I like The Idiot much better, but this book was still insightful and funny.
Summer reading: Work, by James Suzman
A fun romp through history and why we should all be working less. Daisy has taken this lesson heart, although it did not take much convincing.
Summer reading: 24/7 by Jonathan Crary
So many thoughts on this book…
“We are now in an era in which there is an overarching prohibition on wishes other than those linked to individual acquisition, accumulations, and power.” page 111
“Everyone, we are told–not just businesses and institutions–needs an ‘online presence,’ needs 24/7 exposure, to avoid social irrelevance or professional failure. But the promotion of these alleged benefits is a cover for conditions in which privacy is impossible, and in which one becomes a permanent site of data-harvesting and surveillance.” page 104
Recommended summer reading from Libération.fr →
Summer Reading: Bride of the Revolution
“If the heavenly city of Communism could have been entered by dint of Krupskaya’s labors, Russia would have become the world’s first perfect society years ago.”
Summer Reading: Imaging Utopia by Maria Todorova
A history of Bulgarian radicals - what’s not to like!
My comments on the book: Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins
In her chapter on Angelina Boneva, Todorova introduces us to the idea of the “extraordinary” ordinary person,” someone whose life is not representative of some statistical average or of a particular subgroup of some clan of acknowledged historical significance, but a fully autonomous individual whose life and work deserves to be remembered on its own terms, as a legacy of one particular mind in one particular moment in time. As an ethnographer, this question of significance forever haunts my discipline, especially in an era of big data where everyone is keen to understand some imagined concept of public opinion or popular preferences in order to manipulate, deceive, subvert, or most likely, market to it. When the citizens of every continent are microblogging the daily minutia of their lives on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, those harvesting this content see its value only in its aggregation and monetization. But the discipline of cultural anthropology demands that we take individuals and small communities as representatives of something deeper, always looking for clues to the universality of human experience despite the many differences that divide us.
In her chapter on Todor Tsekov, Todorova tells us that his handwritten “memoir-diary” of over 1100 pages only constituted the first 4 volumes of a ten-volume set. Todorova reflects, “excluding novelists and a few politicians, I have never encountered such graphomania in anyone” (205). Her mention of the word “graphomania” reminded me of one of my favorite pages of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when he meets a graphomanaical taxi driver. Kundera writes:
Graphomania is not a desire to writer letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or ones close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)… For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
The many rich lives that Todorova rescues from oblivion in her book, extraordinary ordinary people like Angelina Boneva, Todor and Katia Tsekov, Koika Tineva and Nikola Sakarov, as well as the many glimpses of socialist women and wives, allow us to find the universality in the specificity of these lives: their overwhelming desire to build a better world. Their imagining of utopia.
“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian, explained Emma Goldman in 1911.” The German sociologist Karl Mannheim also argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to ideology, which he defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure of ideas that uphold a particular “order of things” protecting those who hold political and economic power. “Inasmuch as man is a creature living primarily in history and society,” Mannheim wrote in 1929, “the ‘existence’ that surrounds him is never ‘existence as such,’ but is always a concrete historical form of social existence… The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized.” In other words, those who benefit from the status quo have a strong motive for labeling as “utopian” any ideas which threaten it. But even beyond that, those steeped in the ideology of their current existence quite literally cannot imagine an alternative to it. And most people just follow along.
But Todorova’s beautiful book shows us that there have always been dreamers, like these lost socialists on Europe’s margins, refusing to accept the status quo. Fighting for women’s rights, for improvements in the lives of peasants and workers, for worlds free from exploitation and misery, and for more democratic forms of political participation. Their dreams may have had different contours, and we know that there are always conflicts among people with different visions of the ideal future, but we also know from history that it is these dreamers that move our societies forward. Behind the great men and women (but usually men) who are written about in history books, there are billions of “extraordinary ordinary” men and women who have devoted their lives for causes bigger than themselves alone, and these causes gave purpose and meaning to their lives, helped order and structure their days, and allowed them to feel that they might not disappear “unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe.”
In his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, Chernyshevsky outlined a utopian vision of the future where workers would finally enjoy the fruits of their own labor in his protagonist Vera Pavlovna's third dream sequence. "Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful," Chernyshevsky writes, "Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it."
It is not easy to imagine a better future, a utopia out there floating on the horizon, when the crushing burdens of quotidian existence often limit our ability to dream. Tired and apathetic, most of us cling carelessly to the status quo, convinced by our societies that any attempt to change this will inevitably devolve into dystopia. By salvaging these moving lost life stories from Europe’s margins, Todorova has shown us the value and importance of social dreaming in an era when utopianism is still derided as useless at best and politically dangerous at worst. I think Todorova’s book shows us that the uncanny ability to believe in an unknown (but somehow better future)–to see the world not as it is but as it should be–is what makes these individuals extraordinary in their ordinary-ness, and for me this is ultimately a book of “individual close-ups” of hope, of the tenacity of the human spirit to think beyond suffocating ideological boxes of the present.
To end with the full quote from Oscar Wilde with which Todorova begins her book: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Summer reading: Comrade by Jodi Dean
This was a fun essay on political belonging, and reminded me of a conversation I had with a Bulgarian of Turkish ethnicity back in the late 1990s about the Bulgarian word for Comrade, Drugar. I wrote about this encounter for an essay in my 2011 book, Lost in Transition: Everyday Life After Communism.
Summer Reading–Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai
Finally, the semester is over and I have some time to catch up on my reading. I literally have 17 books on my nightstand (or on the floor near it) waiting to be read or reread. I started off with this 2020 reader from an art project done in Sweden in the 2017-2018 academic year. It’s an eclectic collection of essays and interviews reflecting on the importance and relevance of Kollontai and her work today.
Summer Reading: The Called Us Enemy
I love this little graphic novel by original series Star Trek actor George Takei, who was interned as a child during World War II. Very moving and also more proof at how shitty our government has been to people of color during its history.
Summer reading: Lenin's Mistress
So, I take exception with the title of this biography since it isn’t 100% clear that Lenin and Armand were actual lovers, and eve if it were true, Inessa Armand was way more than just an appendage to a great man. Despite the title, this book is more accurate than the R.C. Elwood one because it was published after the post-Soviet Russian archives finally declassified Lenin’s letters to Armand. Unfortunately, it seems all of her own letters to Lenin were destroyed (at his request). The author also used new sources from Armand’s descendants. Aside from her relationship with Lenin, Inessa Armand was a fascinating feminist and Bolshevik who lived an amazing and unconventional live until her untimely death of cholera in 1920.
Summer Reading: Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist
Continuing with my theme of awesome Russian/Soviet women, I’ve spent a lot of time this week with Inessa Armand. This woman had five children and still managed to help foment revolution. Talk about work/family balance!
Summer reading: Lady Death
This is an English translation of Soviet sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir. She is officially credited with 309 confirmed kills in 1941 and 1942. I especially enjoyed the chapters where discusses her travels in the United States with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Summer Reading: The Unwomanly Face of War
An absolutely gorgeous book or oral history with Soviet women who fought in World War II by Nobel-Prize winning author, Svetlana Alexievich. This is the best book that I have read about the experience of women in war. Highly recommended.
Summer Reading: Avenging Angels
A fascinating look at some of the Soviet women who served as snipers in the WWII.
Summer Reading: Maxim Leo's Red Love
I started this book over a year ago but then put it down and life happened. I finally managed to finish it and it is a lovely tale of an East German family and the complicated history of the GDR. Wonderfully written and quite poignant.
Summer Reading: Feminist CIty
An interesting introduction to the field of feminist geography.
August special for all e-books of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism →
Hachette is doing a promotion of my e-book this month. It’s only $2.99 for the whole month of August.
Summer Reading: Circe
This one was highly recommended by my daughter, and I enjoyed it. A feminist retelling of the Odyssey from the witch’s POV. Such a nice break from the heavier academic reading.
Summer reading: Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind
““...the rightist totalitarian program was exceptionally poor. The only gratification it offered came from collective warmth: crowds, red faces, mouths open in a shout, marches, arms brandishing sticks; but little rational satisfaction. Neither racist doctrines, not hatred of foreigners, not the glorification of one’s own national traditions could efface the feeling that the entire program was improvised to deal with the problems of the moment.”
“The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any others order must be ‘unnatural,’ and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature. ”
“Wherever there is a crisis, the ruling classes take refuge in fascism as a safeguard against the revolution of the proletariat.”
“Whoever would take the measure of intellectual life in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe from the monotonous articles appearing in the press or the stereotyped speeches pronounced there, would be making a grave error. Just as theologians in periods of strict orthodoxy expressed their views in the rigorous language of the Church, so the writers of the people’s democracies make use of an accepted special style, terminology, and linguistic ritual. What is important is not what someone said but what he wanted to say...”
“The reader of today is in search of hope, and he does not care for poetry that accepts the order of things as permanent.”
Summer reading: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
“We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. ”
“To see the devil as a partisan of Evil and an angel as a warrior on the side of Good is to accept the demagogy of angels. ”
“For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an undifferentiated universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. ”
“All of us are prisoners to a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise. ”
“The best progressive ideas are those that include a strong enough dose of provocation to make its supporters feel proud of being original, but at the same time attract so many adherents that the risk of being an isolated exception is immediately averted by the noisy approval of a triumphant crowd. ”
“It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense. ”