Month: November 2011

Tolstoy’s Emotional Affair

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I’m almost done reading Tolstoy’s recent biography, so I promise to stop bugging everybody with posts on Tolstoy. Just bear with me for a little longer, OK?

Tolstoy never cheated on his wife Sonia in the 48 years they lived together. He was deeply religious and considered marriage to be one of life’s two most important events (the second one being death, which for a Christian is not a negative thing). This is why physical infidelity was unimaginable for Tolstoy. He did, however, have an emotional affair that made his wife suffer tortures of jealousy. She referred to her husband’s spiritual paramour as “a beautiful idol” and “family-breaker.”

“Every day I wait for your letters, I see you in my dreams, I think about you in my every waking moment. What is happening to you? Did I do anything to upset you? I keep thinking about it but have no idea what it is I might have done wrong” writes 62-year-old Tolstoy to the much younger object of his affections.

“Thank you for your recent letter,” writes Tolstoy in response to a missive where nasty insinuations were made about the writer’s wife. “You probably cannot even imagine how happy it made me feel. . . I feel joyous and I love you.”

So who was this person seen by aging Tolstoy as his only true spiritual companion and who undermined the writer’s long marriage, separating him eventually from his wife of 48 years and children?

It was Vladimir Chertkov, a young, mentally disturbed officer who became Tolstoy’s most ardent follower.

In a patriarchal society, such a chasm exists between men and women that even a marriage of 30 or 40 years cannot bridge it. Tolstoy was dying for somebody to share his intellectual, emotional and spiritual life, but it never occurred to him to turn to his wife for the fulfillment of these needs. The curious thing is that the writer’s wife was a lot better suited to the role of Tolstoy’s spiritual companion than Chertkov. She was a much better writer, she understood her husband’s work in a more profound way, and she had a much more varied sphere of intellectual interests.

Yet, no true communion between men and women is possible in patriarchal societies. Homosociality is the only option for people who have emotional and spiritual needs but cannot even imagine turning to their partners in life for the fulfillment of these needs. And this is yet another tragedy of the patriarchy.

“Women who have liberated themselves from the yoke are horrible,” wrote Tolstoy. His intense spiritual loneliness in his own family and the humiliating groveling before young men who used him were the price he paid for this belief.

Sunday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Have you heard about Gisella Perl? If not, you really need to. Please read this great and important post. We should not forget heroes like Gisella Perl.

A great blogger is asking for help.

“Having read the proposed content of the fifth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known by psychologists as DSM-5, I now realise the entire family is a psychiatric basket case and should be ingesting a bucket-load of prescription medication.”

A funny anecdote about teaching.

And this is how Canadians shop for food, at least in Toronto. Warning: this post should not be read on an empty stomach.

For teachers and public speakers: how to preserve vocal health.

A very insightful post on how to discover what it is you really want to be doing.

Does modernity cause autism? This is probably the most profound post I have read about autism in a while.

How to write an article over the winter break. Useful, insightful practical advice.

What’s in store for China?

Striking clothes a woman in Russia makes for herself. The text is in Russian, but don’t mind that. Just look at the photos. This is all hand-made, including the hats and the coats.

It’s so great to find out that I’m not the only person who drops everything and starts making wishes while staring intently at the clock when 11:11 strikes. How come such superstitions transcend all possible borders?

This is the most offensive, nasty piece of garbage anybody could have come up with in response to the Sandusky rape allegations. I strongly suspect that the person who wrote this article is being paid to discredit the cause of feminism. Surely, nobody can really be that dense?

Toothless feminism: I kept yelling “yes” to every word of this post, which made my husband suspect I was watching porn instead of reading posts on feminism.

Well-deserved ridicule for Russia’s ridiculous election-time propaganda.

Pseudo-Liberal Self-Identification

~ Clarissa ~ 21 Comments

It seems like pseudo-Liberals try to outdo each other in ridiculous self-representations. Here is the most recent one I encountered:

Coca Colo is a graduate student in economics who researches gender issues and international development.  She has white, cis, hetero and US privilege, but is also a religious and ethnic minority.  She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The statement makes me wonder what the blogger would do if she belonged to no minority to compensate for all that nasty privilege she has. It’s possible that the article that is introduced in this manner makes some important points. However, I feel no desire to continue reading it because the way in which its author introduces itself is so artificial, boring and unintelligent that it’s hard to expect anything useful from the article.

Slavoj Zizek tells a story of his encounter with the humorless earnestness of American pseudo-Liberals in one of his books. He was visiting an American university, and the professor who invited him organized a round table with his colleagues.

“First, let me introduce myself,” the host said, “and then everybody can do the same. I’m a heterosexual, cisgendered, middle-class American.”

Then, everybody around the table introduced themselves in the same way.

Zizek says he was petrified. The idea of introducing himself by mentioning his sexual orientation to a group of complete strangers seemed both weird and useless.

In my opinion, people who present themselves with these strings of meaningless collective identifications do so in order to compensate for lack of any individuality. As a blogger, one could choose the road of developing a distinctive personal writing style that readers would immediately recognize. That, of course, is hard and requires a lot of time, energy, and effort. It is much easier to create a pseudo-Liberal persona on the basis of important-sounding terms that create an illusion of a personality where there is none.

Are Horrible Acts Always Horrible?

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Reader Kinjal says:

People ought to be judged according to the times and social mores they lived in.

I disagree with this statement profoundly. I believe that horrible acts such as rape, murder, torture, abuse of children, and pedophilia are always horrible. Their evilness is immanent and does not depend on when the perpetrator lived and what his or her society sanctioned. If you abstain from doing horrible things only because you are afraid of retribution, what is the value of your morality?

Tolstoy raped his wife. In my eyes, he is as much of a vile rapist as anybody who lives today and does the same thing. He saw a human being in pain, crying, begging him to stop, suffering because of what he was doing to her. And he somehow didn’t know that it was wrong because nobody told him that it was? And then he continued doing it many times over because he kept not knowing? I just can’t buy that.

Major crimes like the one I listed are not relative. Some people are capable of them and some aren’t. Different times and changing social norms are just an excuse used to justify perpetrators and disgusting creatures who mask as human beings.

On Tolstoy, Feminism, and 1%ers

~ Clarissa ~ 47 Comments

I’m reading a new biography of Leo Tolstoy by Pavel Basinsky. There is no translation yet, so I can’t link to it, but I wanted to share my impressions nonetheless. (If you read in Russian, though, here is the book.)

First of all, I’m really traumatized by the story of Tolstoy’s poor wife, Sonia. If you have read Tolstoy’s Kreutzer’s Sonata, you probably already can imagine the extent of Tolstoy’s contempt for women. It turns out, however, that the writer’s wife wrote her own response to Kreutzer’s Sonata and narrated her side of their marital drama. When Tolstoy married Sonia, he was a very sexually experienced man of 35, while she was a very innocent young girl of barely 18. The way young women from “good families” were brought up at that time made them more ignorant of human sexuality than any of today’s 5-year-olds. Sonia saw her entire married life with Tolstoy as a series of rapes he constantly perpetrated against her. And this was Tolstoy, a great humanist, a deeply religious person, a philosopher whose ideas of non-violent resistance to evil later inspired Gandhi. One can only imagine what less humanistically inspired men did to their wives.

Sonia gave birth to 13 children, eight of whom survived. She spent 10 years of her life pregnant and 13 years nursing. Tolstoy insisted that she keep having children as long as she physically could, even though doctors insisted it put her life at risk. He also prevented her from getting wet nurses for her children because he believed that “breast is best.” Those who are still not sure of the value of feminism will be well-served to read about Sonia’s life and ask themselves how fair is the system where Sonia’s kind of existence was actually the best a woman could hope for.

Tolstoy was a count, a landowner, a celebrity, and a very rich man. In the last decades of his life, however, he became deeply ashamed of his existence as a 1%er and dreamt of joining the 99% in their life of hardship, poverty, and hard labor. For years, he tried to convince his family to get rid of all their property and begin living the life of poor peasants. When it became clear that they were not interested, Tolstoy ran away from home and started putting into practice his plan of being a 99%er. Of course, in the very first village he reached on his journey, he discovered that he had left behind his nail-brush, his favorite cushion, and a special ink-well that had been created especially for him. And what peasant can do without an ink-well and a nail-brush? It is not surprising that Tolstoy only survived 10 days of living as a regular Russian 99%.

I read all 14 volumes of Tolstoy’s Collected Works when I was a teenager and I always considered all of the fiction he wrote to be of very little value, except one novel, Resurrection. From Basinsky’s biography of Tolstoy, I discovered that there was one person who agreed with my evaluation of the writer’s novelistic production: Tolstoy himself. In his later years, he repudiated everything he wrote before Resurrection, including the supremely boring War and Peace and the failed attempt at imitating the French realists that is Anna Karenina.

Wall Decorations

~ Clarissa ~ 22 Comments

I don’t feel envy often but there is one thing that makes me envious to the point of giving me heartburn. It’s wall decorations. Sometimes, you walk into an apartment, and the walls are so beautifully decorated with original framed posters, quilts, and what not.

I’ve moved so many times that, of course, the number of things I own had to be reduced to the bare minimum. Besides, I come from a culture where the art of decorating walls did not exist. Our walls were papered, and then nobody was allowed tot ouch them, lean against them, or breath on them. So now I sit here, surrounded by mostly bare white walls, feeling vastly inferior to all those people who have mastered the art of wall decoration.

So I decided to ask my readers for advice. What do you have on your walls? Any suggestions are welcome, except photos of relatives. I don’t think I can deal with having relatives stare at me as I try to live my life. If people want to leave links to things they bought for their walls or always wanted to buy, that will be highly appreciated, too. If you have links to photos you posted of your own walls anywhere, feel free to leave them as well.

Thank you!

“I Like Women Without Makeup”

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

I keep getting asked whether men who say they like women with no makeup are to be trusted. So here is the answer.

Anybody who makes the following statements:

– I am attracted to women with / without makeup / in pants / in dresses / young / old, etc.;

– I am attracted to men who wear jeans / business suits / young / old / look like Brad Pitt, etc.

. . . is either extremely immature or represents a clinical case of unhealthy sexuality that needs to be avoided. Mature people feel attraction for specific individuals. The number of those individuals is immaterial and can vary widely. In any case, mature sexuality doesn’t get excited about concepts (women in skirts, rich men, young women, men who play a guitar). It gets aroused by concrete, existing people. (Brad Pitt doesn’t count unless you know him in person.)

Talking to Myself

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

If an uncomfortable, unpleasant situation persists in your life for a significant amount of time, the important thing to remember is that this situation would not have been possible without your active enabling. If you keep finding yourself in the same kind of victimhood, it means you need this victimhood for some reason. If people keep leeching off of you, if somebody continuously acts as a parasite towards you, this means you have enabled them and keep doing it because this is what you need. Without analyzing the roots of this need, the problem will not be resolved.

Anxiety and guilt devour our energy. The causes of anxiety and guilt are always internal. If we choose to retain them in our lives, it means they serve important purposes for us. Some of these purposes might be precisely to rob ourselves of energy because change and progress might be terrifying.

Today I declare the day of getting ourselves of parasites that devour our lives, our energy, our sense of self. Who is your parasite, and what profound need leads you to keep saddling yourself with him or her?

Debt-Free Education

~ Clarissa ~ 81 Comments

I keep hearing about people who struggle under mountains of debt they accumulated as a result of getting a college degree. This is why I decided to do a little promotional activity for my own university.

Tuition for in-state residents of our state university is just $8,864.80 per year (that’s just $739 per month). Tuition includes textbook rental, so the expense of textbooks is covered. I find this kind of tuition to be very reasonable, especially since there is also a great number of scholarships and grants both on the state and federal level.

Many of our students choose to live off campus, but if you want an on-campus experience, your room and board will cost you $8,051.00 per year. This is a price I also consider very reasonable. The room and board cost the same for out-of-state students. Tuition for them, however, is higher and runs to the amount of $18,809.80 (or $1567 per month). This isn’t low, but it is still a lot less than at many other places.

So what do you get in return for this money? Our university made a very smart decision to keep hiring aggressively during the years of the recession. In 2009, when I was hired, the majority of universities canceled or suspended their searches for tenure-track professors. I estimate that at least 60% of all applications I’d sent out returned to me with a letter saying that the search had been cancelled due to the recession. Our university, however, realized that this was the best time to bring a wave of enthusiastic, promising young academics to our campus. I was one of 55 new tenure-track profs hired in that year. Next year, we hired 40+ people. And these hiring efforts continued the year after that.

As a result, we now have a big group of young scholars who graduated from great schools and are very active in research. Nobody else wanted us but this university did. And it offered us great conditions of employment, too, instead of trying to exploit the desperate situation of recent PhD graduates, like some other schools did.

Our undergrads are taught by actual professors on all levels. This doesn’t happen at Ivy League schools where two thirds of undergrad courses are not taught by professors. You can go through your entire Major at certain Ivy League schools without ever taking a course taught by a person with a PhD.

Our university does everything it can to update its technology. None of the universities where I worked before coming here had anything similar to the kind of technology we get here. And I’m talking about really prestigious, famous schools where tuition is several times greater than what it is here. For language and culture courses, for example, it makes all the difference in the world to have satellite television from Spain, a languages lab, a plasma screen to show movies, computers in the classroom, sound systems, etc. It’s one thing to make photocopies of the Mayan pyramids and distribute them to students. It is a completely different experience to show them the pyramids on a huge screen.

Of course, we don’t have anything similar to the prestige of Ivy League schools. However, having studied and taught at the Ivies, I believe that this prestige is not worth getting in debt for. If you are from a background that offers you connections with important people, you’ll have those connections anyways. If you are from a poorer background, you will be a pariah at your Ivy and all that money you pay to be there will be wasted.

In the US, it is more than possible to get a good college degree for a very reasonable amount of money. I strongly recommend that you consider us or any other state university before getting into ruinous debt to pay for nothing but a cool-sounding name. As an added bonus, you might get taught by me, or somebody like me. And that’s nothing to be sneezed at. 🙂

Tolstoy on Joy

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

The meaning of life, its goal is joy. Feel joyous as you look at the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, the animals, the people. And make sure that nothing spoils this joy. If the joy disappears, this means you made a mistake somewhere. You need to look for this mistake and correct it.

  – Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy is not one of my favorite writers but this statement is impossible to disagree with. Many people accept misery or, in the best of cases, lack of any strong emotions about their existence as the normal state of affairs while exultant joy and happiness are seen as rare aberrations. It shouldn’t be that way, though. If we possess the capacity to feel intensely happy, then this skill should be put to use as often as possible.