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Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns. Today’s article, “Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S,” by Maria Tumarkin, was originally published by the SRB on April 28, 2023. What a time to be reading about Annie Ernaux’s self-obliterating affair with S from the Soviet embassy in Paris, not that...
The post Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S appeared first on Public Books.
With Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive now commencing, the backlash against Russian culture continues in the West, raising the question why one should read Russian literature. Gary Saul Morson, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University, offers a reason in his latest book, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter. For Morson, to read Russian literature is to live between wonder and certainty—to sit somewhere between an attitude of humble awe and unyielding dogmatism before the world. This oscillation between wonder and certainty not only shaped Russian intellectual, literary, and political debates for the past two centuries but also asks us in the West who we are in our own tradition—whether we are open to wonderment and surprise or smugly satisfied with our knowledge. Simply put, to read Russian literature is to know ourselves.
Russian literature is known for wrestling with universal questions about the nature of good and evil, human freedom, moral responsibility, and political utopianism. This is because it was written under extreme conditions. Since the nineteenth century, Russian writers have responded to their country’s experiences that included the liberation of over twenty million serfs, terrorism and political assassinations, revolutions and civil war, famines and Gulags, world wars and the collapse of two empires. As Morson observes, such extremity does “not invite euphemisms.” It created a literary intensity that has perhaps been unmatched since the age of Greek tragedy. The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred. The answers from Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and others were equally severe and ranged from deep awe before the world to shutting oneself up in solipsistic certainty.
The direct confrontation of evil stripped the veneer of civilization, so that Russian writers starkly asked what the human condition was and why suffering occurred.
The Intelligentsia vs. The Literary Class
According to Morson, the best analogue to Russian literature is not French, English, or American literature but the Hebrew Bible, where the “artist communes with God.” Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously. For example, Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel is as much a critique of Lenin’s Marxism as of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in War and Peace. Nothing is untouched in Russian literature, and therefore everything belongs to it. The aim of Russian literature is not just “to amuse and instruct,” but to search for something higher—to discover truth itself.
The emergence of the intelligentsia in nineteenth-century Russia marked the beginning of the “golden age” of Russian literature with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Morson contrasts these writers with the intelligentsia: university-educated people whose cultural capital in schooling, education, and progressive ideas allowed them to assume moral leadership in Russian politics and public opinion. Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Chernyshevsky, and others were members of this social class who were certain of their revolutionary ideas and committed to the radical transformation of Russian society.
These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution. While Russian thinkers and writers did not always neatly fall into one category or the other, they worked within these two paradigms. Russian society was polarized like our country today, with writers and the intelligentsia corresponding to “red” and “blue” America. This exchange of ideas was aired in public in journals, newspapers, and literature, and lasted over generations.
These two traditions in Russia—the literary and the intelligentsia—had their own canons and their own truths, with the former favoring wonder in art, beauty, and religion, and the latter valuing materialism, utility, and revolution.
Take, for instance, Turgenev’s 1862 novel, Fathers and Children, where the author satirized the protagonist Bazarov, who was a nihilist and member of the intelligentsia. In response, Chernyshevsky published the following year his own novel, What Is to Be Done?, which refuted Turgenev’s claim about the importance and value of beauty and instead remained steadfast in its philosophy of materialist utilitarianism that denied human agency. These ideas, in turn, were mocked by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864) and Demons (1872), and later rebutted by Tolstoy in his own What Is to Be Done? (1886) which argued for the existence of moral responsibility. Yet in the next century, Lenin published his 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, again echoing Chernyshevsky’s novel, and called for a vanguard party to educate and lead the proletariat to revolution.
The Three Archetypes
According to Morson, out of this exchange between writers and the intelligentsia emerged three archetypes that reflected the dominant personalities in Russian civilization. The first was the “wanderer” who was a pilgrim of ideas, often trading one theory for another, in search of the truth. Some writers experienced life-changing spiritual conversions, such as Tolstoy, as told in his Confessions, or Solzhenitsyn, as told in the Gulag Archipelago; while others accepted ideas bereft of God as the source of human salvation, such as Belinsky or Kropotkin. While both writers and intelligentsia looked to ideas for truth, the intelligentsia mistook theory for reality and thus became dedicated to a fanatical idealism. By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.
The second archetype was the idealist—the opposite of the wanderer, because he or she remained steadfast in loyalty to a single ideal, such as Don Quixote in his dedication to Dulcinea. In fact, the character Don Quixote was an object of fascination among Russian writers, especially Turgenev, as told in his essay, “Hamlet and Don Quixote.” In Russian literature there were two types of Don Quixote idealists: the disappointed and the incorrigible. Vsevolod Garshin was representative of the first—disillusioned with reality, accepting the ugliness that it was; Gleb Uspensky was emblematic of the second—unable to reconcile the horrid truths about the peasantry with his idealization of them. Uspensky remained incorrigibly committed to his ideals in spite of reality, leading him to praise despotism and justify policies of cruelty out of an abstract love of humanity.
By contrast, writers like Chekhov and Dostoevsky understood the limits of theory in accounting for reality, acknowledging that mystery and wonder were at the root of human existence, and they criticized the intelligentsia for their naïve beliefs.
The third dominant personality was the revolutionist who loved war and violence for their own sake. Bakunin, Savinkov, Lenin, Stalin, and others represented this Russian archetype. They were motivated by a metaphysical hatred of a reality that could not be explained with certainty, and, with Russian liberal acquiescence, they came to power to murder millions of Russian citizens.
All three of these archetypal personalities reveal the limitations of theoretical thinking in accounting for reality. Russian writers showed how the intelligentsia’s infallible methods of science fell short, as in the cases of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Pierre in War and Peace, and Arkady in Fathers and Children. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn explained why human freedom and moral agency existed and why suffering brought one closer to God. Human beings cannot be simply classified as good or evil; doing so, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, was the key moral error of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: “The line between good and evil runs not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”
The Mystery of Ordinary Life
Literature, particularly Russian literature, illuminates for us not only the actual but also the possible. There are no ironclad laws of human progress, nor does an inevitable future await us. In his analysis of Russian writers, Morson observes that Solzhenitsyn has shown us the Russia “that might have been” and Dostoevsky has illuminated the “cloud of possibilities” that every human confronts before choosing. As Morson states:
The poetic process suggests that no fate predetermines our future. Possibilities ramify. Constraints limit choice but allow for more than one. There will never be a moment when everything fits and stories are all complete. The future, like the past, will be a series of present moments, and each present moment is oriented towards multiple futures. Time’s potential is never exhausted.
Literature is especially suited to account for life’s endless possibilities, because its attention is on the ordinary—the family, marriage, personal happiness. Chekhov was a master at capturing the ordinary in literature, as were Tolstoy and Grossman. Characters were changed by their choices, but their choices were conditioned by their ordinary context. This is part of Morson’s theory of prosaics, that “Cloaked in their ordinariness, the truths we seek are hidden in plain view.” Meaning is not derived from some intelligentsia’s abstract ideology; it is discovered in our ordinary encounter with the world as it is.
Like Russian writers and their characters, we live in a reality that will always elude our understanding; we can respond with either wonder or certainty. Do we seek a life of contemplation and reflection that always will be incomplete, or one of convicted activism and dogmatic ideology? Does our happiness spring from being with our spouses, children, and local surroundings, or from dreams of an inevitable future of progress and enlightenment? Are we morally free creatures or merely products of a predisposed identity, whether it be race, class, or gender? This is a conversation that all civilizations have, but in Russia it was manifested in literature. All the more reason to revisit its writers and read their works.
A funny thing happened on the way to the 15th century…
Dr. James Wade, a specialist in early English literature at the University of Cambridge, was doing research at the National Library of Scotland when he noticed something extraordinary about the first of the nine miscellaneous booklets comprising the Heege Manuscript.
Most surviving medieval manuscripts are the stuff of high art. The first part of the Heege Manuscript is funny.
The usual tales of romance and heroism, allusions to ancient Rome, lofty poetry and dramatic interludes… even the dashing adventures of Robin Hood are conspicuously absent.
Instead it’s awash with the staples of contemporary stand up comedy – topical observations, humorous oversharing, roasting eminent public figures, razzing the audience, flattering the audience by busting on the denizens of nearby communities, shaggy dog tales, absurdities and non-sequiturs.
Repeated references to passing the cup conjure an open mic type scenario.
The manuscript was created by cleric Richard Heege and entered into the collection of his employers, the wealthy Sherbrooke family.
Other scholars have concentrated on the manuscript’s physical construction, mostly refraining from comment on the nature of its contents.
Dr. Wade suspects that the first booklet is the result of Heege having paid close attention to an anonymous traveling minstrel’s performance, perhaps going so far as to consult the performer’s own notes.
Heege quipped that he was the author owing to the fact that he “was at that feast and did not have a drink” – meaning he was the only one sober enough to retain the minstrel’s jokes and inventive plotlines.
Dr. Wade describes how the comic portion of the Heege Manuscript is broken down into three parts, the first of which is sure to gratify fans of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
…it’s a narrative account of a bunch of peasants who try to hunt a hare, and it all ends disastrously, where they beat each other up and the wives have to come with wheelbarrows and hold them home.
That hare turns out to be one fierce bad rabbit, so much so that the tale’s proletarian hero, the prosaically named Jack Wade, worries she could rip out his throat.
Dr. Wade learned that Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe, was aware of The Hunting of the Hare, viewing it as a sturdy spoof of high minded romance, “studiously filled with grotesque, absurd, and extravagant characters.”
The killer bunny yarn is followed by a mock sermon – If thou have a great black bowl in thy hand and it be full of good ale and thou leave anything therein, thou puttest thy soul into greater pain – and a nonsense poem about a feast where everyone gets hammered and chaos ensues.
Crowd-pleasing material in 1480.
With a few 21st-century tweaks, an enterprising young comedian might wring laughs from it yet.
(Paging Tyler Gunther, of Greedy Peasant fame…)
As to the true author of these routines, Dr. Wade speculates that he may have been a “professional traveling minstrel or a local amateur performer.” Possibly even both:
A ‘professional’ minstrel might have a day job and go gigging at night, and so be, in a sense, semi-professional, just as a ‘travelling’ minstrel may well be also ‘local’, working a beat of nearby villages and generally known in the area. On balance, the texts in this booklet suggest a minstrel of this variety: someone whose material includes several local place-names, but also whose material is made to travel, with the lack of determinacy designed to comically engage audiences regardless of specific locale.
Learn more about the Heege Manuscript in Dr. Wade’s article, Entertainments from a Medieval Minstrel’s Repertoire Book in The Review of English Studies.
Leaf through a digital facsimile of the Heege Manuscript here.
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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”
The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.
A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
The post Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City” appeared first on Public Books.
“There came a point in my life … where I realized that almost every narrative, whatever it came from, that dealt with an African country was pretty much a rewriting of ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
The post A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto appeared first on Public Books.
After dedicating many years to studying and creating stunning works at art school, you might question the next best steps after graduating. It is a predicament many students find themselves in, as they might wonder if they should dedicate their lives to becoming full-time artists or pursue a different career.
It is normal to feel overwhelmed, especially as your art degree will have been your primary goal for many years. Yet, you have plenty of options available, and many could even use your artistic skills. Read the following tips on what to do after art school.
The first step you must take is to figure out what you want to do after an art degree. If the passion is alive and well to pursue a career as a full-time artist, you must find new opportunities to showcase your talents.
For example, you could join a short- or long-term artist residency program to create stunning works of art at your own pace. However, if you don’t want to embark on a career as a full-time artist, you may need to consider other opportunities that fit your skill set.
An art degree lends itself perfectly to many creative careers. For example, you could use your drawing skills to become a professional tattoo artist. Each day you permanently craft your stunning designs onto people’s skin, which they will adore throughout the decades. You can trust you will feel a sense of satisfaction each time a customer’s jaw drops when looking at a tattoo for the first time. You will need dependable tattoo machines combined with your skills to create amazing work. Alternatively, you could use your creative skills to become a curator, art teacher, photographer, illustrator, or interior designer. The opportunities are endless.
It doesn’t matter if you want to become a full-time artist, a curator, or a tattoo artist; you must take the time to create a professional portfolio that will blow people away. Every artist, regardless of their industry, must develop a catalog of their proudest work to date, which could increase their likelihood of securing a new job, a gallery exhibition, or a residency.
Try to create a diverse portfolio to showcase your different skills, styles, and personality, which could boost your industry reputation. If you don’t have much professional experience, highlight your talent by setting yourself a project and creating design mock-ups.
Set yourself apart by building a positive online presence. Make it your mission to spread the good word about your artwork, designs, or photos to grab media attention, increase sales, or secure countless customers.
For example, you could start a website and promote your work on social media. It could encourage an art dealer to buy your work, convince a customer to request a tattoo, or lead to a happy couple hiring you to photograph their wedding day. A well-timed Instagram post or TikTok video could shape your career so use it where you can.
Image credit: Rahul Jain via Unsplash
Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, ranks among the most important writers of fiction American society has ever produced. There is ample agreement on this point.
When it comes to interpreting the meaning of his work, though, there is much less consensus.
McCarthy handled big themes in his work, and that is true in his most recent novels: The Passenger and Stella Maris. These two books form a single narrative of siblings Alicia and Bobby Western’s extraordinary lives. We find here meditations on meaning and meaninglessness, human knowledge, death, spirituality, and the nature of the material world. Truth and beauty, reason and faith, love and sex: it’s all here. Mingled with these themes is obsessively detailed description of machines and contraptions of all sorts (especially guns and cars)—another perennial McCarthy interest.
Many critics read McCarthy’s novels the way they do so many other art forms: devoid of the possibility of hope, transcendence, and a living God. But this often glosses over the genuinely conflicted character of the art. The Passenger and Stella Maris offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.
In The Passenger and Stella Maris, we find meditations on meaning and meaninglessness, human knowledge, death, spirituality, and the nature of the material world.
The Passenger’s plot involves a plane crash with a missing corpse, and one of the main characters, Bobby, is pursued by shadowy and sinister figures who seem to suggest he played a role in that body’s disappearance. But this plot serves as a frame on which McCarthy hangs his reflections on deeper questions. The mystery of the plane crash is never resolved, and readers are left wondering if this is McCarthy’s way of suggesting that the world’s meaning is elusive and ultimately nonexistent. But, as is always the case with McCarthy’s books, put too much stock in tidy conclusions and you will be disappointed.
Slate’s Laura Miller interprets these novels as many other readers will. She wonders why McCarthy would have bothered this late in life to write two more books with a view of life as “brutal and meaningless.”
These books do contain brutality, and meaninglessness haunts their pages. But they offer much more than the total bleakness that professional critics often perceive in them. To be fair, Alicia Western, whose account of reality is detailed in Stella Maris, provides evidence to support Miller’s reading. She is a solipsist who, when a young girl, read George Berkeley on the physiology of vision and concluded that the world existed only in her youthful head. Alicia often appears unrelentingly pessimistic. She has a disturbing—and incestuous—obsession with her brother.
Yet McCarthy gives Alicia much more complexity than most of the critics have noted. She fiercely struggles with the fallen aspects of her character. A first-rate violinist, she lovingly describes music as sacred. She especially admires Bach, and she knows what (or Who) motivated the great German composer’s music. When she describes having spent her inheritance on a rare Amati violin, she recalls weeping when she played it for the first time. Tears come also when she recalls her pure bliss at the sound of Bach’s Chaconne emerging from her violin. The instrument must have originated in the mind of God, she insinuates, so perfect is its construction.
Amid this discourse on music, Alicia tells Cohen, her psychologist and interlocutor through the entirety of Stella Maris, what she believes to be “the one indispensable gift”: faith.
This question of faith is powerfully demonstrated in Alicia’s account of her father’s final days. This man, a resolute materialist throughout his life, developed cancer almost certainly because of his work with radioactive material in developing the atomic bomb. He was told by physicians in the United States that there was no chance of recovery. His materialism gave him no resources for contending with his mortality, and so he embarks on a futile search to extend his life with alternative treatment in Mexico. He asks his son to accompany him, but Bobby refuses—a decision he regrets for the rest of his life.
How do McCarthy’s characters respond to mortality? Eternal life is “unlikely,” Alicia tells Cohen, yet the “probability is not zero.” In the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal formalized the rationality of religious belief in just these terms. Given the non-zero probability of God’s existence, one follows reason in betting on the infinite gain (eternal life with God) from a life of belief against the limited benefits (unrestricted pleasures during a finite existence) from a life of disbelief.
How do McCarthy’s characters respond to mortality? Eternal life is “unlikely,” Alicia tells Cohen, yet the “probability is not zero.”
McCarthy is too clever a writer to have Alicia straightforwardly take up Pascal’s wager. Instead, he puts into her mouth these words: “[I]t may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. … The spiritual nature of reality has been the principal preoccupation of mankind since forever and it’s not going away anytime soon. The notion that everything is just stuff doesn’t seem to do it for us.”
Cohen asks if that’s true for her. She responds: “That’s the rub, isn’t it?”
We don’t learn from Alicia her answer to that question, but her reflection on the incompleteness of science and mathematics and their compatibility with faith suggests much. Acceptance of some version of God is, she relates, “a lot more common among mathematicians than is generally supposed.” Kurt Gödel, the figure in math she most admires, “became something akin to a Deist. … [He] never says outright that there is a covenant to which all of mathematics subscribes but you get a clear sense that the hope is there. I know the allure. Some shimmering palimpsest of eternal abidement.”
McCarthy critiques Alicia’s coldly logical worldview (which eventually leads her to self-destruction) through a character she calls the “Thalidomide Kid.” He appears to exist only in her mind, though, inexplicably, the Kid visits Alicia’s brother Bobby after her death to reveal to him her final verdict of the world: “She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.” (The missing apostrophes are an element of McCarthy’s style.)
The Kid’s name, Thalidomide, is a drug that was briefly considered a miracle cure in the West during the mid-twentieth century. It eliminated the nausea accompanying pregnancy, one of the oldest maladies of human existence but one that actually helps ensure the health of both child and mother. Thalidomide’s safety in pregnancy was not evaluated during the drug’s testing. Scientists thereby failed to discover the catastrophic birth defects it produced in human infants. The Kid’s complicated character, which includes evident concern for Alicia’s well-being despite his caustic personality, might be explained as her emotional core, the more intuitively aware part of herself, speaking back subconsciously to her rational self, which, like Thalidomide, promised balm and delivered misery.
Alicia herself labors toward the complex understanding of the world represented by the Kid, who shows an awareness of the limits of logic and reason. She sees intelligence—defined as mastery of mathematics, the purest form of knowledge—as bestowing a certain superiority over others. Yet she also knows that it “is a basic component of evil.” The unintelligent are typically understood as harmless, while ingeniousness is often associated with the diabolical: “What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.” Throughout the books, the Manhattan Project on which their father worked is recognized by both Alicia and Bobby as the moral equivalent to eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Alicia’s perspective on religious faith doesn’t arrive in full view until the conclusion of The Passenger, when her brother Bobby makes the most profound discoveries on this topic.
After her suicide, he goes to see Alicia’s friend Jeffrey in Stella Maris, the psychiatric hospital where Alicia had admitted herself. Her friend tells Bobby that he had asked her how she could believe in the Kid but not in Jesus. “Everyone is born with the faculty to see the miraculous. You have to choose not to,” he tells Bobby. Jeffrey reveals that Alicia had noted an odd discolor in the eye of another woman in the institution and told doctors, who detected a cancer and saved her life by removing the eye. Subsequently, however, the woman grew depressed and took her own life. Bobby realizes that the death of this woman, whom Alicia had intended to save, led his sister to her own demise. The name of this suffering woman was Mary, and she and Alicia were housed in an institution bearing the Latin name “Star of the Sea.” This is an ancient title for the Mother of God, which originated in a transcription error linked to an etymology of the Hebrew name for Mary. The title designates the Virgin Mother’s protection of sailors and others who travel at sea.
Through the novel’s symbolic language, Alicia is thus connected intimately with the Madonna, who comforts her suffering child and suffers herself. Alicia’s mathematical genius cannot extinguish her emotional need to alleviate the pain of others (Mary of Stella Maris who suffered eye cancer), and after her troubled life’s voyage she seeks healing in the bosom of the Mother (Stella Maris hospital). That she takes her own life is no certain indication she is lost. There is more than enough evidence of her grappling toward a spiritual solution to suffering, enough to suggest that she hoped she might yet find solace.
At the end of The Passenger, Bobby lives in a lighthouse in Spain, looking over the sea that is protected by Stella Maris. He meets an unnamed individual. This could be the ghost of his deceased friend John Sheddan, who left a deathbed letter bidding Bobby in unabashed Christian language to “Be of good cheer.” The friend asks Bobby what he’s doing there, which leads to this exchange:
I live in a windmill. I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray.
What do you pray for?
I don’t pray for anything. I just pray.
Why does he pray? Perhaps for the good reason that his grandmother, Granellen, told him to. Granellen might be overlooked by readers, especially those determined to find no hope in these works. She represents the rootedness in the traditional world that McCarthy has described in detail elsewhere, for example, in Sheriff Bell’s wife Loretta of No Country for Old Men.
“Do you believe in God, Bobby?” Granellen asks. “I don’t know, Granellen. … The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions.” She advises him: “You have to believe that there is good in the world. I’m goin to say that you have to believe that the work of your hands will bring it into your life.”
Bobby has by the end of the two novels suffered much loss. He didn’t save his sister from her demons. He comprehends the legacy he inherited from his father, who helped bring an unprecedented destructive power into the world.
But McCarthy has given us reason to believe that this is not the whole tale. These books hint that we might do well, when we face what Alicia named as “the horror beneath the surface of the world,” to emulate the practice of our ancestors. For they trusted that there would always be protection from that horror, so long as we do not lose faith. Alicia’s commitment to compassion and Bobby’s prayerful penitence give the reader reason to suspect that McCarthy did not shut the door on God before his life ended.
Last month, a school district committee in Utah decided that the Bible should be removed from elementary and middle school libraries.
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Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Beaumarchais and <em>Electronic Enlightenment</em>
The addition to Electronic Enlightenment (EE) of nearly 500 letters from the Beaumarchais correspondence is a significant event in eighteenth-century studies. Drawn from the second volume of Gunnar and Mavis von Proschwitz’s edited collection, Beaumarchais and the “Courrier de lÉurope”, first published thirty years ago in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, these letters join with 175 letters from the first volume (previously included in EE). The total of 660 letters in this collection include a combination of letters printed in that periodical and letters from public and private collections. (In 2005, von Proschwitz published a selection of 107 of these in a French edition, entitled Lettres de Combat.)
Collectively the letters being published by EE represent the largest tranche of Beaumarchais letters available for online research; moreover, they constitute approximately one third of Beaumarchais letters published to date and over one sixth of all known Beaumarchais letters in existence.
In the context of eighteenth-century correspondences, the Beaumarchais archive stands out for several reasons. The first is the volume of the archive. The known portion of the Beaumarchais papers is over 4,500 documents, constituting one of the largest corpora of eighteenth-century papers known. The full archive, if ever fully inventoried and edited, would run somewhere between 6,000 and 20,000 documents. At the upper range it would become among the largest known archives of personal papers of the period.
The second is geographical breadth—from Vienna to Madrid to the Netherlands to England and North America, the Beaumarchais correspondence is important because it shows how actually we limit our understanding if we focus on solely “French” or “Francophone” correspondence networks.
The third is sociological breadth—Beaumarchais as an historical figure offers us insights into the eighteenth century that stand apart from the major figures whose correspondence has been edited and studied. He was an artisan, a musician, a financier, commercial entrepreneur, printer, investor, politician, judge, diplomat, spy, litigant, criminal (he was imprisoned in at least four capitals), husband, lover, brother, father and, of course, a playwright. His correspondence, and thus the network of correspondents connected him to a wider swath of eighteenth-century European and North American society than almost all personal correspondences studied to date, rivaling and perhaps exceeding the Franklin and Jefferson papers in this respect.
The editorial history of the Beaumarchais correspondence extends over two centuries of literary and political history. Since 1809, when the first edition of Beaumarchais’s Oeuvres was published, over 1,500 letters have been edited—though most of them not with the critical apparatus of the Proschwitz letters published by EE—over the course of more than two centuries.
Nearly 500 letters were printed in partial editions of Beamarchais’ work or correspondence, from 1809 to 1929. The first edition of his complete works edited by his amanuensis, Gudin de la Brenellerie (seven volumes, 1809), included 55 letters that Gudin had transcribed. A second edition, by the journalist, historian and politician Saint-Marc de Girardin in 1837 included 53 additional letters. A collection of 29 letters from the Comedie Francaise archives were published in the Revue Retrospective (1836). In his two-volume biography, Beaumarchais et son temps (1858), Louis de Loménie, referenced and included partial transcripts of hundreds of letters, but included in the appendix only 35 complete texts of previously unedited letters. A second biographer, Eugène Lentilhac, in his Beaumarchais et ses oeuvres (1887), included 12 partially transcribed letters not previously published. In 1890, Louis Bonneville de Marsagny published a biography of Beaumarchais’s third (and longest lasting) wife, Marie Thérèse Willermalauz, and claimed to have consulted “sa correspondance inédite” though no letters are reproduced or directly referenced.
In the early twentieth century, the first effort to produce a complete edition of the correspondence was made by Louis Thomas; however, as he explains in the preface to his edition entitled Lettres de Jeunesse (1923), his military service during the Great War put an end to his research; so in 1923 he published 167 letters from the first two decades of Beaumarchais’ adult life, some of which had been previously published. Several years later, in 1929, the eminent French literature scholar in the United States of the day, Gilbert Chinard, edited a collection of Lettres inédites de Beaumarchais consisting of 109 letters acquired by the Clements Library at the University of Michigan; these consisted of letters to his wife and daughter.
In more recent decades, over 1,000 additional items have been published, between the edition launched by Brian Morton in 1968, continued by Donald Spinelli, which added an additional 300 previously unpublished letters over four volumes of Correspondence, and then in 1990, the Proschwitz edition.
Proschwitz, a noted philologist, added to these letters the most extensive critical apparatus associated with any edition of Beaumarchais letters. He did not seek to produce a critical edition or a material bibliography of these letters, approaches that are difficult to apply to eighteenth-century correspondence in general and to the Beaumarchais archive in particular. Rather, Proschwitz in his notes emphasized the significance of these documents for our understanding of Beaumarcahis’ life and of the eighteenth century. In these letters, we see Beaumarchais not only as a playwright seeking to circumvent censorship to have Marriage de Figaro finally staged, but also as an entrepreneur, a printer, an urban property owner, an emissary, and a transatlantic merchant. Through this window we have a window on the eighteenth century that is geographically, socially, and culturally much broader and more diverse than what we generally encounter through the correspondences previously published in EE.
With the appearance of these letters and the launching of the first new projects on Beaumarchais’s correspondence in 50 years, including the effort spearheaded by Linda Gil to produce a definitive inventory with a material bibliography, and my own work to analyze the network of correspondents from the known correspondence, this publication in EE offers eighteenth-century scholars new reason to consider a longstanding, but still little understood, figure of the age.
A version of this blog post was first published on Electronic Enlightenment.
Featured image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash (public domain)
“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.
Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.
It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:
“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”
“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”
(Memorabilia 3.6.9)
Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.
Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.
“Responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust.”
One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.
Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.
Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)
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