikolai Gogol's birth, both countries lay claim to writer

    First, it was politics, then it was gas. Now the protracted antagonism between Russia and Ukraine is taking on a literary tinge, as the bickering neighbours vie for the legacy of Nikolai Gogol on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

    Gogol is best known for scathing satirical masterpieces about Russian society such as Dead Souls and The Nose, but he also wrote intimately about his experience of Ukrainian customs in works such as Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka.

    The writer was born and spent his youth in rural Ukraine - then part of the tsarist Russian empire - in the early 19th century, but wrote in Russian, lived some of his life in St Petersburg and was buried in Moscow. His nationality is the subject of intense public debate as the bicentenary approaches, with both states funding events to mark the occasion.

    Aleksey Vertinsky, an actor at Kiev's academic youth theatre, told the Ukrainian press he was disgusted at Russian attempts to "adopt" Gogol. "They can get lost," he said. "If I announce this morning that I'm a blue trolleybus, does it mean I should drive off to the depot?" he added, in an absurdist afterthought that might have appealed to the writer himself.

    But many experts in Moscow argue Gogol is "100% Russian". "A part of the political elite in Kiev wants to claim Gogol as their own so they can enter civilised Europe with at least one great Ukrainian writer," said Igor Zolotussky, a Russian authority on Gogol.

    "But there can be no such discussion because there is no such thing as a separate Ukrainian national identity. Gogol wrote and thought in Russian. He was a great Russian writer, full stop."

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...russia-ukraine

  3. The Following User Says Thank You to Cypress For This Post:

    dukkha (09-12-2019)

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    Dostoyevsky's Notes From the Underground >>

    My brief summary and take-aways :

    Would you cast yourself out of paradise and into a state of abject misery in order to be free?

    Would you work against your own economic and social best interest in order to cling to the elixir of free will?
    Last edited by Cypress; 09-21-2019 at 03:52 PM.

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    Here is what I did not know about Vladimir Mayakovsky, who at one time I thought was a stooge for the Bolsheviks.

    He started out as a starry-eyed dreamer, confident that the Soviet system was ushering in an era of a Communist utopia.

    By the late 1920s, he became obviously disgusted with the scale of lying and sycophancy in the regime. Rather than the new communist utopia he had naively imagined, he had lived to see a totalitarian Soviet communist system that would lead to the imprisonment of the human spirit. And his plays of the time reflected that sentiment and were therefore dangerous to even perform in a public theater.

    The Bad Boy of Russian Poetry

    When Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930, the news sent shock waves through the Soviet Union. Ilya Ehrenburg, who knew of Mayakovsky’s notorious gambling habit, thought he might have been playing Russian roulette with his beloved Mauser pistol and lost his bet. But Mayakovsky’s suicide note, written two days before his death, suggested otherwise. Asking his mother and sisters to forgive him and sardonically asking for there to be no gossip (“the deceased hated gossip”).

    At the time of his death he was simultaneously involved with three different women: his longtime mistress, Lili Brik, with whom he had spent most of his adult life in a bohemian ménage à trois (together with her husband, Osip Brik), but who was just then involved with a movie director; Tatyana Yakovleva, a striking young White Russian whom Mayakovsky had met in Paris and asked to marry him, but who had just married a Frenchman instead; and Veronika Polonskaya, a sultry young stage actress, also married, to whom he had also proposed marriage. Emotionally he was a wreck, and his death might have been precipitated by his relations with any one of his paramours.

    But that wasn’t the only mystery. In the tightly controlled Soviet Union, suicide was seen as a crime and an act of defiance, an assertion of personal freedom that contradicted the image of the state as a workers’ paradise.

    Why would someone as famous and popular as Mayakovsky have killed himself, even under provocation? What most of his readers didn’t know was that for the first time since the October Revolution, Mayakovsky was seriously disaffected. Stalin had started to purge his regime of “Trotskyists” and other perceived enemies, and two recent satirical plays of Mayakovsky, The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, had aroused official anger with their frank criticisms of government leaders and corrupt bureaucrats. His enemies whispered that he, too, was a secret Trotskyist and an elitist, out of touch with his proletarian base.

    He was already being shadowed by the OGPU (the secret police), and its agents swarmed through his apartment the moment his death became known. They had long since penetrated Mayakovsky’s inner circle. Osip Brik had been an agent of the secret police in the early 1920s and he and Lili still maintained close contact with them; and the official death notice and the official death notice was signed by no fewer than three secret agents, in addition to a couple of Mayakovsky’s literary allies.

    <continued>
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...ussian-poetry/

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    Put this on my library reading list - My grandmother was from a Don Cossack family, and I cannot believe I have waited this long to read Sholokhov.

    "And Quiet Flows the Don"
    By Mikhail Sholokhov


    "An extraordinary Russian masterpiece, And Quiet Flows the Don follows the turbulent fortunes of the Cossack people through peace, war and revolution - among them the proud and rebellious Gregor Melekhov, who struggles to be with the woman he loves as his country is torn apart. Borne of Mikhail Sholokhov's own early life in the lands of the Cossacks by the river Don, it is a searing portrait of a nation swept up in conflict, with all the tragic choices it brings." — Penguin Books synopsis

    Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early 20th century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives readers a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction. In his enormous epic of Cossack life during the Revolution…Mikhail Sholokhov has achieved even greater power, sustained narrative gift and stirring human truthfulness.” —New York Times

    “In addition to its panoramic grandeur, the wealth of its characters and its historic realism, Sholokhov’s book is memorable for its portrayal of the primitive and already almost legendary life of the Don Cossacks.”
    —Malcolm Cowley, New Republic

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    This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.

    Nervous People and Other Satires
    by Mikhail Zoshchenko


    Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts.

    Zoshchenko's sharp and original satire offers a marvelous window on Russian life in the 20s and 30s.


    source credit - GoodReads summary

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    Quote Originally Posted by Cypress View Post
    This is one I just started. I am amazed Zoshchenko managed to get away with writing satire and social criticism of life during the Stalinist regime. His method apparently was to camouflage his satire and criticism within cleverly constructed prose and metaphor. That took no small amount of courage, because getting on the wrong side of Stalin could earn one a one-way ticket to the Gulag.
    This clever little satire by Zoshchenko caught my eye. In a few short sentences, he eviscerates the inefficiency of the Soviet economic system and how it manifested as comic discord in people's everyday lives. It is hard to believe he got things like this past the censors in Stalin's Soviet Russia, but I suppose his satire was camouflaged and two degrees removed from him personally, enough to offer him plausible deniability.

    A Clever Little Trick, by Mikhail Zoshchenko

    I don't know how it is in Moscow, but here in Leningrad they sell only powerful electric light bulbs. Something like one hundred and fifty, two hundred, or four hundred candle power.

    And as for consumers who dream of obtaining a light bulb of ten or maybe fifteen candle power, theirs prove to be truly senseless dreams. Such light bulbs are not for sale.

    Well, I thought, they send these small bulbs to the provinces for use in the villages. And that calmed me down.

    Now my old bulbs had burned out. I got three new ones of four hundred candle power each and basked in this bright light. Of course, it's annoying. It's very bright. The main thing is, I'm not a draftsman. It's so ridiculously bright in the hall and the bathroom that you just start to feel bad. But I stood it.

    But this month the meter reader came. Started to check how much electricity I had burned up.

    "Oho!" he says. "Your bill gets higher every month. What are you doing, frying potatoes in the electricity?"

    I say, "No, I've got powerful bulbs. And I just don't know what to do. It's a hopeless situation."

    Well, I got to talking with the meter reader. A lot of chit-chat. He had a glass of tea with me. Ate a roll. And then he says, "You know why there aren't any small bulbs? Shall I tell you?"

    I say, "Tell me, but it'll hardly make me feel any better."

    He says, "There's a big trick being played with the small bulbs. The whole thing has to do with the financial-industrial plan."

    "I'm afraid I don't quite get you," I said.

    He says, "The factory had to fulfill its plan. Well, so they went and fulfilled it."

    "No," I say, "Ever since so much light has been beating down on me in this apartment, my bean doesn't work so well. I don't understand you."

    "What is there," he says, "to understand? Well let's suppose that according to the plan they had to fulfill a production quota of a million candle power. Well, now just imagine-- are they going to start producing this million in small bulbs? They wouldn't make it in two years, the devils. So they decided to get there with big bulbs. Whether you make small bulbs or big ones, the work is the same. But you don't need nearly so many. And so, those devils have settled on big bulbs. They're turning them out like pancakes."

    I said, "But that's a filthy trick! And also it's no joy to us that the government is wasting a lot of valuable electric power. Take me-- I have four hundred candle power in the toilet. I really feel guilty about going in there."

    He said, "Be grateful that they didn't settle on the biggest bulbs of all. Next year they'll probably start turning out bulbs with a thousand candle power."

    At this point I suddenly got mad.

    "Instead of shooting off your mouth to me," I said, "you should tell me where I can get some small bulbs."

    He said, "Even though I work for the electric service, I haven't laid eyes on any small bulbs for two years now."

    With these words he said good-bye and departed. And I turned off the lights in the room, lay down on the bed, and in the darkness started thinking about what tricks people resort to in order to balance their office accounts.

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    Default Putin is "an aspiring thug" who runs a mafia state

    Bad-mouthing and maligning of Russia and Russians overlooks the fact that there are Russians who are willing to risk their jobs, even risk going to prison, rather than submit to Vladimir Putin.

    That kind of courage is completely lacking in the American Republican Party, whom meekly submitted to Putin without firing a shot.

    Masha Gessen is a Russian-American author, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin and the President of the United States, Donald Trump.

    In an extensive October 2008 profile of Vladimir Putin for Vanity Fair, Gessen reported that the young Putin had been "an aspiring thug" and that "the backward evolution of Russia began" within days of his inauguration in 2000.

    Gessen was dismissed from her position as the chief editor of Russia's oldest magazine, Vokrug sveta, a popular-science journal, in September 2012 after she refused to send a reporter to cover a Russian Geographical Society event about nature conservation featuring President Putin because she considered it political exploitation of environmental concerns.


    Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen on Putin and Trump

    PBS interview with Masha Green: “Putin runs a mafia state. There’s no such thing in Russia as a national interest that is distinct from Putin’s personal accrual of power and money. It’s different from any kind of dictatorship or tyranny. A mafia state is a distinct phenomenon. And we have Trump, who I think would have a mafia state if he could get away with it, and that’s certainly what he has been trying to build.”


    Sources
    wikipedia
    http://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and...tin-and-trump/

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    homage to kin sent to the Vorkuta camps.

    "Each of our lives is a Shakespearean drama raised to the thousandth degree. Mute separations, mute black, bloody events in every family. Invisible mourning worn by mothers and wives. Now the arrested are returning, and two Russias stare each other in the eyes: the ones that put them in prison and the ones who were put in prison. A new epoch has begun. You and I will wait for it together."

    - Anna Akhmatova, 1956

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    "I am of course confident that I will fulfill my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    Solzhenitsyn Says West Is Failing as Model for World
    "Untouched by the breath of God, unrestricted by human conscience, both capitalism and socialism are repulsive." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    "Should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn




    Exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn yesterday denounced western society, which he said has taken on a terrible similarity to the state-controlled societies of the communist world in its suffocation of spiritual life.

    In a bleak and powerful speech at Harvard University's commencement, Solzhenitsyn said "our spiritual life" has been lost in both the West and the East, and he called for a "spiritual upsurge."

    The Nobel Prize laureate came to Harvard from his seclusion in Vermont to deliver his first major speech in three years.

    He titled his speech "A World Split Apart," but it could as well have been called "The Decline of the West."

    After prefacing his address by saying "Truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter . . . but I want to stress that [my speech] comes not from an adversary, but from a friend," Solzhenitysn launched a long, scathing attack on western society as morally bankrupt.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archi...-606631a60e35/

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    When a poet confronted Russia with the Holocaust

    With ‘Babi Yar,’ Russia’s beloved dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko forced his countrymen to acknowledge their roles in the mass genocide of their Jewish neighbors

    Very rarely, a poem changes the way a nation remembers its history. Russian dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” was one such poem.

    Penned in 1961, “Babi Yar” refers to the ravine in Kiev, Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and collaborators during two unprecedented days of slaughter in World War II. Until Yevtushenko’s poem denounced Soviet authorities for covering up the Holocaust and stoking new forms of anti-Semitism, the genocide had been almost totally repressed in the region where it began.

    Remembered for criticizing the Soviet system in hundreds of poems, he wrote “Babi Yar” after visiting the infamous ravine more than half a century ago. On the site where the largest massacre of the Holocaust took place, the poet noticed that not one memorial had been erected.
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/when-a...the-holocaust/
    Babi Yar -- Yevgenny Yevtushenko

    No monument stands over Babi Yar
    A steep cliff only, like the rudest headstone.
    I am afraid.
    Today, I am as old as the entire Jewish race itself.

    O, Russia of my heart, I know that you are international, by inner nature.
    But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
    abused your purest name, in the name of hatred.

    There is no Jewish blood in me, it's true.  
    But with their callous ossified revulsion 
    Antisemites must hate me like a Jew
    And that is what makes me a true Russian.

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