In 2006, [Fredric] Jameson spoke at a conference in Moscow and then visited Petersburg for a few days. [Elena] Petrovskaya asked me to show him around the city. Jameson stayed at the apartment of Artemy Magun, who was out of town but left the key. The program was the most predictably capitalist, with opera-schmopera, Malevich-schmalevich, the fountains of Peterhof and other logic of cultural consumption. On the third day I got tired of it and invited Jameson to a birthday party for little Tasya Zaslavskaya in [the painter Anatoly Zaslavsky’s] studio, which was chockablock with preschoolers, cakes, Fanta and balloons. There was also Foma [Thomas] Campbell and dancing. I should re-read Brecht and Method. RIP.
Source: Alexander Skidan (Facebook), 23 September 2024. Translated by Thomas “Foma” Campbell. Photo, above, courtesy of Duke Today.
[Arlie Russell] Hochschild gets a lot right. Still, as an investigative journalist who covers the MAGA movement, her portrayal of Trump’s America sometimes felt incomplete to me. She mentions how a pastor was radicalized by the QAnon conspiracy theory on the Telegram app, but such online worlds, which can become realer for their believers than the physical world, aren’t captured here with the same concrete specificity as what’s happening on the dusty back roads of small-town Kentucky. And her portrayals of the wounded masculine pride and white nationalism that she suggests drive some Trump voters can feel chilly, distanced by sociological and psychological analysis; in person, such emotions are palpably volcanic.
I finished “Stolen Pride” nagged by the sense that she wasn’t giving us the full picture — most of all, of her own place in it as a retired professor from the University of California, Berkeley embedding in Pikeville to explain its residents to themselves and the nation. It’s a position that I suspect triggered at least some stereotypes that conservatives have about liberals thinking they know better. And yet her ethnography is frictionless. There is none of the grinding of opposing viewpoints so common during this contentious political time. There is little sense of what they thought of her and her project.
Instead, Hochschild has produced a seamless election-season-ready explanation of conservatism that might be just a little too neat. What, I kept wondering, would her subjects say was her “deep story”? And would including that viewpoint in her book have destabilized its carefully engineered explanations? If America is increasingly divided into two countries, one liberal and one conservative, what would it have meant to compare their two deep stories in one narrative rather than have one side tell the other how it is?
Source: Doug Bock Clark, “What Makes the Far Right Tick?” New York Times, 10 September 2024
We can all agree that Vladimir Putin is a bloodthirsty brute, whose invasion of Ukraine was a shameful act of aggression. Having said that, I personally would wish this horrible war to end as soon as possible, which will almost certainly mean with some degree of compromise. When Snyder writes that, for America to remain “the land of the free” half a century from now, “Ukraine must win its war against Russia,” does he really believe that’s possible? Does “winning” mean a Russian capitulation comparable to the German generals’ unconditional surrender in May 1945? The only way anything of the kind could conceivably happen would be following a coup to overthrow Putin, a most desirable outcome but improbable at present.
And when [Timothy] Snyder writes that if Ukraine’s “allies fail it, tyrants will be encouraged around the world, and other such wars will follow,” some of us are old enough to feel that we’ve seen this movie before. It was called the domino theory, and it was invoked to justify the Vietnam War — fought in the name of freedom, but bringing much unfreedom in its wake.
This may seem a gloomy and unhelpful way to end a review of a stimulating and well-intentioned book. Of course Snyder is right, in the sense that his heart’s in the right place. I share his horror at crimes past and present. I only wish I could share his optimism about the future.
Danila Davydov
I see the beetle’s quiet race
and how the dragon-fly doth hover.
the vileness of late-soviet life
cannot be grasped by those who’re younger.
the star that shines is not for you
and not for you the tomcat's purring.
just utter murk and drudgery
no matter what yurchak might claim.
and nowadays? while nature peers
into itself, we seek in vain
to comprehend the somersaults
of active and yet vacant things.
Данила Давыдов
я вижу тихий бег жука
и зависание стрекоз.
всю мерзость позднего совка
ты не поймешь, коль позже взрос.
не для тебя горит звезда
и кот не для тебя урчал.
там только мрак и маета,
что б ни рассказывал юрчак.
а ныне что? природа зрит
в саму себя, и мы вотще
постичь пытаемся кульбит
активных, но пустых вещей.
Source: Ainsley Morse (Facebook), 12 October 2024. Danila Davydov (born 1977) is a poet, critic, and editor. His poem and her translation of it are reprinted here with Professor Morse’s kind permission.
