Theodore Dalrymple on Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons"

[Music] thank you very much for joining us today my name is stephen blackwood and i have the great pleasure to welcome you all here to our first online lecture with dr anthony daniels i'm not going to make by any means a long introduction here but i do want to make sure our tech is working and make a few introductory remarks that music you've just heard was uh box tokata and fugue in d minor that's bwv 565. if you want to look it up it was the fugue from that piece and it was it's actually was written for the organ but it's played by on piano by gerhard opitz it's readily available uh uh for download in various places anyway that's the music we use in our podcast i hope you you enjoyed it um i i want to make just a couple of quick comments here i first want to uh say that we um we we may face uh all the usual uh tech uh toils and tribulations that we have all i know gone through in the midst of of covid dr daniels is at his apartment in paris tonight uh but because of the lockdown and because of the extraordinary internet traffic at this moment in time uh despite our best efforts we could have a a little bit of interruption if that happens we've pre-recorded the lecture and we will with a small delay pick up wherever he's left off so thank you just for um sticking with us i know we've all gone through these things in the midst of covid um many times on that note i i really just want to say something very simple by way of introduction to this series and that is that i don't think i'm the only one that feels that as a culture we maybe are standing on the brink of um quite bad things and that we need perhaps to take a step back and to think and listen and perhaps to explore where we might find some illumination from those who've faced perhaps similar things in the past it may also be that we're standing on the brink of wonderful things um but we need to think about it all so anyway with all that said i want to introduce my friend dr anthony daniels who has often written under the pseudonym theodore dalrymple he's written all in all i think about 30 books he's been immensely prolific he's a he's a doctor in the sense of a physician he spent many years working as a as a prison doctor his reflections out of that time at least some of his reflections were published in a book that really made uh made some serious waves for the clarity and beauty and honesty of its insight that book is called life at the bottom i don't know if you can see this here i highly recommend it to all of you um it's not just any book that has thomas soul saying on the front cover that this book is as fundamental for understanding the world we live in as the three r's that's thomas seoul making a comment on life at the bottom the world view that makes the underclass by it's written under the name theodore theodore dalrymple and uh not to presume where this conversation will go but uh i i don't think it takes uh a great leap of logic to see that the role of ideas in the shaping of the underclass that dr daniels describes in life at the bottom is a a huge theme in tergenev's fathers and sons uh the the the relation between ideas and uh character or life uh the that ideas in short have consequences so we're going to be thinking about some of those ideas today the format of our this event the this afternoon or evening or morning wherever you happen to be in the world um is going to be that i will momentarily turn things over to dr daniels who will give a lecture that lasts about 40 minutes uh that will that will run straight through after that we will then turn to a conversation in which uh tony and i will will will go back and forth with some ideas and thoughts about the book i will perhaps read a few passages for the benefit of those of you who perhaps haven't had a chance to read it yet and we will of course take questions from all of you uh whom we have the pleasure of having with us today such an amazing and sort of vertiginous and um odd thing to think that we're now in some sense as human beings together in our separate places in this moment on the internet um who knows um what we can make of these technologies but we're damn determined to try and do our best um so we will then take some questions from the audience in the midst of that discussion and it will go for as long as it goes i know some of you may be on your way to work or on your way home or have other commitments you may be in your cars it's an amazing thing we have hundreds of people here just drop off when you need to drop off this recording will be made available subsequently for so if you don't catch it all today and you'd like to you can catch the rest of it later but there's no set end time we'll just go until the conversation comes to a natural end and uh leave it at that uh with that i'm now going to turn things over to dr daniels and i look forward to seeing you all uh after his lecture uh dr tony daniels theodore dalrymple welcome very much thank you uh stephen well ladies and gentlemen it's a pleasure and an honor to be able to speak to you uh here today uh here being i'm not quite sure where of course but it would have been a greater pleasure if i'd been able to do it in public of course in person of course and not remotely let's hope that one day it will be possible again to attend convivial meetings and lectures and seminars in person rather than through the miracles of uh through the miracles of technology even without covid the western world has been going through turbulent times economically socially politically and culturally perhaps all times are turbulent and we just happen to be so constituted that we always think that our own times are the most turbulent times there have ever been and we believe that there were periods which seem to ask to have been placid and peaceful but they never did of course to the people who lived through them nevertheless we still think that there are periods that we are pleased to call uh normal that is to say where most important questions uh had been settled and all problems seem to have a solution at least in theory and differences were relatively between people were relatively minor past travails however illuminate present travails historical analogies of course are never exact which is why they're analogies rather than repetitions and the lessons of the past are always disputable moreover there is no human experience either personal or historical from which the wrong conclusions cannot be drawn perhaps one of the ironies of the present conjuncture is that while multiculturalism is extolled and is almost an official orthodoxy so many people lack historical imagination and cannot enter mentally into a world in which people have a different scale of values from their own the past for them is not another country where they do things differently it is the same country where they did things worse and had much worse ideas karl marx was quite right when he said that men make their own history but not just as they please from this well expressed truism however he drew the false conclusion that there existed historical inevitability in his view men could have free will only if they were free of all constraining circumstances but this is not only to invoke an impossibility but to mistake the nature of infinity it does not follow from the fact that there are some choices that are closed to me for example i can't become king of england that the number of choices before me is not infinite a grammar limits what can be meaningfully said but it does not eliminate the infinitude of what can be said well the great writer ivan torganiev was an exact contemporary of karl marx he was born and died in the same years as karl marx that is to say 1818 and 1883. and this these were not the only parallels in their lives they both came under the influence of hegelianism in berlin when they were students and they were both in brussels uh when the revolutions of 1848 uh broke out they both knew uh the russian anarchist bakunin and were close friends with him though they both later broke from him they were both at home in several languages but as far as i know they never met and though tagenif was born into the russian aristocracy his acquaintance where his acquaintances with actual real oppression in this case by his mother of the peasants whom as a surf owner she held us property and whom she often treated abominably and always arbitrarily was far greater than marx's the latter hated oppression in the abstract and developed an equally abstract doctrine to overcome it which eventually took oppression to new heights or perhaps i should say depths but togenieve no doubt both because of his uh temperament and his personal acquaintanceship with uh with oppression hated it viscerally while remaining clear-sighted about the many possible forms that it could take and the many circumstances in which it could arise he was not a doctrinaire and he envisaged no utopias quite the reverse his most famous work though all his novels his short stories and essays were excellent and have never been out of print was fathers and sons published in 1861 which was the year of the emancipation of the serfs in russia and a year before the emancipation decree in the united states it's often said that to genius first published prose work sketches from a hunter's album which was read by both the emperor and the empress hastened or brought forward the emancipation of the serfs though no doubt that would have occurred in due course anyway in fathers and sons the son of a small landowner the son called akadi who's the son of nikolai kazanov returns home to his father's isolated small land home holding after completing his university degree he arrives with his close friend and mentor bazarov a student of natural sciences and an aspiring doctor who is of somewhat lower social class than akadi being the son of an army surgeon and who is as it were a prodromal uh revolutionary or a revolutionary type bazarov is a complete rationalist that is to say someone who accepts no authority other than that of his own reasoning and the evidence of his own eyes or on any subject whatsoever he's a kind of logical positivist and the only kind of knowledge that he believes in is that which is provided by a scientific experiment uh though in fact he is scientistic rather than scientific he regards poetic utterance and even music as worthless and meaningless to gain if coined or at least made current uh the word nearest uh through bazaar of self-description as such bizarro claimed to believe in nothing belief being coterminous in his mind with superstition and irrationality and hence the term nihilist though of course it is impossible for metaphysical reasons to clear human minds of all beliefs and presuppositions whatsoever and in any case science is not straightforwardly a body of indubitable and positive established truths as bazarov appears to think that it is in this rather ironically given his insistence on thinking for himself he is a follower of the rather crude german positivist materialism in vogue at the time buchner being the most famous of them and of course it's not easy for anyone entirely to think for himself in fact it's impossible it is the conflict between bazarov's philosophy and the inevitable exigencies of human life that are the theme at least to the modern reader of this great book bazarov comes to a tragic end dying of typhus contracted from performing a post-mortem on a person who has died of this disease and to gain if a clinical description of the disease incidentally is very accurate at his death bazarov realizes the insufficiency of the whole philosophy by which he has tried to live he is a man of great probity in that respect but alas by then it is too late he has fallen in love and uh his prey to emotions far stronger than his rationalism but his death of course precludes any satisfactory end to his uh love affair his friend kazanov is uh dazzled by bazarov's superior intelligence and even more perhaps by the certitude with which he holds his opinions he has become bazarov's disciple or acolyte but he is not uh made of the stern single-minded stuff of bazarov he's a natural follower uh rather than a leader his weakness and vacillation in fact is his salvation at least as far as his own as happiness is concerned he's not the kind of man any more than was to gain to follow a line of argument and cleave to it even if it led to a horrible conclusion to gainiff's own vacillations extended not only to political or philosophical matters but to personal ones also his only real emotional commitment for most of his adult life was to pauline viedo who was an opera singer of spanish descent married to a man called louis viedo whom uh tagenyev followed around europe almost like a lap dog and with whom he actually lived in a menage a trois both in germany and in france for many years fathers and sons is a novel of ideas but unlike the characters in bernard shaw's plays of ideas who often resemble ventriloquist puppets under shaw's control rather than real living human beings the characters in the novel express their ideas in a way that is indissolubly linked with or expressive of their character though the ideas that they express are fully of their time a time which as we shall see speaks to our own uh more than a century and a half later to a surprising extent given all the historical changes that have taken place in the meantime in short ta genius novel has the feel of lived reality with all the ambiguities and inconsistencies that anyone not in the grip of an ironclad ideology uh will recognize it is tagenif's temperamental vacillation that permits him to see all sides of the situation though of course i don't mean to imply that all vacillators are to genius the heart of the novel as far as the ideas are concerned occurs in chapter 11. in this chapter bazarov has an argument with pavel kazanov's arcade kazanov's paternal uncle who also lives in the house uncle pavel despises hates and perhaps fears bazarov from the very first from their very first meeting and is aware of bazarov's disdain or even contempt for him he is determined to have a quarrel with him as if that would in some way clear the air as the storm does in beethoven's pastoral symphony uncle pavel is an aristocratic drone which was in some sense what turgania feared himself to have been indeed there are parallels between the author's life and the character's life though they are not exact as one uh would expect from a literary artist of tugeniev's caliber pavel kazanov for example has had an unsatisfactory love affair uh with a woman princess r whom he has followed round europe with dog-like devotion uh marches together followed poorly in viedo though in the end princess r dies and she's mad when she dies and uncle pavel unlike tugeniev retires from life permanently licking his emotional wounds and living on his brother nikolai's estate incidentally the difficulties that nikolai experiences in running his estate and many of them consequent upon the soft-heartedness and the advantages taken of him by crafty and dishonest peasants parallel those that guineaf himself experienced in running his estate from which he derived an income throughout his life much of which he spent in western europe tiganiev was aware that his literary activities were possible only because of the labor of his peasants and may have felt considerable guilt about that in a way pavel is a victim of his own good fortune an exceptionally handsome man with at least in youth a natural charm he does not readily have to struggle to make his way again there is there are parallels with the actual life of tagenyev at first pavel goes through life like a hot knife through a butter but too easy success too early in life at least in the social sphere is bought at the expense of failure to strive for anything or even to appreciate that there is a need to strive for something thus together with his disappointed grand passion the one of his life he is set up for a life of pointless if not altogether unpleasant existence he is both fastidious and punctilious he continues to dress as a dandy as as for drawing rooms in aristocratic petersburg though he lives in the utmost rural isolation from society and of course given the vast extent of russia that is very isolated indeed he is careful with his ties his collars his coats his hair and his whiskers which he perfumes he follows english fashions of the time his hands are carefully manicured and of course are free from any taint of manual activity he is intelligent and cultivated reads german and frequently uses french expressions as if they came more naturally to his mind than russian as the best way to express his thoughts he is in the circumstances as exotic as a hot house pineapple in a cold climate as for his moral qualities one could not say that he was either a very good or a very bad man unless of course you take bazarov's view that to live essentially on the labor of others is very bad and of course tugenief himself did live on the labour of others for much of his life the conflict between matzarov and uncle pavel is of course partly generational in fact nikolai and pavel are not very old at least by modern standards being only in their early forties but of course people aged more quickly in those days and talgania himself thought he was old by the age of 42 furthermore not all generational conflict is political in nature whether intergenerational friction misunderstanding or conflict is an inevitable part of the human condition is not a question that i can go into at the moment or at any time because i have no knowledge of all human societies but it is sufficient for our purposes that such conflict is by no means uncommon uh with us as the old shepherd puts it in the winter's tale i would there were no age between 16 and 3 and 20 or that youth would sleep out the rest for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child wronging the ancient tree stealing fighting and shakespeare knew where of he spoke of course did he not get anne hathaway with the child at the age of 18. when arkady arrives home from the university togenya very succinctly draws attention to one of the small tragedies of human existence namely the children often mean more to their parents than parents mean to their children there's an inevitability about this at least in societies where children are expected to make their own way in life on arkady's arrival togeniev tells us nikolai petrovic appeared to be far more excited than his son he seemed a little flurried and overcome with shyness the kind of shyness in fact uh that hides an extremity of emotion youth is often thoughtless towards age that is to say cruel without meaning to be when just after his arrival arkady remarks on the sweetness of the heir at home nikolai petrovic his father says of course you were born here so everything is bound to strike you with a special akiti interrupts him saying but papa what difference does it make where a person was born still the father begins no continuous arcity with the certainty that is born of inexperience it makes absolutely no difference and nikolai petrov which looks at him sideways note how deftly this is done and how much it actually suggests as we are soon to learn arkady has long fallen under the spell of the rationalist bazarov who would say something like this if confronted with a father who said what a nick what arcade's father said if the heir of a place is sweet it is precisely as sweet as it is irrespective of where one was born to say anything else would be to give in to abominable irrational superstition or sentimentality the quality of the air is the same for the stranger and the native this of course is a crude kind of rationalism that re re requires that we ignore the very common if not necessarily universal attachment that people formed the place of their birth and childhood without necessarily claiming that place to be the most beautiful in the world we love where we have been raised partly perhaps for its beauty though many people are nostalgic for places that are very far from beautiful in fact quite the reverse but much more because it is ours it has a vital connection with our lives and our past if we have been happy in childhood we value where we were raised but in bazarov's philosophy we should value places if we should value anything at all according to a strict equal and objective criterion but human beings are not like this and cannot be like this though arkady thinks as bazarov's disciple that he himself ought to be like this akadi clearly inflicts pain on his father without wishing to do so through the callowness of youth rather than through malice his father hopes that arkady having come home for a long time having come home will stay for a long time arkady's professed lack of attachment to place removes one reason why he might do so and thus his father foresees that he will not stay long and this of course dashes his hopes and gives him pain there's nothing political in all this such scenes are enacted and such pain inflicted every day because children inevitably come to make their own lives at least in non-traditional societies and separate themselves from their parents it is one of the prices we pay for freedom of the individual implicitly then this is a tragic situation which is to say that there is no solution least of all a political solution to the suffering that is caused not all desirable things in life for example the freedom of children to make their own lives and the desire of parents to remain close to their children are achievable at the same time utopianism a permanent temptation of the young and of those who decline to acknowledge the complexities and ambiguities of life is excluded and this is important because political utopianism was a growing phenomenon into genius russia as perhaps it is in our countries today but the conflict between uncle pavel and bazarov besides being generational is of a quite different order from arkady's disappointment of his father and his political ideological philosophical and above all cultural as well what is astonishing is that despite the very different social political and economic circumstances of today one can easily imagine such arguments in the households of any contemporary western society or country where such arguments might break out over any number of subjects and any one of which might call into question the underlying assumptions and whole way of life that the older generation has hitherto taken for granted one has only to think of the upheavals in such homes that for example demands for the adoption of strict vegetarianism or veganism might cause or alternatively discussions over the black lives matter movement to imagine the potential for bitterness and dispute moreover radicalism on one question is likely to be associated statistically if not logically with radicalism in another one could call this another form of intersectionality any at any rate mutual exasperation a and misunderstanding is very common the cultural dimension of the conflict is extremely important in effect bazarov wants a cultural revolution even before his dispute with uncle pavel he has remarked to arkady on his father's fondness for reading poetry which he considers useless time consu consuming and even harmful in that it discourages the kind of activity that would lead to social progress and is therefore intrinsically conservative of something that should not be conserved here i must reiterate that togeniev was not an opponent of progress and was fully aware of its desirability having been an effective opponent of the feudalism in the midst of which he had grown up arkady still in complete thrall to his mentor bazarov finds his father reading pushkin and gently replaces the book with one by buchner the militant 19th century german physiologist and materialist whom i've already mentioned who insisted that there was nothing to man but force and matter and also that his complete happiness would be found in the application of science pushkin of course was almost the founder of russian literature and to this day is still considered the greatest poet of his language so that to replace a book by him by a volume of buchner might be considered at least symbolically the equivalent of pulling down a statue of george washington in the united states in recounting the dispute or skirmish as togenif puts it between uncle pavel and bazarov togenyif does not load the dice in other words he does not reduce it to a question of good versus evil allowing good to triumph by means of a conclusively superior argument both characters uncle pavel and bazarov are flawed there are between them not only intellectual differences but those of temperament and class uncle pavel doesn't mention being an aristocrat and bazarov being of the non-landed lower middle class and intelligentsia that was just then emerging in russia and from whom many revolutionaries were subsequently to be drawn it is a tribute to tagenev's art that we do not feel that any single factor is completely determinant of either of his character of his character's views which is to say that they are not just caricatures or an ideal type brought on to illustrator doctrine but real flesh and blood human beings hence the discussion does not proceed in an orderly fashion with one of the characters playing the part of socrates in a platonic diet dialogue but proceeds rather by accusation and counteraction by insinuation and counter insinuation as such discussions tend to do in reality the acrimonious discussion begins when bazarov on paso calls a local landowner a third-rate aristocrat uncle pavel seizes the opportunity for a quarrel and accuses bazaar off of meaning that all aristocrats are third-rate ex-officio because aristocracy is intrinsically productive of the third raid bazarov hasn't actually said this in so many words but we all know that words may carry a heavier load of implication and connotation than of literal meaning uncle pavel defends aristocracy not so much as a social system as an ideal i am seeking he says to prove that there that uh without a proper sense of pride without a sense of self-respect and these feelings are highly developed in the aristocracy there can be no firm foundation for the social bienpublique the social fabric it is personal behavior that matters my dear sir a man's personal character must be as strong as a rock since everything is built up on it here is a reference to a question that even now has not been answered definitively and probably will never be answered definitively namely do men make society or does society make men this goes straight to the heart of the insoluble mystery of being a human being what makes us how do we become what we are bazarov is clearly of the party that believes in a society so perfect that no one will have to be good uncle pavel is of the opposing view and is probably and it's probably true that the young in general are more inclined to the former the older to the latter hence the title of the book here i should perhaps add a personal note i have sometimes had discussions with ardent young people who've reminded me of bazarov and in the course of which i've suddenly thought to myself i am turning myself into uncle pavel uncle pavel continues by extolling self-respect i'm very well aware that you are pleased to ridicule my habits he says my way of dressing my pantiliousness in fact but these very things proceed from a sense of self-respect from a sense of duty yes sir of duty i may live in the country in the wilds of the country but i do not let myself go i respect myself as a human being this self praise not surprisingly gives bizarre off an opening he says interrupting allow me pavel petrovic you say you respect yourself and you sit with your arms folded what sort of benefit does that do the bien publique if you didn't respect yourself you'd do just the same there is obviously there is obvious justice in uh bazarov's retort and reproach uncle pavel's punctiliousness clearly partakes of vanity and self-regard and furthermore does not benefit anyone other than himself when he happens to look in the mirror or parades himself in the house there is no one to admire him or be grateful for his dandism and yet bizarros argument does not quite settle the matter for there is no doubt that even if self-respect is not the true motive of uncle pavel's punctiliousness yet self-respect is genuinely enough a virtue uncle pavel's punctiliousness requires an effort and in other circumstances in a city say an effort made for the sake of others or at least for the opinion of others someone with this kind of punctiliousness must at least be aware of others and try to enter their minds to see things from their point of view contrary to what we might at first have thought punctiliousness of the uncle pavel kind may result from the from a concern for others not for the self though of course it may not and like any virtue which is taken too far it may become a vice compare this punctiliousness with the extreme casualness of the way in which we dress now do we not by the way we dress in effect say to others i'm not going to make an effort just to please you those of intellectual bent may add in their thoughts my mind my mind is focused on higher things than mere appearances and thus an asocial mass sloppiness results so in this part of the argument uncle pavel and bazarov are both right and wrong sincere reflection on this ambiguity would tend to break down the binary political culture in which russia was to which russia was increasingly becoming prey and which in the end was to produce such a catastrophe 50 years later the tsarist russian minister of the interior was to say that the epileptics of the revolution were opposed by the paralytics of the government and we see this above in uncle pavel's disputation with bazarov the epileptic or perhaps i should say correa form which is a more accurate uh neurological analogy the career form nature of russian radicalism is clear from the continuation of the discussion on the matter of principles bazarov claims to have no first principles but the belief that one should have no first principles is itself a first principle and therefore his philosophy is self-refuting again i'm reminded of the self-refuting uh philosophy of the logical positivists who claimed that a proposition was meaningful either if it was by definition or by potential correspondence with an empirically testable state of affairs itself a proposition neither true by definition nor testable empirically and therefore by the standards of the argument itself meaningless unfortunately the incoherence of a philosophy does not make it harmless or lacking in influence quite the reverse in the course of the discussion bazarov says we base our conduct on what we recognize as useful in these days the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate so we repudiate this of course horrifies uncle pavel just as the young nihilists of the present time horrify their elders such as the speaker everything uncle pavel demands to know everything replies bazarov what not only art poetry but also i'm afraid to say it and bazarov with great composure repeats everything [Applause] surely in bazarov we can hear the voices of young people in western society today who claim that their own societies have built been built on nothing but force fraud massacre injustice slavery and so forth and therefore everything must be swept away as if they were trying to clear a jungle in order to start a plantation which of course is not a very good idea since a jungle though luxuriant to all appearances often grows on thin and vulnerable soil that swiftly erodes when cleared of its native vegetation since all our institutions have been founded on this history of force and fraud the past existence of which can't be denied there has of course been force and fraud and all the terrible things i've mentioned it is necessary to begin again from scratch without respect for or even awareness of the slow accretion of achievement that has enabled us to live as well as we do live now by comparison with most people in history one must construct two you know says arkady's father rather weakly in response to bazarov but bazarov simply brushes him aside and says that is not our affair the ground must be cleared first then there is the question of whether the nihilists like bazarov who are very small in number can in practice affect any change do you think that you can take on the whole nation asks uncle pavel to which bazarov replies a penny candle you know set moscow on fire this of course is a reference to the burning of moscow in 1812 during napoleon's invasion bazarov says this a penny candle you know set moscow on fire not as a warning or as a call to prudence but as a message of hope he wants moscow and everywhere else to be burnt down raised to the ground at least metaphorically so that everything may be built up again on sound foundations for example of equality at this point i doubt that many people in america and probably many people in other countries all of which are based more solidly so it seems uh than czarist russia in the 1860s was will not think of the effect that a very small percentage of the population has had very suddenly on the various countries and how what seemed so stable almost immemorial uh now appears extremely fragile and of course we cannot read fathers and sons without knowledge which tugenia himself could not have had of what was to happen less than 60 years after its publication it is impossible for us not to regard bazarov and his nihilism to be a kind of harbinger for the disasters to come albeit that he himself were not was not going to experience them during the soviet period indeed bazarov was taken to be an unequivocally positive hero his morality was a slightly weaker version of the morality of lenin for whom whatever served the revolution and the establishment of bolshevik power was good whatever hindered it was bad indeed morality had no other meaning repudiation of everything else was uh necessary for example the repudiation of normal human decency and kindness which were regarded as mere pity bourgeois sentimentality and even the beauty of music lenin couldn't listen to a beethoven sonata because he said doing so sapped his revolutionary ardour precisely as bazarov might have said or wore warned and he did in fact find it ridiculous that arkady's father should be playing the cello at the age of 44 the advanced age of 44. our knowledge of events subsequent to the publication of taughenia's great book uh prevents us i think from responding to bizarre offers anything other than a revolutionary prig but this was not how tagenif saw him on the contrary he was very sympathetic and in some sense loved him he said to have cried as he wrote of bizarros death which is indeed very moving at the end of his life bazarov has found love which too late he realizes is more important than philosophy or social revolution for a world without love would not be worth working for and since love is achievable in the present world that world cannot be so totally ba bad that everything must be swept away before starting all over again thus we see at base that uh bazarov is a tragic figure not a villain mistaken but not deeply evil again this might inhibit us from too rapid and gratifying a division of humanity into the good and evil though this is also not a mistake and not to deny the potentially appalling effects of radically mistaken ideas lenin once said that bernard shaw was a good man fallen among fabians by which he meant such was his ethic if ethic it can be called that shaw would have been a better man if he had slaughtered his audiences rather than entertain them bazarov by contrast is a good man fallen into ideology albeit of course that he must have had some effective affinity uh for ideology in the way that his friend and disciple arkady ultimately did not well i've only uh touched on some of the depths of tagenia's book which is among the best expositions known to me of the inevitable reciprocal reciprocal imbrication of character and thought and the effect of thought on on politics perhaps in two thousand years no one will have the faintest idea what tougheniev was writing about but for now 160 years later he remains astonishingly if disturbingly contemporary thank you very much thank you very much tony it's a shame that uh you cannot hear the uh the applause of the uh couple of hundred people who are here listening to this wonderful lecture you've given us um both uh deep and uh incredibly succinct you touched on many of the the abiding themes in this novel we have quite a number of really superb questions here uh and i want to get to those uh fairly quickly though i want you all to know they're in the question q that we're going to get to as many of these as we can so keep them coming in and um we're not in any particular you know time limit here uh but i want i want uh by way of beginning our conversation uh tony to to dig in a little bit further into bazarov's standpoint and uh which of course is that is the standpoint that that is uh turgania is himself wrestling with uh it's the standpoint that as you say in so many respects leads to uh lenin and stalin um and to various forms of burn it all down uh standpoints in our own time um but tregenyev is very very careful one of the things you said in your lecture that i thought was um very rich you may sorry you may hear my dog barking in the background here this is uh this is zoom in all of its glory folks um uh you you said that uh you know he these are not puppeteers these characters not as though he's taking an ideology and just putting in someone's mouth he's developing a full human person to show where these uh ideas lead the way they manifest themselves bazarov is for for all the way in which he seems to be a voice of a certain ideological position is also a a real human being with virtues with uh sensibilities um but let's let's just start with this because i want to pick through a few things in bazarov and see the way in which which which turganyv in this in this absolutely masterful novel um brings out the limits both the truth and the limits in this position um you said earlier in your lecture that that bizarro was not actually a scientific but scientistic and i want to start there with a sense of what you mean by that and then perhaps we can build on that to better uh fill out the the the whole of bizarro's position well uh a scientific person is a person who actually knows about science and [Music] and uses the uses science to discover things about the world a scientific person thinks that science itself is sufficient to explain everything and and in essence everything is understood by the shouting i mean there are there are details to be filled in but in fact we this scientism is still with us for example uh in neurosciences many people think that we have finally achieved self-understanding when it's clear to me at any rate that we haven't and we probably never will but uh bazarov thinks that science is everything insofar as he indulges in any science as in as far as the book is concerned he goes around catching frogs which he's then going to dissect but we know really he isn't going to discover anything this is this is more a pose actually than a it's a pose then a real scientific inquiry uh maybe this is because ta genius himself wasn't all that uh knowledgeable about science but but we feel that uh that uh bazarov's desire to to dissect frogs go around collecting frogs before anyone else is up in the house and then goes and dissects them we know he's not going to discover anything that isn't already known it's a kind of pose not in i don't mean by pose in the sense that a poser poses but it is to to reject um any other view of life that he does this and and to shock i think this is very interesting because bizarro of claims that he has you know no principles they recognize no no authorities um you bring out in your lecture the contradiction in that in that in that standpoint he says i'm thinking here uh i hope if above all what comes out of this is that many people will read this novel who've not yet read it in the tenth chapter of this book he he has this this um moment in his in his exchange with uncle pavel in which he says you know uh he talks about these useless words uh even principle is a useless word later he he denies that even materialism is as is as a word adequate to his standpoint so he's there's this kind of complete refusal of any kind of well he portrays himself in the one hand as a rationalist you know as kind of relentlessly uh uh rational he is on the other hand unable to engage with the uh intellectual implications of his own position so he says for example that he they renounce all principles uh only what is useful is is um uh will they acknowledge but of course by what standard is something to be acknowledged as useful that that that implies a whole uh hierarchy of value um similarly he says that uh uh he at least makes the pose of dissecting the frogs and yet even the pose of dissecting the frogs is uh it suggests that there's some good some knowledge to be gained in this encounter with nature that you're somehow your knowledge will become more adequate or more uh realist or more complete or more more grappling with the the the the truth of reality is something that he surely would want to be a uh to to champion and yet he's unable to acknowledge any of those uh uh those implications of his own declared position and the reason i want to to to get at that is because it it does seem to me highly relevant to certain uh moments in our own day this this claim that that we must repudiate everything he says everything you know everything must be repudiated and uh i think just after that that passage where you were you beautifully described to us uh pavel says he says um you think we must repudiate everything he says you are destroying everything but one must construct two you know and to that bizarro replies that is not our affair the ground must be cleared first and he goes on then to say in another passage you know we must smash people we need fresh victims so what i want to ask you dr daniels is um about weather to me first say that tregenie was very clear that bazarov as you say whom he does not dismiss as a mere ideologue that bizarre has some genuine insight into the state of russia into the injustice into certain um uh uh political and familial and other dynamics uh that uh he indeed his perception of these injustices may indeed be accurate uh but he seems to be suggesting that those those injustices cannot be remedied from a standpoint of repudiation and i'd like to ask you um uh what you what you think are the limits or possibilities uh of repudiation and and whether um uh a more constructive standpoint is possible well the two things come to mind the first is of course that bazarov actually as you were describing him uh it occurred to me that he's very nichian actually um nietzsche nietzsche wanted to destroy the whole of philosophy and so on um and claimed himself to have no first principles really and said that there are no facts there are only interpretations but whether it is a fact that there are no facts only interpretations he doesn't he doesn't question um i think if we look at tergenia's own life the fact is that he saw very clearly the terrible things that there were in russia and was an opponent of them but at the same time he valued the civilization uh of which he had been able to take advantage so he he did not want just to clear the ground and start again but he knew that that underneath the things that he valued there was a a subterranean well not even very subterranean actually um a substructure of great injustice and it was this that was very difficult for him and in in particular in russia because there was really no tradition of of gradual reform um and anyone who tried to reform um was treated as a kind of violent revolutionary although later in the reign of alexander ii there was real reform and the the assassination of alexander the second was a catastrophe he was assassinated on the day on which he was going to grant the first constitution to russia and from there things didn't look back but there is this uh it's very difficult for people to keep in their minds both that there are things worth preserving and there is great injustice in the world and uh this is the difficulty that ta guineaf himself had personally so as you say he recognized that bazarov understood that there were the things wrong terribly wrong with russia um but his own bazaros philosophy is in fact extremely weak because you can't you can't criticize anything unless you've got a standpoint from which to criticize it that requires uh principles yeah yeah in the end bazarov is shown to have a contradictory standpoint exactly as you say that the the very power of his insight is inert because he won't acknowledge the principles that are implicit in that very standpoint and that's where the it seems to be this novel is is such a powerful uh uh uh powerful overcoming of a a nihilistic uh repudiational standpoint because continues yeah what i might say however is that uncle pavel who's not a fool doesn't argue against it very well he doesn't argue very well against bazarov he doesn't say he doesn't point to the logical contradictions in what bazarov is saying he he he merely finds it repellent i'm so glad you made this point tony because it seems to me this is also uh highly relevant to our moment that uh on the one hand we we have all kinds of burn it all down revolutionaries with who whose critiques of injustice uh uh are often uh accurate and powerful and necessary and yet insofar as one takes a standpoint of critique that will not acknowledge one's own principles then you're you have an inert position that is unable to redress the very uh uh the very injustices you see so that is to say that it seems to be tregano's position is you can't address injustice by acting unjustly you have to actually know what justice is and justice must be instantiated in your own remedy to injustice just as you can't address ugliness by building more ugly things you can't address unkindness by being yourself unkind uh so he's he's really pointing out the the inert contradiction the hypocrisy as it were in bazarov's standpoint and yet what's so marvelous here is that the the so-called conservative uncle pavo though you know he has a genuine perception of the goods of rationality and civilization he's unable to be an articulator of those things in such a way that bazarov is able to to grasp that in it and i i think that's clearly one of the crises in our own moment is that those who call themselves small c conservatives i don't mean in a political sense i want to hasten to add i mean in a broad sense of there being something in the culture of the past that can illuminate our current moment those people have shown themselves almost without exception unable to transmit what they see to the young and so it seems to me treganiev's position is not bought by any means simplistically on uncle pavel's side no no on the other hand he uh there is also the fact that he he clearly turgania himself did not believe that justice was the only value um so of course it was important but it's not the only important thing so that it might well be true that for example saint petersburg was built by um by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people completely i mean a huge injustice but the solution to it is not to pull saint petersburg down or to say that saint petersburg is not beautiful and so to gain if values justice but not only justice yes well clearly the standpoint and we'll dig into this as where our conversation continues in turgeniev is is very powerfully non-reductive he is in a way i i wonder whether you agree with us tony as i have reflected on the novel which i had not read until you offered to give this wonderful lecture i've been thinking about what the fundamental oppositions are and it seems to me that you know it's it's by no means rationalism versus you know the non-rational because actually in the end what clearly is the case is that tergenia proves to be more rational than bizarre of his observation is more adequate to human nature um basra of pseudo-rationalism proves to be irrational because he's unable to account for he is in kuwait to himself he's unable to give an account of the love that eventually he cannot even answer or respond to so he's he's actually not the trenchant observer of the world or the uh the the master of of observation that he he wants to he wants who wants to to claim uh claim to be uh whereas whereas to genie of himself uh the the power of the novel as i think you've your lecture brings out beautifully is in the the the nuance and subtlety of the anal the observation that allows these the truth of these various positions the falsity of these positions to be to be to be revealed but what i wanted to to ask you is is whether the fundamental opposition here is not you know rationalism versus non or irrationalism but in a way it's it's ideology versus openness and so tageniv is not trying to replace basaro's position with some construct of some reductive sense of what justice is but with a a an over well a sort of super abundant brimming sense of the real uh that somehow we are we are all in and need to answer too yeah and that does uh desiderata are not all uh achievable uh and that are they're in conflict so that uh there's there is no perfect state for man and therefore uh utopian ideas are uh they are um foolish uh and to gain if didn't of course live to see just the disaster that uh that uh that would come from trying to to build a utopia with the idea of perfect justice and so on so yes i mean it's a profoundly anti-ideological novel he's not saying that there is some philosophical scheme by which we can achieve uh a perfect life on the contrary anyone reading it would come to the conclusion that that is completely impossible and it is a great mistake a terrible mistake to think that there is but we must also remember that there is a generational conflict too such as we we have seen many times there's a uh just before we move on to our our first question from the audience here uh tony and i want to intersperse uh reading a few passages in our our conversation uh beautifully trans translated by the way uh tony and i have both been been reading the version of this text that is translated by uh rosemary edmonds uh with a marvelous introduction by isaiah berlin and i want to bring out um the the anti-individual strain here that for all of bizarrov's claim to be the analyst he uh he's utterly disdainful of the particularity of nature and this came out marvelously in your lecture about how the the uh the air has to smell the same uh to everyone you know there's no sense in which there's a home uh in which we find ourselves so basic says he says in the first place experience of life does that and in the second i assure you the study of separate individuals is not worth the trouble it involves all men are similar in soul as well as in body each of us has a brain spleen heart and lungs of similar construction and the so-called moral qualities are the same in all of us the slight variations are of no importance it is enough to have one single human specimen in order to judge all the others people are like trees in a forest no botanist would dream of studying each individual birch tree in an age of uh one size fits all top-down solutions tony um would you like to make a few uh remarks about bazarov position in relation to particularity and individuality well that again would come from his scientism because it is true for example that most of our physiology is is very similar and he would say that we are just physiology and therefore it follows that that the differences between us are very minor it's a bit like people who say that we share 99 of our genes with chimpanzees or whatever people are all or 70 with snails and therefore mankind is 70 snail um so he's got that kind of mentality and uh unfortunately we know what it what uh what that kind of idea leads to um but it was very current in his time and i think it's still quite current one thing i uh wanted to note here is how powerfully edmonds makes this point in her in her introduction to the novel about how chirganyev's when you you mentioned how to gain his novel is itself not rigidly uh it is not itself at all ideological or rigidly reductive he's uh opening things up to the complexity of of reality and one of the ways one's one one sees this is that he he refuses to coerce his own characters uh and he refuses to coerce the reader i i was astounded at the the the light touch of the novel the way in which he's he's aiming to depict these positions with sensitivity and observational power and you can make up your own mind though it is at the same time clear that there is uh turganyev is acutely aware of the limits of these uh uh of the position of basra for example but one of the other ways you see this is is in his depiction of of the natural world this uh uh of the sp of the springtime of the of the birds of the trees of the the the movement of the sun on the uh and shadow and it seems as though you know there's that wonderful moment where where our caddy's father is is outside in a kind of reverie in a kind of contemplation with nature and it seems that turganyev is suggesting that that the human relation with nature is by contrast with bazaar of standpoint is a window into the richness of the real not a clinical reduction of it yes and and is available to all people and will be available to for them uh for all time at least if the whole world is not concrete is over and all other living creatures are killed but um yes so there there is something that transcends politics politics is not all in fact it's it's i mean it's important but it's not all important and for bazarov of course he's ultimately motivated by hatred of what already exists and therefore can't appreciate i mean he he can't appreciate the beauty of anything i could describe a fanatic or you could define a fanatic as someone who looks at beauty and sees injustice and bazarov is of that kind he's he's obsessed by the the uh the wrongfulness of the world and of course there is a great deal of wrongfulness but it's not all that there is in the world yeah bizarro's standpoint is to perceive the wrongness but then to advocate further wrongs um well let's let's turn to to some questions there's a number of other things i want to ask you about and we may even play some music or read some other passages in this this amazing novel um but here we go um we've got lots of questions here here is one you bring up the theme of the connection between rationalism and nihilism in fathers and sons many see the enlightenment and rationalism as a serious achievement of the west though others have pointed out that a purely rationalist viewpoint is behind the marxist and stalinist projects and the planning model that would take hold in the 20th century even now in cobit where statistics and virus cases seem to be the bible that determines our lives through policies furthermore rationalism has extracted a lot of the character of life out of our lives could you comment on the connection between rationalism and nihilism well yes rationalism is not the same as rationality of course it rationalism is the idea that there is a kind of rational solution to all of life's little problems whereas nobody can be completely irrational no i don't think anybody can be against rationality rationalism is the argue is the idea that all that is necessary in life is rationality which is a bit like it is to rationalism is to rationality what scientism is to science um and of course if you if you believe that there is a rational solution to all human problems uh you will believe that you have that solution and that will of course lead to terrible dictatorship whether that is quite the same as nihilism i mean in a sense we when we when we think of nihilists now when we think of nihilism now we think of people who think that life has no worth life has no meaning and uh i suppose the greatest example is uh macbeth when he says that uh you know tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow keep creeps on this petty face from day to day to the last syllable recorded time um and that's what what we think of nihilism bazarov isn't a near list in that sense because he obviously believes that there is a better world uh possible so there are there is more than one sense to the word of uh to uh to nihilism um but that that of course gets at the very contradiction within bowser over in which he's he's unable to give an account of the principles according to which that better world could be constructed so he's or or moved towards and that's the the the fundamental hypocrisy of the position we were talking about a moment ago related to this another question from david donegan can you elaborate on the conflict basarov has with the ideas he learned at university regarding nihilism and the real life emotional feelings he has by falling in love with anna sergnia and how this was tearing at his core values well if you have um if you have principles which are suddenly or fairly suddenly revealed to you as being not in accord uh with your real uh wishes your real desires it is of course very disturbing and most of us have faced have faced that i think at some time we've had principles which we suddenly realize are inadequate to the situation that we face and that our desires are actually different from those that our principles tell us that we really ought to have and most of us have have had and probably still have those kind of conflicts it's particularly acute of course in bazarov because he's made his philosophy the whole focus of his life in a way that most of us don't and there's something very in a way admirable about it in a way he's kind of saint you could almost say he he foregoes everything that is desirable in life for his philosophy but then finds at the end he cannot carry it fully he cannot carry it out and actually something else is much more important than his philosophy most of us avoid that by not having a philosophy that entirely dominates our life and dominates our action there seems to be another alternative there which is to keep one's philosophy open to the complexity and nuance of life and to have one's ideas revised by the experience of reality which is surely what philosophy and being rational is i mean i think this is the tension with bizarro of is that he proves though his though is his commitment to a kind of rational standpoint uh he has such an ideological rigidity about what he's willing to admit to be real that he's ultimately destroyed by that which he cannot acknowledge as real and that is in a way the standpoint that we see again and again in the greek tragedies too that uh the very uh uh th those things that are real which you will not acknowledge will destroy you not externally but in in yourself as as in the case with bazarov we have a number of questions tony coming in um a great deal of um gratitude for your work uh admiration for your work some very touching notes here um several questions pertaining to your your life as a doctor and uh in relation to the novel so one person asks about um uh as a as a as a doctor can you say more about how terganiev's writing makes his characters seem real well you've touched on that in that they're they are not just spokesmen for ideas they are whole human beings with the conflicts of whole human beings and they are individuals uh i can only say that in my uh in my work uh there is always a company in a in a in a in a medical life there's always a conflict between seeing people as a case of something and being individuals everywhere i mean you you want your doctor to recognize the disease in you which is similar to the disease in other persons but you but at the same time you want him to recognize you as an individual and i think a good doctor manages to balance that not necessarily by any intellectual process but does it uh almost instinctively and so that this is what uh turganief obviously does i mean he's not just he's obviously interested in his characters as individuals but also not only as individuals they do stand for something but they're they are not just standing for something i want to relate two questions here tony in my effort to get to as many of these in our time as possible um another comes back to the question of human nature uh it seems this questioner writes that the author portrays an idea that truth cannot be ideologically dismissed as bazarov seems to try and do can we have some sort of confidence that tragenya reveals nihilism to be at natural odds with human nature in spite of socialism's attempts to the contrary well i think it does show that nihilism is against uh human nature in the sense that uh to gain uh bazarov falls in love and love is much more important to him in the end than uh philosophy but unfortunately his nihilistic philosophy but unfortunately it's too late one of the things that it teaches is you teaches you is it that it can things can be too late and so not everything is reparable uh but clearly there's a a conflict between his uh his nihilism and his real deepest feelings and that's why of course basarov is not not ultimately a bad man he's a mistaken man a man who's made a very serious mistake but because he is actually capable in the end he's capable of love he if it hadn't been from the fact that he uh he died he might have been he might have been redeemable he would not have remained a nihilist all his life there's a real sense of that in um gosh it's such a it's just such a beautiful novel i i i've been been uh really moved by this portrayal of of bizarro of his the humanity of the man that transcends his own position and there's a beautiful metaphor i think one of the great strengths of of tregenie that's the only thing i've read but one of these just breathtakingly artistic um aspects of this novel is the way in which he will often use uh natural contrast or juxtapose moments in nature with um moments in the in the human being in the in the soul or in the person um and there's that that wonderful moment and i hope those uh listening here if you haven't read the novel that you um [Music] uh you'll give yourself the benefit of doing so at some point on in the seven chapter 17 there's this moment where where bizarro is is confronting the fact that against everything he believes about himself he's fallen deeply in love with this this odinstov a character and he he's unable this is the the irrational side of his rationalism he's unable to account for what's happening in himself and he this beautiful moment where he he gets up and he opens the window they're in the drawing room and in in their sort of socializing after dinner um bizarrov got up and pushed at the window it flew open at once with a crash he had not expected it to open so easily also his hands were trembling the mild dark knight looked into the room with its almost black sky its faintly rustling trees and the fresh fragrance of the pure untrammeled air this just magnificent sense of the natural world the way in which his opening of the window he's overwhelmed by the beauty he didn't expect by the darkness of the night that he didn't expect as a metaphor of the ways in which he is himself overwhelmed in this very conversation with his own feelings that he could ken did not expect and cannot account for in his conversation with um this woman that he's he's fallen in love with um on this topic of uh human nature in a fuller broader sense than bazarov is himself able to to express but which in a way he is an expression of uh someone writes dr joseph writes good evening mr daniels i have been deeply influenced by your work particularly in your insights into human nature taking everything you have experienced and read into account are you optimistic or pessimistic about human nature can we learn from the mistakes that we british this person clearly writing from the uk have made by having a more realistic view of human nature thank you very much for your time and i must express deep felt appreciation for everything you have written britain is so much the poorer for your retirement from the birmingham prison and hospital regards um um uh would you like to to respond to that tony uh am i pessimistic or optimistic um well so the thing that did uh make me a little optimistic not very optimistic was that i was when i spoke to my patients i never said to i never didn't say to them something that i was prepared to write and they recognized i think they recognized the truth of it and they also quite liked being talked to as full human beings rather than as vectors of forces so that i always acknowledged that they they had made decisions albeit they made decisions in in very unfortunate circumstances but nevertheless they were decisions um and so they and they were prepared to recognize that and were actually relieved that someone talked to them as if that were true and they recognized it as one so that makes me optimistic on the other hand we have a very large part of the society now which has a vested interest in treating another part of society as if they were mere objects and that makes me pessimistic um i don't think human nature is going to change either for the better or for the worse it will always be more or less the same but uh at least within very broad parameters but i think whether whether realism can overcome the vested interests which which there are in irrealism in uh one could almost call it bizarrophism uh i'm not quite sure i'm rather pessimistic about britain in particular i must say so i'm not i'm not quite sure whether i'm optimistic or pessimistic tony the thing i always love about talking with you is that perhaps like turganyv whom i know you greatly admire you have a a a very measured realism about the the dark sides of our nature and yet you yourself are such a life-affirming and loving character with your humor and um deep sense of humanity the deep the the the integrity and possibility uh and respect for the individuals whom you um write about and uh whom you you encounter i have the pleasure of knowing you as a as a friend so i know these things are are true it seems to me that that's uh that that is precisely what it to take that position as it were both to be aware of our darkness uh but not to uh surrender to that as a total principle and to know that our refusal to surrender to that is itself a rational standpoint born of what we know about the nature of ourselves and of of reality uh broadly is um that is the only uh antidote uh to that and we're gonna speak about that a bit uh later i i hope um i want to read um in in in a little bit some uh i'll just do it right now and then we'll come back the number of other questions we're going to get get to one of the there are a number of contrasts here we've talked a lot about bizarrov but he's not the only character in this wonderful book you have in a way just as uh you have in anna karenina a kind of fundamental contrast of two couples uh so too in this you have a contrast between bazarov and odinstov on the one hand and and uh arcadi and katya on the other and though arcadie or caddy i don't of course i don't have any russian i have no idea to pronounce these names please forgive me everyone um though our rkd is um uh under bazarov's spell at the early part and throughout the novel his um it turns out that he's not a nihilist that he he has a fundamental openness to the ways in which he is uh moved by the world beyond himself in his father in his burgeoning love with katya indeed even in his love of of bizarre of he at times has to repress himself from saying the things he wants to say so bizarro because he'll feel like he's not a good nihilist by by talking about his love or admiration for this man and and so too in the kind of uh final uh very sad final conversation that bazarov has with with with arkady there are other things he would say but they would seem sentimental so he won't say them and there's that that kind of denial of what's welling up in him as a human being towards the world that to me is what in a way is really the the the essential character of bizarro's position it's that refusal to be open to the way in which the self opens up to the world uh that that is not comprehensible by his declared principles and and yet we see in the novel a number of contrasts with that position and and beautifully some of these are given to us in people who are portrayed as very simple in a way but as having a grasp of deep things that bazaar of himself does not understand and and two of those people are in fact his parents uh whom he is human enough to recognize the virtues of though he's unable to um you might say give himself over to the truth of their position he sees their virtues but there's this just absolutely uh stunning moment at the the conclusion of chapter 21 where bazarov has come home after a long period away his parents are just so touchingly um moved by their so touchingly expressive of their love of their son and delighted to have him at home and they're fussing over him and they're doing this and they're doing that and and i think anyone who has had the gift of a loving parent knows what uh that is like and any parent who's had the gift of loving a child knows what that is like um and how different those two positions are too but there he leaves prematurely after only three days and they're just uh they're just absolutely uh devastated his father is thunderstruck and he reels he just can't believe his son is leaving and as they try to put on a brave face but as the carriage uh as the carriage drives away uh he has gone left us he faltered gone because he found it dull with us here i'm a lonely man now lonely as this finger he repeated again and again and each time he thrust out his hand with his forefinger pointing away from the rest then arena vestalia came to his side and pressing her grey head head to his gray head she said it can't be helped fazia son is an independent person he's like a falcon that comes when he wills and flies off when he lists you and i are like the funguses growing in a hollow tree here we sit side by side not budging an inch it is only i who will stay with you always faithful forever just as you will stay with me vasily ivanice took his hands from his face and clasped his wife his friend more warmly than he had ever done before even in their youth she had consoled him she had consoled him in his grief pardon me i get emotional reading this uh beautiful novel then later there's a moment after uh it after uh bizzarov has died and his parents are grappling with his death and they they stand together and he turgenia writes side by side they bowed their heads like lambs in the heat of noonday but the blaze of the noonday sun passes and is succeeded by dusk and nightfall and then the night with a return to the quiet fold where sleep sweet sleep waits for the tormented and the weary six months went by white winter had set in with the cruel stillness of cloudless frost with its thick crunching snow rosy rimmed trees pale emerald sky smoked capped chimneys anyway he goes on and on here um in this marvelous contrast of the uh the way in which the sadness is compared to the lambs bowed in this in the heat of some summer and then gives way to this contemplative distance of winter and um all of this in my reading of the novel anyway we see turgany of giving us this just deeply movingly sympathetic account of the simple love of the the the parents for the child this selfless love as he describes it in the last lines uh of the novel uh which which outward movingness we see also in the descriptions of nature and the the the super abundance of spring for example in which the novel the novel begins that that inner reciprocity to reality itself i'm wondering tony um it just having read those passages if um if you have any uh comments on uh you know you were saying how troganyov is not reductive it's not um just a philosophy like this is the nature of things but there's this opening up that's constantly coming through the novel um any any thoughts or reflections on on on that well it just uh the the passages you have read show in a way the i mean they don't it doesn't say it explicitly of course because he's he's not the kind of man not kind of writer to be explicit but shows you if you like the shallowness of all attempts to understand life [Music] through some kind of ideology or simple philosophy such as bazaar zarov's philosophy is is actually extremely simple and we realize from re from reading the end that it's it's very shallow and life is much deeper than than can be caught even by a much more sophisticated philosophy than than bazarovs and that well as uh i suppose uh gerta said uh gray is theory but green is the tree of life and um and this bears that out i'm gonna move back to a few thank you tony i'm gonna move back to a few questions uh from the audience we'll go for a few more minutes if you don't uh don't mind there's so many uh rich things to uh speak about here here's a question um hero gosh so many wonderful questions i'll try and run through a number number of these okay um pardon me everyone these are going by so quickly i'm just trying to uh focus on uh them here we are uh you contrasted tragenya's comparatively oblique and elusive expression of his world view within his fiction with bernard shaw's more direct and didactic habit isaiah berlin's romance lecture on fathers and children which is a in the introduction of this book here also observes that troganyev is far less forthcoming in his views than say tolstoy or dostoyevsky can you say a little more about the dangers and possibilities aesthetic and philosophical for effecting social change or moving individual readers of being more or less direct in the expression of a worldview through fiction well i think the exp if you can affect uh large numbers of people through fiction in a very direct way the chances are it's a very bad fiction um they're not a very good book lenin's favorite novel for example was chernyshevsky's what is to be done and it's an atrocious book but it's very didactic as to what what the situation requires i as for tolstoy i think he's probably best almost entirely best when he's not when he's not obviously pointing to some kind of political uh or philosophical uh point and dostoevsky is to my mind most important in in establishing that there are very deep currents uh sometimes of evil in people um and that again he's he he obviously believes that there is no uh there is no ideology that will save mankind no secular ideology unfortunately he does have some very nasty ideas uh dostoevsky um i think i think turganief is actually the most civilized of them yeah sorry no i don't mean to interrupt you tony at all um there are a number of questions that may be related here one person asks what is the difference between ideology and real thought uh ideology is uh i think the preemption of understanding the belief that you understand everything uh from the point of view of a single or very s small number of principles and that you claim complete understanding uh before i i don't believe there is any such thing as a complete understanding but you claim complete understanding and we've seen several examples of this marxism is a a kind of a claim to complete understanding freudian freudian ism was behaviorism uh was uh neurosciences neurosciences are taking over that uh that view um so uh i think that's the main difference perhaps the it's the closing of the mind in the belief that you have already understood uh the most fundamental questions and that all if anything remains uh to be filled in it's just a few details a related question comes in here about the uh it begins with a a note of gratitude to tony this reader says that in her reading that the characters demonstrated a lack of self-examination or self-reflection and um uh you know not failing to examine the premises of their their actions and this the questioner concludes with this question how do we teach ourselves and others to do this that is to to examine our own positions um that's a very difficult question um we can be helped i think by reading people like dr johnson who said who often began he who examines the motions of his own mind that's what we infrequently uh do so we don't actually examine ourselves um but how you're actually taught to do it i don't know how you actually learn to do it i don't know other than by i suppose reading reading literature but i i have no solution or no answer to that question well i'm going to ask you another unanswerable question then um now that we've we've got started with these these dynamics writes one questioner tony are ubiquitous now including in my own family with my daughter's um blm sympathies what is the antidote when our children reject their parents completely by alienation gosh this is heartbreaking such as my daughter manifested in the destruction of the family unit today you alluded in your your your lecture to the um the the ways in which this dynamic between generations and and specifically as it's animated by the the by a kind of absolute demand of certain positions uh leads to fragmentation um this questioner has really put her finger on something very uh personally uh rich that we perhaps have all experienced tony what did what advice or reflection can you offer us on how to engage in the midst of um these absolute demands that can so easily be alienating of of the things that we love and the people whom we love well the first thing is i think people shouldn't actually despair because this doesn't necessarily go on for the rest of a person's life i mean there are people do grow out of things and i'm sure most of us have grown out of something rather so so it's not uh it's not that there's no hope children often do go back to their parents you remember what uh what mark twain said you know when i was 19 i thought my father was completely ignorant at the age of 21 i was surprised to find out how much he'd learned and and so i i don't think there's need for uh despair because things will change um i'm i hope that most fanatics most uncompromising people will learn to compromise in the end as to how to deal with this my own technique increasingly it's taken me a long time to realize this is not to engage in the argument in the first place and try to let it uh wash over you and with a bit of luck if you if you don't respond too much then then the other person loses interest um but once you start arguing um you do become like uncle pavel and you start saying illogical things yourself so those are two things but i can't i can't say that there's a guarantee of success some fanatics remain fanatics throughout their life but most probably moderate so there there is i would say there's hope actually it's very painful and it might take a few years but uh but the daughter will probably come back um that's the uh that's that's there you go with your marvelous optimism again that uh the human mind is uh somehow uh capable of coming to uh a deeper grasp of what's real uh if only well i've made lots of mistakes in thinking that uh this adolescent is so awful there's no hope for him um you know he's he's uh he's obviously going to end up with a life imprisonment or something and i'm surprised a few years later to find that he's a very nice chap and has changed very fundamentally and that change can occur surprisingly uh late in life so so i am i mean i don't want to be like pollyanna i don't want to say this happens in every case but it it probably happens in more cases than uh then it doesn't happen i don't think anyone's going to accuse uh theodore dalrymple of pollyanna-ism um but i think you are articulating tony wonderfully the the if i may put it this way the principle that's at work in the novel which is the way in which our reductions are reprimanded by reality itself if we're open to seeing its complexity we can move deeper into it and that's the essentially what you see with katya and arkady um it's what you you you might have seen with bazar of had he had he not had he not died uh it's a beautiful the sensitive depiction of him as as still having in himself despite his ideology the possibility of of transcending it there's another question here that is on the similar note um i think it's very good the way you've said that there are times when you it's not that one is rejecting argument it's that there's times that argument isn't possible it's not the mode of engagement that's most useful this questioner asks what strategies could be used today to fight back on the radical movements both on left and right in a way that would bring love peace and justice to the world instead of causing more anger and polarization clearly a question at the heart of the novel well i'm not sure that uh love peace and uh what was the other thing justice i think it is yes i don't think the world will ever be a place of love uh peace and justice uh completely and i wouldn't aim at trying to bring about perfect love peace and justice um i think it's important to try and get people to appreciate what water actually exists and i then that of course is much easier said than done i was very impressed it once in brazil i went to a school it wasn't in the poorest area but it was not a rich school and what the teachers were doing was were i don't know with what success but what they were trying to do was to get the children to look around them and see how marvelous the world was how much more how much more marvelous it was actually than what they were seeing on their telephone screens and other screens and so they were trying to interest them in the natural world which of course in in brazil is extremely abundant um so it's an attempt to try and get people to appreciate what actually exists unfortunately our educational system doesn't seem to be doing a very good job as far as that is concerned well that that leads to a question and we won't go on too much longer here though now that we have you here on a roll with all these questions i'm i'm loath to to close off too quickly um how can the youth this questioner asks is the topic on education tony how can the youth best educate themselves in the humanities today most of the universities seem to have been slowly moving away from holding truth and beauty as their primary values and seem to have shifted their focus towards political problems sometimes in a biased way yes well i suppose uh people should go instead of studying uh history they should go and study entomology and and then and then become if they're interested in history amateur amateurs of it rather than try and do it for a degree because as far as i i know i'm i'm not a university type but as far as i'm aware the university humanities departments have been completely destroyed from within by uh by well by by political correctness by political obsession i should say and my own view is that for example literary criticism is a is possible only outside the universities the only people who write interesting literary criticism and not in universities on on the whole i mean i'm sure that that there must be exceptions but um i think i think it's a question of parents trying to help children rather than expect universities or schools to do anything because as far as i understand i'm i might be exaggerating but there's no hope for uh university uh departments of humanities it's a sobering standpoint but it is uh you know only someone who's not paying any attention at all would i think or who is themselves in the grip of a uh very totalizing ideology would maintain that what is really the heart of bazarov's position uh is not in fact really a very dominant standpoint in our culture and in the humanities we see this everything from the ugliness of our architecture to the uh darkening of the horizon of what we can become of human beings to the suppression of essential human activities like freedom of thought and speech um but above all for that darkening of uh the possibilities that that degradation of the possibilities for how we can interact uh with each other it it seems to me that the the sort of neo-marxism or marx the the the the reductivist materialism that that bazara bazarov uh champions is in fact a very very dominant standpoint in in our in our own world certainly in many universities and in the humanities especially and if if anything this humble little initiative uh with your wonderful lecture in our conversation is uh meant to show that that there's another way as to genius himself um uh tragenya's novel itself shows um i am going to ask you one more question and then we're going to uh conclude with um i'm going to play a little music in conclusion and then we can we'll we'll just have a moment or two to uh to to to conclude um our back and forth um here we go um the final question i want to ask you here is um the forgive me here everyone i'm thank you for waiting along here um the the last question i want to ask you is uh coming from here we are about rebuilding um it seems that there is a fascination in humans with destruction why do you think this seems to be stronger than the need to rebuild and i would ask in addition do you think it is stronger well first of all uh iconoclasm has a very long history as we all know and if we examine ourselves uh i think we in a small way we all understand the attractions of destruction at least i do so that if i'm in a i have i have to restrain myself when i'm very angry not to throw a plate at the wall and somehow the destruction of the plate i feel uh would relieve me so destruction and i remember as a child taking croquet mallets to a radio that was in the shed and smashing it to bits and when i look back how much i enjoyed it and i'm reminded of when i was i had to be in panama when there were riots going on and it was perfectly obvious to me how much people enjoyed the riots there's nothing there's nothing as as pleasurable to some people as the sound of a brick going through plate glass and i think there is something in human nature maybe i'm maybe nobody in the audience has experienced anything like this as for construction unfortunately our present mode of construction is destruction i mean to construct is to de destroy you can see this in many cities in the city that i am in paris where it's less bad than in london but still it's pretty bad every single building constructed from the second world war has done something to uglify the city and it can't be that this is just accidental or that nobody's noticed so there is a there's a destructiveness i i would say our architects are worse than uh worse than um isis or the taliban in this respect in the in the sense that they've destroyed much more uh than isis or taliban have done um so i think the impulse to destroy is very strong and it's particularly strong in our era perhaps because we have a kind of exhaustion of our own cultural tradition that you can see in music you can see in architecture even in literature and if you can't if you have no capacity to create you can at least destroy before we conclude two last things here um uh tony you've just been speaking uh about the the will to destruction uh what does it mean to create i mean we're i think we're all overwhelmed with the alienation the the the sense of of uh tearing it all down uh uh and just the the the the grim um gruel the the thin gruel we're often expected to live on and uh you know of course we here at ralston college are engaged in a in an effort to to build something new um but i i want to conclude our discussion by asking you um about what it means to live in a more affirmative standpoint not um denying or in any way suppressing the injustices or uh uglinesses of the present uh but rather to counteract those uh from a positive standpoint um well i'm not sure i have any prescriptions but i've been more of a diagnostician than they then have any therapeutics to offer um what i i'd just been thinking about the urge to destruction and part of it comes from the inflamed individualism of our times and i can see this in paris for example in before the first world war much architecture was extremely good and what you see on the buildings is a very little plaque which just gives the name of the architect it's a very small thing and you wouldn't notice it and you don't look at the building and think that's a work by monsieur dupont but it says dupont architect and it's obvious to me that at that time um architects understood that a building was not was part of a collective part of a collective endeavor but with the inflamed individualism of our time that is no longer possible for architects or they don't they want to mark their cities so i think we have to try and get over this this kind of individualism but how we do it i i i can't really say they say it's inflamed individualism i'm all in favor of course of the freedom of the individual but the strange thing is we have we live in a state of extreme individualism without individuality well that is of course the uh the the the position of uh in a way of bizarre of the inability to actually be an individual i mean to to be a more a more fully realized individual would be for him to embrace his love for odinsdov and his friendship with archaddy and his and that and the principle of reciprocity with his parents um so he'd actually be a a fuller individual for acknowledging this inner reciprocity to things rather than the closing down of of ideology um well just before we conclude i i i thought that um for those that one thing that might be nice as a way of concluding this this uh this event this conversation with all of us spread around the world in in uh in our cars and zoom rooms and and uh uh iphones or whatever it is would be to um to try and give an example um uh in a non-dialogical form of what that openness might look like and there's this beautiful moment in the novel um where where where arkady and bizzarov are out in the garden talking and they hear a cello being played through the window and and it's playing schubert's uh playing a schubert's song uh just the melody it says he's being played sort of emotionally um playing it with feeling um and the melody flowed sweet as honey through the air and uh this produces in bizarre of this disdain you know your father's far too old to be playing the cello he's i think he says he should he should sort of know better kind of thing um and uh and and then right after that bizarro exhorts arkady to give his father something sensible to read and he gives them a buchner as you mentioned ludwig buchner's uh a stolen crafter of its craft and stole [Music] the german german work of materialism which you can easily get on the internet for those of you who are interested in in engaging with that that work so you have this kind of contrast on the one hand of buchner's work as the this ideological position that basirov is advocating which is a kind of a a closing down to the rich possibilities of life and then you have the shubert on the other hand as uh as a kind of symbol or moment of the of kind of openness and so i'm just going to play i happen to find a lovely recording of not that particular uh schubert uh a song but another uh schubert uh leader uh adapted for a cello and piano um and i will uh play you it's about four minutes and then we'll uh conclude uh our conversation very uh uh expeditiously after that but i thought this might be a nice way for us to conclude our chat [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] blue mm-hmm so [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] sorry i had to get that music stopped there after it i had a hard time getting it stopped after i started it uh isn't that a metaphor for how we hope such things will go um uh tony i want to uh before we uh can uh conclude conclude just give you a chance to make any concluding remarks you might like to make you've been so gracious to write this brilliant lecture for us and to give us the benefit of your your time and your long uh and deep insight into human nature and into this uh wonderful work of literature is there anything you'd like to to say to uh those listening before we conclude uh i don't really think i have anything more to say except that i hope that those who haven't read the book who will read the book and that they will find it as inspiring as as obviously stephen and i have found it i think i had another problem with my audio here um am i back you are with me uh tony uh listen i don't i i i'm only trying to conclude and say thank you um very much all of you for joining us and tony for your brilliant lecture and uh lovely engagement this afternoon to all of you until next time goodbye [Music] you

Channel: Ralston College

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Length: 133min 41sec (8021 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021