Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I've Just Finished Reading

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is excellent.

I also finished The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, which is interesting for the neuroplasticity stuff but does not, generally speaking, add up to more than the sum of its parts. I'm thinking that books actually about neuroplasticity would be a sounder bet for future reading.

What I'm Reading Now

I've started Brian R. Little's Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being. Generally I love personality books (let me tell you about my feelings about the MBTI sometime), but I'm having some trouble getting into this one. I'll give it a couple more chapters, perhaps.

What I Plan to Read Next

I'm thinking about getting my hands on Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, although I suspect that I will either end up utterly worn out by three volumes of gulag - or, alternatively, I will do nothing for the next week but read about gulags, the way that I spent an entire week engrossed in Simon Sebag Montefiore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

That was during finals week. The timing could have been better. No regrets, though.

I might also read Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, or at least a selection of them - there are apparently six volumes, and I don't think I can take six volumes of stories so grim that they make the convicts in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich look like boy scouts (at least according to the writer of the introduction of Ivan Denisovich, whom one can only presume yearned to be writing an introduction to Kolyma Tales instead).

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, the healing angel just came back from school with a heart-rending excerpt from Victor Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom, about the collectivization of the farms.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

In some ways I find the collectivization of the farms even more depressing than the gulags - I'm not sure why; I think they're probably actually both about as awful as the other.

But somehow causing a massive famine on purpose to force farmers into an ideologically correct farming set-up seems like a special kind of evil.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I agree. Ideologues are terrible and terrifying because the Idea is so bright in them that they're just willing to drive people off a cliff for it--or torture them--whatever. Just for the idea. What they're never, ever able to do is say, "Huh. Well, we thought that would work--it seemed like it ought to--but it didn't. So, we're going to rethink and try something else. Maybe even just a little tweak of our original design." NO EVERYONE MUST COMPLY OR DIE YOU ARE RUINING THE PERFECTION OF THIS IDEA BY NOT MAKING IT WORK.

And maybe what makes it so especially horrible in the farming situation--whether it's collectivization in Russia or using glass as fertilizer in China--is that farming is an activity in which people have to bend to the ways of nature, work with nature, to achieve results. Rivers don't run at right angles, plants don't germinate according to ideology. Graaaah.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

glass as fertilizer

What. What. What theory was behind this? Did they just have extra glass lying around, so they were like, "Well it HAS to work as fertilizer! Because that would be convenient!"

I don't know much about the Great Leap Forward. At some point I'll probably look into it, because I seem irresistibly drawn to mid-twentieth century miserable ideological debacles. But by God, there were just so MANY of them.

And yeah, farming always seems to knock ideologues down. Because it's really not susceptible to the kind of control that ideology (or at least, specifically revolutionary Communist ideology) demands: you may be able to take on nature with a factory or a coal mine - because in those contexts you can ignore nature (it will come back to bite you later, but you can do it).

But you need nature to work with you on a farm. If you try to defeat nature there, nature will win.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I do wonder what spurious science (if any!) was used to back up the idea. Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine is a title that comes up a lot in conjunction with the Great Leap Forward. I only knew about the broken-glass thing (that and the backyard blast furnaces), but apparently other impossibilities were also touted:

according to their bizarre world view, infant piglets could be made to spawn litters, broken glass could fertilize crops and earthen embankments could be put to the same exacting use as concrete dams.

It seems like naked wish fulfillment.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

shalamov is exponentially much more terrifying than solzhenitsyn. solzhenitsyn thought that his gulag experience was a, mmmm, something of a holy challenge? a trial of martyrdom one could fight against. shalamov thought that gulag was an utterly and irrevocably damaging experience that killed a person's soul forever. they're both right, each in his own way, but shalamov is much, much scarier.

i've read gulag archipelago twice; at some point it stops being horrifying because you literally can't deal with any more terror, basically, but i think still it's one of these... immanently useful books to know. mundane nature of most imaginable evil, et cetera.

(solzhenitsyn, aside from being the partially self-styled Prophet Of Decades Of Soviet Terror, is a pretty decent novelist; his cancer ward or in the first circle are fiction rather than non-fiction, and they're pretty damn awesome wrt plot, characters, narration, etc.).

if you'll go looking for the female narrative on the same topics, ginzburg's journey into the whirlwind is a very amazing memoir.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I suppose the good thing about Shalamov's work being short stories is that I can read a few and put it aside if it gets to be too much. But I think it will be good to have another point of view to contrast Solzhenitsyn's.

I feel like Gulag Archipelago would go well with Eichmann in Jerusalem: the mundane nature of most evil and all that. Good books to have in one's mind to chew over.

I've heard of Journey into the Whirlwind! In fact I think I read an excerpt from it (was she a zealous young party member before she got sent to the camps?), which I found so compelling that I meant to read the rest, but I never sought it out. Clearly it must go on my list now. I've also been meaning to read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs.

[egelantier.livejournal.com]

yup, that'd be ginzburg; she documented, via her personal history, the grand purges of thirties, when the party started eating their own.

(she's also, by the way, vasily aksyonov's mother, and he's one of the formative anti-establishment late soviet authors; i don't know if he's been translated widely, but say cheese is a great metaphorical retelling of repressions against non-conformist writers in the late ussr, and a great book to boot).

another badass russian writer dealing with her gulag experience was eufrosinia kersnovskaya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eufrosinia_Kersnovskaya).

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

This post brings back memories of the summer I read nothing but histories of the gulags. Why did I? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. What egelantier says about horror overload definitely applied, I think.

I vaguely remember Anne Applebaum's book Gulag as being a good overview -- it's been a long time since I read it, but I do remember it included descriptions of some very early Soviet labor camps, and a very memorable account of a massive canal (the White Sea - Baltic waterway) made by conscript labor with primitive tools in the 1930s

I remember when Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar first came out in bookstores; I couldn't afford to take it home so I had to keep coming back to the bookstore to read it. Why was it so compelling? I don't even remember.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

When I was eight or nine I became obsessed with the Holocaust, read every Holocaust book in the children's section, and then wrote a running-away-from-the-Nazis book of my own. Possibly a morbid pastime, but I found it totally absorbing.

I'll probably save Applebaum's book for after I've read the gulag memoirs - get the personal view first, and than pan out to see the big picture.

My feeling about The Court of the Red Tsar is that it's so compelling because it reads like a really good (if rather odd) novel: there are more secondary characters than you would have in a novel, but the core cast of characters is fairly consistent and you get a good feeling for who Stalin, Bukharin, Beria, etc. were as people.

And it does an amazing job creating that atmosphere of paranoia and fear - not just paranoia and fear about the horrible things that were actually happening, but paranoia that the country really WAS invested with spies and saboteurs who only seemed to multiply the more viciously they were repressed. It's a terrible dynamic, but fascinating.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

A book about neuroplasticity is The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doige. Some of the anecdotes and case studies in this book are fascinating. Others are less interesting. Doige seems to have a bit of a conservative agenda, based on the discussion of pornography and sexuality. The amputation and stroke chapters are very cool (phantom limbs and retraining your nervous system to make up for lost bits), but his assertions that "if you have non-standard sexual urges, you should rewire your brain to be normal" made me furious.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Well that sounds frustrating. I have the impression that neuroplasticity is a pretty hot topic in popular science books right now, so I'll probably look around and see if I can find a different one.