A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I wrote about Dostoevsky’s Notes from an Underground in both its context and our own.
Notes from Underground, with its raving monologuist at war with himself and his society, inspires an entire line of later novels spanning the globe, all of which might share its title: Hunger, Nausea, The Stranger, Molloy, No Longer Human, Invisible Man, and various works by Philip Roth and Thomas Bernhard. Given the Underground Man’s reference to himself as “a mouse and not a man”—Nabokov, who disliked Dostoevsky, claimed the title might better have been translated Memoirs from a Mousehole—Kafka’s Metamorphosis can be read as a more literal rendering of the narrator’s dilemma.
I wanted to linger over Nabokov’s hatred of Dostoevsky—it can be found in his Lectures on Russian Literature—but I thought it would be a digression too far. Briefly, VN’s dismissal shows the limit of aestheticism, its too-finicky recoil from major work, which always exceeds rational design and good taste. Certainly I agree that Dostoevsky’s novel are kin to sensationalist journalism and sentimental and Gothic thrillers, and I will take the Russian-speaker’s word for the novelist’s lack of style; but art is not just or even mainly a matter of literary decorum. Art is also the propulsive delirium of Dostoevsky’s worlds—and the blacklight they shine on our own politics and psychology. Nabokov’s own style is, as everyone knows, unsurpassed, but his prose can be almost immobilized in its carapace of ornament, while his commitment to parody forecloses any psychology not already anticipated in “old Dusty.” Novels, finally, are more than language, as another exilic polymath, George Steiner, wrote in his supreme study, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism:
[New Criticism’s] concentration on the single image or cluster of language, its bias against extrinsic or biographical evidence, its preference for the poetic over the prosaic forms, are out of tune with the governing qualities of Tolstoyan and Dostoevskyan fiction. Hence the need for an “old criticism” equipped with the wide-ranging civilization of an Arnold, a Saint-Beuve, and a Bradley. Hence also the need for a criticism prepared to commit itself to a study of the looser and larger modes. In his Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw observed that “there is not one of Ibsen’s characters who is not, in the old phrase, the temple of the Holy Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that mystery.”
When we seek to understand Anna Karenina, such old phrases are in order.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss, I will direct you this week to the “war” tag for my ongoing reflections on the ideological fallout of the Ukraine conflict. I am most concerned with what I am most qualified to discuss: the way this war is transforming ideological conflict in America, from notorious alt-right white supremacist Richard Spencer’s recent pledges of fealty to the European Union, Ukraine, and the Democratic Party (all this without changing his racial and cultural views) to my own Democratic Congressional representative Ilhan Omar’s controversial reservations about the bipartisan commitment to arming the rebels.
Elsewhere online: I linked this on Tumblr too, but in case you missed it I highly recommend The American Conservative’s profile of YouTube Great Books superstar Michael Sugrue:
Sugrue recently retired from Ave Maria University in Florida. He is a lifelong academic who hasn’t “really had a career.” His passion is reaching audiences beyond the classroom. Genevieve uploaded Sugrue’s entire 1992 lecture series to YouTube in 2020, 56 talks that span some 37 hours. The channel has more than two and a half million views.
Sugrue’s lectures are astonishing, not least for his ability both to account fairly for a text’s content and to prosecute his own case about its significance. A good place to start with Sugrue is his concluding lecture in the “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition” course.
There he sums up all of 20th-century thought in 45 minutes and moreover gives a startling but persuasive “left conservative” reading of poststructualist philosophy. It is, he argues, a bad-faith attempt by resentful humanistic intellectuals to take control of the state, this to aggrandize their own will-to-power, despite their mawkish alibi about aiding the marginalized and oppressed. Considering he offered this analysis in the early ’90s, long before the leftist intelligentsia’s long march through the institutions had actually succeeded in capturing the citadels of American power, he should also be credited with foresight.
Finally, I enjoyed film and book critic Emina Melonic’s essay on the longing for apocalypse in today’s crisis-ridden world, which she turns to Tarkovsky (and our old friend gnosticism) to comprehend:
The mass hysteria that we’ve experienced in the last two years is an exercise in primitive gnosticism. A primitive emotion is attached to the secular yet supernatural forces that strengthen the ideology and fear. The notion of theological reality never enters the picture when we analyze the events. However, an event is not merely linear but also ontological. There’s a misunderstanding of time and its current compression. In his book on the meaning of cinema, Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky writes, “Time is a condition for the existence of our ‘I’… Time is necessary to man, so that, made flesh, he may be able to realise himself as a personality. But I am not thinking of linear time…but the cause which makes man incarnate in a moral sense.”
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