Crisis 22
Literature and Subversion
The Integrated Threat - Exceptionalism - Changing Course: From Gogol to Bulgakov
The Integrated Threat
As I noted on my introductory page, literature dips into multiple disciplines and fields. It also explores an enormous variety of mixed and ambiguous scenarios, involving such things as chaos & order, blindness & insight, sense & sensibility, war & peace, tyranny & freedom, love & hate, etc. Literature may be scattered in this way, yet it almost always brings things together in an insightful work of art, whether this be in the condensed form of a poem or a short story, or in the more expanded odysseys of long poems, plays, and novels. While literature isn’t always susceptible to a summary or thesis, it almost always contains within it a perspective, or a configuration of perspectives, which says something to us, gives us some insight, or provokes us in some way to think harder and deeper about a topic.
Because literature is so deeply entwined in the complexity of life, it’s difficult for authoritarian regimes to forbid it, especially if these regimes pretend to promote freedom and equality, as the Kremlin does. Forbidding literature is in this case tantamount to forbidden citizens from expressing the state in which they live. It’s for this reason that writers are essential politically. One might even say that the more writers are intimidated and repressed, the more they’re essential.
We can see this in Gogol’s Russia of almost 200 years ago. Isaiah Berlin notes that literature was the only way to have an open debate about the complex issues that people wanted to explore, yet the government wanted them to ignore:
The mounting repression made literature the only medium within which any degree of free discussion of social questions could take place. Indeed the great controversy between Slavophils and 'Westerners', between the view of Russia as a still uncorrupted spiritual and social organism, bound by impalpable links of common love, natural piety and reverence for authority, to which the application of artificial, 'soulless' Western forms and institutions had done, and would do, fearful damage; and, on the other hand, the view of it held by the 'Westerners' as a retarded semi-Asiatic despotism lacking even the rudiments of social justice and individual liberty — this crucial debate, which split educated Russians in the nineteenth century, was carried on principally in the semi-disguise of literary and philosophical argument. The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some justice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue as in itself a menace to the regime. Nevertheless the effective techniques of suppression, as we know them now, had not as yet been invented; and the half-clandestine controversy continued, […]
Berlin’s paragraph gets at a few notions that are relevant to the present crisis: the same dynamic exists today in which Russians are looked down on because of their lack of “social justice and individual liberty”; and the same response is made by Slavophiles like Putin who promote a counter-vision of their country, insisting that it’s full of piety, love, soul, and “reverence for authority.”
The tendency of this authority to repress is common to czarist, Soviet, and present Russia. Berlin notes that in Gogol’s day the government didn’t have effective ways to repress freedom of thought and expression. It resorted to sending people like Dostoevsky to the Gulag for reading Belinksy’s letter to Gogol (I looked at this letter on the previous page). Yet during the Soviet Union, Stalin was starting to get the hang of it: he reserved the icy north for hard cases, expanded the internal State spy apparatus, and managed to keep writers like Bulgakov in Moscow. Today, Putin does a different version of The Repression Act: he locks up anyone who publicly disagrees with him, he forbids the use of the word “war,” and he sends incorrigibles like Navalny to the icy north — all the while carrying on opponentless elections and keeping up the pretence of a free and open society.
Today Russians may be free to read the critiques of Gogol and Bulgakov and make up their own minds, yet the Kremlin controls the more recent modes of communication, especially the TV programming and the Internet. For instance, it’s presently slowing down Youtube and hopes to ban it later this year (see this video from mid-July 2024). As a result of this control, literature may more and more become one of the few forms of free thought in Russia.
Writers like Gogol and Bulgakov put regimes in a bind: the regime can’t ban them, given that they’re part of Russian cultural greatness — perhaps even an essential part of the Russian soul… — and yet the regime can’t be enthusiastic about them either, because they critique the authoritarianism that keeps them in power.
What the authorities weren’t enthusiastic about in Gogol’s day seems to be about the same thing as what they’re not enthusiastic about today. In the passage I quoted above about the literary situation in Gogol’s day, Berlin wrote, “The authorities viewed neither side with favour, and, with some justice, regarded public discussion of any serious issue as in itself a menace to the regime.” Berlin also gives us an example of how literature, even about fairly ordinary people, can be a threat. Turgenev’s protagonist Rudin (from the novel Rudin, 1857) is a well-educated, well-intentioned, yet ultimately ineffectual type. And yet he is a conduit for negative feelings about Russian government and institutions, and for the way the regime’s dehumanizing brutality is covered up by vague mystical words about the country’s traditional, deep, nationalistic “spiritual beauty”:
[I suggest replacing Rudin with The thinking Russian today.]
[Rudin] is a radical not in the sense that he holds clear intellectual or moral-political views, but because he is filled with a vague but bitter hostility towards the government of his country, the grey, brutish soldiers, the dull, dishonest, and frightened officials, the illiterate, superstitious, and sycophantic priests; with a deep distaste for the peculiar mixture, compounded of fear, greed and a dislike of everything new or connected with the forces of life, which formed the prevailing Russian atmosphere. He is in full reaction against the queer variety of cynical resignation which accepted the starved and semi-barbarous condition of the serfs and the deathly stagnation of provincial Russian society as something not merely natural, but possessing a deep, traditional value, almost a kind of spiritual beauty, the object of a peculiar, nationalist, quasi-religious mystique of its own.
Exceptionalism
Gogol, Belinsky, and Turgenev help us to see that Putin’s talk about Russians being uniquely special — neither European nor Asian, but still somehow more profoundly and agonizingly spiritual — is just more nonsense and poppycock. Nations may be unique but not exceptional, just as Gogol is a unique writer yet not one who has a key to a unique soul that only Russians can sound. It seems far more reasonable to say that Gogol is part of a global and European line of writers who satirize humanity and its insane systems. And in this context, Kafka, Orwell, and Bulgakov are three of Gogol’s finest heirs.
Unfortunately, Russia isn’t alone in positing a unique or exceptional nature. Most peoples think of themselves as unique, yet some, like the Americans and Chinese, believe that their uniqueness allows them to exert exceptional control over other nations. Yet what might make Russia even more obdurate in this regard is that they not only claim that they’re geopolitically special but that they’re also spiritually or psychologically special.
The Russian soul is about as special, in terms of both essentialism and epistemology, as Putin’s special military operation. Likewise, Russian presumption to control a sphere of influence may be called exceptionalism, and it’s as suspect as the American take on that concept (as I argue in 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism). As a Canadian, surrounded on three sides by the long borders of the US and the former USSR, I can’t see any value in the notions of being spiritually special or politically exceptional. To me, the former is just a way of pretending to be culturally superior, and the latter is just a way to do whatever you want and then put yourself above institutions such as the International Criminal Court.
Just as Americans might have changed course in 1965 and 2003, so the Russians might change course now. Yet as the Eagles note in their song, “Long Road Out of Eden” (2007), to change course — like Paul ont he road to Damascus — is a difficult thing to do when your destination is Empire:
And it's a long road out of Eden
Changing Course: From Gogol to Bulgakov
The desire to repent and reform is a common virtue found in Gogol and Dostoevsky, however much we might dispute the exceptional nature of the Russian soul they seem to believe in. I’d argue that their belief in such a soul doesn’t matter much in the end. An irony about great writers such as Gogol and Dostoevsky is that they can believe in such airy things as the Russian soul, just as Shelley might believe in a Neoplatonic One or T.S. Eliot might believe in the Cross. In all cases, the power, the great universality of their writing, turns on their particular beliefs and insists that their visions aren’t nearly as exclusive, as clearly well-defined as they thought.
In his Introduction to Dead Souls, Maguire writes, “Dostoevsky owes the greatest debt to Gogol, with his pictures of St Petersburg life, the Russian provinces and the quirks and derangements of his characters.” Dostoevsky isn’t the only one. For the question of greatest debt is vexed by the line of history, which never starts in one place. We may all have only one mother, but writers have dozens of fathers, and it’s sometimes hard to say which one should step into the maternity ward. Before Gogol was Balzac, Goethe, Byron, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Cervantes, etc.; after him is Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc.
Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Gogol’s depiction of Russian “quirks and derangements” is Mikhail Bulgakov, especially in his biting Soviet-era satire The Master and Margarita (1928-40). I refer to this novel on numerous occasions, for at least two reasons. First, it illustrates that in between the imperial czarist system and the present imperial FSB system the Russian people had to suffer another expansionist authoritarian system: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Even more than the czarist and present systems, the Soviet system offered little in terms of democracy, liberalism, or freedom of expression. And yet it — like the Kremlin now — pretended to offer the world a new order, a liberation from the evil clutches of the capitalist West. The Russian people lived for 65-odd years under the Soviet system, which may help to explain why they don’t hold their government to account when writers, journalists, and opposition leaders fall out of windows or — like Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and Navalny — are sent to prisons in the frozen north.
Second, Bulgakov’s novel gives us further insight into the madness and schizophrenia that tyrannical systems foster in individuals — a madness so thick that only the Devil himself might penetrate it. And this is exactly what happens in The Master and Margarita: the Devil (Woland) descends on Moscow to wreak havoc on hypocrites and literary bureaucrats (who represent Soviet repression) and to rewrite history (he goes so far as to write two chapters of the novel, in which Christ and Pilate are reconciled). Woland also contradicts the official atheist doctrine of the Soviet State: after a Stalinist poet insists that Christ is a baseless myth, Woland shows up (contradicting the notion that God and the Devil are myths) and then tells the poet that he’ll soon die. The poet’s head is then sliced off by a tram wheel and rolls across the street.
The novel also contains elements of a vague redemption, one that is much more Romantic or rebellious than the conventional one that Gogol had planned for Part II of Dead Souls. Gogol never succeeded in achieving his aim here: the second half of the novel is unfinished and is far weaker than the first. It’s not easy turning selfish beasts like Chichikov into angels, as Bulgakov’s Woland knows all too well. Many consider that it would have been far more aesthetically and structurally satisfying if Gogol had ended his novel with Chichikov’s carriage flying into the unknown.
Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!
It’s hard to say if the redemption of Chichikov would have ended up being more like that of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment or more like that of Pilate in The Master and Margarita. It’s easier to say that his redemption, like that of Putin, is yet to appear on the Russian horizon.
Next: 💰 Selling the Scheme (in progress)
🎭 3. Puppet Masters: Behind the Scenes