Updated sequel to "Hungry Generations" - a new novel "The Fall of the Berlin Wall"

The Fall of the Berlin Wall is a sequel to my earlier novel, “Hungry Generations,” about characters in their late twenties in Los Angeles circa 1972; it featured a legendary German-Jewish/Russian émigré piano-virtuoso, the ‘sacred monster’ Alexander Petrov, his wife and two adult children, as well as the composer and their friend Jack Weinstein, as a young man. 

Now those characters are in their forties in Cleveland in November 1989, and the novel is about personal crises echoing the fall of the Berlin Wall and that upturning of the old order. Jack has become a successful composer and educator, and he is married to Sarah, the intense and irrepressible daughter of the late virtuoso.

The culture of classical music is represented here by Cleveland Orchestra musicians and memories of émigrés in flight from Nazi Europe, some of whom raised their American children in Los Angeles. The lives of the young are partly shaped by popular culture – its music, its preferred drugs, and the influence of punk. The culture of the family is also at risk from memories and betrayals, and members of the Weinstein family share the telling of this story. A surprising bonus is the magnificent music played and imagined here.

It is Thanksgiving week, and Jack does not understand why the couple’s marriage is collapsing. Visiting them for Thanksgiving is Sarah’s brother, Joseph Petrov, who is Jack’s closest friend; the hugely talented pianist son of Alexander is now caught in the middle between his sister and his brother-in-law. The week’s events are told by this trio of characters, and much of the novel revolves around Sarah – her Dostoyevskian intensity, her suffering, her stinging repartee, and the friendships she forms and betrays.

Friendship itself is a force – emotional, erotic, and imaginative – in the lives of these characters, with its potential success or failure for her and Jack, for the brothers-in-law, and for the group of friends surrounding the three characters. Again, the surprising bonus of the magnificent music played and imagined here includes Jack’s plans for a work responding to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The idea that long-standing barriers can collapse shapes the novel, its vision of politics, of music, and the past. 

This heartbreaking, tragicomic work brings to life each of the human beings here. The characters in this emotionally compelling, partly political literary work are reminiscent of Myshkin, Nastasya, and Rogozhin in Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” or, also, of those in a greatly shortened DeLillo’s “Underworld.” Integrated at the end of the short novel is a section titled “The Past” containing six “origin” stories that evoke explosively what has been at stake in the startling past of the characters.

Here’s the synopsis:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall – a novel

Daniel Melnick (216-378-9302; danielcmelnick@gmail.com)

“Maybe I’m proud myself, even if I’m shameless. You just called me perfection. A fine perfection! – if just for the sake of being willful I’ve trampled on a fortune and a brilliant man.”                  --Nastasiya in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

Two events in November 1989 mark the lives of the novel’s characters. One is the death of a woman discovered naked in the snow outside the Weinstein house, during a massive storm buffeting Cleveland on Thanksgiving. The other event is the fall of the Berlin Wall, taking place two weeks earlier – an upturning of the old order that corresponds to these characters’ desire to change their lives.

​Jack Weinstein wants to save his marriage to Sarah, the intense, unpredictable daughter of the late legendary German-Jewish classical pianist and ‘sacred monster’ Alexander Petrov. Unaware of what is causing the collapse of the marriage, he tries to confront her dissatisfaction and shifting allegiances, and much of the action revolves around her Dostoyevskian intensity, her repartee, and the friendships she forms and betrays. Sarah and Jack are in their forties and have a sixteen-year-old daughter, Sue, absorbed by her own efforts to deal with boys and drugs.

Joseph, Sarah’s brother, is visiting this Thanksgiving week. He is gay, and his friendship with his straight brother-in-law unfolds dramatically here. Joseph finds himself in the middle of the couple’s conflicts. The week’s events are told by the trio of family members. Both Joseph and Jack are musicians. Joseph Petrov is, like his late father, a piano virtuoso, and Jack is a classical composer and music professor; one of his compositions has just been nominated for a Grammy in contemporary classical music.

The Weinsteins’ friends have their own turbulence. And friendship – both healing and broken – becomes an issue in all their lives. Each of these characters has a piece of the solution to the troubles in the family’s lives, to their joy and grief, to their betrayals, and to a death – possibly a murder – that takes place in their midst.  The Blacks, who live around the corner, are about to declare bankruptcy, for Jacob has been denied tenure and become a ‘freeway professor,’ teaching one class here, another there across town. There are their mutual friends, the Sinclairs, and especially Robert Sinclair becomes the target of Jacob’s bitterness about his life.

One of the Weinsteins’ best friends is an artist and a bohemian of sorts, Tom Mubar, who is divorced and shares custody of his seventeen-year-old son, Paul. Sarah has an affair, and when it collapses, she is drawn to Tom, who understands – she believes – what a disaster her life has become, but she painfully discovers that he does not reciprocate her feelings and is himself trying to endure his own shocks and dangers.

Everything comes to a head when the Weinsteins celebrate Thanksgiving with Joseph and their friends. At dinner, confrontations erupt from the tensions brewing all week, and Sarah, already depressed and disoriented, plummets into potentially suicidal despair.

 “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” is a tragicomic portrait of the confusions and heartbreaking disasters in love and friendship, and it also pictures what may endure our collisions – whether it be love, art and music, or simply the welter of conflicting passions in youth and middle age. Six stories presenting the startling past of the characters are integrated into the end of the novel.

(The work is about 51,000 words.)

Table of Contents:

           Thanksgiving Week

Prologue: Rachel and Jacob Black – Friday, November 24, 1989

Chapter 1: Joseph – Sunday afternoon, November 19, 1989

Chapter 2: Sarah – Sunday evening at the Weinstein party

Chapter 3: Jack – Monday morning, November 20, 1989

Chapter 4: Joseph – Monday evening at the Ramadanoff party

Chapter 5: Jack – Tuesday afternoon, November 21, 1989

Chapter 6: Sarah – Tuesday evening at Tom Mubar’s party

Chapter 7: Joseph – Wednesday afternoon, November 22, 1989

Chapter 8: Jack – Wednesday evening at Julius and Rose Weinstein’s party

Chapter 9: Joseph – Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 23, 1989

Chapter 10: Sarah – Thursday night at the Weinsteins

Chapter 11: Jack – Friday morning, November 24, 1989

Chapter 12: Sue – Saturday, Christmas Day 1989 in Berlin

The Past - Before the Fall

Chapter 13: Paul’s Story – The Fall of the Berlin Wall – November 9, 1989

Chapter 14 Tom’s Story – Triptych – 1950-1980

Chapter 15: Karen’s Story – Odalisque – September 1983

Chapter 16: Helen’s Story – Contrapuntal Piece – October 1982

Chapter 17: Jacob’s Story – Your Name Is Hiroshima – November 1984

Chapter 18: Julius’s Story – Einstein’s Sorrow – June 1980

"The Fall of the Berlin Wall - a novel" now completed - and circulating

My now completed but unpublished novel “The Fall of the Berlin Wall” is about the musicians who appeared in my earlier novel “Hungry Generations” plus their families and friends – but now more than a decade and a half later. (In fact, the earlier novel - from iUniverse in 2004 - could logically and easily be published with "The Fall" as an 'origin story' or prequel.)

Jack Weinstein is now a successful composer, known for the symphonic “Hostage Music” commemorating the 1980 Iran hostage crisis. He is married to Sarah, the intense and irrepressible daughter of the late legendary Alexander Petrov. It is 1989 in Cleveland, where Jack is a college professor, and in late November, the couple’s marriage is collapsing. Jack and Sarah are visited during Thanksgiving week by her brother, Joseph Petrov, who is Jack’s closest friend and the hugely talented pianist son of Alexander. The week’s events are told by this trio of characters, and much of the novel revolves around Sarah – her suffering, her stinging repartee, and the friendships she forms and betrays.

Friendship itself is a force in the lives of these characters, its potential success or failure for her and Jack, for the two brothers-in-law, and for the group surrounding the three characters. Also, there is the surprising bonus of the magnificent music played and imagined here, including Jack’s plans for a work responding to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The idea that long-standing barriers can collapse infuses the partly Dostoyevskyan novel, its vision of politics, of music, and of the human beings brought to life in this poignant, tragicomic work. At the end of the short novel are six ‘origin’ stories evoking what has been at stake in the rich and startling past of many of the characters.

 Here's a synopsis of the work:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall – a novel with stories

Daniel Melnick (216-378-9302; danielcmelnick@gmail.com)

Two events in November 1989 mark the lives of the novel’s characters. One is the death of a woman discovered naked in the snow during a massive storm buffeting Cleveland on Thanksgiving. The other is the fall, two weeks earlier, of the Berlin Wall, and that upturning of the old order corresponds to a desire completely to change their lives for the characters.

Jack Weinstein wants to save his marriage to Sarah, the intense daughter of the late legendary pianist Alexander Petrov. He tries to confront her dissatisfaction and her shifting allegiances – whether to him, to her lover Dima, to her brother Joseph, or to her own unstable self. Sarah and Jack are in their forties and have a nearly sixteen-year-old daughter, Sue, who struggles in her own right.

Sarah’s brother, Joseph, is visiting this Thanksgiving week. He finds himself in the middle of the couple’s conflicts, and his role is made more difficult by the deep allegiance he feels to both his sister and his brother-in-law. The week’s events are told by this trio of characters. Joseph and Jack are musicians. Joseph Petrov is, like his late father, a brilliant piano virtuoso, and Jack is a classical composer; one of his compositions has just been nominated for a Grammy in contemporary classical music.

The Weinsteins’ friends have their own turbulence. And friendship – both healing and broken – becomes an issue in their lives. The Blacks, who live around the corner, are about to declare bankruptcy, for Jacob has been denied tenure and become a ‘freeway professor,’ teaching one class here, another there. The Sinclairs are mutual friends, and especially Robert Sinclair becomes the target of Jacob’s bitterness about his life.

One of the Weinsteins’ best friends is an artist and a bohemian of sorts, Tom Mubar, who is divorced and shares custody of his seventeen-year-old son, Paul. When Sarah’s affair with Dima collapses, she is drawn to Tom, who will understand – she believes – what a disaster her life has become. He has his hands full with his own urgent problems, and does not reciprocate her feelings.

Everything comes to a head when the Weinsteins celebrate Thanksgiving with their friends and Joseph. At dinner, disastrous confrontations erupt from the tensions brewing all week, and Sarah, already depressed and disoriented, plummets into potentially suicidal despair.

“The Fall of the Berlin Wall” is a poignant, tragicomic portrait of a marriage in trouble, of confusions in love and friendship, and of what may endure our collisions – whether it be love, art and music, or simply the flux and welter of our conflicting passions and needs. The short novel is followed by six stories evoking the rich and startling past of several of these characters.

(Altogether, the work is 174 pages, about 51,000 words.)

a new novel: The Fall of the Berlin Wall

I'm currently working on a new novel, which is about three-quarters finished. It is tentatively titled "The Fall of the Berlin Wall" and takes place in Thanksgiving week after that November 9th, 1989, event, and it imagines what happened to the characters from my 2004 novel "Hungry Generations," which was set in 1972-3. A synopsis will be posted on this blog in a few weeks, once I've completed the novel.

Many elements, though, are clear. The children of the late virtuoso pianist Alexander Petrov return. Sarah is married to Jack Weinstein, a composer, who was the focus of the earlier novel, and they have moved to Cleveland where he teaches at his alma mater, the Institute of Music there. After sixteen years the marriage is now troubled. Sarah's brother, Joseph, is visiting them for the week. Having recently reread Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" again, I couldn't resist writing a series of dramatic parties into the novel with the accompanying turbulent confrontations; also, my characters are not wholly unrelated to Myshkin, Rogoshin, and particularly Nastasya. Finally, characters from several of my other fictions were made to live in Cleveland, and in the new novel, they become significant - Rachel and Jacob Black, Tom Mubar, May and Robert Sinclair, Vladimir Kline, and Juliet and Sammy Weisberg. So "The Fall of the Berlin Wall" is, in part, a Cleveland novel.

There's plenty of music in the novel, as well. However, whereas the music in "Hungry Generations" became part of the experimental form of that novel, it's presented much more straightforwardly in the new work. Here's the opening:

Prologue

Friday, November 24, 1989

           It was the wind that made it worse. Twigs were carried in the air, and dead leaves flew by. On Thanksgiving yesterday, the black clouds of a huge arctic storm had dropped from the north like a giant descending on the city, a massive primordial force obliterating everything that was familiar, felling trees, and dropping a foot of snow on the Heights. And now this morning, the wind kept blowing more snow east into Cleveland Heights with its the hilly neighborhoods, the first foothills of the Appalachians. Its houses, built in the first decades of the twentieth century, were porous to the raging winds. The old double-glazed windows rattled violently. The storm blew wires down and pilot lights out, and with few exceptions, there was no heat or light for blocks on end.

           When Jacob Black’s heater went out this morning, he descended the stairs to the darkened basement to inspect the pilot light. When he directed a flashlight into it, he saw there was no way he could relight it, for without electricity, the newly installed heater refused to start. So much refused to work in this old house – and in his shithole of a life, as well. A stream of unspoken obscenity-filled his mind as he trudged back up the stairs. Rachel and little Mikey waited at the top. When she heard what the situation was, she picked up the kitchen phone. It still worked, and she called Sarah and Jack, who lived up the block.

           “Yes to both questions,” Jack answered. “We have electricity, and come on over. We’ll wait out the storm together. Sarah is still sleeping, but she’ll wake up soon.”

           So they put on their heaviest winter coats, boots, hats, and gloves as the wind buffeted the windows and pressed in on the house. Rachel carried a packed purse, Jacob a valise with a shoulder strap, and four-year-old Mikey his favorite brown bear with its button eyes, in a plastic bag. Together they stepped onto the porch. The wind temporarily paralyzed them, and its bursting intermittent hum poured from the sky. It had begun yesterday on Thanksgiving and had not relented. Holding onto his son’s hand and gripping his wife’s arm, Jacob inched forward down the porch steps and into the blasting snow. In the driveway, their boots sank in the snow drifts. Small branches flew by, disintegrating in flight.

           “I’ll carry you,” Joseph said and lifted the boy onto his shoulders.

“It’s so cold,” Mikey said.

           “We’ll be there soon,” Rachel said.

           “I’m scared.”

           They trudged slowly through the snow banks for half a block, could hardly see through the white-out of blowing snow, and finally came to the wooded, untamed lot edging Jack Weinstein’s property. Barely visible next to the lot was his big home on the corner with its snowy stairs and the inundated porch.

           In the thick woods a few yards away, there seemed to be a partially buried, snow-covered deer or other animal, and Rachel stopped to stare at the curious sight. Jacob, with Mikey on his back, continued to Jack’s house and stairs.

           She carefully stepped off the sidewalk, walked through snow to the frozen form, and began to reach toward it. She suddenly recognized the snow-encrusted naked woman, and she suppressed a scream.

Beethoven xiii - Adorno on Beethoven's Appassionata

A source of power in the Appassionata sonata’s first movement is that it keeps unfolding wave upon wave of creative transformation with relentless iterations and variations of its core motifs, so that the sections of the first movement begin to meld together. Each eruption of development becomes part of the creative flux: the differences between motifs are elided (the foreboding and ferocious first theme, for example, finds insistent echoes in the jaunty, striving third theme), and the differences between sections are all subsumed within the unfolding process: the initial statement of themes quickly and inexorably yields their massive development, and the restatement disintegrates into an enormous redevelopment in the coda. Here is a link to Barenboim’s great performance of the movement in 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPR3pkcNbKI.
In Adorno’s Hegel-inflected formulation in Beethoven: Philosophy of Music, the movement maintains a defiant “diversity [which] evens out into unity but keeps diverging from it while the form remains an abstract sheath over the diversity,” a “sheath” comprised of the unity of sonata form. The continually unfolding sequences and motifs become examples of a tragic, subversive “subjectivity veering into wretchedness” (51) with the “individual moments estranged” (13) from the enveloping and enabling bourgeois conventions of sonata form with its false promise of freed and empowered expressiveness. The tragic power of the first movement of the Appassionata is that it transforms what is false and perfunctory into “a terrible beauty” (to use Yeats’ term), so that the eruptive music of the Appassionata sonata unfolds “a total becoming” within the dominating form which it inhabits (46).

Adorno’s earlier statements bear repeating here: “If Beethoven is the musical prototype of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he is at the same time the prototype of a music that has escaped from its social tutelage and is esthetically fully autonomous, a servant no longer. His work explodes the schema of a complaisant adequacy of music and society” (43). And: “By its power, his successful work of art posits the real success of what was in reality a failure,” for “that bourgeois society is exploded by its own immanent dynamic – this is imprinted in Beethoven’s music,” whose creative process both reproduces and puts to shame (“explodes”) the “esthetic untruth” of bourgeois expressiveness and freedom, which are revealed as a deluded and null in comparison to the power of the music (46).

These formulations locate a paradox in Beethoven’s sonata suggestively reminiscent of a paradox in Dostoyevsky’s novels: in them, a protracted act of confession is expected and exacted from the protagonists, and yet their subversive voicing of the convention of confession is performed in such a way as to cast into question the very nature and substance of the confession. It is an index of their modernity or proto-modernity that the society-sanctioned forms are simultaneously fulfilled and subversively transformed. After Beethoven (or for that matter, after Dostoyevsky), one next step in the history of the arts is modern and postmodern travesty and pastiche.

Adorno offers many specific insights particularly into the Appassionata’s middle, development section in the “dialectical” first movement of the sonata (60). In this section, the sonata hugely expands the development and finally synthesis of the sonata’s two major thematic motifs not only in this middle section but in the coda as well (51-2). These “improvisatory” sections pit the resources of “fantasy” against the rigidity and restraint of sonata form, and they seem “haplessly to desire the suffering” of the confrontation, with its “extra-human” harmonies, their sforzando “minor seconds,” and the hammered chords and demonically driven arpeggios. These effects all place the listener, as it were, in mid-stream, in the midst of extreme turbulence, and instill a continual awareness of the “incompleteness of what has just been formed” – i.e., the open-ended power and shattering freedom of the creative process unfolding before us.

A significant crux for Adorno is the sonata form’s requirement that the original main theme be brought back by the “recapitulation” section after the shattering development. This reprise of the main theme is exposed, he writes, as an act of “crushing repression,” as “a trait of esthetic untruth” implicating bourgeois society’s imposition of and insistence on “the conjuring of static sameness amid total becoming” (44, 46). In the Appassionata, Beethoven refuses that complacent sameness by infusing the recapitulation with instability, continually generating newly energized details and accompanying the reprise with a low-pitched pulse of repeated notes, a constant agitation, quickly leading to the newly massive development of the coda. The sonata in this way exposes “the reprise as a problem,” subverting and upending “the moment of untruth in bourgeois ideology” (16) – and so for “Beethoven, then, the traditional forms are reconstructed out of freedom” (61).

The symphonic equivalent of the Appassionata is the first movement of the Third Symphony, the Eroica, composed just a few years before. For Adorno, the orchestral work’s earlier genesis and its more public “writ-large” gestures of “symphonic mastery” rather streamline the effects of the work. Nevertheless, a tension is once again set up between the “closed symphonic” (sonata) form and the “open” improvisatory organic episodes of “epic” development. There are the harmonic collisions in the Eroica from the opening bars on and the many other intentional irregularities, particularly – once again – in the development and coda sections. The many developments Adorno notes all conspire to reveal the turbulent and even tragic “incompatibility” of those rival, “irreconcilable” conceptions – of the “open” and the “closed,” the improvisatory and the conventional, the “epic” and the “symphonic” (105-6). In Adorno’s Marxist-Hegelian view particularly of hearing such a work in isolation in media remote from the concert hall, the collision of forms in the Eroica confirms “the truth of the unreconciled condition of the individual in bourgeois society” (120) – in part because one exists self-consciously both within and outside the inhabited society [a version of this Hegelian formulation -  stressing the music's ironic Goethean wisdom of simultaneously enacting 'within' and narrating 'outside' - can be found, too, in Scott Burnham’s Beethoven Hero (146)].

In my next post, I’ll attempt to explore Adorno’s rather more detailed and remarkably responsive formulations about late Beethoven and his self-consciousness about convention and innovation.

Emergency Powers - conclusion - art and society in a time of crisis

The shared experience of a sort of internal exile must, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests, be assumed in the contemporary community, whether “coming” or “unavowable” (see Agamben’s post 9/11 articles as well as “We, refugees”: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/we-refugees/  ). To be in internal exile is an experience twentieth century literature centrally explores, and one which contemporary writing continues to confront all the more urgently since our image-bound society has fed on and been bloated by continual crisis and the resulting paralysis. Language itself has been usurped by the rule of crisis with its ever multiplying images and manipulations. Given the resulting deterioration – the sense of the exile and death of language – ‘what is to be done?’ Writers often minister parody, paradox, and solipsism to the patient, instead of making the tragic demand Benjamin defined: that there is more to language and existence than what the rule of continuous spectacle and emergency imagines or allows.
As I noted earlier, Benjamin understands that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule....[I]t is our task to bring about a real state of emergency,” to make manifest the shocking reality of emergency and oppression, to make visible those who are invisible in the emergency world of sovereign power, and to retrieve the marginalized and give voice to the voiceless. Artists and thinkers must meet Benjamin’s challenge and promote the redemptive awareness that yet endures under the tragic and “irreparable” condition of post-modernity. “Our task” is continually to imagine and probe how to activate and sustain alternatives to the world of emergency regulation, to tap the alternative “emergency power” of the tragic reach for and receptivity to the potential still alive within a world of shared exile. My earlier discussion has attempted to show how more recent thinkers, including Agamben and Blanchot (along with Ranciere, Zizek, Nancy, and others), have addressed Benjamin's challenge.
In this time of emergency, the risk remains of being entrapped within the solipsism of a grievous isolation. Dostoyevsky – whom J. M. Coetzee powerfully imagines in The Master of Petersburg – explores just such an entrapped state in his novels, where ravenous and tragically isolated selves become part of a nexus of competing voices, of continual contact among humans, of intrusions, mixings, impositions – even between author and reader. In Dostoyevsky’s vision of emergency, the zone of abandonment is transformed into a zone of contact, and an entire world of contact is imagined with “a little difference,” with a tragically redemptive openness and exposure to the vivid and flowering sense of potential connectedness among humans. In the art of such novels as in the thinking of Walter Benjamin and the other philosophers we engaged, we encounter the model of responsiveness to and contact with the range of life from the margin to the center. Given these ten years of America in crisis after 9/11, the possibility of a resilient responsiveness can yet find its model in the demanding aesthetic experience of tragedy, which tests and activates the capacity to respond in the midst of erasure and abandonment. Such is the ethical obligation to respond incurred in the face of the state of emergency.

Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Silence, continued (first section is an 11-2010 post):

Here's the continuation of the November 2010 post containing the start of my essay, which was published in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (issue 45:2, pp. 231-242).

The deepest terror exhibited and forecast by Under Western Eyes’ images of terrorism, autocracy, and the struggle to endure in Russian life is that, under circumstances of total simulation and dissimulation, truth disappears into silence, and reality undergoes an absolute erasure and substitution. Here we enter the region of Conrad's "néant," of negation. Conrad's readers are themselves made to experience a version of this negation, for the self-reflexive effect of the British professor's unreliable narration is to place them in the position of questioning the Western assumptions embedded in the text as a document written in English.

The resulting self-conscious and paradoxical perspectivism destabilizes our reading which depends on the Western professor's on-going narrative even when, for example, we realize that the compassion and perception he refuses to most of the Russians are what their struggle with erasure and suffering requires and embodies. "I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism," he writes even about the Russian with whom he sympathizes the most, Natalia Haldin (76).

The concept of Russian cynicism helps us again to observe how a motif is made to break down in the novel, and reveal instability and negation. On one side is the Professor's condescension for Natalia's "naive and hopeless cynicism" - his snide "key-word" for his chronicle (49). On the other, we find the protagonist Razumov's paradoxical formulation, contorted by fear and despair, of Russian suffering: '''Stoicism! That's a pose ... We are Russians, that is - children; that is - sincere; that is - cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose!'" (147). Further, there is the revolutionary Sophia Antonovna's comment that "'women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action'" (197). The novel's ironic questioning of irony is as brilliantly dislocating as it is compelling, for these carefully designed structural collisions and negations prompt readers to become as morally alert and delving as possible.

Found everywhere on this vertiginous landscape of dislocation is the primary mechanism of communication at work within a totalizing system and practiced even by Conrad's central, English narrator: that is, "interrogation" – detached, reductive, and imposing, for example, the Englishman's censure and sentimentality on the interrogated. Interrogation in his case is a metaphor to characterize the British professor's point of view on "things Russian," but in Conrad's vision of Russian life interrogation is more than metaphoric. It is at the core of experience itself, and most of the novel's key scenes involve acts of interrogation: the revolutionist Haldin's testing of Razumov and then the Intelligence bureaucrat Mikulin's questioning of both of them, the myriad interrogations of Razumov by the Geneva Russians - the Haldins, Sophia Antonovna, not to mention Peter Ivanovich - and finally Razumov's own self-interrogation in his Dostoyevskian journal.

Why is the intrusion and inquisition of interrogation essential in a totalized society like the Russian autocracy? It is the tool that allows the Intelligence apparatus (the brain of a totalitarian body politic) to confront the silence - and shape the speech - of the totalized Russian society presented by Conrad. The passive, impervious, even moribund nature of this body politic informs the recurrent image of a body - drunk, dead, or asleep - suspended in a vast frozen waste, and this image of groundless suspension in a frozen blank white void applies above all to Razumov. Silence is the meaning of these many encompassing images of being frozen alive, and is the focus of Conrad's interrogation of Russia and, finally, of language itself. The haunted fatality of this vision is confirmed by its echoing of Adam Mickiewicz's classic Polish critique of Russia eighty years earlier, the "Digression" in Forefather's Eve of 1832; Czeslaw Milosz writes that Conrad "seems to repeat its contents line for line in . . . Under Western Eyes" (225)

Silence is a signal characteristic of the frozen Russian wastes here. The novel's images of suspended corpses are silent, and as well the holders of power - Prince K, Councilor Mikulin, etc. - mumble or are silent; the key words in their sentences are ellipses, erasures, silences. The "truths" of Razumov's story are silenced, and by the end of the novel his world is literally silence: his eardrums are shattered by the counterspy Nikita’s gun. This final silence of Razumov's world merely makes manifest its actual condition: all previous hearing and speech have been invalidated by lies, within himself and within the world he inhabited; both the official story or history and his personal version are compounded of falsifications. The brunt and import of the novel's interrogation, then, reveal that language capable of uttering meaning is silenced in the Geneva of the revolutionaries, the Petersburg of the autocracy, and indeed the Europe of modernity.

The interrogatory rhetoric - of the nearly mute aristocrats and of the strategically mumbling Intelligence chief in Russia - plays at a silence which invites the interrogated to fill the gaps, to accede to and participate in a totalized societal speech. What the society evokes is, then, not only passivity and imperviousness, but also a sort of participation taking the peculiar form, however, of confession. Though, as we saw, Conrad was highly critical of Dostoevsky, this novel has characters who echo Crime and Punishment; and of course Razumov's confessional journal represents a development of the novel genre modeled by Dostoevsky, not least in Notes from Underground. Mikulin's interrogation of Razumov draws from him what is desired, confession, collusion, and betrayal, but in a Dostoyevskian confessional form which the interrogating apparatus does not expect and cannot decipher. Against the interrogating rhetoric of the totalized Slavic society, this "Slavic" English novel pits an alternative equally characteristic of Slavic culture - a confessional rhetoric based in a sort of silence.

Totalitarian speech, in sum, ironically and unstably calls forth the upwelling confessional speech it requires, but in a hybrid form undecipherable to it. In a further irony, the opacity of Razumov's confession complicates and reinforces what we have noted is the ironic doubleness of his character, making him simultaneously a haunted Petersburg hero of Eastern genre and origin and a coldly "English" rational Western temperament, though the latter recedes by novel's end. Finally, the novel's narrative structure ironically juxtaposes Razumov's Dostoyevskian confession with the British professor's narration and "translation" of that narrative. A Slavic literary form, then, is paired against and interacts with a more traditional, conventionally Western version of the novel genre, and a mutually deconstructive tension results, measuring Eastern and Western rhetoric against each other.

I'll post the conclusion of this essay next week. 

Here are Amazon links to Conrad's novel and to Dostoyevsky's two works cited above: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics) and Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics)  and Notes from Underground and The Double (Penguin Classics).

Notes on the modern period - 16 - on modern fiction

For information on my political novella about Israel plus “eight stories of the eighties,” please take a look at the page describing my new book Acts of Terror and Contrition – A Nuclear Fable. It’s available from Amazon.com (here's the link: Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable) or from the publisher (click on the cover image to the left).

In some of my first notes on the modern period, I tried to show that Romanticism’s idea of the self has deeply influenced the modern. From 1807 on, Hegel's concept of self-consciousness - as a force which can upend the stability of master-servant relations - resonated in much of the literature and thought of the Romantic period (and of course for later writers, too). Jane Austen’s heroines (as carefully controlled and "ironical" as their presentation is) exemplify the power of self-consciousness as a tool, sensibly utilized it was hoped, to modify rigid class behavior and social assumptions. Emma’s “self,” for example, grows in ambition and self-empowerment to the point that she does harm to others, all as part of her experience of learning to control the force of her character. By the 1850s and 60s, however, the range and force of novelistic self-consciousness and the behavior it stirs threaten to break the deepest social and human bonds, and the “self” of the protagonist grows monstrous in Madame Bovary and in Crime and Punishment.

From its origins, the novel form focuses on the growth and survival of the budding self as it encounters “reality,” engages its nurturing possibilities, and struggles with its blighting forces. As the novel fabricates its fictive beings, the form reveals itself as the very font and model of self-creation, and it naturally yields characters who are themselves self-fabricating. Finally, the peculiar grandeur of this world-rendering, self-creating form reveals the special power and ambition of its social origins in the bourgeoisie, with its own enormous capacity for growth.

A burgeoning enormity of self typifies the characters generated by the great modernist experiments in the novel. And modern authors are implicated in the process, for autobiographical material seems invariably to find its way into the modern masterpieces of the form. There is Marcel Proust’s creation of the autobiographical character and narrator Marcel, crucial among In Search of Lost Time’s core characters, whom Proust terms “giants in time” as they bestride his novel’s colossal, society-encompassing structure. A similar sort of gigantism marks Joyce’s ironic transformation of himself into the autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus, whose struggles and intellect dominate A Portrait and large parts of Ulysses (above all, the novel’s aesthetic structure and ambition); this is not even to mention the degree to which Joyce gives autobiographical qualities also to Leopold Bloom. There are, of course, other powerful examples: Woolf’s autobiographical fictions in To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Mann’s self-implicating summa of western civilization in The Magic Mountain (let alone the autobiographical elements in Buddenbrooks), Conrad’s own Marlovian confrontation with European megalomania, Kafka’s K and Joseph K, Lawrence’s self-searching novels, etc.

For Proust and Joyce, the impulse to fabricate an autobiographical self in fiction arises from their larger ambition: to preserve, to encompass, and also to frame and judge a collapsing world - a disintegrating society and culture. These novelists create a novelistic world capable of encompassing a society grown monstrous on its fare of war, its economic expansions and collapse, and its imperial ambition to regulate human life. In the years just before and following World War One, modern society had become a murderous juggernaut, just as Joyce and Proust published their novels. The seemingly desperate audacity of the modern novel’s aims – the gigantism of its scale and characters – reflects the massive challenge of giving form to and finding signs of life in the enormity of modern life. Even a fundamentally decent figure like Joyce’s everyman Leopold Bloom must inhabit and confront the dimensions of Ulysses’ gigantism. Both modern history and modern fiction can resemble a steamroller which threatens to flatten lives into vast thinned-out representations of the human. In our new century, we participate in a similar experience of monstrosity. It is what we have as the condition of any affirmation in postmodernity. Images of self-destructive and unabated cancerous growth fill the byways and airways of all our activities, economic, political, “cultural,” and medical.

In the face of the rampant growth of self and society, the achievement of the proto-modern novels of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, from the 1850s through the 1870s, is powerfully to engage the dilemma of remaining human – to maintain images of the human even as they undergo a radical redefinition, a simultaneous distension and flattening. The two novelists establish alternative yet equally essential strategies for modern novelists. The clinical realism of Flaubert’s sentences exactly renders characters’ lives; his realism establishes the precise nature and origin of a character’s situation, whether their self-blindnesses, their drowning in a world of things, or their yearning for vision. In Madame Bovary, for example, there is the great cinematic “country fair” scene, in which the rake Rudolf’s hackneyed phrases seducing the unappeasably needy Emma are exactingly paired with the official’s own empty conventional phrases announcing prizes for farm products: “‘Did I know I would accompany you?’ / ‘Seventy francs!’ / ‘A hundred times I tried to leave; yet I followed you and stayed.’ / ‘For manures!’” And the acid climax of this scene of self-aggrandizing public and private manipulations is the image of a final award-recipient: an old peasant woman gnarled and withered by fifty years of hard service and suffering walks forward – “Thus, a half century of servitude confronted these beaming bourgeois.”

At one point, Emma – herself now suffering from the consequences of her enormous appetite to consume things, both material and human – walks in the night, given over to a great aching bout of self-pity, having been rejected by one of her lovers whom she importuned for money. As she walks beneath the stars, Flaubert’s narrator – with a characteristic mix of irony and sympathy – writes as follows of her plea and, by extension, of the novel’s own exacting language in rendering her plea: “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” Our language would fill the unfillable emptiness which is the life of the modern self, grown into a sort of enormity of nothingness, as its self-conscious, self-creating desires consume or, rather, exude extraordinary amounts of destructive energy. It is as if the bourgeois self had grown disproportionate and gigantic in its unquenchable imaginative needs and their impact on society. And the reverse is also true: the burgeoning gigantism of an increasingly destabilized modern society unleashes a distorted, alienated grasping and daring “as never before” in the self.

Emma Bovary’s night plea is only one among many examples of her alienated grasping for life, a grasping which Flaubert’s realism inevitably grounds in psychic emptiness. In contrast, Dostoyevsky renders a similar grasping and daring with quite different aims and techniques. In Crime and Punishment, the opening interior monologue emerges from the mind of Raskolnikov, a “student” character compounded of literate privilege and dire poverty. He is thinking of committing a murder, for his desperate and unmoored ego has grown to the point of contemplating an enormity, a violent breaking of the basic human ‘code;’ even his self-lacerating recriminations have the air of expansive self-dramatizations. These initial paragraphs of the novel draw us into the most dangerous ruminations of the psyche (Freud, of course, saw Dostoyevsky as a source and predecessor), and that psychological realism offers modern novelists a model for rendering the most submerged and potentially monstrous levels of the stream of consciousness.

Yet there is a still deeper point to Dostoyevsky’s explorations of his characters’ psyches. As they enter each other’s lives, these characters encounter a zone of contact, of fluid and unpredictable exchanges, which pressures and requires them to bare their feelings. In an extremity of such baring of self, each human being insinuates himself or herself into the life of the other in what is finally, for each self, a zone or process of creative freedom. In an example of such contact early in Crime and Punishment, there is Raskolnikov’s conversation with Marmeladov, who will stop at nothing in excoriating himself for his drunken exploitation of his daughter, Sonya (she later helps to succor the young protagonist). Here is Marmeladov in action, insinuating, violating boundaries, simultaneously blaspheming and crying out for human contact: “Why pity me, you say? Yes! There’s nothing to pity me for! I ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, and not pitied! But crucify, O judge, crucify, and having crucified, pity the man!...He will pity us who pitied everyone…And when He has finished with everyone, then He will say unto us, too, ‘You, too, come forth!’ He will say, ‘Come forth, my drunk ones, my weak ones, my shameless ones!’ And we will all come forth, without being ashamed, and stand there. And He will say, ‘Swine you are! Of the image of the beast and of his seal; but come, you, too!’” In this zone of contact, Dostoyevsky locates the unrestrained eruption of his characters’ egos; this is an ultimate model for the sort of psychological gigantism which modern novels render and confront.

Here are some links to the above mentioned books: Crime and Punishment (Paperback), Madame Bovary (Penguin Classics), In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses.

My next post will (more briefly, I hope) attempt to explore work by a single modern novelist.

Opening of "Conrad and Silence" - on Under Western Eyes

See Conrad Page for more of this essay.

Published in Slavic and East European Journal 45:2 (2001): 231-242.

Conrad and Silence:
The View of Russia from Under Western Eyes

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In Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad—the English novelist of Polish origin—examines both the West’s images of Slavic life and simultaneously his own imagination of “the Slavic.” The contemporary Western views of Russia in particular are both implicated and illuminated by the novel’s deconstruction of a wide range of assumptions about that country. Conrad’s brilliant, challenging performance here is also one of the culminations of his deepest goal for fiction from Heart of Darkness in 1900 to this work finished a decade later. That goal is to envision human life through the lens of a pervasive, complex, and destabilizing perspectivism, from which both modernism and postmodernism can be seen to proceed—a perspectivism which relentlessly exposes and pursues the question of meaning in human life generally. In this way, the encompassing achievement of Under Western Eyes is to subject the novel’s images of the human to a searching examination and to resist any too easy humanistic recuperation of the imagined lives here. The novel’s still relevant imaginative subversions provoke and intentionally challenge an art made of words, a society based in language, for at its core, this novel’s vision of existence confronts us with the opposition between speech and silence, between meaningful language and its potential erasure by a society based in brutalizing manipulation, propagandistic media, and ruinous violence.

There is a related and even more immediate relevance of Conrad’s novel to con-temporary life, specifically to present-day Russia. The novel’s images of East and West echo and participate with the opposition between silence and speech, particularly speech which is interrogatory or coerced: it is this more specific achievement of Conrad’s which profoundly bears on our contemporary understanding of Russia, and we will turn to it first. I note initially that the paradoxical tensions in Under Western Eyes between speech and silence clearly have correspondences to Conrad’s childhood experience of Poland under Russian domination. After the novelist completed his work, he suffered a profound inner crisis and physical breakdown, for in that novel he reimagines conflicts at the center of his early experience from 1857 to 1874, when he left Poland for Marseilles.

Conrad’s critics and biographers—Fleishman, Hay, Karl, Najder, Said, and others—offer rich insights into the context and details of the writer’s crisis in 1909-10. Particularly Najder illuminates the profound alienation toward Russia felt by Conrad, whose Polish inheritance was opposed to the “Slavonic tradition” (358). As Conrad wrote in “The Crime of [Polish] Partition,” Poland should historically be associated not with Russia but with France as one of the true “centres of liberal ideals” in Europe (117). In his novel of 1910, Conrad confronted in fiction memories of when his family life was consumed by the subjection of Poland by Russia, when his father Apollo Korzeniowski—a patriot and gifted translator into Polish of Hugo, Shakespeare and much else—sacrificed on the altar of his revolt the family’s life, the childhood of his sickly son Joseph and the life of his wife, Eva, who died early in their exile to Russia; Apollo had been sent there in punishment for his political activism, his romantic dedication to agitating for Polish sovereignty. Later, as a British citizen and novelist, Conrad took as his last name the middle name his father gave him, marking himself with the mantle of the heroic figure from Polish romantic poetry, an emblem of his consciousness of Poland.

Five years before writing Under Western Eyes with its vision of human lives driven into silence and negation by Russian subjection, Conrad wrote “Autocracy and War,” the most passionate and delving of his essays about Russia, the Slavic world, and “the Polish problem.” In this essay of 1905, he calls our attention to Bismarck’s comment, “La Russie, c’est le neant!” Russia represents negation for Conrad; it was the region in which the human disappears into nothingness. Nothing “human...could grow” there, he writes; Russian autocracy “succeeded to nothing” and has no “historical future” (97). The force of negation embodied by its rule is expressed through not only its destructiveness toward Poland, but the destructiveness of its effects on all its victims, whether Polish or Russian. In the face of Russia’s “blind absolutism,” no “reform” is possible (96); only a self-defeating “rising of slaves” may occur, never “a revolution fruitful of moral consequences for humanity” (102), for such absolute tyranny is answerable only by absolute, self-destructive opposition, negation by self-negation, in an exfoliating pattern infecting the human universe with the sense of nothingness, of the falsity of all human endeavor. In addition, “every mental activity” is “tainted” there by a Pan-Slavism with its “assertion of purity and holiness” (98). The idea of negation—“le néant”—is finally too tame an indictment of Russia, Conrad asserts, for the word savors of infinity, whereas Russian absolutism tastes of the abyss and swallows the human whole (100). This sense of Russia as a ruinous site, of a failed and negated society has characterized the Western view from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

In such a ruined society, communication itself is seen to be negated, all acts of questioning become hobbled or corrupt, and all answers driven into silence. Language becomes invalidated. For Conrad, Polish—the language of his original culture—had been subjected to a deforming and decisive trauma, so he sought alternative languages, first like so many other Poles in French, and finally English. But in writing this novel of Russia and its impact on human lives, Conrad had to seek new strategies in the language of English fiction to explore the negative universe of silenced lives, and despite his often expressed revulsion for Dostoyevsky, he modeled that part of Under Western Eyes based in a confessional journal on the Russian’s use of deeply searching inside views, his tormented voicings of inner struggle, and his openness to the dark region of psychic suffering; even Conrad’s narrative structure is linked to that of Crime and Punishment, specifically to its parallel action of crime compounded with moral isolation, then extended public as well as private self- interrogation, provisional and protracted upwellings of confession, finally expiation. To note this debt is, however, again to be reminded of the Polish émigré’s agonized crisis in writing his novel during 1909-10, for Dostoyevsky’s vision was—to Conrad—complicit with the Slavic obliteration of humanity and culture Russia represents for him. Among Russian writers, Conrad preferred the “non-Russian” “lucidity” and humanism of Turgenev’s achievement in rendering the “perplexed lives” of “oppressed and oppressors” in Russia; so he writes in an essay of appreciation for that most Flaubertian of Russian writers, admiring his avoidance of Dostoyevskian “extremity” and his refusal to turn his characters into “strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions” (46-7).

Yet to read Under Western Eyes is to encounter just such “damned souls” and “strange beasts.” Razumov, its focal character, is the nearly identity-less illegitimate son of vague ‘noble’ connection; even before he plunges into suffering, we find him profoundly isolated and abjectly dependent on the covert support of his aristocratic protector, as he attends university in St. Petersburg. Conrad appropriates the Dostoyevskian model in creating Razumov and his confessional journal, though the novelist’s mirroring of such a model is ironic and critical. Conrad’s Russian hero possesses a coolly self-protective “English” manner; he is an orphan, himself ironic and temperamentally detached. A vaguely liberal-minded student, he is intent on ‘creating himself’ as a professor, and for the contemporary reader a subversive mirroring is achieved, since—in the English-speaking world—many of the novel’s readers are university students and scholars. (As I photocopied this page, the machine provided by the Administration to the Department obliterated all but the following sentence: Possessing a mediocre soul and an adequate intellect, Razumov planned to become an academic bureaucrat serving what he rationalized to be the necessary order of the current system. Conrad’s text holds the mirror up to interrogate the possibility of betrayal within any academic who would read and face Razumov’s fate.)

The fate of this “damned soul” is to be cut off from origins; initially detached from life and unformed as a human being, he can identify himself with nothing but the abstract patrimony of autocratic Russia; “I am it!” he says at a key moment (148). His detached and uncreated quality of mind is mistaken for profound sympathy by a revolutionary fellow student, Victor Haldin, whose being is utterly focussed on opposition to Russia’s absolute tyranny. Haldin assassinates the head of the Czar’s “notorious Repressive Commission,” he who had written that “‘God was the Autocrat of the Universe’” (8). Haldin arrives then in ill-conceived flight at his acquaintance’s apartment. Razumov is instantly aware that any future career has been obliterated by the suspicion which Haldin’s visit will arouse. In despair about this erasure of his future, he seeks out his protector, Prince K--, who in turn consults with one General T--. With his “goggle-eyes,” the General embodies “the power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible,...the incarnate suspicion, the incarnate anger, the incarnate ruthlessness” (61-2). The two men turn Razumov’s fate over to Councilor Mikulin, in charge of ‘undercover’ work. The Councilor interrogates him and finally appropriates Razumov for his own purposes, and this completes the job of erasing the young man.

Conrad’s creations—Haldin with his fate sealed and Razumov with his tortured and disappearing sense of existence—are just such “damned souls” as Conrad protested against in Dostoyevsky; Razumov exists from then on in the moral isolation arising from both his betrayal of Haldin and the destroyed, destructive identity the establishment offers him—as we find out by novel’s end: the identity of a spy working, exiled from Russia, among Geneva’s Russian émigrés (a community which included Lenin before his journey to the Finland Station). The pressure of his moral solitude increases as he faces experiences which constitute “the revenge of the unknown” (239), intimacies at least of communication particularly with the Russian women he is expected to betray in Geneva: Haldin’s mother and his sister Natalia and a brilliant Russian feminist revolutionary Sophia Antonovna. It is of course Natalia Haldin who provides the epigram on the novel’s title page: “I would take liberty from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread” (97). After a series of provisional and deceptive self-disclosures, Razumov finally confesses his betrayal to Natalia and then to the community at large; ironically, then, one of the “strange beasts” among them—appropriately a secret police counterspy—deafens Razumov’s ears: he will live from then on in a physical silence enacting the moral and societal silence already present in his life.

[And here's an Amazon link to this great novel: Under Western Eyes . Conrad is a powerful influence on my own novel about political extremity - my "nuclear fable" about Israel - here's an Amazon link to that novel  Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable .]

Part i: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

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The music of Alfred Schnittke, who died in August 1998 at age sixty-three, embodies crucial features of the postmodern fate of art. Its signal quality is an encompassing passion for transformation; its lustful and consuming energy seeks to absorb the entire tradition of music, from medieval chant through classical conventions to punk rock. New transformation, new appropriation, is its formal prerogative, whether in music of repose and silvery calm or in the midst of frenzy. Like Karamazov’s buffoonery and the Idiot’s fit, his music consumes all the energy in the Hall of Music, deranging, zapping, and travestying all the disintegrating forms and ruined or falsified vocabularies resounding in the Hall’s grave air. With its “polystylistic” pastiches and travesties of earlier composers, this music has proved to be widely compelling to audiences in Russia and also in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The reasons for its impact reflect on both the nature of postmodernism and the situation of music in recent decades.

In the nineteen-nineties, two discussions of the composer helped to clarify his impact and influence. In 1996, the larger of these studies appeared, Alexander Ivashkin’s Alfred Schnittke in Phaidon’s Twentieth Century Composers series. Here we learn of Schnittke’s Russian, Jewish, and Catholic German background, his early exposure to Viennese musical culture, the formative impact of Shostakovich’s work, and the influence of his teacher Philip Gershkovich’s conception of a polystylistic music, which would echo and absorb the full range of music from pre-Baroque to Webern and beyond. Ivashkin is particularly interested in exposing the hidden content of Schnittke’s music, its “submerged symbolic element” and “spiritual content.” He argues on the basis of its musical echoes of various liturgies that Schnittke’s music conveys and depends on a particularly Russian form of mystical Christianity. Given the extraordinarily wide range of sacred and profane echoes in Schnittke’s music, it is a bit reductive to zero in on its “mysticism.” More interesting than the putative hidden content here is, I think, the intention itself of hiding content. That there are multiple levels of suggested and obscured meanings is characteristic of its musical formations. The significance of its multifarious form is not that it bears a specific meaning but that it enacts the promise of meaning when no meaning can be “spoken”—when meaning-making has become packaged and propagandistic, a usurped if not obliterated activity.

The capability of music to express the potential for meaning when meaningful utterance is obliterated by a society’s apparatus of cliché is a subject approached ten years ago in Richard Taruskin’s delving study of the crises of identity shaping Russian musical history, Defining Russia Musically. It is Shostakovich’s music which Taruskin sees as offering Schnittke a model of musical “polysemy,” a term for the strategically ambiguous voicing of multiple “subtexts and multivalent meanings,” expressing—or, better, insinuating—potentially and simultaneously both “freedom and constraint.” In the repressive context of Soviet society, music (famously, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony) offered “its blessed polysemy, [which] afforded…a consolation no other art could provide.” The dire sense of the Soviet context is most evident in Taruskin’s chapter on Schnittke. In his analysis of the “posteverythingist” composer, Taruskin notes that the late Soviet version of the “’semiotic’ or signaling aspect, a traditional characteristic of Russian music”—say, in the use of “discord”—is transformed by this music into a sort of screen onto which any meaning can be projected in “whatever terms (ethical, spiritual, autobiographical, political) the listener may prefer.” Given its ambiguous and ironic recycling of “prefabricated associations” and bathetic clichés, “the result is socialist realism minus the socialism. It implies dramaturgy and aspires, beyond that, to the condition of philosophy.”

Taruskin is undecided about Schnittke’s realization of this aspiration, and he spends some pages exposing what he perceives to be tasteless and omnivorous exaggeration and bathos: “No other composer so fearlessly recycles cliché.” Yet he also identifies the gamble implicit in Schnittke’s ambiguously transforming into extreme travesty and irony all the bloated entities of musical cliché (whether Soviet dreck or commercialized pablum or academic still-lifes). Where Taruskin perceives the risk of loss—of the failed gamble—Ivashkin hears a quasi-messianic Russian Orthodox strain in Schnittke’s music. Both formulations would do well to acknowledge more generously its key feature: its voracity, a voracious welcoming even of failure and collapse, or especially these, for the lust of appropriation in this music is matched only by its sense of mourning. (In his opera, Life with an Idiot, Schnittke has Proust, Dostoyevskian doubles, and all the others wildly, absurdly waltz about only to collapse in acute pain before our eyes and ears.)

A certain hesitation is understandable in the face of such lustful musical extremity, as we witness the imaginative voracity intensely charging each of his best scores, continually assimilating and transforming musical materials into deracinated and destabilized ambiguity. (One is reminded of Edward Said’s Adornian conceptions—in Musical Elaborations—of transgressive music and of performance as “an extreme occasion.”) Such music enacts a passionate, uncontainable consuming of all music in its path, “without respite, which makes us, the spectators[/listeners], gasp with anguish at the idea that nothing will ever be able to stop it.” These are Artaud words, in “Theatre and the Plague,” describing Giovanni at the climax of “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” Ford’s boundary-violating, genre-exploding Renaissance drama. Schnittke similarly explores a region of transgressive and outrageous travesty, yet it simultaneously ranges into a zone of outraged grief, of mourning for the death of the very forms its so prodigally travesties.