Nature has conspired to create a real break for me from anything that can make me feel restless. There was a massive hailstorm in our area on Saturday and now the Internet is out. I can only access it when I’m around public wi-fi, like right now.

When I was thinking about the next post in this series, the following old joke was coming to mind. A Russian nouveau riche brings Christmas lights to a store and says, “They are broken, I want to return them.”

“What’s wrong with them?” the shop assistant asks.

“They light up, they are bright, they are pretty,” the nouveau riche says. “But they bring no joy.”

In college, I discovered that intellectual growth brought unrivaled, almost physiological pleasure. In the undergrad years, I had a calendar where I crossed out the days left until the end of holidays because all I wanted to be back in class.

And these days, I have books, I’m enormously better equipped to do my own research, I have a lot more time to dedicate to intellectual growth, but the joy is elusive.

One reason why joy has left the building is that academia is very depressive. Even the best among us sigh more than they speak and find joy exclusively in swapping worst-case scenarios.

Another reason is that experiencing life as joyful is incredibly much harder in tiny towns than in big cities. Nobody makes an effort to live beautifully, and that takes all joy out of existence.

Every once in a while, I do manage to recreate a distant glimmer of the enthusiasm and happiness I felt at a library or with a book in my hands 15 years ago. But turning this into a permanent state of being is still a project in its early stages.

I’ve been wondering, does anybody want to talk about the Eurovision? I know I have many European readers, and it seems wrong not to give them a chance to discuss something that means so much to them.

Do you like this year’s winner, Conchita? Was your country unfairly down voted? Would you want your country to win? Was there, in your opinion, an ideological statement implied in this year’s Eurovision?

Let’s discuss! Or if you believe Eurovision is trivial and there are more crucial things to discuss, you can start discussing them in this thread, too.

And for those with the especially severe anal stage trauma, our neighborhood bookstore offers this, right next to its 24 shelves of Bibles:
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People are unhappy that I said the Anglos’ best quality is that they are patient plodders. I do believe this is one of the best qualities a person can have and see that the Anglos do think so too, even though they might protest aloud.

For instance, my students always easily accept that they might have all kinds of intellectual limitations. “Yes, I’m not good with writing,” “You are right, I hate reading,” “Yes, my vocabulary is limited,” “I have no analytic skills,” “I’m very bad with technology,” etc. they say very easily.

But God forbid I say something like, “It seems that you didn’t work as hard on this as you could have,” they invariably explode.

“No! I worked hard! I worked extremely hard! I’m just bad at this! But I worked for 6 hours every day! For weeks! I just have no capacity for literary analysis, that’s all!”

I’m from a different culture, so I can accept a lot more easily that I was lazy and didn’t work than that I might simply be a bit stupid.

So. I finally graded my very last exam. And WWII at my department also ended 20 minutes ago. It was a real world war and it was the second in the history of the department. So I will celebrate the victory in WWII today, in spite of myself. A veritable cloud has been removed from my horizon. And it seems to be final that we are getting The Hedgehogs.

Now I will send the diet to hell for the day, eat a mountain of pelmeni with pickled cabbage, take a restorative shower, plaster a mask on my face, get into bed, and watch 10 episodes if Shark’s Tank while reading Dreiser’s biography. This was a very difficult academic year and now it’s over and I’m adopting a completely new persona. Time to celebrate and rest.

And of all the things I ever had to grade, the following one is the absolute all-time winner:

As the professor explained in class, Sonnet CXCI by Lope de Vega demonstrates that women are just like people.

I especially love this gem of an idea being attributed to me. What I like even more is that this was written by a woman.

This was written over a decade ago, so please, please don’t judge it too harshly. My writing sucked, I know, I’m over it. I’m just publishing it because one of my favorite readers and commenters asked. 

One of the most fascinating issues surrounding the history of the modernist art in the XXth century is its relationship with the totalitarian regimes that are themselves an invention of this century. There are interesting parallels in the way that modernist art was treated in the Soviet Union, the Nazi Germany and the Fascist Italy. It has been pointed out that in their fight for power, and then in the first years of working towards establishing their respective regimes Communists, Nazis and Fascists did not reject or persecute the artistic avant-gardes. To the contrary, as Eksteins demonstrates in Rites of Spring, there are numerous affinities between the modernist way of seeing the world and the ideas that brought Nazis to power in Germany. In the case of the Soviet Union, avant-garde artists were not initially controlled by the government. More than that, as Margolin points out in The Struggle for Utopia, these artists wanted to participate in the project that the communists were supposedly trying to carry out, and strived to either adapt their art to these goals, or to interpret it in ways that would be helpful to the program of changing the society. Yet again, there seems to be a genuine interest on the part of the modernist artists towards this political system, and even a certain identification with its goals. As for Fascist Italy, as Stone demonstrates in The Patron State, Fascist cultural functionaries created a system of patronage in which avant-garde artists were afforded an unparalleled government support irrespective of the political content of their work and their artistic affiliations. At the same time, some groups of modernist artists, such as the Futurists, genuinely and consistently supported Fascist ideas and the Fascist government, seeing them as related to and reflective of their own vision.

In spite of the initial support that these totalitarian regimes first accorded to the artistic avant-gardes and the modernists’ affinities with some of the ideas that inspired the rise to power of Nazism, Fascism and Communism, there comes a point in the history of all three of these regimes when they reject, to a greater or lesser degree, the modernist art they initially supported. While the Nazis in Germany organize the Degenerate Art Exhibition to signal their dismissal of this kind of art, there is a similar (although a less successful, as Stone demonstrates) tendency to denounce modernist art in Fascist Italy. In the most extreme case of all, the Soviet Union not only completely withdraws its support for avant-garde artists, but also chooses to prohibit creative efforts in any style other than that of Socialist Realism. The Western modernism, and later post-modernism, would not be criticized or denounced for the simple reason that their very existence will be concealed from the reading public. Taking into the account the initial attraction between the ideas that inspire modernist art and the ideology that brings to power these totalitarian systems, one is bound to wonder: why do these political regimes always seem to arrive at a point where they feel the necessity to reject, condemn and even conceal the existence of modernist art? If, as Stone suggests, “the dictatorships of the twentieth century all located aesthetics at the core of their centralizing drives” (3), and the aesthetics in question was that of modernist art, then why would this aesthetics eventually come to be perceived by the dictators as incompatible with the needs of their totalitarian regimes?

Continue reading “The Fate of Modernist Art in the Totalitarian Systems: Love or Hate?” →

Fascist ideology has won the day in Russia and the Russian people gleefully support all of the tenets of fascist thinking. Today, Russia is celebrating its victory over Nazism, but how can there be a victory when you fully adopt the ideology you think you defeated 69 years ago?

Hitler, Franco and Mussolini would have approved of what Russia is like today. And that is a real tragedy.

I was going to post that I think I won the Americanization challenge but then I talked about it with my BFF who is a real American and said, “I even had my very first PB&J and I liked it even though I’m not into desserts.”

The BFF looked appalled.

“PB&J is not dessert!” she exclaimed.

“What is it then?” I wondered.

“It’s lunch,” she explained.

This sounded so weird to me that I realized I wasn’t yet nearly as Americanized as I thought.

I miss my BFF!

My parents are getting their Ukrainian passports back and will vote in the upcoming presidential elections in Ukraine. My Jewish father was always a passionate Ukrainian nationalist and speaks the best Ukrainian in the family. My Ukrainian mother, however, used to be a great Russophile and routinely drove us all to distraction with her, “We are Russian people” and “Russia is our country.”

In the light of the recent events, even my mother lost her desire to identify with Russia and is considering switching to Ukrainian full time.

The other day, my mother was at a hardware store back in Montreal and was trying to explain, in her broken English, what she needed to the store assistant.

“Do you speak any other language?” the store assistant finally asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Ukrainian.”

“Oh, then I’m sure you speak Russian, too!” the assistant said, switching to Russian.

“No,” my mother said. “Just Ukrainian.”

The fighting is now taking place around Gorlovka and Kramatorsk, and that’s where my mother is from. The Russian culture was all good until Russian troops started killing people in Ukraine and Russian media began to ramp up egregious lies against Ukraine.

For the first time ever, my mother, a daughter of a WWII veteran, will not be celebrating the victory in the war on May 9. Somebody recently wrote that the victory in the war was used to legitimate the existence of the USSR. That is a ridiculous thing to say. At the beginning of the war in 1941, Stalin realized that if he wanted people to fight, he needed to give them something to fight for. He allowed the previously forbidden word “Motherland” to be brought back from oblivion. And of course every soldier had his or her own Motherland in mind during battle. We didn’t even know the words “World War II” back in the USSR. Our war was called The Great Patriotic War.

The genie of nationalism can’t be stuffed back into the bottle once you let it emerge, and there was an intense revival of nationalist feelings after the war. WWII signalled the rebirth of nationalism even for the Jewish people who had been the most reliable supporters of the Soviet authorities before the war. Stalin is said to have been absolutely horrified at the crowds of Jews who came out to great Golda Meyer during her visit to Moscow.

War brought out patriotic feelings then and it does so now. Many people who were completely indifferent to Ukraine are now learning the language and exploring the culture. There are even quite a few “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine who are trying to renounce Russian and switch to Ukrainian.