A Cold War Trope

 

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlo Ginzburg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.

It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies [1860s and 1870s] famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, someday, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscopic skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanche at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge in Nabokov's caricature of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a rather sinister parallelism – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to the one and applying it to the other.

However, in making the master Pushkin a scarecrow for radical dunderheads, Nabokov can’t really make the parallel lines meet - one being a matter of secret policemen, the other being a matter of newspaper articles. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

Here is the author in Nabokov's The Gift: “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””..

Is that a quotation I spy?

It is. But that meticulous man, Nabokov, seems here to have been caught in his own dream, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them.

In actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” Blok, in writing about the critic Gregoriev, states that he never “tended to the idea that “boots are higher than Shakespeare,” which is proclaimed (directly or indirectly) in Russian criticism from Belinkski and Chernyshevskj…” – which proclamation, one wants to ask, must be, if quotation marks count at all, directly – whereas indirectly breaks us out of quotation marks and into suspicion and deduction. Berdyaev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937), also includes the boots and Shakespeare evaluation. We are told that “Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform.

Berdyaev is followed by Leszek Kolakowski, who attributes to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” – an expansion of Berdyaev’s sentence, making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. Common sayings, they pass from mouth to ear. From ear to mouth. Over the Samovar, in the carriage, or as one trudges with a friend over the summer dusty street in some Moscow city district. Thinking, perhaps, about one's own boots. The hole in the bottom. The nail that has come out and left the heel to flop. And one thinks of the copy of Shakespeare that one has bought at some shop. There it is, in the room, on the shelf, under the portrait. Raskolnikov waits.

I was washing myself in the courtyard that night

the firmament glowing with rough hewn stars.

On the hatchet, star light points like salt,

the water up to the top of the barrel, icy.

What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.”

What to make of this montage? Looking at this from our sad post-Cold War perspective, we notice, first, that the Soviet aesthetic was not Pushkin averse, but Pushkin idolatrous. Soviet school children had to memorize his verse, he was statueified and feted as a part of world civilization: no member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom could touch the Stalinist praises of that poet.

Pisarev, on the other hand, was not so feted. In fact, he was rather shirked, according to the Slavicists. This is because Pisarev was an ironist and a live wire. In an essay on Heine, Pisarev’s kind of poet, he quotes a passage from the Harzreise in which Heine writes that, on a fresh morning in the mountains, the “fragrance goes to my head and I no longer know where irony ends and heaven begins.” Pisarev recognized Heine in that phrase – perhaps because he recognized himself. He wrote that he heard a “hissing” in Pushkin’s poetry, and in Belinsky’s essays, and he was himself one of the hissers.

Alas, this hissing, this zone where irony and heaven meet each other (something that Nabokov, in his secret self, was well aware of) was stripped from Pisarev, he was compounded and pounded with Chernyshevsky, and we get a caricature of Soviet ideology that might well have been the reason none of the exiled Russians much liked Nabokov’s The Gift.

In any case, a quotation that is not a quotation can fill the space of a quotation: gaslighting is an ancient art, and not just one invented on social media.

What a lordly career the phrase has had! An honored place in the book of misquotations - that book which we can put on the balance against Mallarme's book, just as hell is on the scale against heaven.