Category: Russian Literature

Violence and Russian Nationalism in Gogol’s Taras Bulba

Of course, Gogol was a rather odd bird. He had to be, to write such curious little tales as his Nose or Overcoat, which are full of bodies and accessories doing what they aren’t supposed to do, in a city – Saint Petersburg – that seems to have a mind of its own too. But that madness, which most depressingly led him to throw the second part of Dead Souls into the fire, and then try to retrieve it from the flames, and then die, also had its darker side. For Gogol, the most famous writer of Ukrainian heritage, was also a rabid Russian nationalist lunatic who makes even Dostoevsky seem sensible by comparison. In fact, it was for reading the famous response of Nikolai Belinsky, a noted Russian liberal thinker, to Gogol’s miserably moralising hypocritical imperialist codswallop Selected Passages from Correspondence to Friends, that Dostoevsky was sentenced to exile. That, and for being in a terrorist cell. But we digress, however much Gogol would have approved.

I wanted to read Taras Bulba because it seemed the most overtly Ukrainian of Gogol’s works. Unlike the earliest works, it is not designed to sanitise and place in a display cabinet the customs of the Little Russians (as Gogol occasionally refers to them). Rather, by focusing on the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sech, I had expected to find in it a work that would fit just as easily into the hands of Ukrainian nationalists. I was mistaken, badly so. This is a book for our times, but not for either side of the present war. If we read it, we will find it hard not to see it as an accidental statement of the hollowness of (Russian) nationalism, and the wastefulness of war and of martial societies. But unlike Tolstoy’s brilliant anti-war Hadji Murat, it seems Gogol stumbled into this all by accident and was only half aware of what he wrote.

Plot

Taras Bulba tells the story of veteran Cossack Taras Bulba and his two children, Andrii and Ostap. It is an earlier century and the boys have returned home from study in Kiev, to their father and mother. One education has been completed, but now it is time for the real one, the one that will turn them into Cossacks, men who are comfortable only when out on the open plains or by the side of the great Dnieper, free and killing indiscriminately. For that is the one-word answer to what the book is about: violence. Taras takes his sons away from their mother after only one night at home and off they head to Zaporozhe, here a kind of travelling circus of macho manliness and bacchanalian delights.

Immediately Taras is bored. He wants violence. He is disappointed to hear that the Cossacks have agreed to stop attacking the native Tatars and tries to work out whom they can fight instead. Luckily, a rumour spreads that the Polish (the Zaporozhian Sech is nominally part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) in conjunction with the hated Jews are destroying the noble Orthodox faith of the people. Great news. The Cossacks mount up and begin a campaign of destruction and slaughter. All is going well until they begin sieging Dubno. Andrii Bulba, who in Kiev had not just learned his Latin and Greek but had also had a fling with a Polish noble’s wife, and is spotted by her again – she is trapped behind the castle’s walls – and brought into the city through a secret tunnel.

The Cossacks are bored by sitting around, waiting for the people to starve to death. Eventually, fighting breaks out, and Taras uses some of the Cossacks to draw Andrii – now a turncoat – into a forest, where he murders him for betraying his fatherland. Unfortunately, by leaving the battlefield, Taras has abandoned his men, and the battle is lost. He himself is captured but miraculously escapes. He then learns that Ostap is alive but has been taken with the other Cossacks to Warsaw, where he will be executed. With the help of a mistreated Jew, Yankel, Taras gets to Warsaw and witnesses Ostap’s execution,  to then disappear before he being caught again.

Of the Cossacks that remain at the Sech none are left of his former comrades. The new leader wants to sign a peace agreement with the Poles, but Taras has none of it. Taking a band of Cossacks for himself, he goes around the Commonwealth pillaging, before being trapped in a castle on the Dniester river, where he is burned to death by the Poles. So much for the story. The fun, as ever, begins when we get the knife out to begin the dissection.

Violence and Militarism

Some of the most spectacular passages of Taras Bulba concern “the infinite, the free, the sublime steppe” of South Ukraine where the Cossacks are free to roam on horseback and hunt and fish to their hearts’ content. But these are rarities. As a whole, the story is about war and the people who wage it. Andrii and Ostap may have been studying diligently the classics in Kiev, but as soon as they go home it’s time for a better sort of education – “the school of war.” Now, militarised societies have existed for a long time – the archetypal one, of course, is Sparta in Ancient Greece. But the Sech is different for two reasons – first, the emphasis on freedom, and secondly the tension present there.

Discipline is how wars are won. The endless drill of the Prussians and their legendary goosestep was partly what made that marshy state a great power over the course of the 18th century. The Cossacks of Taras Bulba are greedy, raucous, and have no time for order. As things go wrong during the battle at Dubno, many of the little death-vignettes that Gogol gives us show Cossacks becoming vulnerable because they get distracted by little things – here it is an adversary’s armour, ripe for the looting; there it is a desire to desecrate his body. These are not disciplined people.

Secondly, there is this tension, by which I mean a real desire for violence. These people are bloodthirsty. They want a fight. When news comes that the Poles may be converting their people, there is no desire among the Cossacks to actually check this is the case. They want to kill and are glad of the excuse provided. Immediately, they set upon the Jews who help service the Sech, slaughtering them indiscriminately. When besieging the castle at Dubno they get bored because they are not doing enough fighting and seem half-willing to just leave the starving residents alone.

In all of this, there is something elemental about them. At times it is almost funny, as when one Cossack – after starving and besieging Dubno for some time already – declares “first we hit them nicely, now we’ll hit them so much that they won’t carry as much as five of them home again.” But this shouldn’t distract us. When the Cossacks go through the Commonwealth what is the result? “Beaten children, women with breasts cut off, the skinning of all those who were allowed to keep their lives – in a word, it was a heavy price the Cossacks extracted for the Poles’ debt.”

What we see in Taras Bulba is a society that is so set on war, on violence, that it creates the conditions for it, at the cost of all deference to the truth. It is telling that against the marauders are ranged all those who are not part of the Cossack host – the women, the Jews, the Poles. Nothing unites a people like violence done against it. And what is the result, the glory that the Cossacks earn? Death. Repeatedly, for character after character. Taras dies, Ostap dies, Andrii dies, all manner of minor Cossacks die. They spout idiotic drivel about God and the fatherland which all might seem heroic to someone braindead, but we end the book to find a whole lot of dead, and nothing earned for all that suffering.

Religion and Hypocrisy

I have no interest in saying that violence is never justified, but Taras Bulba undermines the validity of its own violence with awesome consistency, and this is nowhere more obvious than in its treatment of religion. The Cossacks follow the Eastern Orthodox faith. Taras himself considers himself “a lawful defender of Orthodoxy”. But in the Sech, what holiness do we find? The whole host is ready to defend their faith “to the last drop of blood, although they did not wish to hear anything about fasting or restraint.” Characters declare that “for faith we’re ready to lay down our lives”. And yet they go about defending their faith against people who, a few doctrinal differences aside, share it, using the most unchristian means.

This irony is possibly deliberate. In chapter 6, when Andrii is smuggled into the city during the siege, he enters through a church, coming face to face with a monk – the exact type of person he had been ravaging the countryside in search of. But he is surprised, all the more so when he hears the prayers: “He prayed for the sending down of a miracle: for the saving of the city and the fortification of a wavering soul, for patience and the removal of temptation”. In short, he is praying for rather familiar things. Then he hears the organ music, and by that point, his defences really are beginning to crumble. He has stepped out of this narrow, macho, male, Cossack society and come into one that seems much fuller, with music, women, and peace instead. And what does he lose? “Moved by compassion,” we can say he loses the active voice. The Cossack loses his freedom and gains a heart.

All of this humanising stands in stark contrast to the description of the Cossacks in the next chapter and morning, who declare they are fighting an “enemy of Christ.” There is more than a little ridiculousness in this. Taras is referred to as “father” by his men, but he commits filicide on Andrii. Though the text has described Andrii as Judas, his death being like the death of “an ear of wheat” also suggests there is something deeply wrong about it. In short, we can say that the faith of the Cossacks, even as Taras himself dies by being burnt at the stake, is not quite a sham, but just an excuse for their violence. These people do not seem heroic as they throw babies into fires, or fight for their faith, because it is obvious that there is no real concern for the faith at all. As with their violence, the Cossacks’ hypocrisy leaves an unpleasant impression upon the modern reader.

National Myths

Still, if we are reading Taras Bulba today, we are interested in the national myth-building it engages in. What does it tell us about Russian nationalism in particular and the place of Ukraine within that? It’s important to remember that in the 1830s and 1840s when Gogol was writing, the annexation of much of what we now think as Ukraine had taken place relatively recently, especially of the south and west where the story takes place. These places needed to be integrated into Russia, and literary culture had some part to play in that.

How does Gogol do it? Well, for one thing, the Cossacks all have “Russian” souls, and live on “Russian land” – this description of the land in particular as Russian is repeated and particularly jarring to the reader of today. “Ukraine” is mentioned, but its people are the Cossacks, and the Cossacks are, after all, Russian. (N.B. The word “Ukrainian”, unlike “Ukraine”, had no real place in either the Russian or Ukrainian language until later. It is absent even from Shevchenko’s works. Until the later 19th century, it was primarily used by the Poles). The reason for this, of course, is because they are Orthodox and in Gogol’s version all speak Russian with only occasional Ukrainianisms for local colour. The Poles, the only other people who could claim control over the Cossacks, are a bunch of church-desecrating heretics who capture, torture and kill a great many proud Cossacks at the end of the story – showing that they cannot be the people to whom the Cossacks should swear their allegiance.

After noting that the Cossacks are practically Russians and that they do not belong to Poland, devalues any notion of independence through the decimation of the Sech. The Cossacks of the story are brave and honourable – for does not Taras go so far as to kill his own son for the sake of his honour? But everyone dies, and the decisions made in the story are poor. Gogol does not say it, but he certainly seems to imply that what the Cossacks lack is an organising force, an empire that could allow them to use their energies productively. Taras’ men die because he focuses on punishing Andrii – his false child – instead of protecting his real children, the people. If only he had a bit of guidance. Certainly, this man can kill, can fight. But wouldn’t things be better for the Cossacks, Gogol seems to ask, if they were engaged in something productive, like the genocide of the Circassians and the conquest of the Caucasus?

The character of Andrii, the traitor, is a complicating factor. Whereas the other Cossacks are motivated only by their desire for violence built upon rickety religious foundations, Andrii has a slightly more complex character. When he meets his old flame in the besieged city, he falls so madly in love that he forswears his own homeland: “Who said that my homeland is Ukraine? Who gave her to me? A homeland is what the soul seeks, what is sweeter than everything else in the world. My homeland is you.” Now, readers, I don’t think this is an unreasonable thought, but that’s just me. Within the story, we must ask what the Sech has done for Andrii. It has shocked him with its justice system, where murderers are buried alive, and thieves are tied to beams to be beaten by passersby. It has gone through the countryside burning, destroying, and killing, for no good reason. When he enters Dubno he sees, for the first time individualised, the consequences of the Cossacks’ actions – all these starving, miserable, mostly innocent people. When the choice is between love and music on the one hand and war on the other, his decision doesn’t seem unreasonable. What differentiates Andrii from the other Cossacks is that he realises there is a choice here.

But Andrii is a traitor, whatever else he is and whatever sense he speaks. (And given he is described as a “schoolboy” caught misbehaving at school when Taras confronts him and does not speak to defend himself, we can say that the scene has been constructed to delegitimise him.) That is what we should understand, at least if we are a Russian or Ukrainian nationalist. He deserved his death. Speaking of Ukrainian nationalists, Taras Bulba is not a good book for them either. Of course, you have the heroic Cossacks, fighting bravely and living enviable lives of freedom. But really, that’s the only positive thing you can take from this book. The women are excluded, and perpetual war and horrible crimes are a delight. And not just the women, by the way. In its description of a mini pogrom at the Sech and its repulsively anti-Semitic characterisation of Yankel (who would do anything for money, and is the one who tells Taras about Andrii’s betrayal) and all the other Jews, and in its demonisation and dehumanisation of the Tatars (like “chased dogs”) and Poles, Taras Bulba depicts the worst hateful and exclusionary tendencies of both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms.

Conclusion:

Poor Ukraine, to have as its most famous writer a man who would have despised its independent existence. Lucky us, to have a writer like Gogol, who could write the works he did. Gogol, reactionary, religious, nationalistic, insane, was of course an odd one. But he took the ambiguities of his life and heritage and created good and often great literature, as did Kafka and so many others. Ambiguities and conflicts within the writer are what make for works that are worth reading. Taras Bulba is such a book. It is both pro-violence and pro-Russia, while also being undercut by a sense almost of disgust at itself and its hypocrisy, occasionally hinted at by the narrator. It is a more complex book than it seems at first glance, but perhaps not as complex as we would wish.

Unfortunately, to the modern reader, it still makes for uncomfortable reading. Although there are some similarities with Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat, especially in the scenes after the siege of Dubno has failed and Taras has lost his sense of balance in the world and feels desperately isolated (as Hadji does in Tbilisi), the tone is completely different here, much less tolerant, much less repulsed by the violence it is forced to describe.

Perhaps the best argument for reading this book is that it and its author are so ambiguous about their identities. In that, you end up getting a far more accurate picture of Ukraine and its people than you might otherwise get. But this is a poor reason, all told. Gogol’s other works are much more thought-provoking. The only ones you get reading this one ar e the thoughts you don’t want to have.  


Update: for those here trying to write essays, there’s a good comment from Vladimir Golstein of Brown which provides some context on the work which I missed.

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.

“Cold Autumn” by Ivan Bunin – translation

That year in June he came to stay at our estate. We had always thought of him as one of the family – his late father had been a close friend and neighbour to my own. On the fifteenth of June Ferdinand was killed in Sarajevo. On the morning of the sixteenth, the newspapers arrived from the post office. My father left his study with one of the evening papers in his hands and came into the dining room where I, my mother, and my love were still sitting drinking tea, and said:

“Well, my friends, it’s war! The Austrian crown prince has been killed in Sarajevo. It’s war!”

As it was my father’s Saint’s Day, on St Peter’s Day all sorts of people were coming by, and after lunch, he was declared my betrothed. But on the nineteenth of July Germany declared war on Russia…

In September he came to us, just for twenty-four hours. He wanted to say goodbye before he left for the front. At that point we still thought that the war would not last long; our wedding was simply postponed to the spring. And so, we had our farewell evening. As usual, once supper was over, we put the samovar on. My father looked at the window as it filled up with steam and said:

“Autumn is surprisingly early and cold this year!”

That evening we sat quietly, only occasionally exchanging the most meaningless of words with an exaggerated calm, hiding our true and secret thoughts and feelings. Even my father had spoken about the autumn with forced, false easiness. I went to the French windows and wiped the glass with my shawl. In the garden, against the black sky, the icy stars shone sharp and bright and clear. My father leaned back deep in his armchair and smoked, occasionally glancing uneasily at the lamp burning above the table; my mother, in her glasses, was assiduously stitching up a little silk bag – we all knew which – under its light. It was touching and terrifying all at once. My father asked:

“So, are you sure that you want to go first thing in the morning instead of waiting for breakfast?”

“Yes, if you will allow me to, I must go first thing,” he said. “It’s sad, but I still need to get my things in order at home.”

My father gave a heavy sigh.

“Well, as you wish, my dear. But in that case, we old folks must be getting to bed if we are to see you off tomorrow…”

My mother rose and crossed her future son – he bent towards her hand, and then to my father’s. Alone now, we stayed seated in the dining room a little longer – I had thought to lay out some cards for a game of patience. Meanwhile, he paced the room silently. Finally, he asked:

“Well, would you like to get some fresh air?”

In my heart, everything grew still heavier, but I answered indifferently: “I don’t mind.”

He was still deep in thought about something while we were getting dressed in the front room. With a cute smile he mentioned Fet’s poem:

“Oh, just how cold is this autumn! / Put on your bonnet and shawl.”

“I don’t have a bonnet,” I said. “How does the next part go?”

“I can’t remember. I think it’s something like: “Look how between blackening pines / A fire appears to be rising…””

“What’s the fire?”

“It’s the moon coming up, of course. There’s something wondrously autumnal in all that. “Put on your bonnet and shawl…” The days of our grandfathers and grandmothers… Oh, oh god! Oh God!”

“What?”

“It’s nothing, my friend. But still, I’m sad. Sad and yet, this is all so good too. I really, really love you…”

Once we had finished getting changed, we went through the dining room and out into the garden. At first, it was so dark that I had to hold onto his sleeve. But then I began to make out in the night sky the black branches of trees, showered in the light of the stars. He stopped and turned towards the house.

“Look, how completely different, how autumnal the windows are. So long as I live, I will always remember this evening.”

I looked, and he embraced me and my Swiss wrap. I took my feather scarf from my face and turned my head a little so that he could kiss me. Afterwards, he looked into my face.

“How your eyes shine,” he said. “Are you cold? The air is worthy of winter. If they kill me, you really won’t forget about me at once?”

I thought to myself: “And what if they really do kill him? And would I really forget him in a short while? Like we forget everything in the end…?” And I hurried to answer him, terrified of my thought:

“Don’t talk like that! I would never recover if you died!”

He was silent at first, but then he spoke slowly:

“Well, and so what if I die. I will wait for you there. As for you, just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me.”

And I cried bitter tears…

In the morning he left. My mother gave him that fatal bag, the one she had been stitching the evening before. In it, there was a gold ikon, the one that my father and grandfather had carried with them when they too went to war. We crossed him with a kind of despair. We stood on the wing looking after him, in that kind of dumbness that always follows when you see someone off for a long time and can only feel the surprising inappropriateness of the joy that still surrounds us – the sun, the shining frost on the morning grass. Once we had finished, we went into an empty house. I went through the rooms, with my hands behind my back, not knowing anymore what I was supposed to do with myself, whether it would be better to weep or to sing with all my voice…

He was killed – what a strange word! – a month later, in Galicia. And since that time thirty long years have passed. And so much, so much has happened in those years, years which seemed so long, when you think about them. So much magic, so much incomprehensibility, so much confusion – all that we call the Past, and which lies beyond the powers of both mind and heart. In the spring of ’18, when my mother and father were already buried, I was living in Moscow in a basement belonging to a saleswoman at the Smolensk Market. She used to laugh at me: “Well, your highness, how are your circumstances?” I too was a trader of sorts. I sold, like so many others did then, whatever I had left to the soldiers in their papakhas and their overcoats – a little ring, a cross, a fur collar eaten away by moths, and then one day, while I was at work, I made the acquaintance of a person with a rare and beautiful soul – an old soldier who had already retired. Soon I had married him and in April we went together down to Ekaterinodar. We travelled with his nephew, a boy of about seventeen who was also heading to join the volunteer forces. The journey took almost two weeks – me, an old woman, in my bast shoes; my husband, with a greying black beard, was wearing his worn-out Cossack’s caftan. We stayed around the Don and Kuban for over two years. In the winter, in a storm, alongside countless other refugees from Novorossia, we set out across the sea towards Turkey, and on the way, my husband died of typhus. After this, I had only three people left to me upon the earth: my husband’s nephew and his young wife, and their child, a seven-month-old girl. But husband and wife returned later to Crimea to join Wrangel, leaving their child with me. I don’t know what happened to them – they simply disappeared. And so, I lived in Constantinople for some time, earning what I could for myself and the little girl, breaking my back illegally working in awful conditions. Then, as did so many others, I left – and with the girl went almost everywhere. Bulgaria, Serbia, the Czech lands, Belgium, Paris, Nice… The girl grew up a long time ago and decided to stay in Paris. She is a real Frenchwoman now – she’s very beautiful and completely indifferent towards me. She was working in a chocolate shop near the Madeleine, putting together little boxes in coloured paper and then tying them up with gold lace. Her hands are manicured, and her nails are silver. As for me, I still live in Nice by God’s grace… The first time I was in Nice was in 1912… and in those days I could never even begin to have imagined what would happen with me…

And so, I lived, and I survived his death, even though I had once said that I never would. But, when I remember everything that has happened since then, I always ask myself: well, what was really in your life? And I answer: only that cold autumn evening. Did it really happen? Yes, it did. And everything else that I lived through was just a waste, a useless dream. And I believe, I believe with a faith like a fire, that he is waiting for me there – with the same love, the same youth, as on that evening. “Just live, find what joy you can, and then come to me…” I have lived, I have had some joy, and now already it is time for me to come.

3 May 1944

This piece is one of the most famous short stories of Ivan Bunin. Bunin was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933, but much of his prose reflects that of an earlier period. Not for nothing is he known as the last representative of aristocratic prose – he was born on the family estate in 1870, befriended Tolstoy, and had a disdain for all that is crass and base. This poise generally means that we either like him or dislike him. To some, he is a dreamy wishy-washy fool, a representative of a class that rightly died out (read – was systematically murdered by the Bolsheviks). He repeatedly writes about love, which is rather tedious after a while. And I have read criticism suggesting he never moved on from the loss of his country in the Revolutions, a bit like Kipling after the first World War.

“Cold Autumn” I think at least counters this final complaint. It is a story precisely about the tragedy and loss of a world, rather than about a refusal to come to terms with it. The narrator has lived, she has existed. We have two paragraphs without her beloved, but they are solid and lengthy. Something lively has exited the prose itself. And how can we blame the narrator, when that autumn eve remains so much more significant in her mind? Whether we like it or not, our memories are incomplete – a part of us decides for ourselves which moments are worthy of remembrance. And that person who cannot find a moment that is seared within their brain has perhaps not truly lived.

The story is stained with death. The beloved, the husband, the nephew and his wife, the narrator’s mother and father – and even, at the at the beginning, the beloved’s father. Not only is the old world destroyed by the coming of the Bolsheviks, but it is also literally killed off and with it its memories. Like Bunin himself, the narrator works as a living receptacle of a lost world. The Frenchwoman of the next generation is already lost to it.

The beloved quotes Fet – perhaps my favourite Russian poet. But Fet is the poet of haybales and sunsets, a very accessible poet whose main sources of inspiration are love and nature and whose corpus is tainted with a certain proud, aristocratic melancholy – he was the first to translate Schopenhauer into Russian, whence he passed to Fet’s friend Tolstoy. Fet is not a poet for the horrors of the 20th century. By quoting him, the beloved shows that his world is not the one he actually lives in, foreshadowing his swift death later. I particularly like the use of the little bag with the ikon in it too. We expect these items, which have protected previous generations, to offer the same protection now. They do not. The superstitions of the past do not have power anymore either.

Faced with a lost world, we have a choice. Either we succumb to our memories, or we build a new one. I do not think, with the memories that she has and the realities that she has to live in, the narrator of Bunin’s story is worthy of much condemnation. Instead, her faith and at least some of that aristocratic worldview, prove deserving of a certain grudging admiration.