Today’s featured image: A morning view from the north side of Camel’s Hump mountain. The day before, this was just a view of the highway. I like this version much better.
You’ve probably heard of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), and probably also know Leo Tolstoy (1847-1910), even if you never a read word from either of them. If you have, you’ll probably recognize the names Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) and Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), and I bet you once heard that Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) said something about a rifle and the third act. All of these men – plus a dozen other great storytellers – produced some of history’s greatest literature from their homes in Czarist Russia in the mid- to late nineteenth century. This was the golden age of Russian literature, a facet of Russian culture that became sacrosanct, even in the (militant, in the fullest sense) atheist Soviet Union. We know these stories today because these men dreamed up ideas about stuff that never happened, described it, and then sent them out into the world for us to interpret. We continue to reprint these fabrications nearly two centuries later.
But to Russians, “literature” is a great deal more than just fiction. As Gary Saul Morson explains in his 2019 article “How the Great Truth Dawned“, “Russians revere literature more than anyone else in the world. When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky, in a review of its latest installment, opined that ‘at last the existence of the Russian people has been justified.’” We in the United States take pride in many achievements, often technological, but Russians are most proud of their literature. And for good reason. Just the phrase “Russian literature” holds a distinguished air, sort of like “German engineering” or “American ingenuity”. What is it about literature, and Russian literature in particular, that creates this sense of importance? Is it just branding? I think not. I think it has to do with exactly the opposite. Unlike the superficiality of marketing (and much communication in modern life), Russian literature is characterized by depth, complexity, and above all truth. It doesn’t matter that the conversations in War and Peace never really happened or that there were no brothers named Mitya, Ivan, and Alyosha Karamazov. It doesn’t make the stories any less true.
Let me explain that. The stories that we call literature may be constructed of events that never happened, but that doesn’t make them untrue. Literature tells us something about the real world that we can’t describe explicitly. Let’s take an example. Say I want to introduce you to my friend Jim. I can tell you that Jim is a great guy, but that’s exceptionally vague. If I tell you, instead, a story about Jim that describes him delivering a project on time, fostering a puppy, and helping an old woman across the street, that will tell you much more what kind of person Jim is. If the story I tell you indicates that all these things happened on one day or in quick succession, that may not be objectively “true”, but I will have successfully painted a picture in your mind that is an honest representation of the image I have in my mind. You don’t remember the facts anyway. You remember the flavor of what kind of “great” guy Jim is. Indeed, if I had just told you all of the mundane events in between those great things Jim did, you wouldn’t have the same impression of him that I have. Leaving out “true” facts would actually have hindered our communication. My “synthetic” or “composite” story was in fact more true than an objectively veritable one. As Peterson likes to explain about mythology, which extracts truths from across time and space: the stories are more true than true; they’re hyper-true. Literature is to reality as metaphysics is to physics. Physics can tell us what is in the objective world, but we must turn to metaphysics (ethics, morality) to determine what we ought to do with/in/to/for/amidst that objective world. The world of literature, of story, deals not with the world as a set of things, but as a “forum for action” (Peterson, 1999, p.1).
I believe that what makes Russian literature so great is that Russian writers believe this. As Morson explains, Alexander Solzhenitsyn promoted his Gulag Archipelago – a tedious and sanctimonious recounting of the endless horrors of the Soviet Union – as “literature”. In a tradition which sees literature as truth, there is no contradiction here. We will return to the importance of truth, but first I want to introduce the dominant material for today’s ramble.
I was recently introduced to George Saunders’ 2021 book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It features seven short stories by four of the Russian authors listed above (all except Dostoyevsky). The book is the product of two decades of teaching a short fiction class at Syracuse University. It was his attempt to share the lessons with a lay audience. It is directed at aspiring writers, but one need not have any interest in publishing their own stories to benefit from the timeless stories and Saunders’ astute commentary. My reflections and thoughts could fill volumes (very disjointed ones at that), so I will limit myself mostly to reflections on one story.
Story #4 is “Master and Man” (1895) by Leo Tolstoy. You can get a free e-book from Project Gutenberg, and I suggest you read it.
Like now.
Why are you wasting your time on my drivel? I just gave you a link to a free Tolstoy story. Read that!
…
Now you’ve read the story? What did you think? Still crying?
Leo Tolstoy became famous by the books we still know him for, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877), but not long after, he had quite the midlife crisis when he was suddenly struck by the realization that life was meaningless (Perrett, 1985). He found solace in the Christian faith, but he was a vehement enemy of the Orthodox Church. His writings starting with his autobiography, A Confession (1882), were devoted to helping people realize the greater meaning of life and fighting the oppressive Czarist social order. His stories are, in a way, social justice propaganda, but they hit home in a way that woke “literature” fails. Where the wokester’s writing is seething with indignation and vindictiveness (e.g. Taylor, 2016; Joseph, 2020), Tolstoy’s writings highlight the all-too-human experience of every individual. His stories seek to show us that we are all equally divine in the eyes of God and ought to see each other in the same way. He introduces us to characters so complex and multifaceted that it’s hard to believe that they are figments of our imaginations. (How exactly these characters go from being figments of Tolstoy’s imagination to ones in our imaginations, and if they’re still the same figments, is a ramble for another time.) In both Resurrection (1900; Tolstoy’s final novel, which I read last year) and “Master and Man”, he makes us identify with (and feel deep sympathy for) at least two characters at opposite ends of the social hierarchy. In “Master and Man”, we meet Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov and his peasant Nikita. (See endnote for aside on peasants in Russia.)
Assuming that you’ve gone and read the story… what’s that? You thought it was too long? Well, it is long, but I promise it’ll be an hour well spent. And even if you read this first, the story is in no way ruined by spoilers.
The first 30 pages (of 50) are an enticing and entertaining buildup that develops these three-dimensional characters and their world. But I want to focus on the climactic scene. Vasili – self-important, money- and status-obsessed – is the kind of person who overcharges and underpays his servants, but is also “honestly convinced that he is Nikita’s benefactor” (Saunders, 2021, p.169). He wants to do good and he often thinks he is doing good, all while not really improving anyone else’s life at any personal sacrifice. Consciously or unconsciously, this ought to resonate with all of us, with our armchair activism (McCafferty, 2011), our recycling that mostly doesn’t get recycled (Shen and Worrell, 2014), our carbon offsets that protect already protected forests (Badgley et al., 2021; Wendover, 2022), and our “organic” produce that has a debatable environmental benefit (Varanasi, 2019). It seems people haven’t changed much in the past 120 years, and that’s the conclusion we ought to draw. We’re all just as flawed and full of internal contradictions as our protagonist, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to improve ourselves. We’ll soon see what it takes for Vasili to transform. I’ll save the discussion of Nikita because I think this character says more about Tolstoy than it does about Russian peasants.
A very brief summary to catch up those of you who insist on subjecting yourselves to this inferior writing when you could be reading Tolstoy. Our protagonists Vasili and Nikita set off for a nearby village where Vasili intends to purchase a plot of land for a fraction of what it’s worth. With Vasili at the helm of their one horse open sleigh, over the hills they go, laughing all the… wait. Wrong story.
The weather turns to a brutal winter storm, and they get lost. The poor horse has to drag them through rutty fields, and they stumble upon a nearby village (not the one they were looking for). Determined to reach the intended village tonight (despite the worsening weather), the pair set off again. Vasili, again at the reigns, again gets them lost. By luck (fate?) the horse has some sense and gets them back to the village they just left. After a bit of tea, during which Vasili refuses offers to host the pair for the night, they set off yet again into the storm. This is 1870-something, decades before the first headlamps were attached to horseless carriages, so it’s dark out there, like really dark. And yet they drove on. Of course, Vasili leads them astray yet again. With no idea where they are, and a December blizzard battering them, they decide to try to wait out the storm. Nikita ties up the horse, covers him with a mat, and then buries himself in snow up against the rear of the sleigh while Vasili tries to curl up inside of it.
Vasili, unable to calm his restless and easily distracted mind, tries to occupy it with more pleasant thoughts. (That this was a problem for Vasili seems to undermine my theory that cell phones are destroying our ability to focus.) He takes the horse and sets off blindly into the night, trusting that he’ll stumble his way to the village (because that worked so well the last three times). He trusts in something; the universe? God? the horse? himself? Whatever it is, it’s beyond his conscious awareness, which is ignorant to the fact that the power he has entrusted himself to has no intention of getting him to the village. He approaches what appears to be a silhouette of the city walls, but it is actually a field of wormwood. As Saunders explains, the wormwood is full of symbolism. It signifies not only his current failure to get what he wants and the universe’s refusal to help him, but also the eternal law of nature that all living things must die. It’s a symbol that, in his state of desperation, cannot be ignored. Vasili is going to die, and it is likely to be this very night.
We in the comfortable modern West spend far too little time contemplating mortality, especially our own. An interesting finding from surveys conducted in Bhutan after they were identified as the happiest country on Earth is that a key to their happiness is a daily contemplation on death (Weiner, 2015). I think that this is primarily because it reminds them to be grateful for their lives while they still have them. It is also a reminder to focus on what is important in life.
But what is important? There are a million cliché answers, and they all have a kernel of truth, but to find what is most important for us personally, we have to experiment. What gives our life meaning is never a thing. It’s how we react to the conditions the world has placed before us. We can go our entire lives being distracted from this question. As mentioned above, the question foisted itself upon a 50-year-old Leo Tolstoy. He is likely to put that question on his characters to see how they react. What the Bhutanese likely understand intuitively is that we regularly need to be shaken out of our habitual thought patterns. Depending on the depth of those habits, this may need to be quite a shake. If you’re wondering, yes, this is how psychedelics work (Carhart-Harris et al., 2014). In Vasili’s case, it’s staring into the eternal abyss, the open maw of darkness ready to swallow him up. It’s coming face-to-face with the grim reaper.
It is an eternal paradox: what do you do when you don’t know what to do? Like it or not, the first thing you’ll do is freeze. “For some seconds Vasili Andreevich could not collect himself or understand what was happening” (Saunders, 2021, p.208). Then you’ll think about what to do, but if you are in truly unexplored territory, you won’t be able to come up with a good plan. At least, the plan you come up with won’t be convincing enough to refrain from relying on habit: “But in spite of his resolution to go quietly, he rushed forward and even ran, continually falling, getting up and falling again” (Saunders, 2021, p.209).
Vasili finds himself in an unbearable present. He wishes for an ideal future. He’ll quickly find that his current mode of behavior is insufficient to achieve his goal of survival. He is burning all his energy plowing through snow drifts and eventually ends up back at the sleigh where he started, closer to death but no closer to anyone or anything to save his life. However, such a situation in which the ideal future we wish for becomes undeniably unachievable presents us with an opportunity. We can either dream up some new mode of behavior that will put us back on track, or we can reevaluate the goal. “Alternatively, we can reframe our context of evaluation (our goals and our interpretations of the present), so that they no longer produce paradoxical implications, with regard to the significance of a given situation. … [This] means thorough, exploratory reconsideration of what has been judged previously to be appropriate or important” (Peterson, 1999, p.42). Vasili’s terror is a product of the knowledge that he is unlikely to achieve what was hitherto his highest goal: survival. What if he were able to discover an even higher goal that can still be achieved?
By luck (fate?) Vasili reaches the sleigh, where Nikita has curled up. Returning to this (relatively) explored territory, he is able to shake the terror he had felt. He comforts himself by “do[ing] something – occupy[ing] himself with something” (Saunders, 2021, p.210). While Vasili is in this mode for action, Nikita gets his attention to tell him that he’s dying. Vasili takes a moment, and again decides on action: he’s going to save Nikita by using his own body to warm him. A thing needs doing, and Vasili, a man of action, is there to do it! But he does not suffer there as he had previously. He cannot speak because some unconscious revelation has begun, a radical transformation. He has realized that it is not his survival that is most important, but that of all mankind (perhaps life in general? or even the conditions for life?). The hours fly by as he finds himself not in an unbearable present, straining unsuccessfully towards an ideal future, but in an eternal moment of creating that future. This is the feeling created when one’s goals and actions are in harmony.
Tolstoy makes Vasili’s transformation believable by keeping it within the characteristics we already know about him. Vasili’s revelation comes not through prayer and contemplation or divine revelation. It’s Vasili’s drive toward bold action, the same trait that got them into this mess in the first place, that leads him to the transformation. He wasn’t transformed until he lay down on top of Nikita. Only then does he have his epiphany. Vasili feels as though he’s become a new man. “[I]t was hard for him to understand why that man, called Vasili Brekhunov, had troubled himself with all those things with which he had been troubled. ‘Well, it was because he did not know what the real thing was,’ [Vasili] thought…” (Saunders, 2021, p.214). I disagree with Tolstoy here. Vasili has not become someone new, but more fully himself. This idea was formalized by Nietzsche around the same time. He called it selbst-bildung, self-creation or self-construction, often quaintly put as “becoming who you are”. As Gemes (2001, p.10) explains, “In some individuals, drives form a hierarchy which allows some drives to redirect others so that the total can form a concerted singular expression.” [Aside on Tolstoy and Nietzsche in an endnote.] Jung used his clinical experience to put this idea into a scientific framework. He called the process “individuation”, and it is the objective of analytical (Jungian) psychotherapy. Our protagonist Vasili became the hero of the story, but not the archetypal Hero. Only Vasili could be this hero, this particular character with his particular traits. Saunders summarizes beautifully on pp.242-243.
We don’t have to become an entirely new person to do better; our view just has to be readjusted, our natural energy turned in the right direction. We don’t have to swear off our powers or repent for who we are or what we like to do or are good at doing. Those are our horses; we just have to hitch them to the right, uh, sled.
What kept Vasili so small all his life? (What is keeping us so small now?) He wasn’t small, actually, as proven by his end. He was infinite. … What is it that finally jolted him out of [his selfishness]? Well, it was truth. He saw that his idea of himself was untrue. His idea that he was himself was untrue. All of those years, he was only part of himself.
This sentiment is also expressed by Peterson (1999), albeit more formally. The entire book argues for the the premise that the sense of meaning is a biological adaptation, just like emotions such as Joy, Anger, Fear, and Sadness. Peterson claims that we have found the ideal mode of being when a sense of meaning or interest is maximized. He gives credence not only to the existence of the state of “flow” (Csikszentmihalyi, Abuhamdeh and Nakamura, 2014), but that finding flow at every opportunity may actually be the optimal way to live one’s life. Peterson summarizes (1999, p.447):
The phenomenon of interest – that precursor to exploratory behavior – signals the presence of a potentially beneficial anomaly. Interest manifests itself where an assimilable but novel phenomenon exists: where something new hides in a partially comprehensible form. Devout adherence to the dictates of interest – assuming a suitably disciplined character – therefore ensures stabilization and renewal of personality and world.
Interest is a spirit beckoning from the unknown, a spirit calling from outside the “walls” of society. Pursuit of individual interest means hearkening to this spirit’s call, journeying outside the protective walls of childhood dependence and adolescent group identification, and return to rejuvenate society. This mean that pursuit of individual interest – development of true individuality – is equivalent to identification with the hero. Such identification renders the world bearable, despite its tragedies.…
This is the message that everyone wants to hear. Risk your security. Face the unknown. Quit lying to yourself, and do what your heart truly tells you to do. You will be better for it, and so will the world.
Here, the old curmudgeon, who rages at anything that smells of lazy Leftist dogma, is telling you to follow your heart. An unexpected twist? Does the addition of the modifier “truly” actually add anything? Yes. And the key phrase is “Quit lying to yourself.” This statement presupposes that an individual can lie to themselves. If you’re still rejecting that this is possible, you’ll need to quit lying to yourself to see that it is patently obvious. It raises the question: Why do we lie to ourselves? We seem to be doing it basically all the time.
Mostly, we lie because we are afraid. Jack was right: we can’t handle the truth. We’re afraid of the truth that all that lives was born to die. We’re afraid of the truth that we’ve squandered much of the little life we have, that what we know is insufficient, that what we know is wrong. We’re afraid because we don’t know how much of the mental map we’ve created to understand the world is hopelessly flawed. We’re afraid that, sooner or later, we’ll need to pay for our mistakes, that we’ll need to repent for our sins. Even more than that, we’re afraid because we don’t know what sins we are capable of. We don’t know to what lengths we will go to cover up our long trail of failures, mistakes, misdeeds, and outright cruelty.
To continue dishonestly denying our past failures, rejecting opportunities for atonement, and silencing that inner desire for truth, is to tie a noose around our own necks. No matter how long we’ve gone along with the crowd, it’s never too late to part ways. No matter how long we’ve worked a soul-crushing job or tried to live in a lifeless city, we can always decide to embrace the truth.
But what is that truth? How do we find truth? Vasili found truth when he put aside all notions of class, propriety, selfishness, or otherwise that may have been preventing him from doing what was necessary to save the life of his fellow man. Tolstoy found truth partly in the Bible, but he mostly found it in creating worlds of characters trying to find the truth for themselves. Each of us must find our truth for ourselves, and we’ll know we’ve found it when we find ourselves so genuinely interested in what we are doing that we forget everything else. “Interest is meaning. Meaning is manifestation of the divine individual adaptive path. The lie is abandonment of individual interest – hence meaning, hence divinity – for safety and security; is sacrifice of the individual to appease the Great Mother [e.g. Nature, the Universe, chaos] and the Great Father [e.g. society, culture, one’s own father]” (Peterson, 1999, p.467). To abandon the lie and to pursue meaning requires acknowledgement of one’s own insufficiency, to accept the limitations of one’s knowledge, and to take responsibility for one’s own life. To accept that I have not yet achieved my full potential is to accept that the patterns of thought and behavior that I have employed up to this point have been less than my best.
Does fighting for social justice spark that feeling of interest? Then stop filling out meaningless online petitions, and call your elected officials (the local ones ought to answer personally). Or better yet, become a mentor for kids growing up in the toxic culture that permeates poor communities.
Do you find meaning in protecting the environment? Then stop wish-cycling and fill your old plastic containers in the bulk section. What’s that? Your town doesn’t have any stores with a bulk section? It sounds like you just found a niche market to fill. And what about your carbon footprint? Are you still setting carbon on fire just to go to the store, go to work, or go out on a Saturday night? If you bought an electric vehicle that strained your finances and required you to plan ahead to make sure you had a full charge when you needed it, would that make your life better or worse? If you really take interest in this cause, I think you’ll find that the greater the sacrifice, the greater the reward.
Accepting my current insufficiency means that I cannot even conceive of my full potential, which in turn means that I must accept responsibility for navigating the unforeseeable road ahead. Like driving a sleigh through a blizzard at night, staying on the path to individuation is no easy task. It requires precise attention to the feeling of the road beneath the skids. If we can notice when our interest flags, we ought to assess our position critically. If we have strayed, we must get out of the sled, put our poorly clad feet in the cold snow, and walk out into the darkness, feeling for the solid ground. We will then need to turn the whole rig about, abandoning any progress we have made toward a false goal.
If we can muster the courage to make the necessary course corrections, we can’t even imagine what awaits us. If we can’t make them, the best we can hope for is disappointment, and worst has no bounds.
What could we accomplish, whom could we become, if we weren’t such cowards?
This ramble has ended just about where the last one did. The next installment will need to deal with the depths of those potential evils that we humans (all of us) are capable of inflicting upon the world.
Eventually, I will wend my way to the phenomenon of what I have been calling “Raskolnikov Syndrome”, taken from Crime and Punishment by that great Russian author not featured in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is the way in which the unsatisfied need to confess our sins can devour us from the inside. I am slowly cobbling together a thesis for the influence of this need on current social movements, specifically the social justice and sustainability movements (which may in fact be one thing).
Notes
Endnote 1: Serfdom is a concept worth exploring briefly. As you might remember from you highschool history class, Medieval European political structures were based on the feudal system. In short, the people who worked the land traded in their liberties for security. In exchange for protection from outside marauders, the common folk gave up a large chunk of their production to a warrior king and his knights. The system quickly became entrenched, and hereditary classes of nobility and peasantry were established. In Russia, this system became formalized beyond that of any other European state. By 1649, Russian law decreed that serfs (from the Latin “servus”, by way of the Old French serf, which means basically “slave”) not only were denied freedom of movement (i.e. they were not allowed to leave the land they worked on), but the condition was hereditary (i.e. a serfs kids (and their kids (and their kids)) were also stuck) (Bartlett, 2003, p.29). In effect, this made serfs a feature of the land, which could be bought and sold. Besides not technically being allowed to kill their serfs, Russian lords could do pretty much anything to/for/with them. However, the lives of serfs varied as vastly as the Russian empire itself. Lords usually did pay their serfs an income that, on average, exceeded that of other European peasantry, and there are even cases of serfs becoming quite wealthy (Bartlett, 2003, pp.31-32). The serf system was abolished in 1861, but Russian society remained rigidly stratified, to the point that it likely led to revolution half a century later (O’Rourke, 2016). I make this aside only to put into context the relationship between Vasili and Nikita. Nikita really has no recourse for any of the wrongs Vasili might commit against him. As Tolstoy seems to suggest in a later story, “Alyosha the Pot”, the best thing Nikita can do is to continue to work hard and keep a good attitude.
Endnote 2: When I saw this similarity between Vasili’s resurrection and Nietzsche’s selbst bildung, I immediately had to find out if the two men had corresponded. They were both writing at the same time (1870s and 1880s), but it appears that Tolstoy only heard about Nietzsche through secondary sources. Apparently, this is what he thought of Nietzsche:
The unhappy Nietzche, who has lately become so celebrated, is especially noticeable as an example of this contradiction. He is irrefutable when he says that all rules of morality, from the standpoint of the existent non-Christian philosophy, are nothing but falsehood and hypocrisy, and that it is much more advantageous, pleasant, and reasonable for a man to create a society of Übermensch, and to become one of its members, than to be one of a crowd which must serve as a scaffold for that society (Tolstoy, 1900).
What I suspect happened is that Tolstoy never read Nietzsche before his breakdown in 1888, after which he was effectively incapacitated. Upon his death in 1900, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche took over his writings. She had already published the first volume of a biography of her brother and was working on a second. I suspect that Tolstoy heard talk of the contents (perhaps even read some) of this biography. The important thing to know here is that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was married to a nineteenth century version of Richard Butler (founder of the Aryan Nations; see more in an earlier installment). She repackaged her brother’s ideas to fit eugenic white supremacy ideology and became a valued member of the Nazi upper echelon. Hitler even attended her funeral (The New York Times, 1935). No wonder Tolstoy thought Nietzsche was a contradictory thinker!
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Geoffrey S. DeSena 