Crisis 22

Preface: Nine Novels

From Moscow to Jakarta - Pushkin’s Brethren - The Global South - War: Poems & Novels

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From Moscow to Jakarta

Crisis 22 explores the Ukraine War from a wide range of angles: ❧ from the shock of it while dreaming of Cuban beaches, to the reality of it while watching Russian glide bombs do their worst; ❧ from epic war poetry to contemporary anti-war songs ❧ from novels set in rural 19th century Russia to postcolonial novels set in Vietnam, India, and Indonesia; ❧ from definite moments in time, to less definite tenses of poetry, religion, and art.

This project highlights literature, which is particularly effective in ❧ exploring history & culture, ❧ understanding foreign perspectives, ❧ making arguments about freedom & democracy, and ❧ fostering critical distance & a sense of humour — both of which are in short supply in a crisis as partisan and grim as the present one.

The heart of this project lies in my look at nine novels. While I use poetry and drama on numerous occasions, I tend to focus on novels because they create miniature worlds that we can experience in psychological and sociological detail — albeit vicariously. Novels can give us a detailed, realistic, personal take on history and politics, and they can also contain moments of intense poetry and drama.

This map locates some of the novels I use, from Moscow to Jakarta:

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Pushkin’s Brethren

Throughout this project, I peer into Russian culture and politics through the lens of three Russian novels: Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (completed by the time of his death in 1940, published posthumously in 1967, and published without censored parts in 1969). I’ll use these novels to argue that there are deep flaws in Putin’s claims. The Russian president sees himself as a champion of Russian tradition, identity, and morality. And in the worst of senses this is true: he’s created a new version of the czarist state we read about in Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky, with the same old nationalistic imperialism and the same old secretive and elite control over the masses. He’s also created a new version of the Soviet regime we read about in Bulgakov, with its ❧ elitism, ❧ pig-headed superiority, ❧ secrecy, ❧ repression, ❧ and imperialistic control from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and the Pacific. This control is more colonial than neocolonial, since it involves direct control over land, not just overwhelming economic influence. The Kremlin’s control also comes with a bizarre claim to be liberating the world from the control of the West.

The Kremlin displays an authoritarianism that’s similar to the czarist one that forbade Pushkin from travelling abroad and that sent Dostoyevsky to a prison camp for a mock execution. It’s also similar to the illiberal Soviet repression that censored Bulgakov at every turn, forbidding him to leave Soviet Russia and write freely in the West. Edythe Haber says this about Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita:

"It’s a very complicated novel, and people get what they want out of it. […] One thing that Putin and the people of present-day Russia support is the Christianity that was attacked during the communist period. Those people who are very pro-church pick that out, whereas most readers look at the anti-authoritarianism of it." Haber says that after all the years of repression, Bulgakov's work is now out in the world, and no amount of censorship can ever put it back. (From NPR, January 21, 2015)

In using Russian writers, I don’t mean to imply that they would necessarily disagree with the Kremlin (although Bulgakov would), especially in its aim to enlarge the boundaries of Russia. Indeed, Russian literature is in general notoriously nationalistic. It doesn’t have the same type of open, powerful, anti-colonial bent we find in England with writers like Swift, Blake, Byron, Orwell, Forster, and Rushdie. It’s difficult to say what the Russians would have written if they were free to write what they wanted to write. Unlike in Russia, in England literary arguments against censorship are time-honoured and deep. They go back to Chaucer’s 14th century Prologue to the Miller’s Tale, to Milton’s 17th century Areopagitica, and to John Stuart Mill’s 19th century On Liberty. These arguments are deeply rooted in traditions of evolving liberalism and democracy, trends which find few parallels in Russia. Notwithstanding all of this, we can still learn a great deal about Russia and about the way Russians think and feel by reading their finest writers.

In cases where we imagine that great Russian writers would agree with the present thinking of the Kremlin, referring to them helps us get at certain ways of thinking, and at certain cultural and historical patterns. For instance, in his 1836 “Journey to Arzrum,” the father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, makes remarks about Circassians which betray the type of deep colonial brutality and superiority we see in European colonialists from the 16th to the 19th century.

The Circassians are an ancient people who were largely decimated by Russia. Their descendants now live mostly in the hills of the Caucasus, north and east of Abkhazia (which Russia recently wrested from Georgia):

Pushkin’s attitude toward the Circassians isn’t far from that of many European colonizers from Congo to Peru. And the result is the same: the local population ends up hating Europeans.

The Circassians hate us. We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out. They withdraw further and further into the mountains and from there carry out their raids. The friendship of the peaceful Circassians is unreliable; they are always ready to help their violent fellow tribesmen. The spirit of their wild chivalry has noticeably declined. They rarely attack an equal number of Cossacks, never the foot soldiers, and they run away at the sight of a cannon. But they never miss a chance to attack a weaker troop or a defenseless man. The country roundabout is full of rumors of their villainies. There is almost no way to subdue them, so long as they are not disarmed, as the Crimean Tatars were, which is very hard to accomplish on account of the hereditary feuds and blood vengeance that reign among them. Dagger and saber are parts of their body, and a baby begins to wield them sooner than he can prattle. Among them killing is a simple body movement. They keep prisoners in hope of ransom, but they treat them with terrible inhumanity, force them to work beyond their strength, feed them raw dough, beat them whenever they like, and have them guarded by their young boys, who at one word have the right to cut them up with their children's sabers. A peaceful Circassian who had shot at a soldier was recently captured. He justified it by the fact that his rifle had stayed loaded for too long. What to do with such people? It is to be hoped, however, that if we acquire the region east of the Black Sea, cutting the Circassians off from their trade with Turkey, that will force them to become friendlier to us. The influence of luxury could contribute to their taming: the samovar would be an important innovation. There is a means that is stronger, more moral, more consistent with the enlightenment of our age: the preaching of the Gospel.

In general, since World War II the West has distanced itself from such attitudes. Russia calls the West colonialist, yet the colonial things Russians did in the Caucasus and the colonial things the West did in places like the Congo, the Caribbean, Burma, and Peru, the Russians continue to do today, whether in Chechnya or Ukraine. In the absence of a Bartolomé de las Casas (whose 1542 Relación details the atrocities of the conquistadors) and in the absence of powerful anti-colonial writers — like Twain in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905) and Orwell in Burmese Days (1934) — we might look instead at Russian writers who witnessed Russian colonialism yet didn’t condemn it. Pushkin’s paragraph above is a case in point.

Seeing how a colonial mentality lingers today in the minds of the Kremlin leaders, we might substitute Ukrainians for Circassians, and put Pushkin’s words into the mouths of a Kremlin spokesperson:

The Ukrainians hate us. We have forced them out of their open grazing lands; their auls have been devastated, whole tribes have been wiped out. […] There is almost no way to subdue them, so long as they are not disarmed [. …] It is to be hoped, however, that if we acquire the region east of the Black Sea, cutting the Ukrainians off from their trade with Turkey, that will force them to become friendlier to us.

The realistic words at the beginning of the paragraph predict the failure of the idealistic words expressed at the end. How can Russians bomb infrastructure and hospitals, and then expect Ukrainians to be friendly to them? Russian leaders may have their reasons for doing what they’re doing — solidarity with Russian-leaning people in the Donbas, fear of NATO, the example of Kosovo, all of which I will look at in later pages — yet none of these reasons justify their use of extreme and prolonged violence. And none of this violence will make Ukrainians feel friendly toward them.

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The Global South

While Russian writers help us see into Russian systems and mentalities, the other six writers I look at help us see into problems related to Russia’s claim to be a champion of “the Global South.” Two of the later sections (Puppet Masters and Fearless Leaders) may seem like deviations in time and space from the Ukraine War, yet they give crucial context to the bizarre spectacle in which the Kremlin presents itself as a champion of The Global South against The Evil West. A close look at the six novels will help us see how this may sometimes have been the case during the Cold War — if you were Vietnamese or Cuban, not Estonian or Czech — but today it’s more a matter of rhetoric than realism.

The Kremlin argues that it’s liberating Ukraine, yet it’s not hard to see through this rhetoric. Like General Westmoreland and George W. Bush, who ripped apart Vietnam and Iraq, the Kremlin is ripping apart Ukraine. Yet somehow they all manage to justify their use of violence.

I don’t mean to equate what the Americans did in Vietnam and Iraq with what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. What the Americans did was extreme and in my opinion unjustified, yet it wasn’t colonial. By this I mean that the Americans didn’t try to take over the two countries and run them like their colonial possessions. And only in a vague sense can we say that they wanted Vietnam or Iraq to be a part of an enduring Empire.

The violence in Vietnam was more lethal (three million Vietnamese deaths) and in Iraq it led to a comparable amount of internal division (it unleashed the Sunni/Shia tensions and it allowed for the rise of ISIS). Yet the U.S. didn’t aim to take over the lands and run them, like the Spanish did in Mexico starting in the early 16th century, or like the British did in the Indian subcontinent from 1600 to 1947. Or — and this is my point — like the Russians have done all the way from Ukraine to Kamchatka, and all the way from the 16th century to 2024.

The Russians may have allowed the Soviet Union to split up in the 1990s, yet the Kremlin soon reverted to their old colonial aims and strong-arm tactics, first in Chechnya, then in Georgia and Ukraine. Because of their colonial expansionism, combined with the fact that they’re expanding into a country that 1. borders Europe and 2. wants to be a part of Europe, what the Russians are doing is far more dangerous to global peace and survival than what the Americans did in either Vietnam or Iraq. Their invasion directly infringes on the international, Western, United Nations value of self-determination, although according to the Russian leaders it’s the West who have infringed on their inherent right to control Ukraine. Yet seen in the light of colonial history, this supposed right is a misguided colonial privilege and abuse.

I spell this out because I want to clarify my position from the start, and distinguish my political view from my overall aim, which isn’t to apportion blame but to use literature as a lens to see into the geopolitical, personal, and cultural aspects of the present crisis.

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War: Poems & Novels

While the death of young men in battle may be accepted by the Kremlin as an inevitable price, there’s a long literary tradition that argues that this price is too high. Even in the Greek epic story about the Battle of Troy, where the glory of battle is a prevalent theme, a deep critique of war is there too. This starts when Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter so that the Greek ships will sail swiftly to Troy. It ends when Achilles drags Prince Hector’s dead body all over the battle field, after which King Priam comes to Achilles secretly. The two enemies then lament the division, destruction, and futility of war.

One of the most moving instances of the combination of poetry & war is the case of Wilfred Owen. A World War I English poet, Owen wrote about the horror of combat, after which he died in battle a week before Armistice. Owen argues, skillfully, within the rhythm and rhyme of poetry, that we shouldn’t teach our children “the old lie” — that is, the idea that battle is a glorious affair. In his 1918 poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Owen refuses to finish Horace’s Latin phrase, dulce et decorum est (“sweet and proper it is”) until the end his poem, after he has shown how bitter and unfitting war is for the soldier in battle. At the end of the poem the phrase Dulce et decorum est / pro patria mori (“sweet and proper it is / to die for your country”) is preceded by three words: “the old lie.”

Owen’s less-famous poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), might be seen as the next stage in this grim process: the funeral. Owen’s dark and poetic vision of the soldier’s funeral isn’t pervaded by a glorious notion of afterlife. Such a notion is for him as illusory and self-serving as Spenser’s claim to write the name of his mistress in the heavens (in his sonnet cycle Amoretti Spenser tells his mistress, “My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, / And in the heavens write your glorious name”). Instead of seeing soothing candles and hearing heavenly music, the attendees at the soldier’s funeral hear “the monstrous anger of the guns.” That is, they hear the very things that their brothers and sons heard before being blasted to death.

Graham Greene gets at the horror of war in a much more intimate way in his 1955 novel The Quiet American. Coming upon a dead Vietnamese mother and child, he writes:

They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up. ‘Mal chance,’ the lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’

Like Greene’s The Quiet American, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five helps us see the present Ukraine crisis within the framework of ❧ the insanity of war, ❧ the brutality of aerial bombardment, and ❧ the geopolitics of the Cold War. Vonnegut understood the logic of fighting Hitler and (later) the Soviets, yet his 1968 novel shows that he didn’t understand the demonization of the average German or Russian. In one moving scene, he has the POWs come up from the rubble of devastated Dresden, only to find that the only place they can eat or sleep is the inn of a normal, decent German family. The parallel to Mary and Joseph being given a place to sleep is subtle yet palpable. In an earlier scene, the protagonist Billy is wounded and doped up on morphine in a prison hospital. The prison has a barbed-wire fence dividing Western and Russian POWs.

[Billy] suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it, but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.

A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing — from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.

The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”

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Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories also deal with the rhetoric and insanity of war. In addition, they supply us with two paradigms, the Sufi conference of birds and the Hindu ocean of stories, both of which ❧ apply to geo-politics and ❧ give us insight into culture and religion in the Global South.

Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously does both of the above: it helps us see into the cultural and political situation of Cold War Indonesia in 1965 (which goes from simmering authoritarianism to apocalyptic violence), and it also supplies us with a southern paradigm, the Wayang shadow puppet theatre, which Indonesians use to explore and evaluate politics. Koch’s use of the Wayang can help us understand ❧ the larger context of the Cold War, ❧ the way Indonesians use religion and art to interpret politics, and ❧ the way puppetry and shadow worlds can help us to come to terms with the fact that much of what we try to understand — Who are the puppet-masters? How do they operate? What are their plans? — remains behind closed doors, beyond our sight-line, behind the screen.

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I see each of the nine novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an imaginative yet realistic 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.

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Next: 🍏 Introduction: Rivers & Apples

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