Category: General

Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative – Jane Alison

In our stories, we usually have “the dramatic arc”, where “a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative asks how far a certain fixation with that idea might be holding us back by proposing, in an accessible way, some other forms that our fiction might take. In this, she serves us all by reminding us that the novel takes its name from the same root as novelty, and that if novels ever seem tired and staid, there always remain ways of recovering that same sense of newness / excitement.

Alison begins by noting that when we talk about narrative, it’s typically in visual terms. Northrop Frye is quoted as saying that “we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means”. Narratives are generally experienced as images -or perhaps that’s how we explain them. Either way, Alison continues by suggesting that if readers experience narratives in this way, a writer could consciously choose to “design” a narrative with a particular shape in mind other than the typical arc. So far, so reasonable.

But why would the writer bother? Alison’s argument, built up through a liberal use of examples from longer and shorter fictions, is that we need different forms for different stories or ideas, or at least for different focuses. In a narrative about grief, must we always tell the story of overcoming, with its arching trajectory of shock and mourning to recovery? Or may we not, instead, focus on how grief works by showing how it ripples through the lives of those affected like a shockwave? In such a narrative there may be overcoming, but the focus is instead on variety and the writer as a kind of clinician, identifying human frailties and strengths.

From a basic toolkit of sentence and paragraph length and structure, the use of colour and any differences between story time and textual time, and other texturing such as repeated images, phrases, and scenes, Alison describes a wide variety of narrative patterns. There are “waves”, which are when the narrative is governed by the principle of symmetry, with scenes at the end mirroring those at the beginning. There are “wavelets”, which take this kind of mirroring and repeat it on a paragraph level. “Meanders” make use of digressions to force us to look around and refocus our attention on the scenery, while “spirals” advance chronologically while always looking back.

“Radials or explosions” are of the type I described above concerning grief – situations where everything looks into the centre, or where everything in the story is trying to pull away from some central point but cannot.  With “Networks and Cells”, “Instead of following a line of story, your brain draws the lines, makes connections.” This is Sebald, where you do the work of identifying meaning. Finally, there are “fractals”, where the meaning is the narrator’s searching for meaning rather than the plot itself, and “tsunamis”, where Alison could only find one example, which in any case seems something of a hybrid approach.

The examples are all contemporary, with writers I knew – such as Sebald and Carver – joined by others I was less familiar with, such Lin Tao and Susan Minot. Arguably, many of the storytelling structures are older than this – we have been disobeying Aristotle pretty much since he first put stylus to wax (or whatever he used). But to criticise the book on this point is to miss the idea that these forms are practically essential for telling certain stories that are increasingly important to us modern readers. Sebald writes differently, sure, but we also needed the horrors of the 20th century to really get to a point where we needed Sebald and his style – and felt the need to write about memory at all as a kind of moral duty.

Then there is David Foster Wallace’s digressive style and his ambition in his unfinished The Pale King to write a novel about boredom and working in tax that somehow was uplifting rather than miserable. Within Meander, Spiral, Explode we also have Susan Minot’s Lust, which uses a fragmentary style and shifting narrative voice to draw readers into the breakdown of self as a young woman’s sexual encounters get the better of her. Yes, Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else has a similar plot, but Minot’s work has a different focus and a different form to make that focus possible.

As an argument about the importance of finding the right form, and as a guide to some of the forms available, Meander, Spiral, Explode is fun and helpful. It would be hard for a writer to read it and not feel at least a little inspiration on how to write next. But there is one point where the book is arguably a little weaker. (I will discount the cataloguing aspect – for example, why “tsunami” has only one example, why “waves” seem fairly unrecognisable to someone who has spent much time at the sea, and so on – all this is unimportant).

The main criticism is one we might detect ourselves from the examples used. With one or two exceptions, we are primarily looking at shorter fiction – short stories, novellas, and short novels. The problem with all the patterns Alison proposes is that they struggle with being sustained into a longer work. There is only so far that we can sit with Sebald before we get tired, given that his shorter fictions in Campo Santo are just as effective as those in The Rings of Saturn, with only a slight adjustment for the power that accumulation brings in the latter. We might circle around the killing at the centre of Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold for a hundred or so pages, but not for much longer without any forward movement. To look at other examples not given in the text, the guilt narratives of Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Bernhard’s The Loser are all short too, barely scraping two hundred pages in some editions.

It’s no surprise then, that the narratives that are longest in Meander, Spiral, Explode are also the ones where the arc is still central. We can talk about the mirroring of scenes at the beginning and end of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, for example, but this is only a feature of a narrative that otherwise is a typical story of a relationship, from its beginning to its collapse. Cloud Atlas, the novel at the centre of the “tsunami” chapter, is huge – but it’s also six narratives in one.

This is not to suggest that patterns are bad, but rather that many struggle with an extension into longer works. We get bored, run out of energy, or even – most dangerously – have our moment of illumination too soon and put the book down, having understood what the author had in mind and lacking any comparably powerful plot to carry us on. Even if the pattern is delivering a moral message – and Alison is to be commended for showing through her examples that experimentation does not have to come at the expense of a sense of right and wrong – a pattern whose shape is determined too soon can lead to reader’s attention sagging. At least with a plot, the author is in charge, letting us know when we are in the beginning, middle, or end. If we want the whole thing, we have to follow them all the way.

I have been considering some of the problems in Meander, Spiral, Explode from a completely different angle this year, within the context of my re-reading of War and Peace. One of the great mysteries of that work is how it manages to keep the reader reading when it is so long. I am now reading, on and off, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, and will then read his Life and Fate, which together are probably at least as long as War and Peace and in the case of the latter, apparently nearly as good. With Stalingrad, however, I am struggling and was trying to understand why.

One reason is that Tolstoy does something that Grossman, at present, does not – he structures his book as a series of novellas with linked characters. We might describe one part of War and Peace as Natasha and Andrey’s romance, and another as Pierre’s experience of wartime Moscow. Other things happen in the parts, but each has a distinctive identity. Stalingrad is, after four hundred pages, just an accumulation – of people, primarily, and a little bit of plot. That makes it both harder to follow and less engaging. People might have a backstory, but they do not have much of a story in the present that drives the text forward. Instead, the only thing that does that is the historical context.

Because each section of Tolstoy’s epic is a kind of novella in itself, with an arc-like structure, the work remains engaging, providing a little bit of that same satisfaction that a shorter, complete novel would. We can say that War and Peace reaches the limit of the arc and has to adjust by breaking it into little arcs, just as some of the narratives in Meander, Spiral, Explode reach the length limit of their own patterns. The really interesting question for authors is how you can expand the patterns of Alison’s book to incorporate them into longer works, for I am sure that the selection here is only just the beginning of what kind of structures and forms we can write into our stories.

So, overall, I found Alison’s book an exciting and pleasant read, even with the length caveat. It certainly made me want to go away and think about my and others’ structuring decisions with a more architectural eye. And it also gave me a raft of new authors I might want to read. Really, in a book like this, that’s what success is all about.

Glaciers, Climate and Humility

In The Age of Wonder Richard Holmes describes the delight at the discovery of nature’s secrets that animated both artists and scientists around the time of the Romantics. Wonder, that sense of awe in the face of the mysterious and great, drove men and women to explore the world on ship and saddle and plumb its depths and farthest reaches. Few things were more exciting than glaciers, those vast marble-white creatures that sit at the tops of the world and lour down at us mortals beneath.

It was the investigation of glaciers that led to the discovery of the climate and its changes which are of vital importance to the present day. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not until the late 20th century that fears began to focus on global warming rather than global cooling. Initially, it was these masses of ice who were our enemy, unpredictable beasts whose movement downwards was felt to be unstoppable and perfectly destructive. The cooling of the planet would decimate crop yields and lead to mass starvation and social unrest, and as late as the 1970s the CIA was preparing for such a potentiality.

We know now, of course, that the present problem we face lies not in cooling, but in heating. After first briefly looking at the history of our understanding of the climate, I briefly consider the relationship between the technological mastery of the earth and human nature.

It was a Genevan scientist, Horace Bénédict de Saussure, who set off the beginnings of our understanding of the climate towards the end of the 18th century. A committed Alpinist, in his Voyages dans les Alpes he first used the word geology but was puzzled by the question of why we did not freeze to death during the night. This seems slightly silly at first glance, but if you shuffle off your knowledge of modern science you can see it for the challenge it once was. When the source of most of our heat is clearly the sun, why does that heat not disappear the moment the sun sets in the evening? Saussure built a kind of mini greenhouse in the 1770s and thus discovered that the atmosphere itself is capable of holding heat long after its sources have been removed.

One problem was resolved, but others remained. In the 19th-century, people were interested in whether there had been an Ice Age at all – not just the posthumously christened “Little Ice Age” of the 16th to 19th centuries – but an actual period of frozen wastes and mass starvation. This was proven by Louis Agassiz, another Swiss scientist with a passion for glaciers. In 1837, he suggested that there had indeed been an ice age, and the evidence was all around us – valleys, gorges, mountains, and so many boulders and stones thrown far from their homes. Agassiz evocatively termed glaciers “God’s great plough” for their work. For proposing that global temperatures had indeed been much lower, and for an extended period of time, Agassiz can be thought of as the founder of the idea of climate and its changes.

Finally, John Tyndall, a British scientist with a passion for the Alps, began investigating glaciers and their movements. Building upon the work of the others above, he realised that some gases, in particular carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) and water vapour, contributed to the greenhouse effect that Saussure had discovered. This was not enough to cause concern about a changing climate. It was only when the Swedish professor Svante Arrhenius began modelling the effects of changing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, reaching conclusions that are not too far from our modern models, that cause and effect were truly linked. Arrhenius himself was not worried. Writing at the end of the 19th century, he believed carbon dioxide concentrations were rising very slowly, and that it would take over three thousand years for figures to double. That was far enough down the road, and in any case, he held the view, not uncommon until relatively recently, that warming could only be a good thing – making the world more hospitable and increasing the yields of crops.

Of course, at the end of the 19th-century things were indeed so. This did not last. As the 20th century got underway the world only produced more and more carbon emissions from new inventions such as cars, the widespread electrification (on a coal power basis) of developed countries, and from a growing population that wanted to consume more and more. How exactly the world would change was still a subject of contention, rather than the consensus it is now, but there was no denying that the atmosphere was indeed changing. An American scientist, Charles David Keeling, created the famous Keeling Curve using data gathered at the Mauna Loa meteorological observatory in Hawaii (and then elsewhere too). This showed in unambiguous terms that the amount of carbon dioxide within the atmosphere was growing, and growing fast.

The Keeling Curve, courtesy of the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. The shocking thing, and the one that really gives those sceptics who claim that the climate has always changed (and it has, that is true) and that humans have nothing to do with it no legs to stand on, is when we consider the curve over a longer period, as below.
The uptick is quite extraordinary, going far beyond the natural cycles beforehand. And it shows no signs of stopping.

It is amusing to think that we once thought that the ice was our problem, but not without its symbolic interest. Imagine a man or woman, standing before a glacier. The difference in scale is extraordinary. Unlike mountains, which are relatively stationary and thus pose no threat except to climbers, and bodies of water, which can be fished and dammed and bridged, glaciers are a force of nature that seems completely unmasterable. (These scientists were mostly writing before Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite in 1867). If a glacier came, or if the temperature dropped, death would seem inevitable. Crops would fail, and cities would be swept away. And that would be it.

The damage from cooling is easy to visualise – just last year the world was rocked by images of French farmers, huddled around grape vines with torches, an almost medieval scene, as they tried to prevent a cold snap from destroying their harvest. But such images also reveal the problem with this great fear of cooling – it is so clearly remediable by heating. Houses could be insulated even in the 19th century, trees could be chopped for firewood, coal could be burned, and warmer clothes could be worn. If one were really being chased by glaciers, then of course a couple of (hundred thousand) sticks of dynamite could be used to break up the beasts and let what sun remained work upon them more effectively.

This fear of cooling reflects, we can say, the legacy of a pre-Enlightenment view of humanity, one where we were small and vulnerable to the world and God’s whimsy. The Enlightenment was not just a time of new knowledge, it was also a time of new mastery and power over nature, individuals, and whole societies. Glaciers appeared as something that, in spite of our advances, remained frightening and uncontrollable – an uncanny reminder that we were not as great as we thought we were. A kind of living white injunction to be humbler. But then we kept advancing, and soon we no longer feared even them. Human arrogance had won out. The kind of arrogance that was the darkest legacy of the Enlightenment because it allowed us to commit the terrible social experiments of the 20th century (Stalinism, fascism, and so on), convinced us that we not only had the might but also the right, to change the world.

In the case of the climate, we really could have benefited from learning our lesson in humility the first time around. The world is warming rapidly, the human and other animal toll is likely to be massive and, worst of all, entirely avoidable. But unlike with battling glaciers, where one is not a Don Quixote, tilting at windmills, but actually capable of fighting back effectively, we cannot so easily deal with heating. Fire brings warmth, but what takes it away? Even if you have the answer, it comes to mind far less readily than fire does to the question of creating warmth. We can take our clothes off, but public decency demands we exercise this ability within certain limits, and in any case, there are only so many clothes we can take off before we need to look at other options.

Fridges and air conditioners are not the solutions they may seem to be. Both of them actually worsen the problem because of their own chemical and electricity demands, which leads to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But even beyond that technical point, both fridges and air conditioners cool a small area, and an enclosed one. Hold the fridge door open and open all your windows and the cooling effects are so much reduced as to be essentially imperceptible. A fire might work the same way, but it heats much more effectively than these objects cool. And in terms of fuels, a fire can eat anything, whereas these things require electricity, which is comparatively complex to produce.  

Pretty much everything in the world is about heating. We heat oil to distillate it into its component parts, which we then heat to make our internal combustion engines work, build new chemicals, or power our power plants. We heat our food before we eat it, we heat our homes, and the production of the dyes we use in everything around us is dependent on heat too. Plastic is basically the result of heating certain chemical compounds to certain temperatures. The same is true of metals. How do you go from iron to steel? The answer, with some intervening steps, is heat.

Even when heating is not the primary factor, heat is the waste product. A gas-fired power plant heats water to produce steam, which puts a turbine into motion, generating electricity. What is left over is that heat. The smashing of mined ore that is part of its processing also produces heat. Within the home, our devices heat up when we use them too much. I am currently balancing my computer on a book so that it does not heat my lap. And speaking of my lap, the human body provides us with another example of heat’s omniprevalence. We heat up as we think, exercise, in a word live, and then lose that heat through things like sweating.

A glacier is an easy example of a cooling climate, the bad guy to be fought. When the climate warms, there is no such enemy coming. Instead, things just die. Deserts grow, plants don’t, natural disasters like hurricanes increase in frequency, and bad weather events like snowstorms and heat waves do too, but in all of these cases we are dealing with something essentially diffuse and impersonal. The problem cannot be dynamited away. And because it is a global problem, it is not as if we could just throw down a fridge and be done with it. Being a global problem, it is harder to accept it as our particular problem. A growing glacier is a specific issue for a specific place, while a shrinking glacier is a general loss, but because of its generality, we end up being only able to care so much about it.

This psychological issue is perhaps the main reason why so few people do any of the things that we can do to reduce global warming. (The complicating issue, one beyond the scope of this piece, is about whether individuals or corporations should be more responsible for emissions). Fire and heat are both easier to arrange than things to cool, they also have a more obvious effect with their burning. Likewise, the delayed effect of climate change, where today we are seeing the consequences of emissions released into the atmosphere quite literally before I was born, means that there’s an element of resignation in dealing with global warming which means that some people may simply not bother doing what they can.

I noted that at the time when people feared the return of the glaciers, they had every reason to do so, being comparatively less able to fight them off. Technological change prevailed, and the Enlightenment dream of power over all things was allowed to continue. Humans need to learn humility, but I doubt climate change is going to teach them it. Some of the most promising developments in fighting against carbon dioxide overproduction are likely to have the effect of letting us “off the hook” for our failure to reduce our consumption earlier. I have in mind technologies such as those for direct air capture, essentially giant reverse air conditioning units that suck carbon out of the air at immense cost and electricity demand, or perhaps nuclear fusion, which was in the news earlier this month.  

Of course, the alternative to being let off the hook – and I should be clear that these technologies are unlikely to save us, only compensate somewhat for our utter inability to do anything about reducing our demand for fossil fuels – is to watch our world disintegrate in fire and brimstone, metaphorically speaking and literally too in some places. A loss of diversity, a loss of nature, a loss of human life in the developing world, in particular, all of this is a catastrophe, even if it’s not “the end of the world”, only the end of “our world.” None of us wishes to see that either.

What then will change us? What then will bring humility? What then will lead a majority of us to take actions to build a better world, rather than continue statically upon the destructive paths that others have laid for us? I wish I knew. The world is a wondrous place, but wonder has not done enough, nor even has fear. Time will tell, I hope, what thing truly is needful. The alternative is not encouraging to think about.

This post was inspired by Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, and the information on the scientists comes primarily from it.

Exile and Emigration – An East Slavic Destiny

I write this piece in the United Kingdom. I left Moscow myself, somewhat unwillingly, on the 5th of March. I was the last Englishman I know to remain in the city – all of my friends had left a long time before me. I went from Vnukovo Airport to Istanbul, where I spent a few days in limbo, before heading back to London and thence to my home. There was a certain historical irony in being in that Turkish city, where a hundred years ago so many exiles from the carcass of the Russian Empire were languishing in fear and uncertainty, alongside a new generation of equally scared and confused travellers, strangers in their country and perhaps now strangers in any country on the face of the earth.

The hotel was full of voices speaking Russian. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians – for everyone Istanbul was neutral territory. On the second day I met with a friend of a friend who had arrived in the city at the same time as me. We were both writers, and as we walked beneath the vast spaces of the Hagia Sophia he told me a story that is not uncommon for people from Russia, of time spent in custody, of threats and difficulties. He had been involved in organising opposition activities in Saint Petersburg, but current events had forced him and his girlfriend to seek safer pastures. I had dinner with them and with another young couple that evening.

For none of us Istanbul was a final destination. The friend of a friend was heading on to Tbilisi, where a lively Russian community has sprung up; the other couple were on their way to Israel; and I was on my way back to London. The atmosphere was tense – none of us knew whether our credit cards would work, as Visa and Mastercard had just announced restrictions on cards issued in Russia. At the same time, there was that peculiar melting of boundaries that always marks a crisis. Everyone seemed closer, friendlier. A young family stopped us as we were eating our kebabs on the street to ask whether the cards were blocked already, and whether Western Union was still working. A certain solidarity, a feeling that we were all in this together. There are worse feelings to have.

The Russians and their East Slavic brothers and sisters are a people who seem perpetually on the move. In this they have much in common with their neighbours, the once nomadic Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz. But unlike those great horsemen of the Central Asian steppe, the Russian people’s movement has always been at least partly political in nature, and rarely without an element of force. Exile and emigration, internally and externally, are concepts without which the Russian people can be difficult to understand, and the present turmoil and flight of a reasonable chunk of the country’s educated population prove that these concepts will continue to be useful for thinking about the people and its destiny for some time yet.

Exile, both the punishment inflicted by the tsars, and the punishment inflicted by sensitive souls upon themselves, are topics that effortlessly break through the bounds we may attempt to dam them into and could easily make for an entire book if we aren’t careful. I aim to be. The myriad forms that emigration took and the fruits that it grew and sometimes saw rot deserve more than only the brief look that I’ll be able to give them here. But I hope this piece will give a sense of the world of historical Russian exile and the meanings it contains while also showing how my experience transiting through a world of luggage and blocked credit cards connects to it.

Russia expanded to cover the space it does through conquest and colonisation. The Russian settlers who manifested a destiny analogous to that of their American counterparts differed from them in their failure to truly settle the land. In his fascinating book, Internal Colonization, Alexander Etkind notes the way that the speed of Russia’s eastern expansion meant that it failed to leave new territories populated. Fur and fish kept people moving, largely because wherever these resources were found the Russian settlers found a way of exploiting them until they were almost exterminated. Then, either they continued moving eastwards, or their lives degraded into a desperate attempt at subsistence farming.

Alongside the hunters, Russia’s clergy also supported the easterly movement of people. Monks fled the towns as far as they could, monasteries were established by the monks or around them, and towns grew up around the monasteries, forcing the cycle to repeat. In addition, as with America, religious dissent – in this case Russia’s schismatics, the Old Believers – also motivated people to seek out safer shores, far from hostile government structures.

Rounding out the trinity there were the criminals. Exile was a means of the sovereign to demonstrate his or her power. Many of us know the story of Dostoevsky’s “execution”: before he wrote his major novels, the Russian was involved in a radical organisation, the Petrashevsky Circle, and was caught and sentenced to death. Just at the moment when the soldiers raised their rifles to end his life, however, a horseman arrived to declare that the conspirators were pardoned and instead destined for exile. In a way, exile was more humiliating than execution, because it demonstrated that the Tsar had power over life as well as death – he could take life and also refuse to see it taken, so to speak. 

Around three hundred thousand Russians were in exile towards the end of the nineteenth century, in a “system” that barely deserves the name. Of those three hundred thousand, about a third were apparently on the run at any given time. There was no money or men to keep them where they were supposed to be, meaning that Siberia was a hive of banditry. There was little economic development – the exiles were supposed to help with this, but instead they brought criminality with them. Unsurprisingly, punishing people turned out to be an ineffective way of persuading them to create healthy communities. What work there was, tended to be temporary – things like building railway lines – meaning that the life of an exile was generally miserable and poverty-stricken.

The image that we typically have of exiles in Siberia does not much conform to this image, aside from the poverty. Our main reference points are the political prisoners, such as Dostoevsky himself – educated, interesting men and women who were exiled for their beliefs. They are easy enough to romanticise, after all. Many Poles were exiled after the failed uprisings against Russia of 1830 and 1863, but the chief example has to be the Decembrist generation. The Decembrists launched a failed military uprising against the Tsar in 1825, with the goal of making Russia more liberal. Although he was begged by many to show clemency, the Tsar had several of the conspirators – almost all wealthy aristocrat officers – hanged. The others, however, were sent to Siberia.

They were followed by their wives, creating an enduring image of womanly self-sacrifice of the sort that Russian literature in the 19th century simply adored. At the same time, their principled stand for the kind of Russia that many young aristocrats wanted to see meant that the Decembrists were a heroic example for many generations to come. Tolstoy envisioned War and Peace as but a prelude to a novel on the Decembrists themselves, but he never managed to write that second novel, though he assembled a mass of notes and even met with Prince Sergei Trubetskoy when he was released from exile in 1856. Meanwhile Pushkin, thankfully, escaped punishment but knew many of the conspirators well and wrote about them too. In reality, though, at most the political prisoners made up only a small fraction of the total exiles – about ten percent at most.

Later, the radicals of the mid and late 19th century in Russia were really the first generation to voluntarily seek exile beyond Russia’s bounds. Men like Alexander Herzen, about whom I’ve written, chose such a life. Others, such as Bakunin, who ended up in Europe after fleeing via Japan and America from Siberia, had less choice in the matter. In exile, these men attempted to continue their revolutionary activities as best they could, but with limited success. Herzen died, after his publication The Bell had long since lost its readership, seemingly rejected by his homeland. As for Bakunin, he just bickered with the socialists. It was not until the tumultuous days of 1917 that a Russian revolutionary exile abroad could consider coming back to finish his or her work, as Lenin did.

In the 20th century, as the Russian Empire collapsed and was reborn as the Soviet Union, those leaving the country became increasingly diverse – no longer were they revolutionaries, but ordinary (well – aristocratic, educated, and rich) people who felt fundamentally alienated by the changes their country was undergoing. Many left as the Revolutions were ongoing, as much as three million men and women in total; others were informed by the new state that they were not welcome anymore. In late 1922 the Soviets exiled hundreds of intellectuals aboard what later became known as the “philosophers’ ships”, such as the German steamship Oberbürgermeister Hakken, which brought them from Petrograd (Petersburg) to Stettin. They were exiled not because of counterrevolutionary activities, but merely because they had the potential to become enemies of the revolution later on.

At first, they congregated in Berlin – as many as 250’000 of them were there by 1922 – producing a lively Russian cultural scene with daily newspapers and much more, all being produced in that language. Later the emigrants moved westwards, to Paris and beyond. Major writers of that period include Nabokov, Khodasevich, and Bunin (who won the Nobel prize, the first Russian to do so, in 1933). Nabokov moved to America, Bunin stayed in France, and Khodasevich died early enough not to have to worry about where to go next, though his young wife, Nina Berberova, ended her days in America in 1993, having outlived the beast they had sought to escape.

Many writers and artists found they could not bear to be outside of their homeland, and returned there, such as Andrey Bely, or Marina Tsvetaeva. Sometimes this return proved too much. Tsvetaeva died by her own hand after being suspected of spying. Not that artists found staying in the Soviet Union to be a better approach – after all, Esenin and Mayakovsky killed themselves, Mandelshtam and Babel were shot, and Akhmatova all but had to give up writing poetry during the darkest days of the Terror. We are grateful that she and her friends had great memories, else we should never have received such brilliant if heartrending works as her Requiem. 

Among later waves of emigrants, the most striking is that of the Jews, who were finally allowed to leave for Israel in 1971. Later on, Israel became a mere staging post on the way to New York for them. When I travelled to the United States last year, spending an unhealthy amount of time among Russians (by which I mean here Jews and Belarusians and Ukrainians as well as Russians, as a matter of convenience), the vast majority of them were the children of that generation of emigrants or those that came slightly later, in the period of relative freedom after the collapse of the Soviet Union when Western states believed, perhaps naively, that these people and their newly-formed states were above suspicion. Now emigration is much harder, and for the time being people must make do with Israel and Turkey, with Georgia and Armenia, with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

In Medieval Europe, the writer Eva Hoffman notes, exile was among the worst punishments a human being could suffer. To be cast out of your town was to have those bonds of work and family and society which together conferred your identity upon you torn away, leaving you completely naked. To be an exile was to lose yourself. Russian exiles today are faced with a similar predicament, a certain misunderstanding by everyone they encounter. Whereas in the days of Dante nobody outside your town knew who you were, nowadays everyone thinks they know who a Russian is (either brainwashed or bloodthirsty, and guilty to boot), and has little time to listen if you tell them that is not the case.  

To be a Russian abroad now is not the same thing as it is to be among thousands or millions of refugees. The aitishnikis, or highly-skilled IT workers Moscow has spent years cultivating, number at most a few hundred thousand. The nervous little oppositionists, the fleeing journalists, are all in possession of a certain amount of money and status, and most are from the two capitals, Petersburg, and Moscow. There are too few people abroad now for someone to successfully disappear, and anyone who seems friendly may well be an agent, sent to gather information. The sense that we are all in this together is only a single strange question away from being a sense that we are all out only for ourselves.

In the 1920s, the exiles and émigrés expected to go back. The 1922 Rapallo Treaty, which formally established diplomatic ties between the Soviet Union and the European states, came as a terrible blow to a generation who had been, as the saying goes, living on their suitcases. Suddenly things seemed a lot more permanent. Suddenly it became necessary to build a life, rather than live within the ruins that one had brought with them of the old one. Whether or not the present situation will last much longer than this blog post, I cannot say. But few of the people I met expected to spend more than a few weeks abroad. I fear that they may be disappointed. 

Khodasevich memorably wrote that he carried “eight little tomes, no more / and in them lies my homeland now”, but we can only get by on Pushkin for so long. Cut off from the rest of Russia, in the 1920s and 30s exile literature had to adapt to survive. In the case of Nabokov, by far the most famous exile, the Russian tradition he embodied had to shift from Russian to French, and finally to the English language. Later, less well-known exiles contributed in their own way to this strange parallel tradition. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, all the energy and dynamism returned back to the homeland, as a new generation of writers grew up – the Pelevins and Sorokins of this new world.

We tend to romanticise exile. To see it through the lens of literature is as faulty as trying to see something through a veil. We are distracted by the beauty of shivering contours, failing to see what they conceal – loneliness, rootlessness, despair. I remember the way that Joyce’s asking the wealthy Lady Gregory for money affected me when I was a bit younger: “though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.” Or else Stephen Dedalus’s words in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.”

These are fighting words, the kind of words that buoy one up. We learn of the success of exile – Joyce, Henry James, Nabokov, my dear Conrad – but not the failures. The failures never reach the page; they end their days in untended graves. For many, exile is at least partly choice. We call these people émigrés, conferring a certain grandeur to their struggle. There’s a certain respectability to it. In Odessa, then enjoying a brief spot outside the borders controlled by Moscow, Bunin set up a little salon, complete with artists and writers and readings and all the proper little arguments that help create a world. The émigré, the exile, becomes a symbol for the culture they’ve left behind and its willing receptacle. It seems all right with them.

The truth is more complex, even for the writers. Eva Hoffman quotes Joyce Carol Oates: “for most novelists, the art of writing might be defined as the use to which we put our homesickness”. Far from our home, we have to decide what to make of it. We cannot remove it from ourselves. Hoffman uses the wonderful phrase, which to me is positively redolent of the world she left behind in Poland, that “loss is a magical preservative.” (I am imagining crooked old women dressed in shawls packing their memories into little jars, which they place alongside the preserved tomatoes and pickled cucumbers in their larders).

Sadness is hard to avoid. Andre Aciman writes that “an exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss”. We crave the stability that only our memory of a lost and irretrievable home can provide. Sometimes it is too much. In Sebald’s The Emigrants, all four of the emigrants his narrator encounters end up dead – and two of them to suicide. Even if we don’t choose to end our lives, still we can get lost in our past lives. A writer can make their entire identity the loss of a past identity. And indeed, one need not be a writer at all. Suddenly I remember Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment, drunk in a tavern and telling his story to Raskolnikov. He is an exile from the civilized world, and he tries to find his meaning in describing and relating that very exile from its beginning to its inauspicious end.

If not sadness, there is another refuge in cynicism and aloofness. Edward Said writes that “to live as if everything around you were temporary and perhaps trivial is to fall prey to petulant cynicism as well as to querulous lovelessness.” Hoffman, meanwhile, notes that we can get enamoured by our own unrootedness, our own otherness. Instead of getting lost in a lost world, we get lost avoiding getting involved in the world before us. And whatever the hard exterior we may create, in cynicism there always lies a certain failure to connect, that certain terrible loneliness yet again. Hoffman says ultimately true bravery, even as an exile, consists of trying to put down roots, however foreign the soil, and reconnecting with the world as best we can.

There is a tension between stories of exile that centres upon nationalism. Charles Simic, born in Belgrade, asks what the forces are that drive people away: “fifty years ago it was fascism and communism, now it’s nationalism and religious fundamentalism”. Our current crisis is driven by an idea of Russian nationalism that bursts the borders of the Russian Federation and floods all the lands once within its former influence, to all the people speaking a language it considers its sole property. Without that nationalism, there would be no conflict, and the Russians of Istanbul and Tbilisi would perhaps still be at home, grumbling at the authorities, occasionally getting arrested, but living in the country of their birth.

Against this idea of nationalism as a problem, Edward Said meanwhile, writes that it is the very thing that saves us from exile’s uprootedness. “Nationalism is an assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. It affirms the home created by a community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile, fights to prevent its ravages”. I imagine that Said means here that rather milder nationalism we prefer to call patriotism. And indeed, today we are witnessing in Russia’s near abroad proof that men and steel are nothing without hearts inside them, and that a phony aggrandising nationalism counts for very little against that spirit that comes when people are defending their malaya rodina, a phrase that means one’s home in the smallest sense – a plot of land, a village, a little life.

And yet, for all the heroism we day by day witness in Ukraine, there can be no doubt that there would be no conflict at all, no special military operation, were there no nationalism. Nationalism began the conflict, and it shall end it. I think back to the country whose collapse in 1991 Simic refers to in that quote. Once the Soviets built a system for transferring people in bulk, a refugee machine; now, their absence has left a vacuum for another great destructive force. It is wrong to say that there were no ethnic tensions in the later periods of the Soviet Union, but certainly things were better then than now. Assimilation, the creation of a new people – the Soviet people – was perhaps the greatest experiment of a century of experiments, and its most noble failure.

If nationalism binds us safely to our lost homeland during our exile, then it stands uneasily opposed to cosmopolitanism, which is perhaps the willing renunciation of any home at all. At that word I think of wealthy men and women jetting about Europe and further afield, wintering here, summering there, working in some nameless profession, sending their children away to boarding school, and never letting themselves settle long enough in a place to have to worry about buying a potato masher. Which anyway would be a job for one of the staff to sort out. Of course, the picture I have described is not really cosmopolitanism, or at least not all that that word means. There are also academics, meeting at conferences, there is the colourful linguistic hodgepodge of a bunch of Europeans abroad, more varied in shade and hue than a bird of paradise. As with nationalism itself, cosmopolitanism has two meanings.

The first, connected to exile again, is this sense of rootlessness. Simone Weil wrote wisely that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul”, but that does not mean that everyone is aware of it. Those wealthy people, who I am in some sense an example of, are missing something. Their souls are withered and shrunken. If we allow ourselves no connection to a people or place, and I must discount the connection that can form to a favourite ski resort or Greek island as a tad inauthentic, then that has a definite negative effect upon our morality. We cannot develop the ability to care for others when we prevent ourselves from putting down the roots that would let us connect to them. The only connections we would be able to form are those to other people in the same position as ourselves, with the result that what little moral thought we would be capable of would be directed solely at looking out for people like us. Taken this way, cosmopolitanism leaves us stunted and distances us from others. It leads to the same emptiness as exile does with its cynicism.

There is another side to cosmopolitanism, however. The ability and willingness to put down roots everywhere allows every place to be a home. Seeing everyone as a member of a great community expands our moral horizons, rather than shrinking them. It fights off that loneliness and cynicism which otherwise would consume us. And it need not destroy the culture that we bring with us – not at all. We may have our own opinion about the successes and failures of multiculturalism, but there is no denying the theoretical potential of this kind of cosmopolitanism to keep an exile alive, spiritually speaking.

Many of the older Russians I met in America still spoke little to no English, even though they had made millions and millions of dollars. None of the Russians I met, fleeing their country now, seemed intent on learning Georgian or Hebrew or Turkish. In the latter case we might forgive them by remembering that they are not sure whether theirs is an exile or not. At the border, of course, many of them declare that they are simply going on an extended holiday. None of us guessed back at the end of February that things might drag on. But the problem with a community of one’s compatriots abroad is that they can distract us easily from the much bigger and much richer community that they are parallel to in that new country.

Putting down roots is the thing. Wherever we are, we have to find those things that will keep us tethered to the world. Culture is one tool alongside friends, family, work, religion, and so many others for achieving that. But I do think that culture is perhaps among the worst tools. A sense of one’s cultural superiority, which many Russians (perhaps rightly) feel, is the kind of thing that prevents them from having any interest in the culture of the soil where they have found themselves. It can protect the spirit from knocks, but it cannot provide much tethering. While reading about the experiences of Russian exiles abroad I was amused and saddened by the failures of the different generations to connect to one another. They all have a different culture, even a different language, creating an atmosphere of suspicion. One is accused of being an FSB spy, another of arriving simply to earn a bit of money. This one’s language is so fusty it makes one want to sneeze, that one’s is so rough and slangy it’s practically incomprehensible to an educated human being.

Culture might help us survive the journey abroad – like Khodasevich’s tomes of Pushkin did for him – but when we arrive, we need to do something else to ensure our survival. We must attempt to find things worth holding on to that connect to us as individuals, not as representatives of this or that class or country. And this is no small challenge. I wonder how many of the Russians I know will manage it. I wonder whether I will manage it myself, whenever I get back to Russia, or whenever I find a place I want to put my own roots down into.

We return to the beginning of the piece. For the Russians, the Belarusians, the Ukrainians, (forced) movement has been a part of their lives for a long time, whether it was the exile enforced by a commune upon a peasant in the 19th century, or the population transfers dictated by the central government in the 20th. Unlike the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, the perpetual movement of the East Slavs rarely came as a choice. And the worst thing about exile is that it rarely gives birth to the conditions that might prevent its repetition – instead, it creates a generation of homeless men and women, detached from the world, and lost within it.

The conditions that created exile need to be changed from within a country. Perhaps that was why I felt a certain discomfort sitting in that café in Istanbul with the two young couples. To flee is often the easy option. When emigration is a choice, as it is with these Russians, it has to be weighed up against the alternative – staying put. In all honesty, their repeated comments about maintaining the opposition from abroad sounded just as delusional as Herzen’s hopes for coordinating the radicals from London in the middle of the 19th century. We tell ourselves things like this to keep ourselves alive, but such narratives rarely have the constitution needed to survive outside the bodies that thought them up. Still, this thought should not be taken too far. People have enough difficulties as it is.

Exile is a terrible thing, with its loneliness and cynicism and stuntedness of the spirit. For those of us who do not have to experience it, it is easy to focus on the positives, in particular the way that exile’s representatives enrich our world. We forget that for those representatives, as Said writes, “the achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever”. And for most people fleeing their homeland there are no achievements whatsoever, just a broken life. We can romanticise it, as we romanticise those radical figures abroad like Herzen or those deep in Siberia, like the Decembrists. But that romanticising comes at the cost of ignoring the reality that millions of people face. Right now, today.

The world has changed, and yet at the same time it has much in common with the world that the exiles of the early 20th century inhabited. Nabokov, Bunin, and all the rest are known to me and you because history has filtered them free from the masses they were once blended in to. But they too were once mere members of a crisis, a refugee crisis, though perhaps back then we would not have used that phrase. If we consider the millions of refugees fleeing westwards across Europe at this very moment, then we can’t quite so easily focus on those figures who history will perhaps choose to have our children remember. Whatever individuals we see now, whoever’s story we hear, theirs will be a story connected inseparably to that destiny of flight. That is good. It kills our romanticism and fills us with horror. We see only hunger and thirst and uprootedness, and not those potentially redeeming features, those dimly lit rooms and poetry recitals.

And if ever there is a horror which it behoves us to confront without the illusions we enjoy from the comfort of our armchairs, then this is it.

This was a long piece and in no way perfect. I would be grateful to hear readers’ thoughts in the comments.

If you still wish to read something after all this, there are various representatives of exile huddled within this blog’s pages. In particular, consider my piece on Nabokov’s Pnin, my translation of Bunin’s “Cold Autumn”, and my post on Sebald’s The Emigrants.