Crisis 22

Preface

Aim & Method - Nine Novels - Six Sections - Literature & Politics - Apples of Discord - Changing Course - Politics & Literature - Coffee in St. Pete’s

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Aim & Method

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 glide bombs do their worst; ❧ from 19th century novels set in rural Russia, to 20th century novels set in the Soviet Union and Asia; and ❧ 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.

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Nine Novels

The heart of this project lies in my look at nine specific novels. While I do use poetry and drama extensively, I tend to focus on novels because they create miniature worlds that we can experience (albeit vicariously) in considerable psychological and sociological detail. Novels tend to give a more detailed and personalized take on history and politics, and they can also contain moments of intense poetry and drama.

In section 3.Cunning Plans, I use Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, and The Master and Margarita to peer into Russian culture and politics. These novels help to identify the internal flaws in Putin’s logic: he presents himself as a champion of Russian culture, tradition, identity, freedom, and morality, yet he perpetuates the same old czarist authoritarian muddle and the same old Soviet repression that we see lampooned and excoriated in the novels of Gogol and Bulgakov. This is the same authoritarianism that sent Dostoyevsky to a prison camp for a mock execution, and the same that censored Bulgakov at every turn — and yet forbade him to leave Russia and write freely in the West. Edythe Haber says this about 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)

While Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, and The Master and Margarita help us see into Russia, the other novels deal with recent problems related to the Global South. Section 3. Puppet Masters and section 4. Fearless Leaders may seem like geographical and cultural deviations from the Ukraine War, yet they apply because Putin is attempting to co-opt the Global South. These particular novels — Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously, Greene’s The Quiet American, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Haroun — can be particularly helpful in countering the Kremlin’s claim that it champions the Global South against the Evil West. In addition, the novels of Koch and Rushdie supply us with paradigms — the Indonesian shadow theatre, the Sufi conference of birds, and the Hindu ocean of stories — that give us insight into the cultural and religious background of the Global South, and also into ways of resisting repressive and authoritarian regimes like that of Putin.

I see each of these nine novels as a unified, contextualized world that we can use to understand our own world. Each one gives us an artistic 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 a Russian brutality that might otherwise make us boil up in anger or break down in tears.

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Six Sections

Because this project is wide-ranging and somewhat unconventional, I start with a three-part introduction & overview: 🌗 With Open Eyes, 🌘 Gogol & Co., and 🌒 Down South. These three pages give brief overviews of all the pages, and also explain how they fit into my overall plan.

The six main sections are as follows:

1. A Literary Premise illustrates the way that literature can be used to see into personal, social, cultural, and political aspects of the Ukraine Crisis. While I focus mostly on literary texts, it’s important to note that the role of literary language is very very wide. It can be seen even in the words used at the highest level of international politics. Here, for instance, the Ukrainian representative at the Security Council (on October 31, 2024), turns the otherwise common metaphor of crossing a red line into an extended metaphor which has great visual and emotional impact:

We have heard now and then that Russia would never cross this or that red line of the civilized world. But open your eyes: Russia is not crossing your red lines. Russia is walking down a red carpet, a carpet woven from weak responses, unfounded hopes, and complacency. In truth, it is not even a red carpet, but a river of blood, one that began flowing the moment that Russia was given the Soviet seat in this chamber in 1991. Do I need to remind anyone whose blood flows in this river?

Taking this metaphor of a river of blood in a different direction, literature can be seen in terms of multiple river currents which feed the ocean and which are fused with other stories in the currents of the ocean. Rushdie uses this extended metaphor in his 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in which he explicitly borrows from the sea of stories Somadeva writes about in 11th century Kashmir. True to the spirit of Somadeva, Rushdie then takes this Hindu metaphor and fuses it with Attar’s Sufi metaphor about a flight of birds toward God.

Literature, like history, contains many types of currents: epic and common, sacred and profane, peaceful and unitary, violent and divisive. Among the violent and divisive currents we find the long, far too long history of the rivers of blood — from the warring city-states of early Mesopotamia to the present massacres in Bucha and Mariupol. Literature can freely explore all of these currents, good and bad, then and now, because literature doesn’t crown any one metaphor as the river or the last straw, or the final red line. Atrocities run left and right — German blitzkrieg toward Moscow, American bombers over the jungles of South-east Asia, tanks moving in a line toward Kiev, 500 kilogram glide-bombs coursing down the air to a Ukrainian power station, etcetera.

In his Kathāsaritsāgara or Ocean of the Streams of Stories, Somadeva brings together a staggering number of stories. The typical Hindu notion is that these stories have been mixed from the past and can be remixed in the future. As such, the ocean of stories offers a vision of proliferative narration, one that contrasts with the rather tight canal of history that is attempted in the Bible. Yet the biblical attempt to shepherd Middle Eastern water is rendered difficult by the tributaries and underground springs of earlier narratives — the flood & ark story of Gilgamesh, the One God and His evil nemesis of Zoroastrianism, the afterlife journey of Egyptian religion, etc.

The canal of Judaism also branches out into new canals, rivers, lakes, deltas, and finally the ocean — in the run-offs of Christianity and Islam, and the further run-offs of Sunni, Shia, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, as well as the ubiquitous waterways of ecumenicalism, comparative religion, and any type of mysticism that contemplates the global nature of water, from the eucharist of a Jesuit priest in the Amazon to the underground, invisible river of Saraswati, Goddess of Writing and the Arts. And then there’s Laozi’s watery God who gives the water of life and asks nothing in return. And then there’s Heraclitus, never stepping into the same river twice.

Just as religious narrative has many sources and many directions of flow, so too has social and political narrative. In today’s polarized world — where algorithms give us incredible volumes of information but also tend to shepherd us into political bubbles — literature offers an extension, an exit door, a run-off stream leading us further afield, to different perspectives and different paradigms.

The one thing literature insists upon, however, is freedom of expression. This means the freedom to read and access information of all kinds, as well as the freedom to write, speak, and participate in the management of an open, free society. Literature is a borderless merging of disciplines and perspectives that requires the freedom to delve into any topic, including politics, global conflict, and war.

This is perhaps the crux of the issue: Putin is corralling the thought of his population, and stopping writers, reporters and politicians from offering alternative streams of thought. His beliefs are the only accepted beliefs, and he believes that the Dnipro should be a Little Russia or a river of blood.

2. Waking Up looks at how the 2022 invasion came to Westerners as a shock, especially after having spent our peace dividend on fantasies of comfort and art. I also look at how we might cope psychologically with a crisis that has shaken the world and that has the potential to destroy the world as we know it.

3. Cunning Plans uses Gogol’s Dead Souls and other Russian literature to look at Putin’s actions in light of cultural and political morality. Like Gogol’s Chichikov and Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Putin commits a primal error — in this case a primal sin of international law. Yet unlike the other two Russian characters, Putin doesn’t repent. Rather, he doubles down, making apple sauce from forbidden fruit.

4. Puppet Masters uses the Indonesian puppet theatre and other non-European paradigms to compare the Cold War and the present Hot War. Both the novel and the film version of The Year of Living Dangerously present us with a new, foreign way of looking at Indonesian politics in 1965 — yet it’s also a very old way, going back over 2,000 years to the Indian epics, and to the words of Krishna to Arjuna about placing duty and morality above blood relations. I’ll also use Rushdie’s postcolonial novels to round out my argument against Putin’s vision of colonialism and history.

5. Fearless Leaders argues against Putin’s vision of internationalism and the Global South. While the Russian president acts like an imperial czar against any internal dissent, and like a colonial overlord against his neighbours, he uses the rhetoric of an anti-colonial leader like Sukarno. Those who are intensely bitter about the West may get sucked into Putin’s argument. Yet those who realize that the West — unlike Putin — has generally moved on from colonialism are not so easily fooled.

6. Coda presents several short creative pieces which hint at worst-case scenarios, from slaughter to apocalypse.

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Literature & Politics

Throughout Crisis 22 I stress literature, yet I don’t downplay politics. 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: who’s to blame for the present crisis, and how I see the relation between politics and literature.

Who’s 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.

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Apples of Discord

An example of how literature can do this can be seen in the final two verses of the 2007 lyric “The Long Road Out of Eden” by the Eagles. In a powerful, ambiguous, universalized response to the Iraq War, the Eagles get at the core of the problem:

I can imagine at least two reworkings of what one might call the primal political sin of massive violence, an evil that the US and Russia have engaged in at the most dangerous levels over the last hundred years. Lately, the Russians are engaging up to their eyeballs with their threats of using tactical nukes against Ukraine and conventional nukes against the West. The first reworking is directed (more specifically than in the original) at the US: 

The second is directed at Russia:

And yet the final verse is the same for both:

Both the US and Russia have bitten deep into the apple of warfare technology. They continue to develop their nuclear arsenals, and Russia repeatedly unnerves the world with the possibility of their actual use. Meanwhile, much of the world tries to stay out of the nuclear club, and nations like Iran and North Korea strive to become members.

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Changing Course

In all the versions of “Long Road Out of Eden” that I imagine, Damascus stays the same. Damascus is of course the Lebanese city we know today, vexed amid the present nightmare of the Middle East, with the Russian airstrikes in Syria, the Hamas slaughter of Israelis dancing in the desert, the Iranian missiles exploding overhead, the Israeli bombings and assassinations, the needless suffering in Ghaza, etc. Yet the road to Damascus has also symbolized something very specific for the last two thousand years: Saint Paul’s change of heart from persecuting to embracing Christians. In general, the road to Damascus symbolizes a change of heart leading to a change of course.

I don’t know if Putin can ever change course, but what of the other Russians? And what of the other players in this dangerous nuclear game — the Americans, British, French, & Chinese — when will they look up into the sky? When will they look deeply into the wide blue human sky above us, with notes of birds and the sweet smell of nectar and the west wind, and see beyond it the endless black night in which we spin?

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Politics & Literature

“Long Road Out of Eden” is a great example of literary language used in a popular and political mode. It’s very much in line with my notion that literature isn’t just an aesthetic or elite activity. Personally, I don't see literature in terms of 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 often-fraught 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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Coffee in St. Pete’s

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 define 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. What on earth possesses Russia to go to war in this way? In 💥 Exceptional Violence I look into this question, as I do in ✊ Fearless Leader of the Global South, 🇺🇦 Golden Bridges, and 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism. I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer to this question. For this reason I call Crisis 22 a project and an exploration. It’s an attempt to explore some of the complexities involved, and to edge toward an understanding of what’s going on.

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Next: 🌗 With Open Eyes

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