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.