— I’ve seen this linked all over the place and finally got around to reading it: How the Freaky Octopus Can Help us Understand the Human Brain. I certainly don’t want to meet an octopus out in the wild but I am fascinated by them, and find them to be beautiful and interesting creatures.
— A piece like this is akin to crack for someone like me: Stalin’s Blue Pencil. I knew he was an editor. I knew he fancied himself a writer. This piece goes into his editorial decisions, and his political philosophy (what can be discerned of it anyway).
— A couple of links from my good friend Cara about her correspondence with the late Tom Clancy: RIP Tom Clancy and Remembering Tom Clancy.
— I have been devouring The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge, and frankly I cannot believe I have not read it before. Considering my fascination with all things 1930s-Soviet-Terror. What a novel. I am not done with it yet, about 40 pages to go. It’s a page-turner but in a truly awful way. Maybe I’ll have more to say about it when I finish it. I have commenter John Vail to thank for alerting me to it.
Dear Sheila,
Glad to hear that you’re enjoying Tulayev-it’s always especially gratifying to recommend a book you love to a reader like yourself who has such an incredible (and amazingly diverse) love of literature. my buddy Richard Greeman, who’s working on a biography of Serge (who had one of the truly interesting lives of the 20th century) and has translated many of his other novels- introduced me to the novel more than a decade ago. What impressed me at the time -and I really will have to re-read it again soon- was that the kaleidoscope of characters gave such a wonderful and moving account of the multiple pathways (as opposed to the singular focus of Koestler on a party official) by which individuals trapped in the period tried to find ways to survive and remain true to their ideals. I was in Mexico City on vacation in September and spent a lovely day going in and out of museums, government buildings, concert halls looking the the amazing murals of Rivera and others but one of the highlights were the ones painted by Serge’s son, Vlady, who had followed him into exile there. I look forward to reading your thoughts on the novel.
John – I can’t thank you enough! I finished the book the other night. It’s devastating. And yes: the multi-character approach is just amazing, revolutionary really. You see the Terror from all sides, not just the higher-up Party folks (like in Darkness at Noon) – but all sides. Makayev, I think his name is … I don’t know if I’ve ever read a better portrait of what it actually looked like and meant when you give an illiterate peasant a whole bunch of power. I mean, there it is – in that portrayal. It’s terrifying. Serge portrays him with a lot of sympathy, and you can see that it is the System he is criticizing, not the poor rubes who bought it hook, line and sinker. But he just nails the guys insecurity, the shallowness of his thinking, his silly stupid pride, and how when the axe falls he never even saw it coming because … how could he? He wasn’t smart enough to be one step ahead of events. He’s a dumbbell who was made to feel he was special by all that rhetoric. Shivers.
But there are so many great portraits. I was overwhelmed by the sheer massiveness of the bureaucracy – which is one of the things that always strikes me about Stalinism (and communism, too, let’s say). You go through a revolution to get yourselves free – and then what do you do? You create the most complex bureaucracy the world has ever seen where no one can make a move without getting 8 signatures, etc. etc. It’s AMAZING. Serge buries you in that paperwork.
And all of the glimpses of Stalin. The twinkly eyes, the friendly manner which fooled everyone, including world leaders. The “useful idiots” of the world. I think one of the most chilling moments though is when he is basically condemning one of his old friends/colleagues to exile – calling him a traitor, etc. – and the friend fights back in such a way that it somehow gets through … and so Stalin just re-assigns him to another post. That random benign-ness he could show is almost more scary because it makes the Terror have even LESS meaning. It just shows what an autocrat he really was, that the entire country was trapped according to his whim.
I’m still absorbing the book. It was incredible. Thank you so much! I am fascinated to hear about your friend doing the translations, and also about the portrait by Serge’s son! There’s a whole world for me to discover here. I want to read more of his novels.
Dear Sheila,
Now you’ve got me keen to read it again (as soon as I finish Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens which I just started and am enjoing very much). Hitchens has a typically incisive and elegant review of Tulayev and Serge’s legacy in Arguably that’s worth a read. When I had the chance to meet Serge’s son Vlady nearly 20 years ago, he turned out to be a lovely guy and a marvelous storyteller. The first, which he apparently regaled many others with, was that he happened to be the only person who ever pissed on Lenin! The explanation-his father had brought him as a baby into a Comintern meeting, Lenin, who often attended, reached over to pick him up and the diaperless kid (not surprising given the scarcity during the civil war) peed all over him. The other that I fondly remember was an anecdote which his father had told him about Karl Radek , one of the old Bolsheviks who started out as an oppositionist but capitulated to Stalin in the 1930s only to die at the hands of the NKVD in the gulag. In the civil war period, everyone wore the same baggy greycoat but of course if one looked more closely there were always small differences between a newer one with lining and a really dishevelled one; when the party members would go into a meeting, everyone would hang their coats on the common racks and when they left, they normally grabbed which ever coat was handy given that they were nearly all the same. But Radek, Serge said, was fond of timing his departures from meetings just so that he could poach the best of the coats on the rack-a nearly perfect character portrait of his political opportunism and selfishness that led him to Stalin. Hoping that Richard’s biography gets finished soon cause it will be filled with wonderful stories like this and because he’s such a great writer but until then Susan Weissman has a lovely biography The Course Is Set On Hope that you can probably get second hand. happy reading.
John – wow. He peed on Lenin. That is so brilliant – and so FASCINATING about the coats.
and you know, I read Arguably – every word – but for whatever reason the Victor Serge thing didn’t sink in. Will re-read it again tonight. It was amazing, I’m still thinking about it.
Very interesting how Kirov is mentioned in the text – and obviously Comrade Tulayev is sort of a stand-in for the murder of Kirov. But in real-life it seems clear (or as clear as it can be) that the assassination of Kirov was somehow orchestrated by Stalin in order to have an excuse for the Terror – while the murder of Tulayev was a chance encounter. But Kirov is referenced, in passing, I think only once, which gives the book even more verisimilitude.
One of the things he is so excellent at (Serge) is that moment of dawning consciousness/awareness that happens to people who have been brainwashed by tyranny. You know, the moment where someone thinks, “Something’s OFF about this whole thing.” But even the THOUGHT was dangerous.