Dissident envy

We don't live in Stalinist Russia, but...

I’m not a big re-reader. I think in the last ten years I’ve re-read Middlemarch, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, In Search of Lost Time, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses bios and the first ten books in David Weber’s Honor Harrington military sci-fi series. I’ve nothing against re-reading, but if I want to revisit a particular time and place, I like to read adjacent works of literature or read deeper into an author’s oeuvre. So if I want to go back to Heian-era Japan I won’t re-read Tale of Genji, I’ll read Lady Murasaki’s diary or a work by a different Heian writer.

This means when I reread a book it’s not out of a sense of obligation or study or curiosity: it’s pure comfort reading. I reread books whenever I’m feeling depressed and want to fortify myself with something I can only find in a certain book.

For the last few months I’ve been re-reading Nadezdha Mandelstam’s autobiography, Hope Against Hope, which is an account of the four years that spanned her husband Osip Mandelstam’s first arrest, exile, second arrest, and death during the Stalinist terror.¹

Most accounts of the terror that were written by men are, necessarily, accounts of the camps. If you want to see what happened to a person after their arrest, internal exile, deportation, then you look to Solzhenitsyn or Shalamov. If you want to see what civilian life was like outside the camps, you need to read accounts by women. It’s not that women weren’t arrested or deported—it’s only that a woman intellectual had a chance of surviving without compromising herself. A man didn’t.²

Under Stalinism it was extremely difficult to maintain your honor. This indeed is one of the main themes of Nadezdha Mandelstam’s account. Nobody was brave. Nobody spoke out. Few people helped others or spoke on their behalf. Early in the book, she recounts how when people were arrested, inevitably their friends asked, “What did they do?” Everyone knew the answer was “Nothing”. Nobody had done anything. But still they asked, and they always found some answer, some failure on the part of the victim, something that justified their arrest.

Mandelstam’s book is an account of the moral collapse of the Russian intelligentsia. Within the span of about ten years, liberal humanist values go from being a punchline to being incomprehensible. During the early years of the revolution, the intelligentsia comes under attack, and they’re lambasted in the press for adhering to obsolete principles. But eventually those attacks end, because at the height of the terror, the idea of principle or of human dignity simply makes no sense to anyone anymore. Even the concept of humanism has been lost.

One of the more amusing accounts in the book is when Mandelstam attempts, late in his exile, to write an “Ode to Stalin”, a praise-poem that he hopes will save his life. Morning after morning he sits down and tries to write the poem. His usual method is to listen for the tone of the poem, then compose it in his head, working through it over and over, until the tone is fully realized. This obviously won’t work. When he thinks of Stalin he doesn’t hear any tone. There’s no music. So he tries to create the poem through pure effort, by sitting down pen in hand at the same time and place every day, the way you’re supposed to.

He manages to compose the Ode, but in the process, he keeps throwing off counter-poems—each line of the Ode triggers a responding tone, and his next book of poems (unpublished during his life) has a cycle of poems that are all chafing against and responding to the Ode.

But what Mandelstam is struggling to do is exactly what a large number of writers did quite easily. Throughout the Soviet Union there were huge, very well-compensated coteries of writers produced exactly the fiction and poetry they were supposed to. Almost every Soviet writer who is famous in the West was a dissident, so we have the impression that most Soviet writers were dissidents, but that’s not the case. Most Soviet writers conformed. They wrote reams and reams of books that supported the official line. A few of them were even readable (I own a few spy novels by Yulian Semyonov that are essentially a mirror-image of a James Bond novel, they’re all about heroic KGB agents foiling evil CIA and MI6 plots).

It’s tempting in reading a book like this to be like “It’s happening here!” But it’s not happening here. In all of the debates about free speech in America, it’s impossible to escape the idea that, for now, speech remains pretty darn free. Any society that is capable of celebrating a banned books week probably doesn’t need to. And if it’s unfree, then it’s difficult to say who’s suppressing it. I might feel beleaguered, but I can open up the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Slate, or the Washington Post any day and find viewpoints closely resembling mine. So no, I don’t think we’re going to end up in a Great Terror any time soon—the worst-case scenario for the US is an Orban-style take-over of cultural institutions. It will be unpleasant and financially calamitous, but I won’t end die in a gulag.

What this book allows me to see is what would happen if it happened here. Right now, in 2024, liberal humanism still more or less runs the table. You’ve got to support free speech to work in media. You’ve got to praise classic literature if you want to write high-brow (i.e. state-supported) novels. You’ve got to pay lip service to the idea that individual human life has value and that people’s thoughts shouldn’t be policed.

I know lots of my readers have an anti-woke bent, so they’re like, “But the universities have abandoned humanism!” Except that’s not really true. At least…not in any organized or coherent way. You’re not going to find many professors who will say, outright, that certain speech acts should be illegal or that Shakespeare is trash or that if you don’t believe X then you should be fired from your job.

Instead, what you find is a lot of people who say liberal humanist stuff, but then…it just doesn’t seem like they really believe it? They’re the people who’re always ready with an argument that in this particular case, with this particular statement, this particular employer was justified in firing this particular employee. They’re the folks who always seem willing to sacrifice the individual in favor of the collective good.

And so modern life, particularly in the intelligentsia, is so strange, because you all notionally believe in the same thing, and you go along fine chatting about art and commerce and aesthetics and philosophy, and then a journal blows up because it published an essay its other editors didn’t like, and everyone applauds, and you’re like…okay, yes, they have the right to withdraw their labor, but is the ideal to run journals where every editor gets a veto on every article? And people look at you like you’re insane: It’s a matter of principle, they say! They couldn’t in good conscience be a party to such and such and such and such.

And yes…they’re explanations all make a sort of high-minded sense, but you’re left with the strange feeling that nobody who’d had a genuine encounter with art would behave in quite this way.

Similarly when a great novelist writes a vaguely crotchety essay, I always hear my friends being like, oh god, why do so many talented artists have such milquetoast, bourgeois NYT op-ed political opinions, and these friends never stop to think—oh, you know, maybe there’s a reason all the greatest writers are on one side and all the world’s biggest mediocrities are on the other. And the reason is that being a great artist means opening a portal inside yourself that doesn’t open very easily—even the slightest criticism or judgement is often enough to close it. And so yes, while the boring NYT op-ed world might seem self-indulgent and fatuous, it’s exactly that kind of fatuity that gives people the freedom to think “Maybe my own voice is important.” Not all great artists are liberals, but all great artists allow themselves the freedom of thought and expression that liberals believe should be allowed to everyone.

I read Mandelstam’s book to remind myself, oh yes, there is something that underpins liberal humanism—there is some encounter with truth or with transcendence, with beauty or with the divine, some understanding of the ineffable—there is something real, something outside of himself, that underlies both Mandelstam’s poetry and his humanist ideals, and it’s not that he doesn’t want to compromise that thing—he does want to! He would dearly like to ensure his wife’s survival at least! But the fact is, he is simply unable to compromise—he cannot write Stalinist poetry. Mandelstam is simply a different kind of poet from most of his contemporaries. He is writing real poetry, they’re not. And for someone who really lives those humanist ideals, it might be possible to compromise morally, but not artistically.

(That’s why the most famous compromise during the Great Terror was simply to go into “internal exile”. For a true talent, the only way to avoid writing something dangerous was to avoid writing anything at all. Mandelstam (at least in his wife’s telling) had a five year period of silence, from 1925 to 1930 that ended only once he decided to accept the fact that he’d someday get arrested. Another writer acquaintance, Erdman, stopped writing entirely, and would whisper to her the plots of plays and stories that he’d never actually write).

I’m not an art-hero. I don’t think anyone will ever persecute me for my writing. And I don’t think that if I quit writing the world would suffer a great loss, but I read Nadezdha Mandelstam’s memoir in order to be reminded that, although our talents differ, she and I and her husband have come into contact with the same truths, and we have allowed those truths to shape our lives in the same way.

---

Addenda:

Can’t help feeling this week’s entry is short and a bit anemic. I’ve been sick, my daughter’s been sick, my father-in-law’s been sick, my wife’s been sick. I’ve been traveling. She’s now traveling. Just lots of day-to-day stuff—no time for writing. I did post an article this week just for paid subscribers, on friendships in the publishing industry (and the [im]possibility thereof). I wrote about how I purposefully cultivated a friendship with my latest literary agent!

As always, please pre-order my novel, The Default World. It’s coming out in just three weeks! I have events forthcoming in SF (May 30th) and NYC (June 6th). Click on the links to RSVP.

1. Mandelstam is an incredible lyric poet, writing short poems full of yearning for the inchoate, imagined classical past. He strikes me as very similar to Cavafy in terms of his deep engagement with history, his types of images, and the brevity of his poems. I recommend this edition of his work.

2. Another good account of life during the terror is Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna. Written in 1938, during the height of the terror, it came within a hair’s breadth of being published during the Krushchev thaw, but then the publication was cancelled. And then of course Anna Akhmatova’s poem-cycle “Requiem” is the quintessential document of the terror—her husband was short early in the 30s, and she spent much of the Terror waiting in lines, trying to save her son.