Gary Saul Morson – Pray for Chekhov: Or, What Russian Literature Can Teach Conservatives

good afternoon my name is David as Aaron and the director of the be Kenneth Symons Centre for principles and politics here at the Heritage Foundation and I'd like to welcome you to one of our two annual Russell Kirk lectures at the end of Plato's Republic Socrates famously speaks of an old quarrel between poetry and philosophy Socrates thinks that the poet's by which he means all those who tell stories which today would include playwrights novelists and writers that they harm the thought of those who hear them the poets in turn dismissed the philosophers for being great in the empty eloquence of fools now Socrates famously won the quarrel in the Republic by banishing the poets but with the advent of modernity both philosophy and poetry or banished by a new mightier foe science today it rules supreme over the minds and souls of men it alone presumes to explain to us the world we live in as such serious people especially serious people in Washington DC take neither philosophy nor poetry seriously but if for a moment we ignore the dizzying array of material wonders brought forth by our science and if we instead ask ourselves what do we really know about what it means to be human how well do we understand our regime then the limitations of our scientific worldview become manifest for what can economics really teach us about courage what the psychology know about genuine love what the sociology have to say about the family very little that matters it seems the deepest questions the human questions are either ignored by our sciences or answered in superficial ways philosophy and poetry or what we today call literature may still have something to teach us after all now I don't propose the real the quarrel between philosophy and poetry today much less to settle it but I have invited Gary Sol Morrison to open our eyes to what Tolstoy Dostoevsky Chekhov and the other Giants of Russian literature may have to teach us not about 19th century Russia but about the world we live in today for the questions they grappled with questions about the problems of nihilism and materialism the possibility of love and modernity still confront us professor Morrison teaches Russian literature at Northwestern University where he's the Lawrence be Duma professor of the Arts and Humanities his work ranges over over era avoid per me a variety of subjects including Russian and European thought literary theory and his favorite writers Chekhov Gogol and above all Dostoevsky and Tolstoy he's the author of several books including one in particular that is very dear to my heart Anna Karenina in our time seemed more wisely which is one of the best academic books I've ever read in my life although I hesitate to call it an academic book because it's so well-written and insightful his introduction to Russian literature class at Northwestern regularly attracts more than 500 students making it one of the most popular elective classes there we've invited him to the Heritage Foundation to give a talk on what Russian literature can teach conservatives please join me in welcoming Gary cell Morrison thank you David and I am really truly honored to be here the title of this talk you'll see why later is called pray for Chekov it's in can you all hear me it's in ten parts and I tell you that so that at any point you'll know how much more you have to sit through it begins with an opening quotation from a Russian critic and philosopher writing in 1909 who wrote the surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer is the extent of his hatred for the intelligentsia part one is called the argument I propose to recount a century long argument with great relevance today as my epigraph suggests it pits the great Russian writers against the intelligence you think of it as Trotsky versus Tolstoy Lenin versus Dostoyevsky Bakunin versus Chekhov we Americans have our intelligence here which increasingly resembles the classic Russian one but we do not have anything like Russian literature with which to oppose it we need to enrich our thinking if we are to avoid the Russian outcome of 99 years ago Russia made two enormous contributions to the world though never good at physical technology it devised the world's most influential political technology which we have come to call totalitarianism in 1999 Time magazine proclaimed Einstein the man of the century the person who quote for better or worse most influenced the last 100 years but Einstein did not remotely affect so many lives as Lenin Russia's other enormous contribution was its literature part two is called slavery romantics Russian appreciation of literature has no rival I can compare it only to the way the Hebrew Bible must have seemed when books could still be at to it for Russians the cannon was and is sacred not only did literature represent life as Westerners presume but you could say that life existed to provide material for literature when Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was being serialized Dostoevsky's enthused at the end of one portion that at last the existence of the Russian people had been justified can anyone imagine a Frenchman supposing that the existence of the French people required justif justification and if it did that it could be justified by a novel when the writer Karl Janka who was half Ukrainian was asked his nationality he replied my homeland is Russian literature in the recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 19 of 2015 Rana Alexeyevich echoed this comment by claiming three homelands her father's viola ruse her mother's Ukraine and Russian literature like the poet Anna MAHT ova she thought of literature as a people's equivalent of an individual's memory without which a person or a culture is demented Alexei of its rights I quote flow Barre called himself a human pen I would say that I am a human ear when I walk down the street and catch words phrases and exclamations I always think how many novels disappear without a trace unquote like the great novelists alekseyev it's thought of life as the secret thoughts and feelings of individual souls which live in literature so here is where the argument is joined his life a matter of grand politics or individual souls and cannot be captured in a theory or is there always what russian philosopher mikhail bakhtin called a surplus exceeding the grasp of any theory the Intelligencia believed in theories and crises the novelists in the complexities of ordinary prosaic experience so the intelligence he was ready to sacrifice or enslave individuals who did not really matter to achieve their utopia alekseyev it refers to such people as quote slavery romantics slaves of utopia and quote Alexeyevich quotes varlaam Salama that the gulags second most famous chronicler who declared quote i was a participant in a colossal battle a battle that was lost for the genuine renewal of humanity unquote alexei abyss herself then continues quote and i reconstruct the history of that battle its victories and its defeats the history of how people wanted to build a heavenly kingdom on earth paradise the city of the sun in the end all that remained was a sea of blood millions of ruined lives there was a time however when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism or the october revolution as its symbol a time when nothing attracted Western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully and emotionally raymond aron called the russian revolution the opium of the intellectuals end of quote today that opium calls itself social justice Alexeyevich insists that we must not forget what socialism for all its aspirations meant in practice quote because arguments about socialism have not died down a new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again unquote on American campuses there's no need to say again part three is called why Tolstoy did not belong to the intelligentsia we get the word intelligentsia in English from Russian where it was coined about 1860 in its strict sense the Russian word meant something very different from what its English counterpart now means it was not synonymous with intellectuals well-educated people or least of all those who value independent thought in any given society well-educated people might or might not resemble an inteligencia in the Russian sense my fear is that in America they increasingly do resemble it to be an intelligent that's a member of the intelligentsia one had to satisfy three criteria which most educated people including the great novelists did not first of all an intelligent had to share a set of radical beliefs there was no such thing as a conservative or moderate intelligent required beliefs varied from generation to generation but in the classic period they always included materialism atheism some form of socialism or anarchism and revolution ISM by which was meant not a belief in revolution as a means but as something valuable in itself the terrorist Sergei achieves catechism of a revolutionary explains that one is not a true revolutionary quote if one feels compassion for something in this world unquote note the language here catechism this world revolution ISM was a substitute for religion like I suppose environmentalism today the stay F ski once observed that Russians do not become atheists they convert to atheism the prototypical intelligent was in fact either the child of a priest or a former student in a russian orthodox seminary and so in the classic period calling someone a seminarian was the equivalent of calling him or red X seminarians included the classic ages most influential figure Nicholas Turner chefs key and later Joseph Stalin one reason no one would have considered tell soy and until againt is that he believed in God second and intelligent had to identify primarily as an intelligent leave everything abandoned father and mother and follow us if you thought of yourself as a nobleman a doctor or family man who just happened to be well educated you were not and intelligent that is another reason no one would have called Tolstoy who used his title of count and intelligent Chekhov particularly hated what he called this artificial overwrought solidarity because it entailed not thinking but repeating orthodoxies by quote from Chekhov yes our young ladies and political bows are pure Souls but nine-tenths of their pure souls aren't worth a damn all they're inactive sanctity and purity are based on hazy and naive sympathies and antipathies to individuals and labels not to facts it's easy to be pure when you hate the devil you don't know and love the God you would never enough brains to doubt unquote does it sound familiar third an intelligent embraced a particular lifestyle in the 1860s and 70s this entailed a rigid code of anti manners prescribing behavior formerly regarded as sordid tarnish chefs key came by his lower-class manners honestly but they became a model aristocrats took lessons in anti refinement women just had to smoke when dust a Eskie was looking to get remarried he had trouble finding a woman who was well educated but not a radical once to satisfy a deadline for producing a novel the in desperation hired a graduate of Russia's new stenography school in order to dictate a novel as it occurred to him at their first meeting he offered the stove for a cigarette but she declined thus they have ski thought if she doesn't smoke perhaps she believes in God in fact she did and that is how does they a ski met his second wife today we have our own ever-changing virtue signaling part four is called little Napoleon's behind these criteria lay a set of assumptions too obvious to be articulated one one had to argue for one or another theory but not for theory meaning theory of everything itself theory itself as an explanation everything that was a given one reason Marx has improved so appealing was its ambitious claim to resolve all contradictions think of March's assertion that quote communism is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution unquote no Theory claiming much less could appeal to Russian intelligence or if it did it was habitually transformed into something all explanatory a habit of transformation that dust a Eskie called quote the russian aspect of european doctrines unquote here's how dusty as he explains that it consists of those inferences from those doctrines which in the form of unshakable axioms are drawn only in russia or as in europe the possibility of such deductions is not even suspected unquote or as the stay asked to be marked elsewhere a Russian intelligent is someone who can read Darwin and promptly resolve to become a pickpocket if theory rules then theorists must rule the intelligence shared what Thomas solo has called the vision of the anointed this is the key criterion without which a group cannot be an intelligence here in the Russian sense let every other intelligence you believe changed they have ski insisted but the belief in themselves as saviours would remain Raskolnikov the hero of crime and punishment invokes several contradictory theories to justify murdering an old pron broker first he invokes utilitarianism just calculating on one side is an old woman sure to die soon anyway whose life is worth quote no more than a cockroach unquote less in fact since she does since she does positive harm on the other side hundreds of lives that might be saved by her money quote one death and 100 lives in exchange it's simple arithmetic unquote not only is it moral to kill her it would be immoral not to but Raskolnikov also invokes radical relativism which unlike utilitarianism denies any foundation for morality morality he muses quote is all artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be unquote because the world understood naturalistically has only is not off there is no should be Raskolnikov voices still more justifications for murder but the one underlying them all is his Napoleonic theory the world is divided into two sorts of people the many ordinary and the few extraordinary ordinary people are conservative they uphold tradition in the ancient law they are people of the present quote mere material that serves only to reproduce its kind unquote extraordinary people like like urges Solon and Napoleon are men of the future who bring a new word they are necessarily criminals because the mere fact they create a new law makes them violators of the old they have the right indeed the obligation to do whatever their idea requires quote Raskolnikov I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one a dozen a hundred or more men Newton would have had the right would indeed have been duty-bound to eliminate the dozen or hundred men unquote the Bolsheviks also required murder as not just permitted but morally required for Ross koulikov quote even men a little out of the common as he puts it must be criminals in this way this point is crucial because it allows for a group of special people not just one a century like Napoleon that group is the intelligentsia to appreciate how long live diz this idea of most people as mere material think of the frequent reference among Western intellectuals to the Soviet experiment at as a justification of the Revolution even though it didn't turn out as hoped one experiments on mere material not human beings like oneself a true social scientist Raskolnikov maintains that the exact number of extraordinary people must be governed by a natural law which one could presumably discover quote there certainly is and must be a definite law it cannot be a matter of chance unquote it cannot be a matter of chance because for the social scientists nothing is anymore than there can be such a thing as free will if something is governed by law then everything is well Skolnick of sister replies with horror quote what is truly original in all this is that you sanctioned bloodshed in the name of conscience and excuse my saying so with such fanaticism that sanction of bloodshed by conscience is to my mind more terrible than the official legal sanction of bloodshed unquote why more terrible bloodshed his bloodshed isn't it look ahead to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago where he asks why Macbeth killed only a few people while Lenin and Stalin murdered millions the answer he says is that Shakespeare's villains had no ideology I quote ideology that is what gives the evil do with a necessary steadfastness and determination that is the social theory which helps to make his act seem good instead of bad in his own and others eyes so that he won't hear approaches and curses and receive praises and honors unquote if ideology applies everywhere then to quote Sergei Nechayev the terrorist quote everything that promotes the revolution is moral everything that hinders it is immoral Lenin and Trotsky maintained it is not just that the party never makes mistakes rather whatever the party does is right because the party does it the agent of history with a capital H itself the party's actions are moral by definition it follows that compassion to class enemies must be immoral we teach children to overcome their natural selfishness but the Soviets taught them to overcome their natural compassion which might stay their hand from killing a class enemy one valued not the bushwa notion of human rights which includes everyone but class interest as the novelist Vasily Grossman explained what race was to the Nazis class that is the one you were born into was to the Soviets to refrain from torture Trotsky declared was quote the most pathetic and miserable liberal prejudice unquote in 1918 the founder of the Soviet secret police feelers Church insky published an article in the journal Red Terror I didn't make that up in which he instructed well we are not waging war against individual persons we are exterminating the Bush huazi as a class during the investigation do not look for evidence that the accused acted in deed or word against Soviet power the first questions that you ought to put are to what class does he belong what is his origin what is educational profession and it is these questions at all to determine the fate of the accused unquote like morality truth is by definition what the party says it is georg Apiata goth who was twice expelled from the party and eventually shot wrote that a true Bolshevik is quote ready to believe not just to assert that black is white and white is black if the party required it unquote in 1984 do recall o'brien proclaims this very doctrine 2+2 is really 5 if the party says it is which he calls collective solemn sysm there are no limits this is what the rule of theorists ultimately means so let me lay my cards on the table to the extent that a group of intellectuals comes to resemble and inteligencia to that extent is totalitarianism on the horizon should that group gain power that not Swedish style social democracy is what I see happening here I foresee in years rather than decades first a Putin style managed democracy and soon after a Stalinist state or rather one beyond Stalinism since Stalin did not have access to today's monitoring technology my scientist friends tell me we are on the verge of reading people's thoughts from the outside that would make 1984 a libertarian paradise and now for the pessimistic part of my paper part 5 is called equality so far as I know the only nineteenth-century thinker to foresee totalitarianism was dust is key the reason he could I think is that he deeply understood the mentality of the intelligentsia and what it would do with power unlike Tolstoy he had been a radical until again and recognized but he himself might have been willing to do in one article he refuted the idea common among conservatives that young radicals are simply idle and evelle undeveloped people as one journal put it on the contrary dust AFC declares quote I am myself and old Nechayev esteem i self stood on the scaffold condemned to death and I assure you that I stood in the company of educated people and therein he says lies the real horror that in Russia one can commit the foul list and most villainous act without being in the least of villain the possibility of considering oneself and sometimes even being in fact an honorable person while committing obvious and undeniable villainy that is our whole affliction unquote and I might add it's ours today the villain in dusty s Keys novel the possessed Piazza de Stepanovich who was modelled loosely on the terrorists Nechayev outlines his plans which come amazingly close to what actually happened either in Russia China or Cambodia he endorses the theory of one shugayev who famously declares maybe the most famous line from the novel quote I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start starting from unlimited freedom I arrive at absolute despotism I will add however that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine unquote it is thinking we recognize deny any limit on individual especially sexual morality and then repress anyone who thinks differently far from being incompatible the two go hand in hand Chihuly augggh demands quote the division of mankind into two unequal parts one-tenth enjoys unbounded power over the other nine-tenths the others have to give up all individuality and become so to speak a heard and through boundless submission will by a series of regenerations a primeval innocence they'll have to work however unquote another revolutionary objects that it would be better to take the nine-tenths and quote blow them up into the air and said they putted him into paradise I only leave a handful of educated people who would live happily ever after on scientific principles unquote at last protest upon which endorses a proposal to cut off quote a hundred million heads at the time that sounded like sheer absurdity but if you know step in court waz anthology of experts the black book of communism that estimates rather conservatively that very total for communist killings worldwide is it any wonder Russian writers are considered profits purest upon of its promises quote a system of spying every member of society spies on every other and it's his duty to a form inform against them any quote justice Stalin was to require the boy Pavel Morozov was made a national Soviet hero for turning in his parents we already have campuses where students are encouraged sometimes required if they have an honor code to turn each other in if they hear expressions of bias pure to Savannah beaches new societies key principle is to be absolute equality which requires a complete suppression of individuality or great talent quote Cicero will have his tongue cut out Copernicus will have his eyes put out Shakespeare will be stoned unquote did Paul Pott know this novel even before achieving power the Intelligencia offended great writers because it restricted art to political propaganda assuming art should exist at all quote boots are more important than Shakespeare became a slogan art was suspect because it claimed to reveal the human soul but the very idea of the soul was retrograde everyone knew the material was saying that the brain secretes thought the way the liver secretes bile in the early 1860s the physiologist Yvonne set Univ that was published mentor by the way published his influential book reflexes of the brain which outlines a neurological explanation of consciousness Dmitri Karamazov paraphrases the theory what people used to call the soul is really so many neurons with their tails quivering with the smallest change in wording that theories of course prevalent today but I'm sorry to lose God Dmitri concludes part 6 is called The Pursuit of Happyness the Russian novel is known above all for psychology what is less often appreciated is that in showing the complexity of the psyche the novelists were making a polemical point the intelligencia denied that people were complex at all human complexity was an idea hindering radical action like Jeremy Bentham and mainstream economists today churn a chef ski insisted in his novel what is to be done a book that became the intelligence Bible that everyone always does and should act according to their greatest advantage thus their skis notes from underground parodies churner chef's skis book by remarrying it's incidents as they might actually happen to people with real psychology the underground man appeals to empiricism which presumably a scientist should respect no one actually observing human behavior could presume it is simple or rational what is more people unlike molecules can know the laws that supposedly govern their behavior and act to fort them a possibility that forever rules out a Newtonian account of human beings what a person values most of all is that her action should be her own that she is not just a piano key or an organ stop played upon by impersonal laws that her choices could have been different and therefore matter rather than give up that sense of self the underground man insists people will act spitefully meaning against their self-interest just to prove that they are not piano keys or organ stones if a rationalist utopia could ever be achieved if everything were provided for one without effort and if the laws of nature and society could show the future in advance then life would become pointless as just a asking himself observed in one of his articles quote people would see then that they had no more life left that they had no freedom of spirit no will no personality people would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity that it is not possible to love one's neighbor without sacrificing something to him of one's labor and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it part seven is called the surplus of humaneness all the great realists not just Russians were master psychologists from Jane Austen to Henry James the genre of the realist novel depicts people as individuals who cannot be reduced to abstract categories I begin where all categories social or even psychological that could account for me end Mikhail Bakhtin who argued that genres embody implicit philosophical assumptions concluded that realist novels presuppose the irreducibility of individuals to abstractions people have what he called a surplus of humaneness and here's the famous quotation an individual Inc cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing socio-historical categories there is no mere form that would be able to contain once and forever all his human possibilities no form that he could fill to the very brim and yet at the same time not spill over the brim there always remains an unrealized surplus of humaneness unquote the difference between Russian and European novels is that Russian novels make this assumption explicit Russians regard novels as another and superior form of philosophy Westerners typically regard novelists as illustrating truths learned from some philosopher or social scientists and so Proust is read as applied bearson stern as enliven Bloch and Jane Austen as illustrated Thomas Reid but all one has to do is compare the philosophers psychological theory with a great novelistic heroine and is plain that George Eliot must have known something no philosopher ever did otherwise philosophers would have produced portraits of people as believable as Dorothea Brooke but no philosopher or social scientist has ever come close when this failure becomes obvious Westerners typically resort to the idea of Freud uses in his essay on Dostoevsky with condescending indulgence to a brilliant if sloppy mind he presented the author of Karamazov as grasping nearly intuitively deep truths that only superior thinkers like Freud himself could articulate explicitly but this is even more absurd Dostoyevsky's characters not just the bookish underground man but even the brawling Dmitri Karamazov delivered long speeches about the mind so that one could more readily fault us to Eskie for two months explicit articulation Russia's view their novelist not as illustrators but as discoverers with the philosophers lagging after to provide what Bakhtin called a partial but always inadequate inadequate transcription of novelistic wisdom for Bakhtin that is the proper role of the critic which is one reason so many philosophers including Barton himself presented their ideas as explications of great writers bhakti understood that the ideas he transcribed from dusty f ski continued his argument with intelligentsia ideologues now in Bakhtin's time represented by the Bolshevik regime part eight is called Jones so here is one lesson of Russian literature there can never be a social science if by that term we mean a discipline modeled on the hard sciences the Russian writers were reviving a tradition in Eclipse since the 17th century when the idea took hold that any respectable discipline must resemble Euclidian geometry or after or after Newton physics for the great rationalist in their heirs real knowledge was theoretical ideally mathematical and all specific events with a mere consequence of the laws Theory discovers to the extent you need a narrative rather than laws to explain things to that extent you fall short of scientific status real Sciences don't tell stories but the 19th century this moral Newtonian as le Halevi famously called it became a mania and not just with marxist and social Darwinists before Auguste Comte coined the term sociology he planned to call his new discipline social physics and land Wallace the founder of modern economics basis idea of equilibrium on the stability of the solar system he even sought the endorsement of the day's greatest mathematician already Poincare a even Freud found himself adopting hydraulic metaphors of the mind and claiming not just that some acts of forgetting or intentional but that all are since what sort of natural law admits of exceptions but there is another tradition of thought extending from Aristotle to Montaigne and Tolstoy which holds that reality demands two types of reasoning in addition to theoretical reasoning Aristotle's Epis team we need practical reasoning what he called Bernice's like geometry theory offers truths that are Universal precise without exception and timeless one reasons from the theory down to the specific examples it subsumes for the alternative tradition some questions demand reasoning up from particular cases aristotle cites clinical disciplines like medicine one does not want a physician whose only interest in one's illness is its potential contributions to science no good doctor is ever just an applied biologist he uses everything he knows theory and unties experience to devise a treatment for this patient and at this moment timeliness matters except of course in the Department of Veterans Affairs as it doesn't in geometry the same holds true for ethical issues if one reasons down from general rules one will often wind up with monstrous answers Aristotle notes because rules are formulated with a paradigm case in mind but real situations may differ in significant ways that cannot be foreseen then one must use judgment which by definition cannot be formalized good judgment grows out of experience mistakes and reflection upon mistakes a process yielding not theoretical knowledge but practical wisdom that is why as Aristotle observes young men can be good mathematicians but not good F assists which requires long experience practical wisdom yields answers that are to use Aristotle's favorite phrase true on the whole and for the most part now anyone who described the Pythagorean theorem as true on the whole and for the most part would demonstrate he did not grasp what mad mathematical reasoning is but by the same token anyone who sought quasi mathematical solutions to ethical problems would be just as wrong headed Marxist enemy the Russian socialist Alexander Harrison argued that there are no definitive solutions to social problems that history has no aim and that quote as he put it there is no libretto in history all's improvisation all is ex tempore on quote the answers given by practical reasoning are always tentative open to revision depending on circumstances that is why one never gives all power to anyone committed to a single answer but allows for critics to point out failures if not yell then at least at the University of Chicago in ethics the tradition reason the tradition reasoning up from cases is called casuistry and the fact that the term is now pejorative suggests how thoroughly the theoretical view triumphed casuist s-- use rules in the sense of rules of thumb which serve as mere reminders of particular sorts of cases the beginning but not the end of an argument when the theoretical tradition triumphed casuistry was banished from philosophy but it found a home in the novel Daniel Defoe began his career writing casuist achill advice columns you know Dear Abby sort of things and the cases he invented gradually grew in length to become novels like mole Flanders as a genre the realist novel is casuist achill it teaches how to derive wisdom from careful consideration of particular richly described cases philosophers still present ethical problems by briefly sketching a dilemma that occurs to Jones who has given no biography lives in no society and chooses at no particular time contrast that with the dilemmas facing Anna Karenina or Dorothea Brooke take this as a novelistic dictum no one is ever Jones not even Jones again the difference between the Russians and other realist novelists is that the Russians especially Tolstoy make the genres casuist achill assumptions explicit at the end of Anna Karenina Levin learns to make wise ethical choices not by applying rules but by acquiring wisdom from particular cases sensitively observed but teens/early treatises on ethics also explore the ethical limitations of what he called theoretician part 9 is called a good night's sleep Tolstoy's heroes begin believing in theory but then learn its limitations in war and peace Prince Andrei at first admires the German generals who have purportedly discovered a hard science of warfare which in this novel stands for any conceivable social science before Austerlitz the generals claim that it is a mathematical certainty that Napoleon will be defeated and that quote every contingency has been foreseen unquote but when the generals lose as they do so spectacularly at Austerlitz they explained that their instructions were not properly carried out which in battle is always the case they behave just like economists today who when predictions fail say either that their recommendations were applied too cautiously or that even though they were they were proven wrong they have at least now adjusted their theory sir now accounts for what happened like Paul Krugman they are never wrong of course even astrologers can adjust a theory after the fact to predict what already happened Prince Andrei learns that a science of human affairs is impossible he asks this is a quotation what science can there be in a matter as in every practical matter where nothing can be determined and everything depends on innumerable conditions the significance of which becomes manifest at a particular moment and one can tell when that moment will come we face tomorrow he says a hundred million chances which will be determined on the instant by whether we run or they run whether this man or that man is killed unquote irreducible chance matters no one can tell whether a bullet will hit a brave man or a coward capable of infected infecting others with his cowardice and timeliness matters things are decided on the instant an instant that is not just the automatic derivative of earlier instance and what is true of battle is true quote of every practical matter Tolstoy's wise general Kutuzov who falls asleep in the council of war before Austerlitz at last calls a halt to the discussion gentlemen he says the disposition for tomorrow cannot be changed and the most important thing before a battle is he paused a good night's sleep why a good night's sleep because in a world of radical contingency where unforeseeable situations arise and opportunities must be seized instantly or lost what matters is not theoretical knowledge but alertness the last part is called prosaic and indoor socialism what Andrei fails to learn but as friend Pierre does is the insight for which a quarter century ago I current I coined the term prosaic s' an idea central to numerous writers most obviously Tolstoy and Chekhov radicals and romantics picture life in terms of dramatic events the ordinary incidents between crises are viewed as trivial or despised as bushwa Tolstoy and Chekhov believed the opposite life is lived at ordinary moments and what is most real is what is barely noticeable like the tiniest movements of consciousness toss toiya observes the painter brew law of once directed a student sketch why you only touched it a tiny bit the student remarked but it is quite a different thing new law of replied art begins where that tiny bit begins Tolstoy concludes that saying is strikingly true not only of art but of all of life one may say that true life begins where the tiny bit begins where what seemed to us my nude and infinitesimally small alterations take place true life is not lived where great external changes take place when people move about clash fight and slay one another it has lived only where these tiny tiny infinitesimally small changes occur unquote Tolstoy's novels describe the infinitesimally woman's of consciousness our smallest choices and the mistakes we instantaneously forget but which the novel records and that is one reason his novels are so long in our brief lives every instant matters the Russian novel is so long because life is so short Tolstoy's wise as heroes learn to see the richness right in front of them hidden in plain view learning this truth Pierre comes to resemble I quote the key passage a man who after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance finds what he is seeking at his very feet in everything near incomprehensible he had seen only what was limited Petty and meaningless but now he discarded the mental telescope through which he had been gazing over the heads of men and joyfully surveyed the ever-changing eternally great unfathomable and infinite life around him unquote in Chekhov ignoring ordinary experiences is what wastes lives and such waste is his constant theme in Uncle Vanya one character observes Yvan Petrovich you are an educated man and I would think you would understand that the world is being destroyed not by crime and fire but by all these petty squabbles unquote shockingly Chekhov praised what no intellectual was supposed to respect bushwa virtues like cleanliness ordinary decency and even paying one's debts in this spirit Svetlana Alekseyevich his books orchestrate the voices of countless ordinary people responding microscopically to events historians treat macroscopically she seeks to capture what she describes as quote the history of domestic indoor socialism the history of how it played out in the human soul I am drawn to that small space called a human being a single individual in reality that is where everything happens unquote she is keenly aware of her debt to the great novelists and their dislike of grand theoretical systems I quote from her again it always troubled me that the truth doesn't fit into one mind that truth is splintered there is a lot of it it is varied and it is strewn about the world thus they us he thought that human humanity knows much much more about itself than it is recorded in literature so what is it what is it that I do I collect the everyday life of feelings thoughts and words the everyday life of the soul the thing that the big picture of history usually omits or disdains unquote these novelistic insights the existence of sheer contingency true life has lived in the tiny bit the openness of time meaning that what we choose really matters and the importance of the individual soul all these insights are closely linked the ideologue who look down on ordinary people as boars and rednecks and who put their faith in the abstractions they alone master will never understand them they see the world if you through the right lens as ultimately simple unlike Pierre who comes to appreciate quote the endless variety of men's minds which prevents a truth from ever appearing exactly the same to any two persons unquote by the novel's end quote the legitimate individuality of each person's views now became the basis of the sympathy Pierre felt for other people and the interest he took in them unquote my conclusion is brief we face a choice between the dangerous theory based uniformity of the intelligentsia and the wise perspective on life espoused by Russian literature pray for Chekhov thank you I guess we have time for questions David as a writer I think between the intelligentsia and the Russian novelist is an interesting one why in America do we tend to see the artist and the revolutionary on the same team that's a good question because the artist second and third rate artists typically are on the same team because if you can get praise as an artist by simply providing a ready readily consumed package of a received idea you'll be celebrated as an artist for a generation or less and those are the artists who of course will get the government grants and who will be you know taught in courses that one of my colleagues calls literature since Tuesday but surely you would have to you're not going to put Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville into that category are you I mean or God knows Henry James is not going to fit that right and those of course are the artists you know which are easiest to teaching the literature writers let's say we Jews teach in high school right because they have a very simple message which is easy to get across and easy to master and in fact it raises the obvious question of why should the students read it at all why not just memorize the message for which the students understand and that's why I think them literature classes now turn people off literature they don't give any reason to read it I mean if if the book is only a message and you can memorize the message without reading the book why bother people talk about the decline of the humanities but I think you know the way its literature is taught is makes a student lack of interest in the humanities a rational conclusion I don't know if that answers your question but yeah my question concerns a an explanation for the potential irony of why the intelligencia with the most elitist view of human affairs most often associate themselves with the most polat aryan populist viewpoints and why they find success in advocating those viewpoints for a population that they seem to clearly disdain well I mean the reason they do that is because they disdain them that is those people cannot speak for themselves in the assumption therefore we have to speak or we represent they can't very well come out and say you should believe us because we are advocating our self-interest they have to say you're not advocating our self-interest but the class of the oppressed we defined who the oppressed or of course given our theory and so you have to be able to do that right if you do not despise those people you would allow them to speak for themselves but that means that if they speak for themselves then who are you to speak for them the two go together do you see that they have to be they have to go together right if those people who you're speaking for suddenly find a way of speaking for themselves and twittered it's positively an insult what do you know that it's not just that they're not doing they're supposed to it's not they're challenging you your self-image and that that simply can't be allowed that's why it's really you know people get so angry at it I think that that's the connection is you know you have to describe the oppressed that way yeah just a slightly different angle thinking of Anton Chekhov play like the the Cherry Orchard got the old aristocracy who he seems to be critiquing but but also a young revolutionary who he's somewhat mocks as well are we to infer from that what what Chekhov zone politics were or was he being deliberately ambiguous both in in art and in life I think I mistake would be to assume that whichever was writing about its politics he's writing about basic questions of human values in that play about the experience of time and the people who he's going to come out them the worst in those plays are the people who have who see the world either simplistically or and this is his most common technique people who view the world melodramatically the key thing about all Chekhov's plays is that they are plays of inaction right which was a revolutionary thing to do I mean you know one of the critics remarked that the only thing that happens in the three sisters is that three sisters do not go to Moscow and that really is right because in most dramas people who see the world melodramatically are in tune with the universe that the play represents but in check out their ridiculous if you make grand speeches like Uncle Vanya right if you are one of those characters who says there goes around like some one day of the three sisters who says hmm people say even look like lemons over your absurd the people who are in the background who do their work like Sonja I have basic sensitivity to others don't waste human beings and resources and don't feel the world dramatically so I think he's that's the view is right it's not it insofar as there's a politics implied by that it's a politics of I said you know assuming that the world is about dramatic action it's not again it's easy when you take a great writer to interpret the writer as a document of his times and find the social correlates of what's being talked about it's always true of course but it's never what makes the writer a great writer everybody is equally a document of their times I mean Dickens you know shows the conditions of the working class in this time and of course he does but a factory surveyors reports would probably do an even better job what makes something great literature is what you don't need to know the historical context for what that's what makes it readable but people don't give a damn about Russian culture in 1902 severy thing who needs it I don't care about Russia in 1900 why should I read it it's a perfectly rational answer to me to that description but that it shows you something about how human beings experience time death change this is not something and that's what makes you unless you already believe yeah I'm struck by how the literary canon of high-school students has changed in my lifetime when I was a teenager Catcher in the Rye was banned in many places and I would never have let my parents know I was reading it now it was a required reading in my daughter's high school class at a Catholic school and um so this incredible sort of topsy-turvy turn around the Canada what what what is what what's behind it are there certain ideas that are being put forward with that with this change or is it just sort of accidental that one group books out in another's in uh no I don't think it's accidental um once you don't have the notion of great literature you know it's been the orthodoxy now or take a rough stab like a probably calculated 40 years that there is no such thing as great literature that's a reactionary notion the only thing is there are works close rate literature by hegemonic forces of oppression and what you may be thinking that is if you did set anything else in an English department and you would be shocked if people would be shocked right now um once you if you really believe that of course the candidates gonna change right I mean there isn't you teach books then that bring your message across best that are easy to teach any other note but not because you think there are great books it by the way this is never taking place in Russia by the way what you know I mean you just everybody still knows Pushkin and Gogol in Tolstoy it's just yeah even if the Bolsheviks that did not change right you interpreted them in a different way but my god the Canon was the Canada you know I remember a scholar brought up in the Soviet Union who happened to look at the required reading for the art English PhD listed at Northwestern at one point remarking that such a thing would never have happened even in the worst days of Stalinism you would never have gotten for example melville off the list as did Emily Dickinson would never have been one off the list in place of let's say Toni Morrison Dreiser Uncle Tom's Cabin and so on I mean but it follows from the notion that there is no such thing as great literature and again once you if you tell students there's no such thing as great literature well how'd you think what to read I mean it's why put in the effort for something that isn't great a lot of great literature isn't easy to read like you tried teaching Paradise Lost to somebody who has been told there's no such thing as great so you know I think the change in Canada there are other reasons like it's you know it's easier to do it this way once you're freed from the necessity of doing great books you can do whatever is you know most easily teachable so it's not only that but it's and one can suspect that you know the camera will continually shift of taught books based on the needs of the moment and also because what the political criteria for acceptability are keep shifting quite rapidly so that you know things that might have been considered every watch reruns of mash I mean which we considered quite liberal the time I mean it it's nothing but you know sexual harassment today it is by the way you know I thought so then but but that would be recognized singing about some of these general themes that you're talking about now that's wondering it seems well it seems like free speech is under assault a lot in our society right now because you know didn't offend somebody in the room next to me or you know it's just not work you know it's it's it seems to be devalued I wonder if there is certainly role in American novels you think currently to defend the right you know free speech free speech has to be defended to kiss you know it's a bit either to a government or to somebody else but that seems to be lost a lot you know we're given up free speech for other considerations well the defense of free speech is not going to be done by novels I mean in Septon so far as the novels show why whenever you think you have love truth with a capital T your wall which is what all wheels not multiple show but it doesn't matter what the truth is in that case it but there you know even Henry James its political moderates you know if you through joseph conrad's if you any one of the things they know you know what the score is and everybody else is just dumb if that's the case then you always want to hear other points of view the way you know if there are passages that you can quote to that effect in Tolstoy where the argument is somewhat different it's that when Levin wants to reform agriculture in his estate and he borrows all the currently theoretically of progressive theories and it fails as most performs do right well intention but the world isn't too complex what you want to do then is do what he does find people who have other experiences and figure out why your reforms are fairly so you can adjust what you don't want to do is what most of the intellectuals and Vigo's have complete discount the evidence I'm hearing but then the question is this is how I put to my students you have a choice when you want to make social change for certain goals if you want the goals to be reached you invite criticism because you want them to work and only if you hate this is why John Stuart Mill said you know who knows only is on the side of the case those little of that you need the critic so you gonna jump ah okay this part has been tried before let's do it that way if you believe in the goal you invite criticism if you don't invite criticism you don't believe in the goal you be you believe in number in yourself among the good people and I tell my students that is the choice you have to make do you really care about the goal or do you care about hanging out with the right people and I think that's that's the argument that you can you know make and you know it's a perfectly rational egotistical thing to want to hang out with divided people I can't think of a better way of doing it but okay this is maybe the last question I gather well I'm certainly hearing the other side of the case today but I have two questions for you and I hope that related one is I think I heard you say four early on to sort of Augustus and I got the impression you know a big fan could you just define what social justice that term is to you and second questions I think it's related is uh what are some the characteristics of your society that you would like to see what's just and happy what is a good society for you well I'll answer the first question but no not the second question because the second question presupposes that I'm I think my views about what society should be are particularly good or enlightened the well informed and I don't it's not what an expert I don't know that sort of thing I know that when you how you need to think about it how do I entertain other views or how to think about the effect of theory on particular people what questions you need to ask I don't know the answer because I don't that's why I really can't answer them what my social justice I of course everyone believes in social justice there are not outside of spider-man comics nobody goes home and says oh we gonna commit evil isn't everybody's question is what you call social and what I was talking about is what is often called social justice which is you know the typical things that happen you know on campus today excludes a diversity of points of view right excludes legal protections you know in in hearings that kind of thing which you know I put in quotation marks because I don't know exactly what social justice is but I know that it isn't that it's what I want to know a better idea of what it might really be and how to achieve it then I read a report from the Heritage you

Channel: The Heritage Foundation

Views: 6,176

Rating: 4.8805971 out of 5

Keywords: Heritage Foundation, Chekhov, Russian Literature, Gary Saul Morson, Russia, Morson, Pray, Russell Kirk Lecture Series, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, intelligentsia

Id: _9kViIIJ3rQ

Length: 72min 7sec (4327 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2018