Note on Foundation Pit

Rereading my earlier posts, as I've already done at least 15 times since this blogging contraption is still new to me (and my vanity pleads with me to keep revising awkward passages) I realized I didn't mention the most exciting thing about this book.

It is the most interestingly written, beautifully written, tender book. Somehow I read the English translation much faster than the original; the original is so unprecedented in my Russian-reading experience, that I could only take it in really slowly. Wow
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Bulgakov

A couple of weeks ago, I read two plays by Bulgakov, Adam and Eve, and Bloody (or Red, I haven't figured out the translation) Island. They're both about people trying to be people in a world of political fanaticism. I was surprised to read in the introduction that Bulgakov had hoped Adam and Eve would actually be published, it was kind of his last attempt to survive as a writer in Soviet society. Writer in the sense not of writing quietly in the kitchen, but in the sense of being published and a part of public life. This play is about a couple who survive a chemical attack that kills off all of Russia, sometime in the 30s I think. They, and a few visiting neighbors, live because just minutes before they meet a professor who's invented an apparatus that protects people from this sort of attack. The professor is a disheveled man, the symbol of humanity of sorts, who loves only his dog, believes in pacifism and hates political ideologues. The husband in the couple, Adam, is exactly the latter, and the wife eventually becomes disenchanted with him, as they live in the woods while waiting for another survivor to find out if anyone else in the world has survived. She eventualy tries to leave with the professor.

So up to now, it's your regular Bulgakov fare (hehe, I've just unwittingly quoted something the NYT would write. I don't exactly know what Bulgakov is about.) The lone and gentle male genius, the caring woman, falling in love in a world without rules and leaving the other dirty world behind. What I meant by 'regular Bulgakov fare" is that this reminds me of another storyline of his. But then, in this play, the guy who had gone off to find survivors, comes back. It turns out the rest of the world has united in a communist federation, where gender equality rules, and Spaniards, Germans and Russians battle together (although, now that I think of it, who do they battle now?) Eve and her professor then come out as traitors, lacking the grandure of imagination and faith to have believed all will turn out ok after this little chemical holocaust.

The funny thing is that though they are forgiven - the professor did after all invent the cure - at the very end he is ordered to speak to the leader, on his liberation plane or whatever. And on one hand, I think Bulgakov intended this to say - everyone can come around to communism, just have mercy on those slow ones who don't right away, they're still useful. That's probably why he thought it might get published. But at the same time, it is a completely tragic end - the only people with humanity don't escape, they probably can't love each other in the future, and the professor might very well be told everything is fine and be sent to some camp in Perm' the next day (this is a conclusion someone familiar with Russian history in the 30s may draw.) This friendly international union of young Communists, as benign as Bulgakov paints it, is still imposed from the top (literally, since these people fly in on some sort of exciting plane) on every human in sight, leaving no personal choices to be made. And, moreover, the professor's dog is dead already, so really who cares about the future anyway.

It's interesting, this play seems similar to the two books I babbled about in the last post, but also it is very much a work of Bulgakov, where the life of dogs and sacred personal space are supremely important. Although I would be the last not to agree with these feelings, they are somehow different from Platonov's approach I think. The latter has more empathy for the desire to sacrifice, and to help others who are lost, at least through mindless companionship. Bulgakov then, is more like Nabokov. They are sort of aristocrats of the spirit, whose characters only need themselves and a loved one to exist in the world, not bothering others but understanding these others to be unable to engage with them or bring them happiness. I can't take sides in this debate I just imagined, both make a world of sense to me. I guess it's just interesting to find such fundamental differences in authors who at first glance write about the same thing, this oppression of the individual in the construction of the communist system, and even pass the same sort of judgment on it.

Platonov and Kazantsakis

It’s interesting, the similarity among books about the individual in the midst of political upheaval, usually orchestrated by callous people. Platonov (I’ve read only the Foundation Pit so far, though a number of times, and will write on it as soon as I understand what the hell I think about it) does it really well. In the Foundation Pit, which takes places in 20s Russia, he depicts a very awful reality being created. But he spreads complicity among all the characters, regardless of the amount of power they possess. [The characters are construction workers digging a foundation pit for a building to house socialism’s future inhabitants; also some peasants in a dreamy process of ‘de-kulakization’(?), a little girl and a couple of activists-administrators with fat wives or no wives because no one will take them.]

They all thoughtlessly labor at constructing an entirely messy future they call socialism. Because they can’t evaluate what they’re doing, they’re primitive and misguided; the results are deadly and hopeless. But somehow, Platonov manages to make me reluctant to blame them. Because they so willingly give themselves and their lives to what they think is the collective good, and also because they are clearly dissatisfied with the life around them. They resemble amnesia-afflicted sailors whom the revolution has cut off from the civilized world like a shipwreck, casting them onto an empty desert island. They can’t make the link between present and future, process and the end, understand that social building, unlike construction, can’t succeed on the bones of its constructors. Communism sucks, blah blah.

This book does something to me I can’t understand. Something about its world, created clearly to portray emerging Soviet society, seems very relevant to understanding the link between political events and personal life, it’s mesmerizing. It raises all these tingly questions about the worth of individual sacrifice for collective good, and what society does to people, and how the meaning of lives changes when people are at the edge of ordered social and political life.

I also read a novel by a Greek author, apparently famous, Nikos Kazantsakis. It’s about a priest in the Greek civil war, whose son leads the communist rebels, but whose village is on the other, the whatever, un-communist side. This priest admirably attributes all of his opinions to god, so both god and the priest come out very confused about who’s right in this war. After all, how can fratricidal killing lead to a unified beautiful Greece? The same question about means and ends.

Here, the priest just gets shot at the end though, for trying to arrange a truce, and deep insights are avoided. Still, it’s similar to the Foundation Pit in that everyone ends up at fault, they just don’t evoke any empathy. Instead of deep sadness upon finishing reading, I felt mainly disgust, the kind you feel when you read too much in the newspaper about foreign ethnic violence. The “ahh, people” response. The book is still powerful because of its message, that courageous people can rarely turn the tide of collective violent insanity because they’re not fanatics, but in a different way.

I don’t really have a point in this posting it seems. I should reread Doctor Zhivago because it’s the same sort of book. But reading all this sort of depressive literature about stifled lives in political turmoil, it makes me interested in reading more of the ‘success stories’ I guess. What does one read? Beckett, where lives are bravely stifled by personal turmoil alone? Or history books, where one can after all have positive outcomes for groups of people, if only through the aggregation error.

More on Power's "The Problem from Hell"

I have so many questions. Power writes that the US resisted, for decades, signing the Genocide Convention, or for that matter being a signatory to any international mechanisms for trying crimes that do not impede sovereignty, because these things are, as some Southern senator had put it, "vicious communist perversions." Basically, many American politicians do not want to expose Americans to being tried by an international court.

But at the same time, wouldn't it relieve the US of the regularly recurring pressure of humanitarian intervention in different parts of the world to have a court with its own mechanisms of deciding when genocide obtains? From Power's description of the American policy debate during every genocide, it seems the main issue is always whether to call the thing "genocide." Apparently, once the government does that, public opinion holds it accountable for intervening. If US policymakers were relieved of this power of nomenclature, and if whatever body that received it lacked the power to commit US troops, wouldn't that take some of the pressure off? Now that I've written this, I see how simple it is to interpret this idea as a horrible constraint on American Sovereignty.

But the picture Power paints is pretty awful. Basically, policymakers can always say, "we don't have proof it's genocide," do nothing because no "proof" within government ever gets collected unless the principals or whatever they're called order it, then argue they don't want to kill American boys and defuse the option of intervention by this mere mention of casualties. But she writes, there are many other means of influencing a country. Freezing bank accounts and travel of foreign dignitaries, trade sanctions (granted, maybe even more difficult that military action), simple diplomatic pressure and public censure, tracking movements of weapons within the country and publicizing it, and doing same with location of concentration or killing camps, bombing roads to such places after all. Also, I don't know anything about the international criminal court or the UN one, but don't they ever simply arrest people while killing is going on? With so much supposedly ethnicly-motivated violence, the arrest of one or two main instigators, these "ethnic entrepreneurs," can prevent so much. But musings of utopian international cooperation aside, why does the US so rarely deploy painless sanctions against other countries for humanitarian reasons?

Mm, confusion. Reading about foreign policy, when you don't know that much about it, is a funny thing. It seems so simple, primitive and "shkurnaya" (have no idea how to translate this). At the same time, the multiplicity of powerful interests that intersect to make it render it complex, often ridiculous.

Samantha Power's "Problem from Hell"

I've been reading, on and off, Samantha Power's book on genocide ("A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, 2002). Alberto, the professor I work for, asked me how I can stomach it, but the truth is, I have always used my reponse to human injustice, above the individual level, to jumpstart my concern for the world at all. That's part of why I studied political science. (If I hadn't discovered this pattern, I probably would have remained confused as I was in my freshman-sophomore years, and become a third-rate translator or something.) So in a way, this book falls onto well-developed receptors in my brain. Nonetheless, there are things wrong with this approach, I am sure. But apparently it enables me to read books on gassing and extermination - though mainly the political responses to these - when older men cannot.

So I had a few thoughts reading it today. I was reading about Iraq's genocide (this word has a fascinating history) of the Kurds, and that the US was reticent to confirm the killings for years. This was because Iraq was an ally against Iran at the time, in the late 1980s, just after the Iraq-Iran war. But Power alleges it was also because the US had invested immensely in Iraq in the 1980s, including through agricultural and other economic subsidies and not just weapons. And the Reagan administration, as well as many House members, had faith that these years of investment will "create a kinder, gentler dictator." Power attributes this belief to a tendency in diplomacy to "improve relations," but mainly to a desire to advance domestic US economic interests.

This has some interesting implications. How does a long-term provision of subsidies to Iraq by the US government entail the advancement of interests of US firms? Only when these domestic economic interests are mainly huge agricultural exporters, oil producers, etc. - all the types of large business that rely on foreign affairs policy to make money, and have good connections. They probably needed the US gov't to elicit cooperation from Hussein to work in Iraq, since it was a hugely state-controlled economy. This is nothing original really, but it's interesting how different was Reagan's and his administration's thinking on the Soviet Union almost at the same time. Any cooperation, and god forbid US assistance, was seen as weak-willed, naive and counterproductive. Yet Khrushev, or even Stalin since it was probably he who still ruled the SU in the Americans' historical memory - how do you compare him to Saddam in terms of brutality? Were their state machineries that different, or their methods of state building? It was probably important that Russia was largely closed economically, held no markets for US producers (except, I seem to remember, some agricultural exchange in the late years), and could not be convinced to open them.

I don't believe, really, in economic interest explanations of US foreign policy on their own, but boy they are certainly important. Especially if I think back to all I read - and forgot - about US in Central America. As for the other complementary explanations, my head starts swimming when I think about conceptions of diplomacy. Granted, I've never read or learned much about it. But ideas in foreign policy often seem to me extrapolated from micro-level human behavior, the Aristotle-like conceptions of world as family, friendship, or the stages of life or something like that. Based on these symbolic conceptions of "not angering," "appeasing," "challenging," which when you apply them not to people but to clans of politicians and bureaucracies, don't make sense. I guess I ought to read more political science about it, I think there's a large literature on signaling in international relations... Not that I would understand it

But also, to end this too-long post, the change of the American approach to Iraq makes more sense in light of the failure of the hopes for a gentler Hussein. (How stupid, in the first place! To think that people with socialist ideas about the economy, however silly, are life-threating, but blood-thirsty dictators swaddled in power may get better.) But it means that this revival of preemptive, strong-stick American foreign policy toward Iraq arose in reaction not to Carter's failures in Iran, or those in Vietnam, Russia, whatever, but in response partly to Reagan's - or, to be fair, everyone else's too, I don't know - blunders in Iraq not long ago. Maybe it was inconvenient to frame it this way, however, because Reagan was so famous for his sexy tough dealings with the Evil Empire.

This book of Power's is, on the whole, so impressive! Of course it's hypocrticial to be reading it now and know nothing about Darfur, but welcome to the reality of my 'intellectual pursuits.'