Crisis 22
Coffee in St. Pete’s
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I stress literature throughout this project, yet I don’t downplay the political dimensions. Indeed, most of the literature I look at has a strong political element. Even literature that doesn’t seem to focus on politics, such as Gogol’s Dead Souls, I use to a political end: the scam at the heart of Gogol’s famous novel has many parallels to the scam of Putin’s “special military operation.”
Given the complicated points of view I explore, and given the complex nature of the fiction I use to explore these views, I should make it clear from the start where I stand in regard to the following: A. who is to blame for the present crisis, B. how I see the relation between politics and literature, and C. how I see the present global struggle between Russia and the U.S.
A. Who is to blame? While I think the West should acknowledge the big mistakes it's made in the past — for instance, slavery, colonialism, and the wide-scale bombing of Indo-China — I don't believe that the West is responsible for the present war. Russia is clearly to blame for its full-scale attack on Ukraine and for its continued brutality against its army, infrastructure, and civilians — just as the Americans are fully to blame for their brutal bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I don’t spend much time debating whether or not Russia is using massive violence in an imperial and colonial manner because to me that seems rather obvious — as obvious as a B-2 bomber over North Vietnam in 1972. I look to organizations such as the International Criminal Court to tally the exact distance Putin has gone down the path of genocidal destruction. My focus is more on the way we might think and feel about the violence, and how we might come to a deeper, wider understanding of this dreadful situation.
B. The relation of politics to literature. I don't see literature in exclusively aesthetic terms, as in art for art's sake, nor in terms of a necessary political engagement (as in Orwell’s brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four). Literature can be detached, engaged, or something in between. Personally, I’m most interested in writers like Romain Gary, Graham Greene, Albert Camus, Mikhail Bulgakov, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Koch. These writers use literature to explore our geographical, historical, & political situations, yet also to delve deep into our psychological and aesthetic experiences, our philosophical and religious beliefs, and our sense of who and what we are.
For instance, in condemning the war waged by the West Pakistani generals against East Pakistan in the 1971 civil war, Rushdie in Midnight’s Children has his protagonist Saleem take on the persona of a dog, literally barking Yessir! to the orders of the generals. He wags his tale as they slaughter Bengalis, after which he flees into the jungle to escape the horrors to which he’s numbly acquiesced. In entering the Sundarbans Jungle, Saleem enters a Heart of Darkness afterlife that turns his self into a haunted shadow. His sister Jamila, a ghazal singer of renown, is also co-opted by the West Pakistani Army, this time to sing patriotic war songs. Prior to her singing for the generals, Jamila’s voice resembled that of thirty birds warbling their way into mystical infinity — as per Attar’s Sufi paradigm in The Conference of the Birds (1177). Now Jamila joins her brother in urging Pakistanis into the trenches of death. In depicting the trajectory of these two characters, Rushdie doesn’t just condemn the surface destruction of war: he also suggests that war destroys the cultural and religious beauty of the society that wages it. War turns us from citizens who think for ourselves into dogs who follow their masters into Hell. It turns us from birds who sing of freedom and love into propagandists who urge our brothers to kill each other.
Like Rushdie, Koch, Greene, and Bulgakov, I see politics and history as liable to deep literary treatment. This is the direction I take in my book Stranger Gods (2001), in which I analyze the way Rushdie uses myth & mysticism to make political arguments for communal tolerance and liberal democracy (communalism in the Indian context refers to the relations between Hindus and Muslims). Rushdie’s arguments almost always have a political point, yet his methodology is literary, and much of the interest we find in his writing comes from his creative exploration of psychology & the strangeness of the human mind, sociology & the tension between individuals and within groups, culture & the way it determines our beliefs and actions, history & how to overcome the burdens of the past, and religion & the difficulty of belief.
For me, a playwright or novelist creates a world and a view of the world. The difference between Putin and a literary artist here is that the writer sees his view of the world as a view. His novel is a world, not the world. Putin on the other hand thinks his view of the world is the view of the world, that is, the right view of the world, the view that others must adopt — especially Ukrainians! Novelist, poets, and other artists present us with alternative views, ones that aren’t structured along platforms, action lists, or defined principles, but rather along the diversity and ambiguity of experience, be it the experience of thinking or feeling, coming together or falling apart, loving or hating, losing or winning, etc.
I find literature gives holistic perspectives that are hard to find elsewhere. As a result, it’s helpful in understanding intricate and complex political situations like the Cold War or the Ukraine Crisis. These situations are deeply rooted in personal experience & social interaction, identity & culture, geography & history, rhetoric & narrative, media & drama, philosophy & idealism, myth & religion, etc. Literature takes in this wide range of life, yet it brings together more than it scatters. It takes the chaotic diversity of life into its fiery depths, and forges a coherent work of unity and meaning — even if that meaning is as ambiguous or open-ended as life itself. It’s this type of wide understanding that I hope to bring to the Russian invasion and to the global situation it’s created.
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Because my contribution is along the general lines of literature, I quote Gogol and Bulgakov more than Zelensky and Lavrov. Yet while I can interpret specific novels by Gogol and Bulgakov, I don’t claim any expertise in Russian culture or literature. In 2005 I spent a week in Moscow and three weeks in St. Petersburg, the hometown of both Dostoevsky and Putin. Yet playing Dostoevsky’s criminal Raskolnikov (about to open the apartment door and commit my terrible crime) doesn’t give me any special insight into what some call the Russian soul. Nor does sitting in a coffee shop reading The Petersburg Times — even if a shot of vodka comes with the coffee.
I’ve read some Russian novels and travelled a bit in the country (see ✈️ Dream Vacation 2005), but I don’t speak the language and I can’t pretend to fathom the way Russians think or feel.
Indeed, Crisis 22 is in part an attempt to come to terms with a way of thinking that turns political disagreement into cluster munitions and FAB-3000 glide bombs (FAB = Fugasnaya Avia Bomba = high explosive aerial bombs). These 3-tonne ‘fab’ bombs are anything but fabulous. They’re both devastating and very difficult to stop, and Russia’s been dropping them on Ukraine since June 2024 (I’m writing this introductory page in August, 2024). A July 19, 2024 article in The Foundation for Defence of Democracies estimates that Russia is dropping about 3500 FAB-3000s per month. Each bomb contains 1400 kilograms of explosives.
What on earth possesses a people to go to war in this way?
Next: 💥 Exceptional Violence