do you know the feeling?

I have a little black notebook in which I scribble whatever strikes me as profound during the day. For this reason I would be deeply ashamed if anyone else read it in its entirety. (What I consider profound very rapidly unprofounds when I discover how many other people’s books already said it.) However, the other day I stumbled upon a little entry, undoubtedly written sleepily during midterms or finals or something, that carried me back so quickly to the feeling of Chicago that I thought I would share it with you Chicagoans.

“Reg stacks:

bare concrete ceiling

blowing air duct

sporadic lighting, both nat’l and artificial

firm seats, but all too easy to fall asleep in nonetheless

scribblings on the wall”

or another one, from a boring Russian Lit lecture in the Social Sciences tearoom:

“In the room, on the broad windowsill, there is a large, rather tacky urn in several garish shades of yellow, green, ochre. There is a white animal on it with a skinny waist. It reminds me of those Afghan hunting dogs, elegant.”

Or after catching the Red Line at Garfield:

“scary to stand at the red line stop and watch the highway: too fast.”

Visigoths and kangaroos

I knew before I came here that there was a good deal of animosity in the former USSR between Central Asians and ethnic Russians. I assumed it was the typical “lazy-illegal-immigrants-from-the-south-who-don’t-even-speak-our-language-coming-in-and-taking-all-our-jobs” trope, maybe something to do with the nasty business of nineteenth-century imperialism.

This Medieval Russian stuff changes things a bit. Beginning with the mid-thirteenth century, Old Russian writing and oral poetry attempt to deal with the incredibly traumatic Tatar invasion. All of Old Rus pays substantial taxes to the foreign invaders; villains in epic poetry adopt Turkic-sounding names; monumental architecture (church-building) stops entirely for a full sixty years. This is still a very sore spot for Russians. A Russian historian of Tatar-Russian relations that I recently read says that ever since the 1247 invasion, Russia has been plagued with the “servile Asiatic spirit” and therefore to this day lacks confidence to assert itself in foreign affairs. Hmm.

There’s a very well-known (in Russia) school of historians that argues the Tatar-Mongol invasion was really not as traumatic as it’s been made out to be, that it breathed new life into Russian culture. But in a certain sense what “really happened” doesn’t matter for what I’m talking about; what matters is what people have said about it for the past seven centuries.

This would all be one thing if it were just an ivory-tower academic controversy. It became a little more significant when I realized how deeply the 14^th-century Tatars are associated with modern Central Asians. Take the very popular cartoon about Dobrynya Nikitich, the medieval Russian equivalent of Paul Bunyan, which portrays the Mongols with suspiciously Central-Asian features and accessories. Check out this signpost Dobrynya’s assistant comes upon during his travels:

Rus’ one way, Vragi – enemies – the other.

At least in part, such superficial associations underpin the really horrible neo-Nazi movements in Russian cities. Really, ethnic “Russians” have nearly as much 14^th-century Tatar-Mongol blood as their neighbors in Tatarstan and Uzbekistan; associating Central Asians with the Golden Horde is something akin to hating Western Europeans because they’re really Goths and Visigoths.

Incidentally, I suspect that the way to deal with these things is embedded in the texts and philosophies that formed Old Russian society. (Not that I really know the way myself). But this shallow perspective on the Middle Ages is wreaking havoc in the CIS. Don’t anyone tell me medieval history is esoteric and irrelevant.

on Sudoku and quoting Dostoevsky

I recently finished reading Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, which is absolutely worth checking out for anyone who reads Dostoevsky.

I began reading it on Friday, in between notes on the frescoes of the Church of the Dormition on Volotovo Field near Novgorod (of course, Old Russian). One of those books that suck you in, like Sudoku does some people (Lila F? What thrilled me most as I continued reading the next morning on the trolley was discovering references: Crime and Punishment, Devils, Daniel, Psalms, Revelation; I’m sure if I were less of a fake lit student and had read Brothers K, I would have discovered allusions to that too. I suppose this is really a quiet kind of pretentiousness: how exciting it is to catch these things, to pick out biblical quotations in Old Russian Lit and to recognize allusions to Dostoevsky in Coetzee – so I am drawn in to the text less because I identify with or have compassion for the characters, than because I discover in the book a puzzle I feel uniquely qualified to solve. I’m excited to read for the same reason that some people solve crosswords: I find in the act an opportunity to take control, to organize, and I suppose also to feel knowledgeable.

 

Not all books strike me this way. This is the first real Coetzee I’ve read, and it feels to me unoriginal, not with the negative connotation that word tends to carry nowadays, but in a genuinely neutral sense. Master is really a commentary on Dostoevsky and the Bible, a creatively organized set of glosses (certainly helpful for this reader of devilish Devils!), an interpretation of things that have been said before. And if Master is really, in the platitudes of the Wall Street Journal quote on the cover, “a fascinating study of the dark mysteries of creativity, grief, relationships between fathers and sons, and of the great Russian themes of love and death,” then it is so only because all those are themes that Coetzee saw in Dostoevsky and managed to re-express in a more contemporary form.

No denying, to use the words of a friend’s friend, that C is a “cold fish.” Whoever wrote that review was right to see that C’s approach is essentially academic, a “study”: C sees a puzzle, discovers in the dialogues of Dostoevsky a glorified way of procrastination (from what?), and sets himself the task of discovering the hidden references in all of D’s novels. I am somewhat dismayed to realize that my own approach to C is similar. Perhaps I can plead that Coetzee made me do it, that he encourages that kind of reading?

Anyway, I didn’t set out to write a review of Coetzee (the Wall Street Journal beat me to it). Mostly what I want to bring out is a certain approach to allusion. C drops references where they defend his creative solution of the Dostoevsky puzzle, just as a modern academic would cite a text to prove his point. Coetzee can superimpose his interpretation, like a lens, onto Dostoevsky; as critic (albeit a creative one), he can go from commentary to source. He cannot go the other direction, from source to commentary; D cannot be a lens for C. Dostoevsky is smothered in Coetzee. The biblical quotes become similar museum pieces, artefacts of D’s day and age. The first symptom of the way we look at texts these days is thus this asphyxiation, when quotes from the old serve purposes of the new and never vice versa. If D uses allusions differently from Coetzee, the medieval stuff I’ve been infatuated with lately is even more unusual. More on this later; I hope I haven’t confused you all hopelessly.

I also hope I haven’t grossly misinterpreted Coetzee. I still highly recommend the book, as my puzzle interpretation is really a reduction of a very thought-provoking book. I realize a good deal of what I just said about critics can be found in another form in Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism or Tolkien’s The Monsters and the Critics, if you want to hear it a good deal more eloquently.