Crisis 22
All Over the Map
Geography - 7 Chapters - 11 Novels
🇺🇳
Geography
In my look at the Ukraine War I’m all over the map. I go back and forth from Ukraine to locations all over the world: Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Dresden, Saigon, Jakarta, Mumbai, Cape Cod, and Vancouver. In terms of genre, I use straightforward argument, history, human geography, music, art, and all forms of literature — especially novels from Russia, India, Australia, England, and the United States.
Reading from top left, my point of view starts with where I live in Vancouver, next to the state of Washington. After a brief dream of escape on the beaches of Mexico & Cuba, I move eastward to the complexity of Europe. The dense stretch from Dublin to the Danube could use its own map, so deep is Europe in this conflict and in my own personal experiences and perspectives. The pink stars indicate the main powers involved in the Ukraine conflict, and the purple stars indicate the places & authors that are key to my exploration of it.
The size and colour of the Middle Eastern star isn’t clear to me, given the unpredictabilities that lie on the road from Damascus to Teheran. The interpenetration of Russian & Ukrainian stars might seem disturbing to some, yet this indicates the complexity involved. For instance, two of the great “Russian” writers I deal with, Gogol & Bulgakov, come from Ukraine …
🇺🇳
7 Chapters
Crisis 22 is divided into 7 chapters. The first three — Politics & Literature I, Metaphor & Symbol, and Politics & Literature II — illustrates my eclectic approach and clarifies my stance in regard to the Kremlin’s war. Waking Up explores how the outbreak of war in 2022 interrupted our peaceful, complacent Western lives. This chapter is partly autobiographical and suggests ways of coping with the present stressful political moment. Cunning Plans looks at what Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Bulgakov might have to teach us about the sneaky and immoral operations of the Kremlin in particular and authoritarians in general. Puppet Masters uses novels by Koch, Greene, Vonnegut, and Rushdie to argue against superpower claims to speak for the Global South. Finally, Fearless Leaders argues against nationalistic exceptionalism, whether this be American or Russian.
My project is largely experimental, a sort of test to see how effective literature can be in coping with the present crisis. My hope is to shed light on ❧ the Kremlin’s ghastly game, ❧ the larger geo-historical context of the Cold War, and ❧ the nature of literature itself.
🇺🇳
11 Novels
The heart of this project lies in my look at 11 novels — 5 from Russia and 6 from the English-speaking world. The complexity and deeply human personality of novels provides us with miniature worlds that we can experience in psychological and sociological detail, albeit vicariously. Novels can also transmit the intensity and compression of the other two literary genres, drama and poetry.
The following map locates the novels I use, from St. Petersburg to Jakarta — and, in the case of Slaughterhouse Five, from Germany to New England:
I see each of the 11 novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an imaginative vision of alternatives, as well as a critical distance from today’s world of difficulty and pain. The novels of Gogol, Bulgakov, Vonnegut, and Rushdie also contain deep comic elements, which can help us deal with the present war in Ukraine, which might otherwise make us boil up in anger or break down in tears.
The 5 Russian novels I’ll look at most closely are Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842), Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1940). My angle isn’t that of a specialist in Russian Studies or Literature, but rather that of an enthusiast of literature in general. In reading Russian novels I try to see what a thoughtful reader can get from them, even though that reader may not speak the language or be an expert in that culture. As I delve into these novels, I ask the following questions: How can these novels give us a glimpse into the culture and history of Russia? What is the Russian experience of colonialism and imperialism? What has led them to accuse the West of colonialism and imperialism while at the same time invading their neighbour Ukraine? These questions complement the question I ask about the other 6 novels: How can novels help us see that imperialism — whether Western or Russian — isn’t in anybody’s best interest?
The 6 postcolonial novels I use are Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Greene’s The Quiet American (1954), Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1968), and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) & Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1995). I’ll use these novels ❧ to compare the Ukraine Crisis to Cold War scenarios in Europe, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and ❧ to compare the Ukrainian struggle for liberalism and democracy to a similar struggle in the Indian subcontinent. En route, I’ll explain the value of understanding Islamic and Hindu paradigms such as ❧ the mystical journey of the Simurg to Qaf Mountain, ❧ the shadow-theatre of Indonesia, and ❧ the ocean of the sea of stories.
🇺🇳