It’s just that demon life has got you in its sway…

 

 

In Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, the nihilist hero and the son of an old army doctor, makes a remark to his friend and disciple, Arkhady, son of Nikolai Kursanov, an aristocrat and landowner, about the latter: “The day before yesterday I saw him reading Pushkin,” Bazarov continued… “Do explain to him that that will never do any good. After all, he’s not a boy: it’s time he threw that he threw aside that nonsense: wanting to be a romantic in these days!”

I recently re-read Fathers and Sons. It was in this remark, and others of that type, that I recognized something, that a grand thesis suddenly presented itself in my mind.

But I have to preface the grand thesis riff with a little autobiographical remark.

In 1970, I was 12. In 1980, I was 22. That decade marks me – though I have ranged pretty far to be sitting here in Paris, with a wife and a boy and my life, such as it is, entering the retirement twilight, it is most likely the case that I am of the 70s generation.

In Russian intellectual history, the members of the “1830” generation, like Herzen, self-identified as such. So did the “youth” – the generation of the 1860s, the shestidesiatniki. These identifications are, of course, fluid and non-binding – and yet they evoke something like different moods and modes that are actually experienced. In the 1830s, Herzen and Turgenev, among other intellectuals, took it as their task to propound, or to pound out, what it meant to be a member of the Russian civilization. An important word, for this cohort – to be a member of a civilization was, above all, an existential task. Were they to be real subjects, like the Europeans (the idea of a European subject, here, meant basically a thing composed of bits of the French Enlightenment, bits of Hegel, and bits of the English economists, but it meant, as well, to dress in a certain way, feel in a certain way, love in a certain way – above all it meant freeing the serfs), or were they condemned to be Russians under Nicholas – a sort of slough composed of Dead Souls, samovars and flies. And yet, wasn’t that slough a warm and live thing, unlike the mere surface of the Europeans?

For the sons, however, the shestidesiatniki: this generation of the 1830s, which rose up and were put down in 1848, was full of the most pathetic dreamers. Reading Pushkin! What rubbish.

The struggle between the heirs of these decades was fought out, most openly, in Russian literature – in poems and novels. Novels such as Fathers and Sons.

Now: here’s my grand thesis. If I think of the generation of the sixties, and the generation of the seventies, in America, and so on, it is striking to me that the terrain in which our generational mood, so to speak, was fought out – our Russian novel – was popular music. Instead of Herzen and Turgenev, instead of Chernyshensky and Pisarev, instead of Doestoevsky and Tolstoy, the terrain was the British invasion, Bob Dylan, Motown, R & B, Disco, and Punk.

This is not about the aesthetic quality of these cultural products, but rather their existential, identifying effects. What Bazarov says about poor Nikolai Kursanov and his affection for Pushkin could easily have been said by some late seventies punk about some aging hippie child’s affection for the Beatles. It is not just a comment about the Beatles as a group, it is a comment about the whole little world in which you would listen to the Beatles, you would know their songs, you would quote them occasionally, you would care for them in a certain way.

It is a sociological fact that I don’t quite understand about my own growing up that it was not novels, or movies, or television – which were all massively consumed, of course – but popular music, albums and concerts, that provided the terrain upon which was fought out a certain mood and a certain existential identification that gets harked back to, that still can suddenly start up in the brain. A sound, lyrics.

Myself, I read enormously between 12 and 22, and would not have thought of myself as a “fan” – but I know, now, that even though I did read the Russian novels then and thought I was Ivan Karamazov, my lodestar was really Bobby Dylan. Like everybody else I knew,  my little bit of this history was enacted more through music than anything else. This was true for the back of the class, the fans of Freebird and Southern Rock, as well as the front of the class, the fans of David Bowie and Patti Smith.

I don’t think that popular music plays this role for, say, my son’s generation. Rap is very important, but it doesn’t set the communal mood. I’m sure that mood is set by Internet genres that we don’t really have genre knowledge of – social media, for instance. What is Tik Tok or Instagram? I’m not sure they bear the burden of the Russian novel. Perhaps, in fact, the task of existential identification comes and goes – is there any need of it, or desire for it, at the moment?

In the creche, the nursery located behind our apartment, the three year olds are chasing each other around and screaming at the top of their lungs at this moment. I can’t tell you what their communal mood will be. Out of those screams, what art, what tragic love, what happy or sad life arrangements are to come I can’t divine. I can only look backwards, it seems.

But Fuck it. Lot’s wife has always seemed much saner to me than her husband, with his bizarre methods of childrearing. Three cheers for the backward’s glance.