It's a good review, but you're very unfair to Fathers and Sons, which is nowhere close to wish fulfillment you describe. You say it's about zoomers learning to accept their boomer parents? Please! Bazarov, (the book's hero), scorns his own loving parents, romantically humiliates and then shoots the narrator's uncle, and finally dies of a self-inflicted wound. You make it sound like an after-school special. It's true that Arkady (the narrator) ends on good terms with his family, but not because he's realized they're hip after all. Rather, he finds he can't stomach the cruelty of Bazarov towards their parents' generation, for whom he has always harbored great affection. The point of the novel is not that Bazarov is wrong and Arkady is right, or reverse -- it's that Arkady's maturation forces him to recognize that he will never be as bold or exciting as Bazarov, and that any attempt to emulate Bazarov will always come off as ugly and inauthentic. Even with his downfall, at the novel's end it's clear that the future belongs to the Bazarovs of the world, and not the Arkadys. Arkady will live a nice life on his farm, but he will never become a figure of importance.
The Faust passage is wonderful. I want to read Faust now.
I'm going to recommend Antony Beevor's _Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921_, if you haven't read it already. (I might have gotten the recommendation from you in the first place!)
One thing that really comes through in Beevor's book is just how incompetent the White forces were. While very few people hate the Bolsheviks more than me, it was very hard for me to root for the White forces. Everything you mention in Demons is true of the White forces.
Came in the comments to protest the libelous treatment of Fathers and Sons. IMHO its message is not so different than Dostoevsky's -- the point is not that the progressivism of the children can be accommodated to that of the parents, but that because the parental (boomer) generation is so beholden to rebellious pieties, this generation not only sets the stage for the nihilism to follow, but lacks the conceptual categories and emotional resources to counter the next generation's nihilism when it shows up. In Fathers and Sons you see every NYT editor horrified at the young wokes but unable to do anything with that horror but mutter a few muted statements of shock in the background.
I read this review a few weeks ago and it was so good it inspired me to immediately begin reading the book in question. Finally finished after a bit of a pause midway through, came back to reread the review and it's even better now that I know the book myself. Really incredible piece.
I was very traumatized by how similar the miniatures-loving governor is to myself. Dostoevsky is right about Germans.
"La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire[1] (English: The Chinese, or, rather, in the Chinese manner: a film in the making), commonly referred to simply as La Chinoise, is a 1967 French political docufiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard about a group of young Maoist activists in Paris.
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students—three young men and two young women—belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named after the novel Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan). The film won the Grand Jury Prize in 1967 Venice Film Festival."
Your review made me think of Yuri Slezkine's "The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution". The first several hundred pages are amazing, showing the parallels between the revolutionaries and Christian apocalypse. And the joy in destroying evil-doers/non-revolutionaries.
You may have mentioned Chadsky as a throwaway joke, but funny enough there is actually a character with that name in another Russian book about young radicals (Wikpedia suggests the English title is Woe from Wit). Maybe better transliterated as Chatsky, but I still kept waiting for the punchline that never arrived.
The guy is anything but what his name suggests (sigma male if you're feeling generous, edgelord if you don't), but this he is interesting as the step that precedes Fathers and Sons' Bazarov. One can draw a history of radicalism from westernized Chatsky who sees Russia as backwards and his relatives as what Caulfield will later call phony (but otherwise shares morality with every other guy), proceed to Bazarov who disrespects a lot of things Chatsky would hold dear, but is still an ardent believer in Enlightement ideals of Reason, and eventually this trend leads to Dostoevski's demons.
Hi this spoke to me bc I didn't think anyone could or would have translated this work into the hilarious language of the internet, and with such depth of comprehension and historical context (I am reading this right now and marveling how all of peter's little schemes mirror the 'catechism' to the letter, and how the catechism shaped the views of Lenin and Stalin, and how powerfully predictive this whole novel is). The meme of an egregore has latched on to my brain like a benign little tumor or a cute little devil on my shoulder and I can't help but see it in everything. I just wanted to say that I appreciate you, and I am sorry that I am too poor to donate, but I will continue to read your work, for what it's worth.
Like others in the comments, I shall carp on the author’s ridiculous treatment of Turgenev
«His most famous work, Fathers and Sons, is of a piece with the most lurid boomer fantasies».
More like “tell me you know nothing about Russian literature without telling me you know nothing about Russian literature”.
In each one of his works, Turgenev primarily castigated himself and the weakness of the educated Russian aristocracy (his people). Plus, his aristocratic sense of good taste told him that to be both the author and the protagonist at the same time was, first of all, low-class showboating, and secondly, downright foolishness (in the professional literary sense).
This is best shown in Turgenev’s undeservedly overlooked novel Smoke, which has been considered an apologia for (boomer) liberalism for some reason, where the character espousing something close to Turgenev’s real-life views is portrayed as a pathetic person and a downright simp.
The whole novel is basically about the protagonist arriving at the European ideals of hard work, championed by Russian Westernizers ideals via essentially a Slavophile route. And it also mapped onto a love story. I think Jane would like it.
This is touching a really interesting subject! There was a time when I was really interested in Tibetan Buddhism, in the modernized, "meditation is healthy sense". But that was not what Tibetans were interested in. They were interested in protecting themselves from demons, although they tried to downplay that for us Westies who tended to see this as superstition. But I have also seen Westies at the more fringe kinds of Christian sects who were talking about demons a lot, like getting possessed through masturbation.
I have always tended to consider this a breakdown of religion, when a religion sometimes becomes dysfunctional, it is like this.
To see this as a completely normal premodern phenomenon... is disturbing.
The modern Christian, just like the modern Buddhists, see our own sins as the primary problem, committed from our own volition, coming from our own desires.
To think in a way that we might not be entirely in control of our actions, but something might possess and control us is very disturbing. Where is even personal responsibility then? Isn't "demons made me do it" just a too easy excuse?
Besides, aren't all these demons so obviously just an externalization of our own internal psychological "demons" ?
Cholera and malaria do their deadly work internally, but to treat them as a solely individual problem would be profoundly unwise. The same is true of some psychological phenomena.
I didn’t have a name for the Mao-beast in Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” until I read “Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.”
It reminds me of the part where in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Lee Fermor tells of seeing in the early 1930s a young German boy's room covered in Nazi posters and being told by the boy that he should have seen it a year before when it was covered with Communist posters.
This is one of the best book reviews I’ve ever read.
It's a good review, but you're very unfair to Fathers and Sons, which is nowhere close to wish fulfillment you describe. You say it's about zoomers learning to accept their boomer parents? Please! Bazarov, (the book's hero), scorns his own loving parents, romantically humiliates and then shoots the narrator's uncle, and finally dies of a self-inflicted wound. You make it sound like an after-school special. It's true that Arkady (the narrator) ends on good terms with his family, but not because he's realized they're hip after all. Rather, he finds he can't stomach the cruelty of Bazarov towards their parents' generation, for whom he has always harbored great affection. The point of the novel is not that Bazarov is wrong and Arkady is right, or reverse -- it's that Arkady's maturation forces him to recognize that he will never be as bold or exciting as Bazarov, and that any attempt to emulate Bazarov will always come off as ugly and inauthentic. Even with his downfall, at the novel's end it's clear that the future belongs to the Bazarovs of the world, and not the Arkadys. Arkady will live a nice life on his farm, but he will never become a figure of importance.
The Faust passage is wonderful. I want to read Faust now.
I'm going to recommend Antony Beevor's _Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921_, if you haven't read it already. (I might have gotten the recommendation from you in the first place!)
One thing that really comes through in Beevor's book is just how incompetent the White forces were. While very few people hate the Bolsheviks more than me, it was very hard for me to root for the White forces. Everything you mention in Demons is true of the White forces.
Came in the comments to protest the libelous treatment of Fathers and Sons. IMHO its message is not so different than Dostoevsky's -- the point is not that the progressivism of the children can be accommodated to that of the parents, but that because the parental (boomer) generation is so beholden to rebellious pieties, this generation not only sets the stage for the nihilism to follow, but lacks the conceptual categories and emotional resources to counter the next generation's nihilism when it shows up. In Fathers and Sons you see every NYT editor horrified at the young wokes but unable to do anything with that horror but mutter a few muted statements of shock in the background.
I read this review a few weeks ago and it was so good it inspired me to immediately begin reading the book in question. Finally finished after a bit of a pause midway through, came back to reread the review and it's even better now that I know the book myself. Really incredible piece.
I was very traumatized by how similar the miniatures-loving governor is to myself. Dostoevsky is right about Germans.
You should watch Jean Luc Godard's La Chinoise:
"La Chinoise, ou plutôt à la Chinoise: un film en train de se faire[1] (English: The Chinese, or, rather, in the Chinese manner: a film in the making), commonly referred to simply as La Chinoise, is a 1967 French political docufiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard about a group of young Maoist activists in Paris.
La Chinoise is a loose adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1872 novel Demons. In the novel, a group of five disaffected citizens, each representing a different ideological persuasion and personality type, conspire to overthrow the Russian imperial regime through a campaign of sustained revolutionary violence. The film, set in contemporary Paris and largely taking place in a small apartment, is structured as a series of personal and ideological dialogues dramatizing the interactions of five French university students—three young men and two young women—belonging to a radical Maoist group called the "Aden Arabie Cell" (named after the novel Aden, Arabie by Paul Nizan). The film won the Grand Jury Prize in 1967 Venice Film Festival."
Your review made me think of Yuri Slezkine's "The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution". The first several hundred pages are amazing, showing the parallels between the revolutionaries and Christian apocalypse. And the joy in destroying evil-doers/non-revolutionaries.
You may have mentioned Chadsky as a throwaway joke, but funny enough there is actually a character with that name in another Russian book about young radicals (Wikpedia suggests the English title is Woe from Wit). Maybe better transliterated as Chatsky, but I still kept waiting for the punchline that never arrived.
The guy is anything but what his name suggests (sigma male if you're feeling generous, edgelord if you don't), but this he is interesting as the step that precedes Fathers and Sons' Bazarov. One can draw a history of radicalism from westernized Chatsky who sees Russia as backwards and his relatives as what Caulfield will later call phony (but otherwise shares morality with every other guy), proceed to Bazarov who disrespects a lot of things Chatsky would hold dear, but is still an ardent believer in Enlightement ideals of Reason, and eventually this trend leads to Dostoevski's demons.
Read it again a year ago. Bracing how relevant it remains, really.
Hi this spoke to me bc I didn't think anyone could or would have translated this work into the hilarious language of the internet, and with such depth of comprehension and historical context (I am reading this right now and marveling how all of peter's little schemes mirror the 'catechism' to the letter, and how the catechism shaped the views of Lenin and Stalin, and how powerfully predictive this whole novel is). The meme of an egregore has latched on to my brain like a benign little tumor or a cute little devil on my shoulder and I can't help but see it in everything. I just wanted to say that I appreciate you, and I am sorry that I am too poor to donate, but I will continue to read your work, for what it's worth.
I never thought a book review could be so entertaining. Well done!
Like others in the comments, I shall carp on the author’s ridiculous treatment of Turgenev
«His most famous work, Fathers and Sons, is of a piece with the most lurid boomer fantasies».
More like “tell me you know nothing about Russian literature without telling me you know nothing about Russian literature”.
In each one of his works, Turgenev primarily castigated himself and the weakness of the educated Russian aristocracy (his people). Plus, his aristocratic sense of good taste told him that to be both the author and the protagonist at the same time was, first of all, low-class showboating, and secondly, downright foolishness (in the professional literary sense).
This is best shown in Turgenev’s undeservedly overlooked novel Smoke, which has been considered an apologia for (boomer) liberalism for some reason, where the character espousing something close to Turgenev’s real-life views is portrayed as a pathetic person and a downright simp.
The whole novel is basically about the protagonist arriving at the European ideals of hard work, championed by Russian Westernizers ideals via essentially a Slavophile route. And it also mapped onto a love story. I think Jane would like it.
This is touching a really interesting subject! There was a time when I was really interested in Tibetan Buddhism, in the modernized, "meditation is healthy sense". But that was not what Tibetans were interested in. They were interested in protecting themselves from demons, although they tried to downplay that for us Westies who tended to see this as superstition. But I have also seen Westies at the more fringe kinds of Christian sects who were talking about demons a lot, like getting possessed through masturbation.
I have always tended to consider this a breakdown of religion, when a religion sometimes becomes dysfunctional, it is like this.
To see this as a completely normal premodern phenomenon... is disturbing.
The modern Christian, just like the modern Buddhists, see our own sins as the primary problem, committed from our own volition, coming from our own desires.
To think in a way that we might not be entirely in control of our actions, but something might possess and control us is very disturbing. Where is even personal responsibility then? Isn't "demons made me do it" just a too easy excuse?
Besides, aren't all these demons so obviously just an externalization of our own internal psychological "demons" ?
Cholera and malaria do their deadly work internally, but to treat them as a solely individual problem would be profoundly unwise. The same is true of some psychological phenomena.
lovely
I didn’t have a name for the Mao-beast in Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” until I read “Its true name sounds to human ears like a high-pitched mechanical screeching and clicking, a sound calculated to drive men mad, and to drive madmen into making it real.”
It reminds me of the part where in A Time of Gifts, Patrick Lee Fermor tells of seeing in the early 1930s a young German boy's room covered in Nazi posters and being told by the boy that he should have seen it a year before when it was covered with Communist posters.