yonkon

[yonkon]

Master storyteller

Some of the Kusrosawa Posters.

[yonkon]

A personal hero. I studied his studies on the Russian peasant economy in school. Did not know that he had a literary side to him. 

A guest post by Russian literary scholar Muireann Maguire, who blogs about literature as Russian Dinosaur

Between 1918 and 1928, Alexander Vasilievich Chayanov (1888-1937) wrote and published (at his own expense) five short Gothic-fantastic tales in separate volumes with print runs of no more than 300 copies, mostly under the whimsical pseudonym “Botanist X.” In his lifetime and until the 1990s, Chayanov was better known as an expert in agricultural economics, particularly peasant labor – and his objections to Stalin’s program of forced collectivization caused his arrest in 1930, exile from Moscow to Kazakhstan and eventual execution. After his rehabilitation in the post-Soviet period, these stories were re-issued in a single volume and ran to multiple editions, sparking a short-lived Russian “Chayanov boom” and a renewal of academic interest in his fiction.

Scholars are particularly intrigued by the potentially significant creative link between Chayanov’s short story “Venediktov” (1921) and the novel The Master and Margarita (1940) by his much better-known contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov. Chayanov’s illustrator, a friend of Bulgakov’s, gave the latter a copy of “Venediktov” as a gift. Bulgakov was intrigued and somewhat spooked to discover that this story’s narrator is also called Bulgakov, and that his fictional namesake falls victim to a bizarre form of psychic possession, or hypnotic persuasion, exerted by a quasi-diabolic force. Since both Chayanov and Bulgakov share an obsession with demonic characters, carnivalesque grotesquerie and magical chaos, it is reasonable to speculate that the former’s now-obscure tales influenced the latter’s now world-famous fiction.

Another tantalizing link to literary celebrity is the coincidence that Chayanov’s science-fiction utopia, My Brother Alexey’s Journey* (probably intended to demonstrate the future social benefits of his principles of agricultural economy) is set in 1984, the same year immortalized in George Orwell’s dystopian novel (published in 1949). While there is absolutely no evidence that Orwell was aware of Chayanov’s novella, he did read and review the first English translation of Evgeny Zamyatin’s science-fiction novel We (written 1921), which may have been influenced, or partially inspired, by My Brother Alexey’s Journey.

Three of Chayanov’s stories – “Venediktov,” “The Tale of the Hairdresser’s Mannequin, or, The Last Love Affair of a Moscow Architect,” and “The Venetian Mirror, or, The Extraordinary Adventures Of The Glass Man” – are available in my translation in a collection of Russian twentieth-century ghost stories called Red Spectres. Two still await publication: a love story about a ghost, and a picaresque trans-European adventure starring two accidental mermaids and a magician. All five are indulgently intertextual, erratically citing Hoffmann, Pushkin, Karamzin, Catullus, and the occasional authority on agronomy. For me, the great charm of these stories is their robust pastiche of a genre I love – the late Romantic fantastic. Chayanov intermingles an abundance of characters and tropes beloved of the early nineteenth century: mermaids, mirrors, mesmerists, and card-playing demons who worship Satan in London gentlemen’s clubs. E.T.A. Hoffmann is acknowledged as “the great master” (in the dedication of “The Tale of the Hairdresser’s Mannequin,” but Chayanov’s eclectic knowledge of Russian and European culture is reflected in the multiplicity of his influences. Théophile Gautier’s eponymous opium-hazed artist in the short story “Onuphrius” (1832) could be refracted in the beautiful female spectre, conjured by tobacco smoke blown from a charmed pipe, who enchants the naïve diarist-narrator in “Julia, or Trysts At Novodevichy Convent” (1928). Alexey, the hero of “The Venetian Mirror” (1923), whose double escapes from an antique looking-glass to cause havoc around Moscow and even kidnap his wife, joins a long Romantic tradition of mirror-doubles – but Chayanov may have been inspired by the comparably malign runaway reflection in the 1913 German silent film The Student of Prague, directed by another now little-read author, Hanns Heinz Ewers. Ewers’s film inspired Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic treatise The Double (1914). We can only imagine what Rank or Freud would have said about Chayanov’s fiction had they enjoyed the opportunity to read it – doubtless, a great deal.

In Yuli Kagarlitskii’s phrase, Chayanov “belonged to the flower of the Russian democratic intelligentsia.”** This was a uniquely cosmopolitan and intellectually dowered generation whom Stalin and the Communist Party did their best to exterminate or exile. Chayanov’s fascination with urban topography and architecture, his knowledge of European languages, his passion for engravings and his aspirations to write historical fiction (even during his first arrest he began a novel about the medieval Slav prince Yuri Suzdalskii), all bespeak the breadth of his interests and his apparently inexhaustible energy. His second wife and staunch supporter Olga Gurevich was a theatre historian, whose career was also destroyed by the Soviet regime. Chayanov’s imaginary universe was almost ludicrously antithetical to the political environment of his own time: his entire oeuvre is an anomalous outcropping against the realistic trend of Soviet literature. The rediscovery and translation of his fiction is hard to justify by economic principles, but remains deeply enjoyable for all lovers of the eccentric and eclectic.

* Chayanov’s unfinished sci-fi novella, My Brother Alexey’s Journey Into the Land of Peasant Utopia (first published in Moscow in 1920 under a pseudonym) was published in an English translation as a slightly eccentric addendum to the late Professor R.E.F. Smith’s 1977 book The Russian Peasant, 1920 and 1984.

**Yuli I. Kagarlitskii, Slavic Review, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter, 1990), pp. 634-642 [link]

images: (1) photo of Chayanov, 1921; (2) original illustration by Natalia Ushakova (who gave “Venediktov” to Bulgakov); (3) & (4) recent woodcuts by Grigory Babich for a Chayanov edition via book designer Alina Vekshina; (5) unpublished 1928 illustration by Kravchenko via nasledie-rus.ru (6) photo of Chayanov

This is a guest post by Russian literary scholar Muireann Maguire, who blogs about literature as Russian Dinosaur.

[yonkon]

I've been reading with much enjoyment all the articles on the ongoing "Twitch Plays Pokemon" experiment. Sure, no one might be calling it an experiment (yet), but it is clearly a social experiment of epic proportions. And the experiment is looking to answer the age-old question: can technology facilitate the establishment of spontaneous order in human society? This question carries the potential of completely rewriting social theory and political philosophy as the possibility of technology allowing people to overcome uncertainty will open the doors towards building communities without formal institutions. The end of states. The end of history.   

This is reminiscent of another experiment done in the past, conducted by Loren Carpenter in 1991, where a large group of people, without instruction, began collectively playing a game of pong. It was a social experiment that highlighted the vision of the internet utopians in Silicon Valley in the early 1990s (see the whole documentary here). 

Of course, just because thousands of people are able to play Pokemon together doesn't mean that our society is ready to burst forth into a state of anarchy. As the internet utopians of the 1990s discovered, the world is less rational and orderly than is prescribed within the boundaries of algorithm and logical output. 

Perhaps society is ready to meditate on this matter again - with Anonymous, Wikileaks, etc. challenging the way we think about intelligence and statecraft, the world has taken leaps since the early days of the internet. Edward Snowden has definitely brought the power of the internet to promote popular democracy to the forefront. But as Evgeny Morozov commented on cyber-utopians:

What you don't hear about is the distinction between digital renegades and digital captives, which I think is a much more important one because we need to know how exactly technology influences civic engagement

The world is complex and because it is, the question of spontaneous order is extremely fascinating and worth ruminating. But we must be ever wary of falling into the dangerous trap of ideological absolutism.

over and out

[yonkon]

History meets art meets travel journal meets ruminations - this is exactly the kind of stuff I would like to see more of

The Man who Built Beirut

Rafik Hariri’s murder trial began today at the Hague. I living in Lebanon in 2005 when he assassinated and witnessed the massive protests and events that followed.

Here’s the comic I wrote in 2011 comic about my experiences during that time. As a minicomic, it was listed as a notable publication by Best American Comics 2013. 

You can also read it on my website with this clickthrough.

[yonkon]

Kim Stanley Robinson’s modest utopias.

Lovely commentary on how wonderful science fiction truly is

[yonkon]

One of my favorite war novels. Less about the fighting and more about the loss of humanity that accompanies deprivation. Heartfelt and personal, but still detailed in capturing the horrific human casualties of the Siege of Leningrad - I could not recommend it more. 

City of Thieves, David Benioff (F, 20s, curly hair, black stacked heels, olive green jacket, floral scarf, C train) http://n.pr/1behc6M

[yonkon]

Really looking forward to seeing this. 

Not only is Errol Morris a master story teller with a flare for bringing to life the inconspicuous and pulling the carpet of misconceptions from under our feet, Rumsfeld was a chief figure in the Bush administration's rhetoric offensive that established the need for war in the hearts and minds of the American public. This will not be like Fog of War. This will be struggle between two master wordsmiths that could very well define the way America makes sense of its recent past.  

[yonkon]

But is Leipzig Germany’s Austin, a city where every other “hip” twenty-something will soon want to live? Or is Leipzig Germany’s Detroit, a struggling place where small pockets of revival get highlighted while the rest of the city quietly rusts away?

How Leipzig Became ‘Hypezig’ (via theatlanticcities)

And this is the question that will plague all peripheral urban areas in post-industrial economies. The disappearing smoke stacks across America and Europe, alongside the great embittered disillusionment of the youth, leaves an uncomfortable yet unavoidable question.

Perhaps the difference is that Austin never aspired to be the shining city on the hills. Detroit did. There is no coming back up from a fall as great as Detroit's - everything good that will ever happen to Detroit will feel like a meek consolation while every good thing in Austin will feel like a blessing.   

[yonkon]

I would like to one day have a stare down with a cat while sitting at my low-lying desk with my back to a massive bookshelf, no doubt a manuscript of a book that is near complete in its midst.