Russian book club

Without socialism, bourgeois practices and the egotistical principle of private ownership gave rise to the "people of the abyss" described by Jack London and earlier by Engels.

Only the competition with socialism and the pressure of the working class made possible the social progress of the twentieth century and, all the more, will insure the now inevitable process of rapprochement of the two systems. It took socialism to raise the meaning of labor to the heights of a moral feat. Before the advent of socialism, national egotism gave rise to colonial oppression, nationalism, and racism. By now it has become clear that victory is on the side of the humanistic, international approach.

The capitalist world could not help giving birth to the socialist, but now the socialist world should not seek to destroy by force the ground from which it grew. Under the present conditions this would be tantamount to the suicide of mankind. Socialism should ennoble that ground by its example and other indirect forms of pressure and then merge with it.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
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Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

The reader will understand that ideological collaboration cannot apply to those fanatical, sectarian, and extremist ideologies that reject all possibility of rapprochement, discussion, and compromise, for example, the ideologies of fascist, racist, militaristic, and Maoist demagogy.

Millions of people throughout the world are striving to put an end to poverty. They despise oppression, dogmatism, and demagogy (and their more extreme manifestations — racism, fascism, Stalinism, and Maoism). They believe in progress based on the use, under conditions of social justice and intellectual freedom, of all the positive experience accumulated by mankind.

- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
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My good companion Yuri Petrovich held Sakharov in the highest esteem. Sakharov - an intellectual, an humanist, admired for his fierce integrity, unbounded empathy, and sterling moral conscience. Basically, everything that Donald J. Drumpf isn't.

Civilization is imperiled by: a universal thermonuclear war, catastrophic hunger for most of mankind, stupefaction from the narcotic of "mass culture," and bureaucratized dogmatism, a spreading of mass myths that put entire peoples and continents under the power of cruel and treacherous demagogues, and destruction or degeneration from the unforeseeable consequences of swift changes in the conditions of life on our planet.

In the face of these perils, any action increasing the division of mankind, any preaching of the incompatibility of world ideologies and nations is madness and a crime. Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressures of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization.

-- Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
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Micawber said:
Gotta read notes and crim and punishment. Neither long.

The fur hat... funny

Death of Ivan ilych ....
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I need to circle back and read "Notes"....but not until I have finished my Deadpool comic books!

Arguably one of the greatest novelists in history, Fyodor Dostoevsky is especially notable for interweaving deep philosophical, psychological and theological threads into his brilliant fiction. As a result, his works become much more than stimulating, entertaining stories but actual representation of 19th century intellectual history. This can not be any more true for his most philosophical work of all, Notes from Underground. Notes is Dostoevsky's groundbreaking philosophical prologue to his later novels, and it wrestles with modern existential questions which deal with Man's role in a world where the idea of God was being rejected more and more.

The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries espoused the value of reason, proclaimed the potential improvement of Man and Society, and freed humanity from superstition. By the 19th century, with the belief in God declining, Dostoevsky saw mankind having lost its moral bearing, wafting directionless in the tempest that is life. Instead of liberating Man for the better, the Enlightenment had renounced his spiritual connection. Where Dostoevsky saw a creature of God, his contemporary philosophers were seeking a new definition of modern man, out from under the definition of God.

"Notes from the Underground" provides a greater perspective in European thought. The 19th century was the characterized by a brutal polarization of existential thinking in which there was no synthesis. Dostoevsky and Friedrich Nietzsche epitomize this philosophical schism: at one end, Dostoevsky calls for Man to embrace faith and Christian morality; at the other stands Nietzsche, rejecting religion as unnatural and entreating Man to transgress contemporary moral values. By the turn of the century, Man and God were still as much a mystery as before, and so remain.

In Notes, Dostoevsky shows us the Underground Man, a despicable and pitiable creature who betrays himself and is not even aware of it. He is the creation of a thoroughly anti-modern author imploring his fellow Russians to resign from the West.

http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/novels/UGMan/ugman.html
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Can Dostoevsky Still Kick You in the Gut?
The New Yorker - Book Reviews
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-dostoevsky-still-kick-you-in-the-gut
 
"People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing—refusing to participate in activities that make life bad." -- Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
 
kflaux said:
I have no opinion on movie versions--have not seen one yet--but one of the most remarkable parts of the book, for me, was the passage describing her mind during her final trip from home. Starting with where she sees herself in the mirror and doesn't recognize herself.

It seems to me that Tolstoy brilliantly described the psychological implosion of a human mind. Not that I'm an expert on e.g. madness or the like, but it rang true to me.

And, of course, the scene in which Levin proposes to Kitty (...the second time!) is wonderful...and much else besides......
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I like that scene too (although seen better versions, i.e. in a recent Anna Karenina musical)
 
I am reading "Gulag Archipelago" and here are some quotes I like

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice. ” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


https://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?95445-fyi-about-me&p=2369489#post2369489
 
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My contribution to improving the internet.
This forum could probably benefit from having more Solzhenitsyn, and less Republican racism.


“What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position - all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.” 

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
 
My latest donation to improve the tenor of jpp.com, also known by its alternate name “Stormfront II"

Isaac Babel 1894-1940

Arrested by NKVD agents on 15 May 1939, and subsequently executed, his common law wife Antonina Pirozhkova wrote: We drove to the Lubyanka Prison and through the gates. The car stopped before the massive, closed door where two sentries stood guard. Babel kissed me hard and said, "Someday we'll see each other..." And without looking back, he got out of the car and went through that door.

Isaac Babel, the Writer Stalin Wanted Us to Forget

July 13th, 2017 will be Isaac Babel’s 123rd birthday. It seems important to remember it not just because Babel is one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, but also because the Stalinist regime, which executed him at the age of 45, tried to utterly obliterate his memory.

His name was removed from literary who’s whos and encyclopaedias. He disappeared from school and university syllabuses. The films whose screenplays he’d worked on no longer showed his name in the credits. Even to mention him in public was a risk. None of it worked. Babel is perhaps more famous now than at any time since his death, partly thanks to Peter Constantine’s wonderful translation of his Complete Works, and partly thanks to the many contemporary authors who have acknowledged a debt to Babel’s writing.

<<snip>>

On May 15th 1939, Babel was arrested and taken to Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison. Under torture he confessed to espionage. On January 16th the following year, in the early hours of the morning, he was tried in the private chambers of Lavrenti Beria, Stalin’s security chief. Babel retracted his confession, but he was sentenced to death anyway. At 1:40 the next morning he was shot, and his body thrown into a mass grave. His last recorded words are a plea: “Let me finish my work.”

Full article https://www.bookwitty.com/text/reme...ter-stalin-wanted-us/5963675050cef73f3fd2cccc
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I'm, gonna have to give grudging respect to a culture in which stadiums get filled up with people wanting to hear poetry readings.

When Poets Rocked Russia’s Stadiums

Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, Russian poetry has begun to resemble American poetry in ways that are both fascinating and sad. What’s sad is how little they are read, and how little they matter. Whatever reach contemporary poetry had in Russian society has vanished like wood smoke.

The death on Tuesday of Andrei Voznesensky, a stirring poet of the post-Stalin “thaw era” in the 1950s and early 1960s, caused many to recall a time when that reach was enormous. Voznesensky’s generation of poets, which included Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina, declaimed their work in sports stadiums to overflow crowds. A moment presented itself — the relative artistic freedom of the early Khrushchev era — and these poets pounced on the microphone. As Mr. Voznesensky put it, with a punk lip curl: “The times spat at me. I spit back at the times.”

The poets of the thaw era were liberating figures, and have frequently been likened to the West’s most word-drunk rockers and singer-songwriters: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen. They were political, sexy, a bit louche and sometimes ridiculous. They squabbled. Mr. Yevtushenko seemed to be alluding to poets too, when he asked, “Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?”

The attention paid to Mr. Voznesensky’s death is a reminder not just of that ecstatic thaw era, but of how important Russia’s poetry has been over three centuries, from Aleksandr Pushkin to Anna Akhmatova, to the country’s sense of itself. It is a vast and elusive country, one that poetry — that pointed words — helped to unite. Pushkin (1799-1837) is the rebellious founder of modern Russian literature, and the country’s greatest early poet, its Shakespeare: all roads snake back to him. He had a cultivated voice that nonetheless caught the Russian vernacular, and he continues to be adored there. Among Pushkin’s qualities was a suspicion of power and corruption that would fortify his successors and help see them through the darkest hours.

Full article https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/books/03poets.html
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This book involves two of my favorite entertainment genres - a post-apocalyptic dystopian future -- and video gaming!

Metro 2033
Dmitry Glukhovsky

Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic fiction novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It is set in the Moscow Metro, where the last survivors hide after a global nuclear holocaust.

In 2013, a nuclear war occurred, forcing a large amount of Moscow's surviving population to relocate to underground metro stations in search of refuge. Eventually, communities settled within the underground train stations and developed into independent states over time. Factions emerged, ranging from the independent peacekeepers the "Rangers of the Order", to the communist "Red Line" faction and the fascist "Fourth Reich", to the more powerful factions such as "Polis", which contained the greatest military power and the most knowledge of the past, and the "Hanza" regime, which controlled the main ring of metro stations by its sheer economic power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033

Video Game inspired by book...
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter survival horror video game developed by 4A Games. The story is based on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novel of the same name, and is set in the ruins of Moscow following a nuclear war, where the survivors are forced to live in underground metro tunnels. Players control Artyom, a man who must save his home station from the dangers lurking within the Metro. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(video_game)
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How Tolstoy Can Save Putin’s Soul

If Putin preferred Tolstoy over Dostoevsky, what a happier, more peaceful place Ukraine would be right now

The drama being played out right now in Russia and Ukraine isn’t merely geopolitical. It’s a deep-seated drama of the national soul that’s been around for centuries. And Russian literature is the place we see it in full flower. You see, the question Vladimir Putin is grappling with is the one that recurs throughout the 19th century Russian classics: What is the source of our national greatness?

In approaching this question, Putin, whose two favorite writers happen to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, has two distinct traditions to choose from: Dostoevsky’s belief in Russian exceptionalism or Tolstoy’s belief in the universality of all human experience, regardless of one’s nationality, culture, or religion. Alas, he has chosen Dostoevsky, not Tolstoy.

Dostoevsky believed that Russia’s special mission in the world is to create a pan-Slavic Christian empire with Russia at its helm. This messianic vision stemmed from the fact that Dostoevsky thought Russia was the most spiritually developed of all the nations, a nation destined to unite and lead the others.

This sort of triumphalist thinking was anathema to Tolstoy, who believed that every nation had its own unique traditions, none better or worse than the others. Tolstoy was a patriot—he loved his people, as is so clearly demonstrated in War and Peace, for example—but he was not a nationalist. He believed in the unique genius and dignity of every culture. One of the hallmarks of his writing from the beginning was his capacity to uncover the full-blooded truth of each one of his characters, no matter their nationality.
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continued at
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-tolstoy-can-save-putins-soul
 
One of the best novels I have read

Cement (Russian: Цемент) is a Russian novel by Fyodor Gladkov (1883–1958). Published in 1925, the book is arguably the first in Soviet Socialist Realist literature to depict the struggles of post-Revolutionary reconstruction in the Soviet Union
 
This is on my nightstand, and next on deck for me to read.


Solzhenitsyn's One Day: The book that shook the USSR

In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp. So begins this masterpiece of modern Russian fiction, a harrowing account of a man who has conceded to all things evil with dignity and strength.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic novel, was published 50 years ago this month. A short, simply-told tale about a prisoner trying to survive the Gulag - the Soviet labour camp system - it is now regarded as one of the most significant books of the 20th Century. Illuminating a dark chapter in Russian history, it is at once a graphic picture of work camp life and a moving tribute to man’s will to prevail over relentless dehumanization.

"It was still dark, although a greenish light was brightening in the east. A thin, treacherous breeze was creeping in from the same direction. There is no worse moment than when you turn out for work parade in the morning. In the dark, in the freezing cold, with a hungry belly, and the whole day ahead of you. You lose the power of speech..."


https://www.amazon.com/One-Day-Life-Ivan-Denisovich/dp/0451531043
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20393894
 
I am not afraid of Putin

Evidently, this is the most viewed thread in this subforum….

This lady is reputedly one of the most popular and respected Russian authors today, I have have got "The Big Green Tent" on my reading list - it is evidently a portrayal of the Soviet dissidents of the 1950s and 60s, and an indictment of the totalitarian Soviet regime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/books/review/the-big-green-tent-by-ludmila-ulitskaya.html

Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin

Lyudmila Ulitskaya does not like to draw attention to herself. In person, she is unassuming and softly spoken, a 68-year-old grandmother with grey cropped hair and small, elegant hands. She does not consider herself exceptional. But this modest, self-effacing individual is one of Russia's foremost contemporary novelists and a leading advocate for freedom of expression. She started writing almost by accident after she was sacked from her job as a geneticist in the 1960s and accused of dissident activity by the former Soviet authorities. "I thought, quite wrongly, that scientists were freer [than artists]," she has written in the past. "Of course, all these illusions were shattered over time."

"I'm not afraid," Ulitskaya insists, speaking through a translator. "Compared to the Stalinist era, our government now is a pussycat with soft paws … Having said that, I believe that (Russian liberal democratic reformer) Khodorkovsky is in jail because the whole society was so scared that no one stood up for his defence. There were threats: the court was afraid, the witnesses, the judge, because no one had the courage to speak up and that saddens me. That loss of dignity frustrates me because our society had only just started overcoming its fear after so many years of oppressive rule. The Russian people have once again started to be gripped by fear."

"In Russia, there is a drastic gap between rich and poor, to the extent that I feel the country is on the brink of civil war. The salary of a civil servant can be hundreds of thousands less than that of a businessman. It causes huge irritation, especially when people show off their wealth, with all their furs and bling. I hope that the next generation will be educated more to spend their money wisely and charitably. And, for me, the first person to realise he should act like this was Khodorkovsky."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/17/lyudmila-ulitskaya-dissident-putin-interview
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