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AN AUTHOR EXPLORES HOW TO SELL HIS BOOKS IN RIGA, LATVIA

by Kevin O’Connor

While publishing a book can seem glamorous on the surface, author Kevin O’Connor reflects here on the hard work of marketing your own wares.

It’s only 2 p.m. and I’ve nearly reached my goal of walking 10 miles a day. So far, I’ve hit the magic number every day but one. Put away the chips and walk 20,000 steps a day and watch in amazement as your clothes get bigger. I just ordered a heavy Latvian dish in a restaurant located on the ground floor of a palace that was built for Peter the Great 300 years ago. You’d never know what this building used to be. It’s often like that in Riga.

Why so much early activity? I’m trying to hawk my book, which is nowhere to be seen except the National Library. Kind of disappointing, but I didn’t really expect any different. It’s a university press book and it’s expensive by local standards. My publisher made a flyer for me, and I had 20 glossy copies printed. So I’m literally going door-to-door — the larger bookshops, high-end hotels, museums.

Salespeople are a different breed. It takes a certain kind of personality to do that, one that could not be more different from my own. Asking people to consider buying my product? To tally beyond me. My job is to travel, learn stuff, and sequester myself somewhere and write. Let others do the selling of my Very Important Book. But me — selling? I don’t think so. Until now. Because, if not me, who?

I once spent half a summer soliciting funds for an environmental organization and got burned out quickly. Then there’s the time I tried cold-calling, a job that required me to fudge the truth—I mean, to lie. I didn’t even make it to the first lunch break. Trying to persuade people of the value of things they did not ask for is not my forte. Plus, I don’t take rejection very well, even when it comes to the small stuff. When I took out my book and offered a flyer to the woman at the front desk and gift shop at the Riga Museum of History and Navigation, she held her hand up and refused to even look. Having been rejected, I became visibly irritated, explaining to her in my

I’m literally going door-todoor—the larger bookshops, high-end hotels, museums.

poor Russian that . . . well, never mind. Your loss, to both you and your antiquated little museum that nobody visits! (I didn’t actually say that.)

Others have been more polite if a bit circumspect. I had a pleasant little chat with the manager at Valters un Rapa, the biggest bookstore in Old Town, and was gratified to learn that my pub lisher had contacted her when the book came out. She leafed through it and graciously accept ed one of my flyers, even as she expressed reser vations about its price and potential audience. She was nice; so was the concierge at the ultra-fancy Niebergs Hotel, which has a tiny souvenir shop. I’m not bothering with the souvenir shops that cater to the annoying German tourists, who have taught me the true essence of Lebensraum as they colo nize the outdoor seating at Riga’s eateries. That’s not my audience.

This morning, before I set off to sell my goods, I went to the post office to send home a box of books—a transaction that I had to conduct entirely in Latvian, which I can read somewhat but which I speak very poorly. The lady there was old enough to know Russian, as it was required in Soviet schools, but when I’d say something in Russian she always answered in Latvian. Okay. We’ll do it that way. I’ll have a lot of reading to do when I get home.

The people who work in these kinds of low-paying public sector jobs are a completely different sort from the young, English-speaking Latvians you’ll encounter in Riga’s restaurants and cafes. This morning I went for coffee and a pastry at a tiny cafe near my apartment, whose sole em ployee was a Russian lady, a few years my senior, who seemed to be having a bad day. She was yelling at someone on the phone when I entered. As I paid my bill, I smiled my best American smile and asked, “How are you doing?” in Latvian. My obvious charm had no effect whatsoever. As I drank my coffee, I could hear her yelling on the phone some more.

I had a pleasant little chat with the management at Valters un Rapa, the biggest bookstore in Old Town, and was gratified to learn that my publisher had contacted her when the book came out.

The Cornell University Press Podcast

an interview with Vera Michlin-Shapir, author of Fluid Russia, hosted by Jonathan hall the transcript

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Vera Michlin-Shapir, author of Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era. Vera is a Visiting Research Fellow at The King’s Centre for Strategic Com munications, King’s College London. We spoke to Vera about why the Western conventional wisdom about Russia is fundamentally incom plete, why Russia can be considered “patient zero” when it comes to the populist wave of anti globalization and the rise of neoauthoritarian re gimes, and why Putin’s regime is a political system actually depends very much on Russia being part of the global world. Hello, Vera, welcome to the podcast.

Hello, Jonathan.

It’s pleasure to have you on the podcast and we want to congratulate you and your new book, Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era. love the quote that you have in the beginning of the book by Zygmunt Bauman, which says, “We live in a globalizing world. That means that all of us consciously or not depend o n each other.” Now, there’s a conventional wisdom about Russia’s national identity right now. And in your case, you think the conventional wisdom needs to be updated. Tell us what the conventional wisdom, how that inspired you to write this book?

Yes, so indeed, actually, Zygmunt Bauman was one of the inspirations he’s writing was one of the inspirations for writing this book. And I was served researching this topic, Russia national identity for quite a while and, and the reason that I was researching it for so long is that there is a very rich debate, both academic and public, in Russia and in the western Russia national identity. And there is a kind of common understanding that it is in crisis. Russians themselves speak about their national identity as an identity that is in crisis. And then there are two groups of thoughts of thought of this. So one group is saying basically, Russian national identities in crisis because this there is a historical continuity to that. So since the Romanovs since the Russian Empire, this identity was always crisis ridden. And it’s because of Russia’s geography and Russia’s history. And Russia’s and the Tsar, and then the Soviets. And it was always sort of America, the American situation for Russian identity. And so now we see the continuation of that in the form of this post Soviet national iden tity crisis. And then there is the other group that is saying, well, actually, there’s something quite novel here. And this is the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the collapse of Soviet Union sort of prompted this big iden

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tity crisis that is linked to, well, what is often described as kind of the Weimar, it’s a certain Weimar, German syndrome, yes, so “Weimar” Rus sia, so lost in the Cold War, they lost the Cold War, humiliation, loss of territory, population, resources. And so this is the kind of this is what sets the grabbed the field for discussion, Russian identity, national identity. And for me, specifically, when I was reading, when I was reading litera ture on current identity formation, and challenges to identity formations, formation in the global world, I felt like there was a disconnect between this debate between the debates that were going on in the West, and the debates that were going on in Russia, and Russia, for me, it was very obviously part of this global world, but kind of there was a disconnect in terms of the literature of the of the discussion. And it was also strange for me that there was constant talk about Russian identity crisis. But for me, identity is always a question mark. Identity always needs to be defined. So why is it so strange that the Russians, the Russians also need to define their identity? It’s a process. And so the literature this, this theoretical lit erature by Sigmund Bauman and Anthony Giddens very much inspired me to sort of try and write the Russian, the Russian path and the Russian question mark around its identity into this global story. And to bridge this, this gap in the literature.

So Excellent. Well, your book very definitely ties Russia’s authoritarian politics to the shortcomings of globalization and neoliberal economics. Within this new understanding, you describe Russia as patient zero, of the anti-globalist populist wave and the rise of neoauthoritarian regimes. Tell us more about this.

Yes. So this is a very kind of important point to make here, which is that I am constantly in the introduction. And when I speak about the book, I say that there is actually nothing that abnormal about Russian current identity search and the feeling that it is that there is some kind of crisis. But the fact that it’s not abnormal doesn’t make it fine. Yes, doesn’t make what happens in Russia and Russian politics, what happens with the cur rent regime and Russia, it doesn’t kind of whitewash the problems that are there. Actually, in fact, what I’m saying is that I’m refocusing the problem. So the problem is not necessarily with what happens within the walls of the Kremlin, or what happens in Russian politics. But the prob lem is, is broader. And the problem is the disruptions that are created by kind of this uneven globalization. And specifically, well, specifically, in our kind of transition between classical modernity where the state was more involved in people’s lives. And late modernity, when the state withdraws and allows neoliberal economics to sort of manage society, but it doesn’t really manage society, it leaves a lot of insecurity. And this insecurity basically, kind of creates almost intrinsically creates this calls for more confirmer hand and inserts the ground really for new authoritarian regimes. So in Russia, actually, what we saw is that, and this is a really, I think, a fascinating example of this, because everything happened so fast, in the 90s, Russia open almost kind of it wasn’t in a day, but it was such

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a such a baptism by fire, sort of how Russia open to the global world with with radical new liberal economic reforms, and society was just forfeits, transforming so rapidly, but also the pushback came very, very quickly. Yes. So this, this kind of pushback of, of going off well, for Russia is go ing back with this gravitation towards authoritarianism. And it happened also very, very fast.

Yes, it certainly did certainly did a kind of a whiplash effect. So you’re the book is titled, you’ve called it Fluid Russia and fluidity - one of the things when I think of fluidity, I think of time, and you have a fascinating exam ple of Putin attempting to unify the Russian calendar by promoting two types of holidays, military and religious. Tell us about this initiative. And how successful was it in unifying the country?

Yes. So when putting comes to power, he actually he see, I mean, he’s almost as described in the book, it’s almost kind of a natural. And this is what people who lived in Russia in the late 1990s described, it was kind of a natural flow of events, yes, all this insecurity. And suddenly, there was a person who saying, well, trust me, I can fix this, you know, just let me fix this for you. And so he’s kind of rice flour is I mean, not smooth, but you know, relatively like he is the right man in the right in the right time, in the right place. And one of the things that he finds is that is that this insecurity around the identities often is often connected to time, into the construction of time. And when I write about time, I write about historical time, national time, personal time, these are all things that are kind of bounded, or that are interconnected in the analysis. And it’s very, very crucial. So actually, the book, it looks at different spheres of poli cy, it looks at immigration, and citizenship and media discourse. But I finished the book with with with analysis of the national calendar, and they’re both in the 1990s, but specifically under putting a lot of inter esting things are happening because he really shapes and molds the na tional calendar to help people sort of fixate their identity to help people feel more secure. And the reason that the footing kind of takes military and religious issues and forms the national calendar around them is that actually because they’re quite popular, and there is quite a lot of reciproc ity in Putin’s regime, what kind of popular trend as was described in the book by Samuel Green and Graeme Robertson, Putin Versus People. So he takes these two themes, and he tries kind of almost a Durkheimian kind of like Emile Durkheim described what High Holidays work. So Emile Durkheim’s understanding of holidays is that every day we go on our daily business and then during holidays, we all perform the same routines we all unifying, we all kind of bind ourselves together as a collective—holidays are very important first for asserting collective identity. And And with Putin, I mean, he really he saw that in the 1990s, the, the calendar was kind of unraveling. And he was gathering it around things that are already popular. And one excellent example are celebrations of Victory Day in Russia ninth of May, which became kind of it was very popular in the 1990s, actually, but they became very sort of a big national

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holiday for Putin, it’s kind of a new sanctity in Russia. And for many people, this becomes kind of an example for how how put in was able to, you know, to, to refer refer kind of reformulate and use strong, assertive Russian national identity. But when you look and how I described it in the book, and Fluid Russia, when you look at the kind of traditions that developed around this Putin’s Victory Day, let’s go and put in Victory Day, they’re very much in line with with global trends, they’re very individual ized or personalized. And people who follow the new traditions, the new rituals of victory days are for instance, there is the immortal regiment, which is people are marching with photos of their relatives who perished and who died in the in the war, or veterans who perished who died since then. And this is an extremely kind of late modern, personalized, global way to celebrate the holiday. It’s my holiday, it’s my family, it’s my history, and yet we’re together. So in that way, it’s it is it is very successful. Yes, he is very successful. And I mean, he’s actually taking over this, this ritual, but but he doesn’t really changed. He doesn’t really reform, reformulate the society, the society remains very integrated into into global trends.

Yeah, I can see see why he will pick on the calendar, as you said, it’s such a shared experience by everyone. And when it comes to fluidity, I also think of Putin, he’s a Judo expert. He’s really good at taking things that come towards them, and then using them in the best way that ben efits him. And so using that analogy, you know, the media reports kind of coming full circle to what we were talking about the beginning, the media reports in the West, they have Putin, as you know, this aggres sive leader, isolationist leader, and what I think is fascinating about your book, the conclusions in your book, that we actually have to understand that Putin is trying to have Russia be part of the global world, that that Putin’s regime is built on integration with global financial markets, and that its aggression from the western point of view, is actually in Putin’s own mind, that he’s striving for international recognition, rather than being isolationist. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, so definitely, I mean, what I’m trying to impart it to encourage the readers in the conclusions of the book is to is to stop seeing this kind of well, actually, is to stop seeing put in as an outside player that there is some kind of global order, and he tries to undermine globalization, he tries to be at the forefront of a populist wave to undermine sort of the post cold war global order or the post Second World War, global order, or there are so many, there are so many formulations to it. But actually, what I tried to encourage a readers to see is how he is intrinsic to this order. Yes. I mean, he was born out of the insufficiencies of globalization. He never fully took Russia outside this context, because I mean, his regime is built on being part of it. Yes, he’s deriving it. Yes. He’s mocking, he’s mocking the international kind of Western liberal order. But he, he has to have it. This is I mean, this, he can’t, he can’t sort of exist without it. And you mentioned the financial markets, this is an extremely import ant thing, the offshorization of the Russian economy. And, and I mean,

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when you look now with the escalation in Ukraine, it’s so curious for me that the recent escalation now, it’s so curious for me that all the Western analysts, the indie, they speak in the Stone of here, put in this aggressive leader who tries, you know, push does more and more the West and kind of more and more isolationist in his own world. And actually, all the Russian analysts, all the Russian commentators, whether they’re liberal or conservative, whether I’m put inside or opposition, they all say, well, actually what he wants is he wants to get recognition that he is an inter national leader that he, you know, he wants this phone call with Joe Biden who wants to meet with him he wants to get he wants to get this permis sion. And I think that this kind of, I think this kind of should challenge also to think, not only not to think of just putting as a leader that he’s not an outside force that attacks globalization from the, from the outside, but rather also to think of kind of there is the national and there’s the global. And these are two poles. Yes. And there is like kind of swing between them, that you have Putin on the one hand, and you have Biden, who is more like liberal globalist leaders, but actually the maybe to the electric, so it’s not one or the other. It’s a struggle. It’s an electric within, within the kind of globalization in which in which we currently live.

Yes, yes. We’re so grateful that you’ve written this book that you’ve spent years of research, creating it, because it does, you know, the, the con clusion is counterintuitive, particularly, you know, seeing the Western media reports, you think, particularly with this Ukrainian situation, that, you know, an invasion is eminent and, you know, we’re on the cusp of, you know, a new hot, cold war, or maybe even a real war. So, there’s a lot of saber rattling, and your book kind of gives us the much larger picture that can only enhance understanding. So we really appreciate that.

Thank you. Yeah, no, I mean, the fact that I mean, again, this is and I said it in the beginning, but I’m going to repeat it is that this doesn’t white wash Putin - this doesn’t say that what he does is all right. And the book is actually very critical of a lot of things that any I think reasonable free dom, you know, a loving person would would be critical of and and you know, the aggression in Ukraine happened. And annexation of Crimea happened. The incursion in eastern Ukraine happened, all these things, you know, the, I mean, use of chemical weapons on British I am based in London on each territory. So all these things happened. It’s just that we we need to understand their context. Yes. So all these crimes happened, and maybe he will invade Ukraine? Yes, maybe he will. But the context is that he is not he’s doing it because he has to almost because if he doesn’t, then he’s like an athema. He’s out, you know, he becomes a nobody.

Why does he have to do it?

Because he, he was born out of this, in my opinion, he was born out of this dialectic he was born out of the struggle. And if it doesn’t continue, yes, it’s it’s sort of, and I’m sure that he, he is he is a galleon in his un

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derstanding because he was, he was raised in the Soviet Union. So this is an understanding of history of history as a dialectic as a struggle, and he has to fulfill this place. And if it doesn’t fulfill this place, he believes that that’s it, he will, he will perish, he will disappear, he will become nobody.

Someone else will replace him to continue that struggle.

Yes. So he has to, he almost has to take this role. And when you listen to how he speaks about Russia, and Russia’s mission and his mission, I believe him he thinks that, you know, he, he has a certain mission. And if he doesn’t fulfill it in history, then he has no place in history.

Yeah, so this is this is what I was going at, as far as this is I was wanting to tap into that this other perspective that that we can understand because we’re blinded by our own ideologies and our own viewpoints to be able to bridge that gap. And obviously, neither side in the conflict is an angel, even though they think they might be or they’re on the side of the good. And the other side, you know, this is a classic war, whoever, whoever wins gets to write the history. Yeah. But to be able to see that other perspective. I think it’s fascinating, and we need more of this type of analysis. So thank you for writing this book Fluid Russia: Between the Global and the National in the Post-Soviet Era. It was such a great pleasure speaking with you.

Great, excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for this.

That was Vera Michlin-Shapir, author of Fluid Russia: Between the Glob al and the National in the Post-Soviet Era.

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DON’T LET PUTIN DESTROY FLUID RUSSIA

by Vera Michlin-Shapir

n my book Fluid Russia, I argue that analysis of Russian national identity largely overlooks the extent to which globalization shaped Russian society and politics. Throughout the book I demonstrate the profound impact of globalization on legislation, discourse, and ordinary people’s practices in Russia. Such analysis helps explain the rise of authoritarian politics in Russia as a reaction to the disruptions produced by global trends. It also gives hope that Russian society, which is more of a part of the global world than it seems, can still be open for dialogue.

In the book’s conclusion, however, I warned that “external changes in the global context, such as an international conflict” might drive “Putin’s project to solidify Russian national identification . . . beyond its shallow nature and result in a deeper transformation in Russia.” This scenario is materializing right now. The West must make sure that it does not help Putin to isolate the Russian society, a process which would have long-lasting effects.

In these precarious condi tions, a desire to reaffirm a stronger identity comes from the need for a sense of security.

Fluid Russia argues that when the Soviet Union collapsed, borders opened, censorship lifted, and Marxist-Leninist ideology was cast aside, in dividuals were ever freer to travel, to live where they wanted, to express what was on their minds, and to form their own understanding of Russian ness. But this transformation also revealed globalization’s disruptions, where greater free dom and more flexibility are often experienced as an insecure existence. In these precarious conditions, a desire to reaffirm a stronger identity comes from the need for a sense of security. Putin’s rise to power and his project to reaffirm a stronger Russian identity should be construed as a campaign to address a deficit of security that was lost in the post-Soviet quest to integrate into the global world.

Accounting for the impact of globalization allows to tell a more complex story about Pu tin’s Russia. Putin never tried to reverse history and recreate the Soviet Union. Instead, he positioned himself as one of the most vocal and active challengers to globalization and to the hegemony of Western liberal values. He argued that Russia was in a struggle with the neoliberal Western-dominated world and framed this confrontation in existential terms. In this context, Ukraine’s drifting westward closer to NATO and to the European Union was seen as both a geopolitical-strategic and an ideological challenge.

Yet, for many years Putin and his allies continued to enjoy the fruits of globalization and have never fully isolated Russians from the global world. They tried to perfect a new type of global oppression, corruption and disruption, which derided globalization while at the same time using its perks. Putin’s bet was that what he called “Western double standards” and hypocrisy would allow him to ride two horses at once. As a result, the Russian society was in a hybrid state, where elements of global openness were mixed with more exclusivist and closed political agenda that the Kremlin promoted. The popularity of Western social media platforms such as Instagram and YouTube are examples of the profound headways that global trends made in Russian society.

While Western sanctions send an important message to the Kremlin, they carry the risk of playing into Putin’s hands.

Putin works hard to fight these trends, and the West must make sure that the introduction of sanctions would not help him accomplish his mission. While Western sanctions send an important message to the Kremlin, they carry the risk of playing into Putin’s hands. By isolating Russia from the global economy, sanctions also cut it from global trends and may help Putin to isolate Russians from international flows of information. This will make it ever easier for the Kremlin to shape public opinion.

The Kremlin recently closed the last independent Russian media outlets and blocked access to websites. In his recent address, Putin called the Russian people to segregate “patriots” from “traitors,” calling for the persecution of anyone who holds Western values or enjoys its lifestyles. Popular online bloggers, like Veronika Belotserkovskaya whose well-crafted cookbooks I discuss in Fluid Russia, are being prosecuted and may face up to 15 years in prison. These steps aim to isolate Russians as much as possible from the outer world, so that the only narrative available for them would be Putin’s twisted story about a “limited military operation” in to “demilitarize” and to “denatzify” Ukraine. Within this narrative, Western sanctions could be viewed by ordinary Russians as a disproportional, vengeful and indis criminate collective punishment, and reinforce Putin’s claims that the West is inherently anti-Russian.

In order not to let Putin win, the West must acknowledge the holistic character of the strug gle that Putin engages in. We must stand with Ukrainians, who heroically defend their free doms. We must also find channels to communicate with ordinary Russians, and not let Putin complete a deeper transformation of the Russian society that might outlive his presidency.

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

As he moved intellectually and existentially away from his earlier career as a Marxist economist and commentator on contemporary Russian social and cultural issues toward a life as a theolo gian and priest, Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871–1944) made one final formal foray into philosophy, under conditions that were far from optimal.1 Stripped of his university appointment in Moscow by the Bolsheviks in 1918, he relocated to Crimea, where he taught political economy and theology at the university in Simferopol’. Two years later he lost that position when the city fell to the Red Army, and at the end of December 1922, he was expelled from the Soviet Union, landing first in Constantinople before ending up in Paris in 1925.

During this period of personal and societal upheaval, Bulgakov continued to write. His “At the Feast of the Gods,” a dialogue modeled on Soloviev’s Three Conversations, was included in the collection Out of the Depths. 2 His dis illusionment with the Russian Orthodox Church found expression in At the Walls of Chersonesus, only published in 1991;3 and his formal farewell to phi losophy took shape in The Tragedy of Philosophy4 and Philosophy of the Name, which he worked on from 1918 to 1922. While The Tragedy of Philosophy attracted some attention during his lifetime, Philosophy of the Name remained largely unread and unknown.5 Neither book appeared in print during Bul gakov’s lifetime, though a German translation of The Tragedy of Philosophy

came out in 1927.6 Philosophy of the Name was only published in 1953, nearly a decade after his death, through the editorial efforts of Lev Zander. As late as 1942, Bulgakov was still making changes to the manuscript, adding a sig nificant postscript dedicated to a sophiological interpretation of naming and the name of Jesus. In the post-Soviet era, the book has been published three times, in 1997, 1999, and 2008.7 In 1930 the first chapter was published in a German translation as “Was ist das Wort?” The book in its entirety was translated into French in 1991 with the title La philosophie du verbe et du nom, and in 2012 an English translation of the final chapter, “The Name of God,” appeared in print.8

Philosophy of the Name consists of six chapters, a postscript, and some ex cursuses. In the first five chapters Bulgakov examines in considerable de tail the nature of words, parts of speech, the simple sentence comprised of subject-copula-predicate, and the epistemological implications of gram mar. The book demonstrates Bulgakov’s extensive reading in classical and modern linguistic and philological theories: he cites the works of eleven premodern authors, two English, five French, twenty-two German, and twenty-one Russian authors. Of the modern linguists or philologists, the most important for Bulgakov are Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and his continuators, especially Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899)9 and Aleksandr Potebnia (1835–1891).10 Other philologists cited are Jan Baudouin de Courte nay (1845–1929),11 Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893), Max Müller (1823–1900), Gustav Gerber (1820–1901), Vikentii Ivanovich Shertzl’ (1843–1906), Tadeusz Zieliński (1859–1944), and Michel Bréal (1832–1915).12 His creative use of these historically important linguists is by itself a notable contribution to the history of modern linguistics.

Buried in the extensive excursus section of the book is Bulgakov’s résumé of Plato’s incomplete dialogue Cratylus, which revolves around the question of whether names are conventional or natural, whether words are arbitrary signs or intrinsically related to the things signified. The three speakers in the dialogue, Hermogenes, Cratylus, and Socrates, each wrestle with the question of the correctness of names, with Hermogenes speaking in favor of the conventional nature of words, Cratylus of the opposing natural view, and Socrates probing the positive and negative aspects of both positions. A significant portion of the dialogue concerns the etymology of the name Hades, as well as the appropriateness of the sounds of certain letters for the formation of words, i.e., the onomatopoeic theory of word formation. Bul gakov, unlike Plato or his own mentor Florenskii, engages with etymology only to a limited degree in Philosophy of the Name, perhaps displaying by his reticence a feeling of uncertainty about the actual purpose of that at times

comical section of the dialogue. Rather, it is the dialogue’s dissection of the natural or conventional nature of words that most resonates with him. Sum ming up his précis of the dialogue, Bulgakov wrote, “It is remarkable that in his dialogue, Plato touched on all the most important aspects of a philosophy of the word, even if only casually. He is equally concerned with the ques tion of the inner nature of a word, or the word of a word, as he is with the body of a word, i.e., the sound, and he wants to push through the labyrinth of the history of words and of semasiology to the proto-elements of words, letters, i.e., he offers his hand to the mystics of the Cabbala.”13 Bulgakov also briefly discusses Plato’s treatment of words in the Sophist. What particularly interests him in that dialogue is the examination of grammar as a way to understand the nature of words and meaning more generally.

Bulgakov acknowledged the importance of Leibniz, whom he regarded as the sole modern philosopher to have addressed the problem of language, word, and name. His philosophical foil, however, is Immanuel Kant, who comes in for considerable criticism for failing to pay attention to language and grammar.14 He continues his debate with Kant that had occupied such a prominent place in Philosophy of Economy, Unfading Light, and the contempo raneously written Tragedy of Philosophy. Natalia Bonetskaia has demonstrated convincingly the extent of Bulgakov’s indebtedness to Pavel Florenskii’s thought on the nature of names, especially as they appear in Florenskii’ s Imena [Names], written in the 1920s and included in the incomplete U vodor azdelov mysli [At the watersheds of thought].15 Aleksei Losev, who wrote extensively on the meaning of names, does not seem to have influenced Bulgakov.16 However, he, Florenskii, and Bulgakov formed a triad of intel lectuals who, in the process of examining the name-glorifiers movement, elaborated their own distinctive philosophical and philological studies of words and names from a sophiological perspective.17

Bulgakov’s first systematic treatment of Sophia and sophiology comes in his Philosophy of Economy. There, Sophia is described as the transcendental subject of economy and as the transcendental subject of knowledge.18 He notes, “Sophia, partaking of the cosmic activity of the Logos, endows the world with divine forces, raises it from chaos to cosmos.”19 As in Philosophy of Economy and Unfading Light, so in Philosophy of the Name Bulgakov de scribes Sophia as “the Soul of the world, the Wisdom of the world, as the all-perfected organism of ideas, as the Pleroma, the fullness of being. It is the intelligible basis of the world, the world as cosmos. . By contrast, our world is this same cosmos in the process of becoming. . . . It is sophian in all its being, but extra-sophian and even anti-sophian in its state.”20 It is in that environment that words appear and naming occurs.

Bulgakov believed that the universe communicates with humankind, and that as part of that communicating reality, human beings are able to receive and interpret the message, to speak for the otherwise mute and voiceless cosmos. The one speaking to them, he thought, was Divine Sophia. “Today I visited Niagara Falls,” he wrote in his diary for November 30, 1934. “It is a vision of Divine Sophia in powerful elemental chaos! The Canadian side particularly astounded me. The mist and spray, the chaos, the seething in which the lucid form of the flowing power of the water would open up, and then close under a watery cloud. It was just like the ocean before the first day of creation. . This is clear evidence for the existence of Divine Sophia and her power in the world.”21 For Bulgakov it is the human being who receives the ideas of the universe and speaks them in words. Meaning precedes the human being; it is eternally present in God and manifested in the created world, the cosmos, in which humans act as the creative amplifiers for that meaning. The universe and the human being belong to the one same reality, dual in nature, united without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation, sophian in its foundation, imperfectly realized in its state. The ideas, the meaning filling the sophian universe are expressed in human language, or as he prefers, anthropocosmic speech.

Building on his own religious experiences stimulated by the natural world, Bulgakov turns to the prologue to the Gospel of John (Jn 1:1–5) to ground his understanding of an animated universe bursting with points of meaning. In his interpretation he distinguishes “two ideas about the Logos: the Logos in himself as a Divine Hypostasis, as God, and the logos operating in the world, although turned towards God, the energy of the Logos in the world, Sophia.” Further, containing life, the Divine Logos imparts life as light to human beings, which empowers them as the microcosm to speak the word of the cosmos and to name. For, Bulgakov says, “the power of thought and the power of speech are one—it is the world logos abiding in human beings as their actualizing essence.”22

The universe, containing meaning, ideas, does not interpret itself except through one particular component, the human being. According to tradi tional Christian theology, humans are able to call things by their name, to speak as the microcosm of creation because they are created in the image of the Divine Logos. Bulgakov returns frequently to Adam as the first-created human containing all names in himself in virtue of being created in the im age of the Logos. Especially useful for him is the scene in the book of Genesis where Adam names all the living creatures. “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and he brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called

every living creature, that was its name” (Gen 2:19). For Bulgakov this verse suggests not that Adam created names for the creatures, but that they spoke their names to him, names that were latent within Adam as one bearing the image of the Divine Logos, who is the source of all names.

Bulgakov charts a meandering course toward an elucidation of the mystery of names and our capacity for naming, by first considering the nature of a word in general. He focuses on three aspects: the origin, the composition, and the function of words. With respect to their origin, Bulgakov insists that words are not invented; they are not the result of some process, and are definitely not human works, but simply are. He reviews various theories put forward by linguists to explain the origin of words—onomatopoeia, convention, imitation—but rejects them all. He writes, “It remains simply, humbly and devoutly to recognize that it is not we who speak words, but words, sounding in us interiorly, speak them selves. . . . The world speaks in us; the entire universe, not us, sounds its voice. . A word is the world, for it is the world that thinks itself and speaks; however, the world is not a word, or rather it is not only a word, for it still has metalogical, nonverbal being. A word is cosmic in its nature, but it belongs not to consciousness alone, where it blazes up, but to being, and the human being is the world’s arena, the microcosm, for in it and through it the world sounds.” 23

A second feature of a word is its composition. A word is dual in nature, composed of form and content; the form is the sonic body, the sound gener ated by the speech organs, while the content is the meaning enclosed in the sonic covering. There can be no word without an inner content, or meaning. The two fuse into an inseparable unity, without losing their distinctiveness, analogous to the union of the divine and human natures in the one person of Christ as defined by the Council of Chalcedon. Bulgakov writes, “A word is not merely an instrument of thought, as is often said, but is thought itself, and thought is not only the object or content of a word, but also the word itself. And yet, a thought is not a word, for it abides in itself, and a word is not a thought, for it has its own proper life. Logos has a double nature: word and thought, body and meaning, are merged in it without division and without confusion.”24 Further, he notes that every word signifies an idea, so that there are as many words as there are ideas. However, ideas do not exist without being incarnated, just as sounds are not words unless they contain an idea. Later, when he focuses on grammar, he will expand the description of word and speak of the phoneme, morpheme, and sememe, but a word remains twofold. The morpheme and phoneme are together the body, the sememe, the inner content.

Finally, he looks at the function of words. Bulgakov believes that words are necessary for thought; without words, no thought is possible. He calls words “symbols” and “hieroglyphs.” In his understanding symbols are not arbitrary, external subjective signs but are naturally connected with the idea they convey. He says, “But it is not their arbitrary and deceptive use that makes symbols into symbols, it is their realism, the fact that symbols are alive and efficacious. They are the bearers of power, condensers and receivers of world energy. And this energism of theirs, divine or cosmic, forms the true nature of a symbol, thanks to which it is no longer an empty husk, but the bearer of energy, a power, life. To say that words are symbols means that in a certain sense they are alive.” Hieroglyphs seem to be a particular type of symbol, for he calls a word that clothes an idea “the hieroglyph of the world, its verbal microcosm. . . . Words are living and efficacious hieroglyphs of things, in some sense they are themselves things as meanings.”25 But the meaning represented by a hieroglyph is not immediately evident. One must be able to read the hieroglyph correctly, as it does not necessarily correspond to the thing it represents. As an aside, it bears mentioning that he regards the image depicted in an icon as a hieroglyph of a word.26 One could say that the function of a word is to envelop, embody an idea in some sort of discernible, perceptible, and intelligible covering, but the covering is not identical to the idea it contains.

One other feature of a word that attracts Bulgakov’s attention is its magi cal quality. Words are incarnated meaning, idea, but they are also power, en ergy. Magic emphasizes the energy and power of words. Spells, incantations, hypnotism are all manifestations of the magical quality of words, in his opin ion. He laments the loss of appreciation for the magic of words in modern culture, where words have become merely instruments of communication and not the voice of the world.27 For Bulgakov only poets and poetry retain a sense of the magical power of words. Poets stand in awe of words that resonate with the voices of the universe. “In poetry a word ceases to be only a sign that it uses for signaling meaning, ‘concepts’; here it appears as itself, i.e., as a symbol, and waves ripple away from it as a cosmic surge. It seems that one more moment and the lyre of Orpheus will tame wild animals and move mountains.”28 Poetry captures the magic present in words.

Although a word is the root of cosmic self-expression, were it to stand alone it would cease to be a word and revert to a meaningless sound. The word-symbols of the cosmos are interconnected, like the elements of the cosmos itself. The human articulation of the cosmic word-symbol occurs in speech, language, in the sentence, and it is only in speech that words exist in the true sense. Here the still undefined quality of the cosmic word-symbol

MARJORIE MANDELSTAM BALZER ON GALVANIZING NOSTALGIA? INDIGENEITY AND SOVEREIGNTY IN SIBERIA

by Margorie Mandelstam Balzer

Incursions of Russia or its proxies into Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan have shown that the geopolitical territories of the former Soviet Union are far from stable, and their boundaries are continually being tested.

While these high profile hot spots are in the news, republics left within the legally defined Federation of Russia are less well pub licized. Could President Putin’s current belligerence in part be diversionary, a ploy to unite Russia’s diverse multiethnic peoples against manufactured outside enemies? Domestic political instabil ity, poverty and ecological discontent are growing, with enormous yet varied ramifications depending on the region inside Russia. The country’s vast Far Eastern territories, disproportionately influenced by climate change, hold important keys to its wealth, future devel opment, and stability. Yet precisely these regions are among the least understood.

My book exposes Russia’s contradictions and multiple civilizational solidarities by comparing three republics of the Siberian Far East. Analysis highlights the viewpoints of individuals and groups living in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia), Buryatia and Tyva (Tuva). I explore local conditions and social change, on the basis of longterm engaged anthropology fieldwork with Indigenous peoples.

The term “Indigenous” in the context of Russia is prob lematic, since Russian law defines its “Native” (korennye, from ‘rooted’) peoples as only “small-numbered” (under 50,000), while United Nations definitions incorporate larger non-state ethnonational groups with long-recognized homelands, such as the Sakha, Buryat and Tyvans of the Siberian Far East. Recognition as Indigenous and as peoples with their own republics is advantageous.

As the Soviet Union came apart, national aspirations of republic peoples living within Russia’s boundaries were satisfied to uneven degrees with various bilateral treaties. Two Chechnya wars in the North Caucasus put chills on any premature dreams of secession by republic leaders. Instead, partial sovereignty claims within a federation built on historically unequal homelands resulted in a system of ad hoc negotiations, and patterns of decentralization and recentralization. When President Putin came to power, the nested sover

Recognition as Indigenous and as peoples within their own republics is advantageous.

eignties that provided potential building blocks for post-Soviet sociopolitical and cultural revitalization be came increasingly precarious. Could Russia fall apart, or would it be held together yet again by repression?

Such difficult questions require historical perspectives and contingent, conditional analyses. A major theme to emerge from fieldwork in all three republics was nostalgia for the past, but that nostalgia was variable, targeted to different time periods for various purposes. Some define nostalgia as a sense of sorrowful yearning that evokes passivity or memories of lost Soviet-period youth. However, just as various forms of sovereignty and identity can co-exist, so can different kinds of nostalgia. When ethnonational leaders tap into longing for civilizational and political solidarities that existed before the Soviet period, they can be gal vanizing and inspiring. For many Sakha, Buryat and Ty vans, a presumed golden age when their languages and pre-Christian spirituality flourished has become worth recovering selectively.

Cultural and political renewal is nourished by horizontal interconnections among the Turkic and Mongolic groups featured in this book. While cultural ties bypassing Moscow have been under-funded, they have increased in intensity and diversity in the twenty-first century. Film and art festivals, youth camps, pilgrim ages to sacred sites, and Eurasianist ideologies have thrived across the historically variable borders of the republics. Alarm about forest fires, floods and other ecological disasters has brought people together as well, creating networks for civic society activism.

Demonstrations have become risky, with Russian opposition leaders like Alexei Navalny and his follow ers being jailed or declared “foreign agents.” Fear of arrest has caused protest movement organizers to disperse responsibilities and curtail activities. Yet, after a spiritual epiphany, a Sakha ‘warrior shaman’ Alex ander Gabyshev rose to public prominence in 2018-20 by calling President Putin an authoritarian demon. Critiquing Russia’s corrupt, impoverished and unequal society, he became a voice of civic conscience. His march on Moscow from Yakutsk via Buryatia accumulated numerous multiethnic followers. Arrested several times, he was incarcerated in 2021 in a Novosibirsk psychiatric clinic, subject to an involuntary drug regime, and restricted visitation. His treatment spotlights Russia’s human rights failures, especially the terrifying Soviet era tactic of declaring critics psychotic. A 2022 bard-like pop video in the Sakha language has made Alexander a legend; his followers are hoping he will be neither martyred nor forgotten. Amid speculation about his legitimacy as a spiritual leader, including in the international press, a major question remains as to why President Putin and his powerful Russian Orthodox elites find him threatening.

Russia’s valiant opposition and multiethnic composition are significant because they reveal fault lines in Russian society. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence in the name of stability. Opposition mobilization, ranging from secular to religious, and Russian to non-Russian, has been mostly reformist and non-secessionist. Protests, based on hopes for cultural, personal and societal dignity, have centered on such diverse issues as local environmental causes, election fraud, and unjust arrests. This book puts concerns of Siberians on the map of international awareness.

Such difficult questions re quire historical perspectives and contingent, conditional analyses.

Article

THE REVOLUTIONARY KONSTANTIN NIKOLAEVICH LEONTIEV

by Glenn Cronin

There can have been few Russian thinkers and writers as consistently misunderstood as Kon stantin Nikolaevich Leontiev. During his lifetime he was generally considered to be a Slavophile, which he was not, and this myth flourished for a hundred years after his death in 1891 and is alive even today. Others dismissed him an arch-conservative and black reactionary in the mold of the Czar’s chief advisor Konstantin Pobedonost sev. This view was equally mistaken, but of course it colored his memory right through the Soviet period until a revision set in following Perestroika.

Century-old rooted opinions take time to change however, and such revision as has occurred has been largely confined to Russian language publications. I should like to give a spe cial mention here to the valuable and exhaustive work done by Olga Fetisenko, the co-editor of Leontiev’s most recent Collected Works, in amassing and collating the very large amount of new material which has emerged in recent years, which I found invaluable in making my own analysis. But in the West since Perestroika there have been only a handful of studies touching on aspects of Leontiev’s thought; indeed there has been no comprehensive assessment in English of the man and his ideas in more than fifty years.

There has been no compre hensive assessment in En glish of the man and his ideas in more than fifty years.

In fact Leontiev was much more of a revolutionary than a conservative and it was no doubt their instinctive appreciation of that fact that explains why he was kept at arm’s length by true conservatives as the nineteenth century drew to its close. Take his relations with the Slavophiles for example. Leontiev certainly sympathized with their views but he also considered that in put ting Slavic community of blood at the centre of their political agenda they were committing a serious error which would end by destroying the cause of Slavdom and sowing the seeds for the destruction of Russian culture as well.

Leontiev’s rejection, in an age of rampant ethnic nationalism, of the idea of racial homogeneity as the basis for political union certainly has a striking resonance for us today. Leontiev’s insight was that in order to succeed a political program needed a central unifying idea around which

peoples could rally, and he saw community of blood without such an informing idea as sterile, in deed as dangerous. This explains why, for all his fulminations against them, Leontiev harbored a certain admiration for the Russian revolutionary groups, the nihilists, whose central idea, though destructive, he saw as clear, simple and perilously alluring to the masses.

It is not the least of the enigmas surrounding Leontiev that one of the most famous (or infa mous) aphorisms made by a Russian statesman in the nineteenth century, the view expressed by Pobedonostsev that it was “necessary to freeze Russia a little, so that she does not decay,” was a di rect quote from Leontiev himself. As I mentioned earlier, this association was to bedevil Leontiev for more than a century. Yet there was in fact lit tle common ground between the two men. Pobedonostsev was a true reactionary in that he opposed all change with a view to maintaining the status quo at all costs, whereas Leontiev’s study of history had taught him that historical movement is inexorable in the long run. It might perhaps be channelled but, as Canute demonstrated, it cannot be stopped by the arbitrary interventions of statesmen and kings.

Leontiev was much more of a revolutionary than a conservative.

If Russian culture were to be rescued therefore, it would not be through the vacuities of Pobe donostsev and his camp. For Leontiev a redemptive idea was essential. What then could this idea be? Here we glimpse Leontiev’s most revolutionary notion of all. The Russian Czar, he argued, must put himself at the head of the revolutionary movement and introduce into Russia a form of autocratic socialism, in the same way that the Roman Emperor Constantine had taken the radical decision to place himself at the head of the Christian movement early in the fourth century. The enduring strength this gave Christianity had in Leontiev’s view led eventually to the great flowering of Christian culture known as the Renaissance. An equally radical move on the part of the Orthodox Russian Czar might save Russia from nihilist devastation and preserve the possibility of a similar renaissance in Russian and Slavic culture.

Of course, Leontiev’s proposals were not taken seriously by those in positions of power and influence in Petersburg and the attempt was never made. A quarter century after his death the Revolution came to Russia and swept away much of the cultural heritage Leontiev had striven to preserve. Ironically though, a socialist autocrat now indeed emerged at the head of the revolu tionary movement – Joseph Stalin. It has been observed that at the height of his power Stalin’s regime mirrored uncannily the prescription set out by Leontiev half a century before. From a cultural standpoint, of course, the Soviet regime can hardly be said to have brought about the flowering Leontiev hoped for. Politically though his perspicacity is astounding. But then Leontiev was never afraid to follow his thoughts to their conclusion. “By the fundamental law of our Empire,” he wrote, “by the essential spirit of our nation, everything that proceeds from the Highest Power is lawful and good... The will of the Sovereign is sacred in all circumstances, even when the wrath of God seems to be upon us, as in the time of Ivan the Terrible.”

Here we have Russian history epitomized in two sentences, sentences with which it is difficult to envisage today’s “autocrat” Vladimir Putin disagreeing at all radically.

an interview with JoSe Vergara, author of all FutuRe Plunges to the Past, hosted by Jonathan hall the transcript

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Jose Vergara., author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Jose is Assistant Pro fessor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College. His teaching interests cover a wide variety of topics, Russian language, prison literature, Chernobyl, Russian novel, (of the classical and experimental varieties), and contem porary Russian culture and society. We spoke to Jose about what inspired him to study James Joyce’s influence on Russian literature, the five major Russian authors he studied, and the Joycean themes he found in their work. Hello, Jose, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Well, we’re happy to have you on the podcast to talk about your new book All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Tell us how you got interested in this topic and the backstory of this project?

Yeah, I think it’s a slightly long one and kind of goes back quite a while I feel like there’s certain moments or events in my life or my academic life anyway, that kind of brought me to to this topic, convoluted history with Joyce. I actually first tried to read Ulysses, Joyce’s book in high school on my own. But I ended up stumbling when I got to the part where we pulled blooms cat starts talking, I thought, well, maybe I’ll come back to this later. And I think I just had other writers on my mind and other things to read at that point. But later in college, I had some extra room in my schedule, and I did an independent study with one of my professors Tim, Tim Langon on Ulysses, Andrei Bely’s novel, Petersburg - Russian novel. That’s often compared with Ulysses and Flann O’Brien’s at SwimTwo-Birds, these three great, classic, modernist texts. And they’re it’s sort of hit me that. For me, Joyce is at its best when it’s a communal experi ence when I’m engaging with other people and talking about him with other people. And that’s something that ended up happening for this book was, which was really exciting for me.

So between those two things, and then in grad school, when it was time to pick a dissertation topic, this is my book based partly on my dissertation. I was taking a course on Joyce and Beckett and modernity, that was the title. And as we started reading Ulysses, I recognize these moments in the book that reminded me a lot of a Russian novel by Yury Olesha, the first author I look at in my book novel is called Envy. And I realized that that might be what I should write about, started digging around and

Jonathan José Jonathan José

José

recognize that there was no kind of systematic study of Joyce in Rus sian literature of his influence, for lack of a better term. Nothing that kind of brought it all together, there were individual studies and hints at how writers had responded to him, but nothing kind of broad and with the scope that I wanted to approach it with. The closest thing was Neil Cornwall’s excellent James Joyce and the Russians. But for the most part, he’s looking at the critical reception, or he was in that book. And what I was interested in doing is really looking at the literary response how these Russian writers took Joyce’s ideas and his kind of persona and his devices, all these things in his books, and adapted them for their own purposes. So in other words, kind of what he represented and continues to represent to them as a Western writer, as an innovator, as this kind of unavoidable figure in literature. So yeah, all of these things, just kind of chain of events throughout my recent life, from high school anyway, kind of brought me to the point of this topic and baking in, you know, I just found all these really fascinating connections and the topic resonated with me.

Nice, nice. Now, Joyce was his his work was suppressed by the Soviet authorities for decades. And so a lot of researchers have kind of over looked Joyce’s influence on modern Russian literature. You dive into that, and you found clear influences of choice and five major Russian authors. What brings together these authors?

Absolutely. Yeah, that’s so kind of one possible explanation that I con sider in the book that with the response to Joyce starting in the 1930s, in forward and the kind of clamp down on modernist writing and the simul taneous turn into socialist realism, there kind of wasn’t room for Joyce to be a significant figure in Russian literature. And therefore this question wasn’t really brought up or considered under the assumption that there wouldn’t be anything. Look for any sort of influence. But right in kind of digging around and looking closely at these author’s texts, I realized that that wasn’t the case, they were still discussing him still reading him accessing him in these different ways, both direct and indirect. Not so di rect. And on the one hand, what I’m trying to emphasize throughout the book is that these these case studies that I bring up Yury Olesha, Vlad imir Nabokov, are probably the most well known among these authors, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin. In these case stud ies, there’s no kind of single monolithic, quote unquote, Russian Joyce, there’s a kind of series of choices that they pick up and create. And that’s kind of manifested in their work depending on when they’re writing. So a Russian writer, like Olesha from the 1920s 1930s. Reading, Joyce, what he gets out of Joyce is going to be much different than what a writer after Stalin’s death gets from Joyce, or after the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s all very contextual. That’s, on the one hand, what I meant was sizing. On the other hand, to get more directly to your question about what brings them together, I think there are some commonalities and themes and ideas that they were attracted to enjoys. And I can speak about one of those.

Jonathan José

And that’s the kind of through line that I develop in the book about how these authors in again, very different ways. Turn to Joyce’s ideas about lineages and genealogies and history. And this really goes back to, to get specific about it. Episode nine in Ulysses, in which Joyce has his hero, Stephen Dedalus, explain what he calls his kind of Shakespeare theory or his idea about creativity via Shakespeare. And according to this theo ry, the creative artist or writer particular can kind of become a father to himself, by creating a park that lasts forever, so you create a hamlet or you create a Ulysses. In that way, the world recognizes us as Great Creator and your legacy is sort of ensured. And thus, you’re a kind of father to yourself to how others perceive you. This is even more possible or more effective when you kind of supplant the biological father figure in your life with a literary one. So again, Joyce’s case, in his hero Stephens case, it’s a turn to Shakespeare and creating these connections between life and literature. And I noticed that all my writers, the writers I selected to focus on in the book kind of observed this idea in Ulysses and responded to it in some way. So the kind of key through line or thread of the book.

Interesting, interesting. So for the listeners, if you’ve got if you could tell us again, who the authors were that you studied, and the joycie and themes that you found in their work?

Sure. So the five authors are Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bi tov, Sasha Sokoloff, and Mikhail Shishkin. And I can say a little bit about this, a couple of them and kind of how they dug into the Joycean world view in this this theme of fathers and sons in particular. So the first one is Yury Olesha in chapter one, who again, was writing in the early Soviet era in the 1920s, and 30s. He represents this early response to James Joyce, who publish envy his novel in 1927, to just a couple years after the first translation, Russian translation of Ulysses appeared, which was just frag ments, but he would have access to this. And vi notice these connections between the two works. But in particular, what’s most most intriguing to me about Olesha is how he feels this tension between wanting to pursue the individual his path, the Western path, Joyce’s path of becoming a father to yourself and kind of narrating and telling your own story, on the one hand, and on the other hand, adhering to what was developing in the Soviet Union at the times, not socialist realism, officially, but moving toward that moving in that direction of the kind of regimented system that would support the state, in literature and art and so on. And art with The purpose as opposed to art for art’s sake. So in the novel, Olesha has this hero couple yet of kind of try out evens path, going out on his own and becoming an individualist artist but ultimately shows that that’s not possible in these changing conditions in Soviet Russia, Given these circumstances and given the kind of ambivalence that both of Yeshua and his hero expressed in their, their lives. And so Joyce, excuse me, Olesha is using Joyce and using Ulysses and his idea from Ulysses as a way to com ment on what he was experiencing at the time are starting to feel anyway. And then the second chapter with Nabokov - he’s unique in a number

Jonathan José

of ways, he could rejoice in English, you know, much more easily and readily than any of the other writers. And one of my favorite parts of his story is that he actually offered to Joyce he wrote a letter to Joyce offering to translate Ulysses in the early 1930s. And obviously, this didn’t come to be, but it’s one of the great what ifs of literature to my mind, what if Nabokov had been able to translate Ulysses in the 1930s? What would that have actually looked like? So it didn’t happen. But I read and argue that his final Russian novel The gift, (Dar) can actually be read as a cre ative translation, even a kind of miss translation of Joyce’s book. There’s structural similarities, in some ways in the plot, themes, and images, dogs and footsteps, various numbers of things. But the main one is that Nabokov like his hero, had to flee into immigration to go to Europe from Russia after the Civil War. And they both lost their fathers in different ways. And Nabokov’s father was assassinated, accidentally assassinated he took a bullet for someone, someone else. And then Nabokov’s hero in The Gift loses his father, when, when his father disappears on a scientific expedition is never seen again. So for Nabokov the idea of cutting out the biological of kind of breaking your ties in the way that Steven proposes, and Ulysses was kind of blasphemous and wrong in a certain way. But in The Gift he does pursue this Shakespeare project, he merges though the literary with the biologicals instead of cutting things apart, he’s bringing them together. In his case, he’s uniting the father figure with Pushkin, the kind of Russian equivalent of Shakespeare, the father of modern Rus sian letters. So He retells in a way, this translates bits of Ulysses and uses the project but to a different end. So these are two examples, in the book of how these Russian writers would use Joyce’s ideas, but alter them, due to the conditions around them, their their context, or to achieve some thing different. And the other three chapters do similar things and also look at stylistic influence and kind of more playful attitude toward inter textuality in these connections between the books, again, depending on when and where the writers were writing from.

Interesting, interesting. And now you also have, you’ve interviewed au thors who are alive today, other living writers in Russia, there’s a whole section of this Moscow based choice reading group called The Territory of Slow Reading, I thought was fascinating. There’s others. Tell us about these interviews and what you learned from authors today.

As someone that factored into my fifth chapters book with me how Shishkin about choice and exchanges with him. But in the conclusion, in particular, I interviewed this reading group as well as other writers, like you mentioned, and the conclusion is divided up into five sections. And the first one, I focus on this Moscow Joyce reading group called TheTerritory of Slow Reading, as you said, they’re a group of Joyce fans basically that meet once a week on Sundays for an hour, and then meet on Zoom. And they’ve been doing this for several years now before soon became a reality for everyone. And as I was getting ready to conduct some research in Moscow in the summer of 2019, I was asking around and someone

Jonathan José

mentioned this group, so I got in touch and while I was in Moscow, I was able to sit in on a session of theirs again, it’s on Zoom. But that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise because of the time difference. I’d be up re ally later. Make up really early to participate. And they go through Ulysses bit by bit, and also read some other texts that are, you know, contextually related to Ulysses or Joyce or thematically in some way. And focus on both the details in the work, as well as kind of broader themes and sort of more universal aspects of the novel and what they get out of this ex perience of reading Joyce. They really take it slowly. That’s why it’s called Territory of Slow Reading as one should. Joyce. Obviously there are other Joyce reading groups all around the world do similar things. But for me, it was really useful and fascinating to talk to them about why they rejoice. I posed that question, you know, after the session to some of them. And there are different answers. One participant, for instance, suggested that Joyce allows them. This group, at least are readers in Russia, according to his view, to discuss things that aren’t often discussed in Russian lit erature, at least not so candidly, like sex or money was another example they brought up. So that was really neat to hear. And they also hold an annual Bloomsday walks on June 16, they wander around central Mos cow and read bits of Joyce in in the Russian translation and then have some drinks at a pub or bar suppose there. Yeah, and beyond that, as I said, for the conclusion, I wanted to get kind of most recent perspective on Joyce and Ulysses in his work. So I interviewed some writers really range from younger generations, Ksenia Buksha, Ivan Sokolov, differ ent Sokolov. And then some writers from older generations like Dimitry Bykov, Anna Glazova, Marina Stepnova, Zinovy Zink and other ones. So either interviewed them or corresponded with them via email or Face book and other ways, and talk to them about Joyce’s place in Russia, how they first encountered him, and so on. And for this part of the conclu sion, the penultimate section, what I did is put together all their voices. So I asked them all the same questions, and then some individual ones, and took parts of these interviews and created a kind of mini oral history, but the their words, the things they had to say about choice and dialogue with one another, and for me, it was, I don’t know, exciting and useful ex ercise and kind of restructuring, reframing this history of choice that I do throughout the book that it’s held throughout the book. So the book has five chapters, it moves chronologically, but here, it’s a mix of voices and different perspectives. And has the, the writers, you know, speaking for themselves, and I think kind of emphasizes the spontaneity and chance encounters that you find in Joyce, in their voices, show that reveal that. And then beyond that, it was just nice to see the connections between what they had to say, for instance, Stepnova and Grigory Sluzhitel both describe Joyce - they use the metaphor of a mountain that is a mountain in the writerly landscape that no one can avoid. But sometimes you turn your your view slightly to the side or something to avoid his influence it to change things. But again, that was totally by chance that they use the same metaphor. Yeah, and finally, most broadly, it was, again, useful in a way to see how the same debates about choice that we saw in the 20s

and 30s, about whether he’s sort of passe, or is he actually an innovator, is he worth emulating for Russian writers or in general? All these kinds of debates that started a century ago are still happening now. Joyce’s place in Russian culture is still not settled entirely. Can we see all this recur on these pages here?

Wow. Well, this is an amazing project that you’ve, you’ve created. And I like that analogy of Joyce as a mountain. I mean, he looms over the lit erary world, and people are still working to try to understand him more clearly. Without not only groups in Russia, but all over the world reading his book. I know of one book group in Ithaca, that’s taken on Ulysses now wow, you know, how to even start. I think that’s it’s amazing what you’ve collected for anyone who is interested in James Joyce and his writings to see the different perspective that another culture can can bring to to the conversation, and they may be able to see things that we are blind to because we’re immersed in it. So having that Russian view and Russian experience of his literature, I think is a great contribution to to under standing Him. And it’s all right here in this new book, All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature. Thank you so much for shar ing just a little bit of the book, we encourage folks to to take a deeper dive into it by getting the book it’s on our website. You can get it on a library. It’s available now. So we encourage you to read it. And I want to thank you again, Jose, for for coming on to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. That was a pleasure. Thank you.

That was Jose Vergara. Author of All Future Plunges to the Past: James Joyce in Russian Literature

José

Jonathan Jonathan

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

THE REVOLUTIONARY SOVIET SMOKER

After the February Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Il’ich Lenin and nearly three dozen other displaced radicals began a trek across war-torn Europe. They sped back to Russia to agitate for even greater change, barreling through hostile ter ritories in a special train car where real German guards monitored the chalk lines that denoted their space of fictive Russian soil. But more than suspicious glances and phantom borders divided the travelers. As the revolutionaries passed through the fields of one war, Lenin fired the first salvo in a battle that few had anticipated—an attack on tobacco.1

It was no secret that Lenin abhorred tobacco, but many of his colleagues embraced the habit. Surrounded by puffers, Lenin imposed no-smoking zones for their steam-powered isle of Russian territory—tobacco use would be allowed only in the bathrooms. For the thirty-some activists pressed together for days of travel, this sanitary authoritarianism nurtured the seeds of discontent. Soon enough the bathrooms became clogged with smokers, lines snaked down the cor ridors, and bickering erupted. Lenin stepped in, “with a sigh,” issuing bathroom tickets for two types of clients—smokers and users. For every three conventional uses, he issued one smoking ticket, rationing tobacco time and smoothing over the difficulties he had created.

A queue persisted, but things got back to a more normal state of affairs as discontent turned to discussion of absent comrades—and what they would say to Lenin’s tobacco tyranny. Karl Radek joked, “It’s a pity that Comrade Bukharin isn’t with us.” Others agreed that Nikolai Bukharin could surely have enlightened the waiting group on the placement of tobacco on the varying “levels of human

necessity,” because he was an expert in the Marxian-value theories of the Austrian economist Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. Lenin’s thunderous return became the sub ject of many books, yet no one seems to have recorded if the revolutionaries finally settled the necessity of tobacco.2

After his return to Petrograd, through the fall of the Provisional Govern ment, and following the success of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin’s disgust for tobacco did not wane. The revolutionary Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich joked of Lenin, “He could not stand the smoke . . . Wherever he was—by himself in the office, at home, at a meeting, or a discussion, even as a guest—he energetically protested smoking . . . hanging signs everywhere saying, ‘here it is forbidden to smoke,’ ‘please don’t smoke’ . . . [he] resented when smokers did not follow these requests and . told them that if they themselves could not stop . why must others put up with and breathe this disgusting, stupefying-to-consciousness poi son.”3 At the meetings of the Soviet of People’s Commissars (Sovet narodnykh kommissarov—hereafter Sovnarkom), Lenin exiled the smokers to the fireplace, forcing them to blow their smoke up the chimney and mocking them as “charred cockroaches.”4

Although Lenin’s smoking prohibitions tended toward securing his personal comfort, he found an ally for a broader fight against tobacco in Nikolai Aleksan drovich Semashko. Semashko was the leader of the newly created Commissariat for Public Health (Narodnyi kommissariat zdravookhraneniia, est. 1918, abbre viated Narkomzdrav, and after 1945 Ministerstvo zdravookhraneniia, Minzdrav).

As the leader of the world’s first national health administration pledged to uni versal, unified, prophylactic care, Semashko placed the Soviets at the forefront of twentieth-century socialized medicine and, importantly for this story, smoking cessation. Semashko waged a war against tobacco unprecedented for its intended scope and exceptional in range, making the Soviets the first country in the world, in 1920, to entertain a national health program to curtail tobacco production, sales, imports, exports, and use with the goal of eventually stamping out tobacco. Semashko did not achieve his full utopian ideal. Political and economic regula tions languished, but the Soviets established the earliest national anti-tobacco campaigns and funded the first public cessation clinics.

Despite this early start, the animosity of the architect of the revolution, and the support of the leader of the first national health service in the world, tobacco remained integral to the Soviet experience and grew in use. By the 1960s–1970s, Soviet medical authorities estimated smoking rates of 45.0 to 56.9 percent among men and 26.3 to 49.1 percent among women.5 Despite recent successes, the num bers caught in dependency and suffering are still high.6 In 2020, 50.9 percent of Russian men and 14.3 percent of women used tobacco, most in cigarettes. For comparison, smoking rates in the United States (hereafter US) crested in 1965

at 52 percent of males and 34 percent of females and currently hover around 15 and 13 percent, respectively.7 Considering that regular tobacco use kills half (or more) of its users with a smoking-related illness, it should not be surprising to learn of the nearly 329,000 tobacco-related deaths in Russia in 2020 or overall about 30 percent of male and 6 percent of female deaths.8

Tobacco may seem a small, even negligible thing—Leon Trotsky termed the butts an objectionable “trifle of life”—but as he noted, “Trifles, accumulating and combining, can constitute something great—or destroy something great.”9 Cigarettes and Soviets surveys the accumulation and combination of tobacco’s effects on people, government, and culture across the Soviet era and the destruc tion it has left in its wake.10 This analysis concentrates on the priorities of many different actors—from the government, tobacco producers, and public health administrators to workers, smokers, and the nonsmoking public—to unearth the culturally specific, politically contingent origins of Russia’s current tobacco problem. The resulting stories engage debates on the history and rise of the global tobacco epidemic that challenge the centrality of capitalism to those nar ratives and reveal how changing technology influenced experiences and behav iors. At the same time, Soviet tobacco is more than just a global story. Smoking permeates Soviet identity creation, gender definition, physical experience, and cultural values. Tobacco’s production, consumption, management, conception, and condemnation reaches into Soviet politics, economics, and society. Under standing how the state might both produce and resist tobacco showcases the influence of consumption and popular tastes on Soviet policy and undercuts visions of a unified state of coherent policies. Analysis of Soviet tobacco cessation and therapy highlights the difference of Soviet health care, its style, and its basic tenets. Gathering and interconnecting these stories of tobacco indicates smoking was more than just a trifle. Smoking outlasted Lenin and Semashko, endured and even triumphed under Stalin, survived the war, heated up through the Thaw, and persisted and intensified after the Bolshevik experiment collapsed. The revolu tionary state withered away, but smoking, stubbornly, remained.

Lenin and Semashko’s attention to tobacco reflected not a quixotic fight against an imaginary enemy but a reaction to its prevalence in revolutionary Russia. Despite an initial resistance in the 1600s, Russians had strongly taken to tobacco by the nineteenth century.11 In 1898, the anti-tobacco author Dr. A. I. Il’inskii claimed that in Russia, a country infamous for its prodigious drinking, “the number of smokers is ten to twenty times greater than the number of people in alcoholic excess.”12 Although other types of tobacco use were available in Russia and then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (hereafter USSR), by far the most common mode of intake was the unique Russian cigarette—the

papirosa (singular -a; plural -y). The hollow cardboard tube affixed to a tissuepaper-wrapped cartridge of leaf accounted for almost half of all processed tobacco in Russia by 1914; by 1922 the number was 80 percent.13 For compari son, on the eve of World War I only 7 percent of tobacco in the US went into cigarettes.14 Most Russian tobacco went to papirosy or loose tobacco for selfrolled smokes, and most Russian males smoked. Official consumption statistics, based on taxes, assumed 143 papirosy per person per year, but observers estimated much higher usage.15 Industry analysts claimed that a pack a day (about twenty smokes) was standard for almost every Russian male.16 The use of tobacco stretched across the empire, through its social fabric, and across its cultural divides, a democratic dependency that still allowed differentiation of status with brands, accessories, and styles of consumption. The more than one thousand Russian papirosy brands recorded by 1913 implied a market of diversity and size.17 Even women smoked in large enough numbers to merit custom marketing, specialized brands, and exquisite Fabergé accessories.18 It would be years, decades in some cases, for similarly mass use of cigarettes to develop in other markets.19

Not only did Russians consume tobacco in large numbers and in a unique form, most lower-class users, the vast majority, smoked a singular type of tobacco called makhorka. Makhorka (Nicotiana rustica) is a nicotine-laden, highly fra grant tobacco varietal smoked, loose and self-rolled, by about two-thirds of Rus sians at the time of World War I.20 For the peasantry easily grown, worked, and smoked makhorka offered a cheap, untaxed, and untraced way to smoke. In the city, the use of aromatic, rough makhorka differentiated class, as makhorka was cheaper than the oriental/Turkish leaf (Nicotiana tabacum) preferred by wellheeled smokers. American-style bright leaf appeared rarely.

These two conditions exceptional to late imperial Russia—the large por tion of tobacco smoked rather than snuffed, piped, or chewed and the avail ability of nicotine-heavy makhorka—made the Russian smoker revolutionary in another way. They created the possibility for more powerful tobacco dependency. Inhaled tobacco, as with cigarettes rather than pipes, quickly impacts the smoker. Dragged into the lungs, inhaled smoke delivers over 90 percent of the nicotine to the blood in less than thirty seconds, giving a quicker fix and increasing the possibility of dependency. Not only did Russians take to a more addictive means of tobacco use, but the tobacco smoked by the majority was incredibly strong. Makhorka contains nearly twice the nicotine of other tobaccos, and contempo rary accounts all point to it being inhaled, despite the harsh experience this must have imparted.21 These two factors are likely to have pulled Russian, and then Soviet smokers, into a quicker, more intense, dependency earlier than those in other tobacco markets.22

Whether the smokes were grown and worked at home, then self-rolled into “goat legs,” or factory-rolled papirosy bought from a street seller, a tobacco haze enveloped revolutionary Russia, flavoring every aspect of life. Smoked tobacco, especially from makhorka, produced an almost palpable stench, and in the close confines of the city, the smell of smoke impacted bystanders and the diaphanous tendrils from papirosy showed visibly from afar. After use, smoking marked bod ies with stale breath, yellowed teeth, stained fingers, musty hair, and burned and foul-smelling clothes. The smell from cheap makhorka or more dear oriental dif ferentiated class and pretentions. Smoke anchored the “scentscapes” of Russian cities and homes delineating spaces of respectability, danger, work, and leisure with either odor or stench according to personal predilection.23 The detritus of tobacco—musty spaces, ubiquitous butts, crumbs, and ash—blanketed streets and homes. When Russia experienced its liberal revolution in February 1917, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution in October of the same year, the politics changed, but every rally reeked of smoke. Spent papirosy and crushed packs littered the floors and tables of the numerous, endless meetings.24 When the journalist John Reed described the postrevolutionary gathering of the soviet in Petrograd, not just Lenin and Trotsky took over the stage but so too did the rank miasma: “There was no heat in the hall but the stifling heat of unwashed human bodies. A foul blue cloud of cigarette smoke rose from the mass and hung in the thick air.”25 The smell of revolution was tobacco, its sensibility smoke. This early start made smoking more noticeable and socially accepted and expected earlier, but the reasons and ways that the Soviets opposed tobacco also differed from those of the west. The Bolshevik seizure of power created oppor tunities for the maintenance of public health, even as heavy state interference in the production and sale of goods became policy. Connections to lung cancer or addiction were years in the future. Instead, Semashko’s and Lenin’s animosity to tobacco stemmed from the mass imposition of its smell and an opinion among some revolutionary-era doctors that nicotine was a poison that attacked the ner vous system. In addition to viewing the danger of smoking differently, Soviet medical authorities held unique attitudes toward public health, had a singular set of professional conditions in medicine, embraced therapeutic techniques born of their native reflexology, and expressed concerns over a contextually spe cific, perceived decline in the population’s health and virility.26 In the decades that followed the revolution, the Soviets forged innovative cessation techniques dependent on social interventions and chemical therapies and penned inventive arguments regarding the social costs of smoking and the dangers of secondhand smoke.

Despite this push for cessation from some government actors, others sup ported tobacco production, use, and export. This was not quite the disconnect

that it initially appears. On the one hand, not all were convinced tobacco was dangerous, and none considered it addictive like opium or alcohol. On the other hand, many thought smoking would cease on its own. Semashko tied smoking (and drinking) to capitalism and believed that revolution would defeat tobacco as social conditions eased and cultural levels rose. Representatives of industry and trade argued that for the moment, tobacco had to be produced and pursued heightened output to counter black marketing and public anger over low sup ply. The calculus, established early, maintained for years. Over the decades, state planners centered, celebrated, and even sacrificed for tobacco, and medical fig ures proved horribly wrong about smoking’s eventual demise. By the end of the twentieth century the newly independent Russian state would be home to one of the highest smoking populations in the world, with horrific consequences for popular, especially male, health.

The events of October 1917 destabilized more than just political systems. Rev olution rearranged the basic building blocks of society and expectations for male and female behavior. Tobacco use or abstention—freighted with social mean ing, political ideas, and gendered concepts—became integral to the creation of a new Soviet self. Soviet family law evolved over the decades and campaigns at the factory and in the battlefield transformed the image of the ideal Soviet citizen. Just as expectations for masculine and feminine behavior fluctuated, so too did tobacco’s meaning transform. If a woman smoked, what she smoked and how, where, and with whom was sticky with meaning. For males in the revolutionary era, tobacco could be a sign of un-Soviet attitudes in cartoons, a mark of distinc tion in advertising, an attribute of the hard-core Bolshevik in public, or a sign of resistance to the past even as health literature depicted it as a disgusting source of impotence.27 In war, type of tobacco could signal military rank or authenticity as well as connections and status. By the 1960s smoking became so expected an aspect of male behavior that to attack it was seen as stripping away everything that made a Soviet man a man.

Not simply a cultural signifier, used and manipulated by people to commu nicate status or fashion, papirosy acted upon the body. Most basically, tobacco creates chemical dependency that can alter behavior and mood with both its presence and its absence. Further, smokers’ gestures and habits for lighting, hold ing, inhaling, and extinguishing papirosy bring comfort in their familiarity and can convey vehemence or promise intimacy in their completion. Lack of tobacco can increase anxiety or spur anger. And smokers are not the only players in this drama. Papirosy are also social and political actors.28 The sight of tobacco or an accessory could prompt desire to a habituate or trigger revulsion to a confirmed quitter without the smoker even being aware. For some an offered smoke invited comradery, for others the imposition of its smell denied a shared humanity.

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