Ken’s Comments (group member since Jan 21, 2020)

Ken’s comments from the The Obscure Reading Group group.

Sara wrote: "Thanks Ken. This will give me a chance to go back and read everything on the group bookshelf. 🤓"

Well, there's THAT! (smiley emoticon here)

In case people don't read the Group Home Page description (where it's been posted since July), I'll add it here. The ORG is taking a little respite. As stated on the homepage:

July 2024 update: This group is going on hiatus due to low participation in recent discussions. Like a phoenix, however, it reserves the right to fly up from the ashes!

Thanks, all. And happy fall!

Nice quotes from Serge via Sontag, Kathleen. So true. Though this book is about both politics (Communism run amok) and history (the Soviet ouroboros), it is much more than that. Its intricate architecture is an amalgam of portraits in bravery, indifference, and sensuality. The living creatural world is right (though the word "creatural" looks made up, showing the additional benefit of a poetic license -- I keep one handy at all times).

Are there any readers playing catch-up, or is this the Kathleen, Craig, and Ken show (an alliterative show, for sure).

I forgot to mention in Week One a connection made to my own family. Most of the Polish I learned from my Polish grandmother came in the form of swears. What's weird is how they didn't directly translate to English swearwords. For instance, I remember one translated to "Dog's blood!" (not exactly a vicious profanity on these shores).

Anyway, the Comrade Tulayev connection: multiple times characters shout, "Cholera!" That was one of the swears I recall my grandmother used in Polish (sounding something like "Ho-let-a!"). I asked her why cholera was a swear word, and she said you could never wish anything worse on a person.

Thus, I figured most readers were confused by the exclamation. Me, I got it right away. Apparently as fearful a curse in Russia as Poland!

Sorry about the aches and the pains (which follow the weather, at times).

I thought it was brilliant the way Serge wrote about her departure from France, too. Smart girl, she refused to go, but go she did, with a unique mixture of carrot and stick from the Soviet agent sent to bring her back to face the music.

One of my favorite chapters in the entire book was the penultimate -- the appropriately named "Let Purity Be Treason" -- which, in its first half, features one of the few major female characters in the book, Popov's young daughter, Xenia.

And what a breath of fresh air her innocence and "purity" is after all the Soviet drudgery, bureaucracy, and fear! Set in Paris, yet, a bastion of bourgeois excess if ever there was one!

From p. 305, Xenia's take of the French capital she is visiting:

"It was a minute and peaceful universe, where people lived without discussing Plan quotas, without fearing purges, without devoting themselves to the future, without considering the problems of Socialism."

When Xenia visits Professor Passereau to seek his intervention in the fate of Kiril Rublev, scheduled to be executed for his part (read: "non-part") in the death of Comrade Tulayev, the good professor, like all other Soviet satellites living in fear, begs off as a means of protecting his own skin.

"Well, mademoiselle," he says, "I beg you to believe that you have my deepest sympathy... I assure you... It is terrible... Revolutions devour their children -- we French have learned that only too well... the Girondins, Danton, Hébert, Robespierre, Babeuf... It is the implacable movement of history...

"In short, mademoiselle, it seems to me that all hope is not lost. If Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice..."

Xenia: "Do you mean to say you believe that?"

"Professor Passereau tore yesterday's sheet from the calendar. This young woman in white, with her beret askew, her hostile mouth and eyes, her uneasy hands, was a strange being, vaguely dangerous, swept into his peaceful study by a sort of hurricane. If his imagination had been literary, Passereau would have compared her to a stormy petrel, and she made him uncomfortable."

If only there had been more to stand up and make the powers-that-be uncomfortable. Of course, Xenia, like all others, will pay a price...

This thread covers the whole book, so in the almost-words of Susan Sontag, "Stalin spoilers" are allowed.

Jannifer wrote: "I'm in the middle of chapter 5. It's interesting the way Tulayev was assassinated simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, not simply because of timing but it was completel..."

Great point on the randomness coming up against the Soviet leadership's insistence on some organized plot that must be uncovered. Is it because the Soviet leadership traffics in this sort of thing itself? I think of the assassination of Trotsky himself, for instance, wherein Stalin sent someone all the way to Mexico to make the hit.

There's this inherent sense that people are hardwired for story, and any death involving a high official must have a plot planned well in advance with a wide net of co-conspirators. The thought that some Ivan, Dick, or Harry of the proletariat might just stumble upon a Communist bigwig, off him, and get on with his evening does not compute. Or sell with the public. Important people demand important schemes, even when it comes to their sudden and untimely demises. Heads must roll, or at the very least be sent to Kamchatka to play RISK.

Craig wrote: "Thanks to Ken and Kathleen for getting this going. I’ve only now finished chapter 5, ( I was floating on a stone raft) and find myself, as always when reading Russian lit., struggling to follow who..."

You are not alone on confusing personalitles at times. One of the challenges of episodic books like this, Russian or not, is the changes in characters from chapter to chapter. You no sooner get comfortable with a character and he (for it is mostly "he" in this one) disappears. Literally disappears in the case of "The Chief's" purges.

Yes, I finished the book and now the introduction (cart before horse). Are there other comrades in the union? Whistle blowers like Serge? Let's pray to the illegal God it's so! ;-)

Just finished the Intro. One valuable miss from skipping it (because it tells you who dies) is that the character referred to as "the Chief" is Stalin himself. Duh. Right over my head. Or under my feet, maybe.

I was also surprised by the comparison to Darkness at Noon a book I've heard of but never read. Also about the Stalin purges, only with the advantage of a single protagonist start to finish.

This book, Sontag insists, is much more sophisticated with a more complex narrative structure. If you want to call them "protagonists," you might go with the Ch. 1 "little guys" Kostia and Romachkin.

The proletariat! The people! What Communism is supposed to be all about!

Supposed to be.

Kathleen wrote: "True. But then I think sometimes, because I drive a lot, of how much I have to put my full faith and trust in the other drivers on the road, when I just want to go from A to B, and how much I actua..."

Point taken. And it's not just crazy drivers. It's crazy gunmen with SCOTUS-approved bump stocks! Whistle past Graveyard A on your way to Graveyard B, as they say.

Anyway, back to our young Soviet gunman, last seen in Chapter the First....

We Americanos like to say that we are now living in something previously unheard of -- a post-Truth world -- thanks to certain individuals whose every word is a lie, but this book puts the lie in that conceit. I think ABSURD is a perfect word -- though certainly not one we typically see associated with murder.

Of course the randomness and the mystery (to the characters) would never play out today where politicians are surrounded by security details (not that this in itself can prevent assassinations). Our man Tulayev is truly on his own the night of his unfortunate event. In retrospect, it seems crazy that a man with that many enemies would hazard a walk from A to B under such circumstances, but then, when you think of it, so does the thought of an American president traveling through a city of high-rise buildings in an open convertible some thirty-plus years after the events of this book.

How weird to see the names "Colt" and "Browning" bandied about in the yet young Soviet Union under the notorious Josef Stalin!

And a gun (from above Chekhov's mantel?) does indeed play a key role early on in this episodic novel that gives us waves of Soviet stalwarts -- the Old Guard as well as New Blood. To put it mildly, all hell slowly breaks loose when a random act of violence creates the "case" that Serge will riff off of for the rest of the book.

Were you as surprised as I was at how "minor" this "major" event was treated in the early going? I mean, that's quite the dramatic irony he pulls off here, treating his reading audience to a key secret that the vast majority of other characters will be denied. And oh, how it tears at the deepest innards of their political beings with all kinds of repercussions that spread further and further as time plays out.

IMPORTANT NOTE TO NYRB READERS:

If you have the nyrb paperback, I'd skip the Susan Sontag introduction, as it contains spoilers. I cannot fathom why otherwise astute publishers categorize Afterwords as Introductions.

Yes, you can argue it's the ART people want to enjoy and Sontag is championing Serge's underappreciated talent (somewhat obscure status), but some people want to enjoy the STORY and CHARACTERS while they're at it.

Luckily, due to the Russian names, I will probably forget all the "this one dies, this one is arrested" etc.

Kathleen wrote: "Okay, I just want to say--this is SOOOO good!!

I'm reading the same NYRB edition, but on Internet Archive. It's slower going for me because of reading online, but I'm about 100 pages in. I did ski..."

Always good to hear before launching into a book, Kathleen!

The reading schedule is up! I have the nyrb edition, which totals 362 pp.

I'll be wading into Susan Sontag's Introduction first. Back soon!

Welcome, Comrades, to what's deemed to be "the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges... a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernie Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate."

We will split this book in half, chapter-wise, with the following schedule:


WEEK ONE (June 15--June 22) Discuss Chapters 1-5 (have materials read up to p. 168 if in the NYRB paperback edition).

WEEK TWO (June 23--30) Discuss Chapters 6-10 (end of book).

See you on the Ides of June.

Just a reminder, as we enter the stretch drive of May, that the first of two June discussions begins on June 1st (next Sat., a week from tomorrow).

It's a two-week discussion of The Stone Raft hosted by Cherisa, and you'd only have to have the first half of the book completed by the first. The rest of the book should be ready to discuss beginning the 8th.

Following this, on 15 June, we will begin our discussion of The Case of Comrade Tulayev hosted by the law firm of Me, Myself, and I. Again, only the first half of the book need be done by the Ides of June. The rest is for the last week of said month. Set in the time of Stalinist purges, it has some topical applications because history has a tendency to repeat itself. (Have you noticed?)

OK, comrades. Happy Memorial Day and I hope, after honoring those who served to protect our country and Constitution from liars and mountebanks (like the Duke and the Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn and, er, some modern-day politicians as well), you get some reading in!

Fergus, Quondam Happy Face wrote: "Ken, I checked Tilayev and it is pricey beyond my current means. Yikes! Mind if I bow out of joining the discussion group on the 15th? Sorry about this. But I'll be there for the Saramago! It's so ..."

No problem, Fergus. The paperback is $16.74 at amazon dot glom but maybe more in Oh, Canada! Me, I'm lucky. I can get a copy freebies through the interlibrary program.

As for you, it's yeoman duty to read and participate in ONE of the two June discussions, so no worries!