Alexandra Popoff's Blog - Posts Tagged "robert-conquest"
Notes on Political Correctness
In January 2018 the conservative National Review magazine published a piece The Most Ridiculous PC Moments of 2017 . The comedian and television personality Katherine Timpf commented on eleven nonsensical episodes of political correctness on campus and elsewhere.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article...
“Novelists are now employing ‘sensitivity readers’ in order to make sure that they don’t portray fictional characters from other communities in an inaccurate way. Note: No one actually knows how to portray a fictional person ‘accurately,’ because fictional people do not exist. In all seriousness, this trend is a terrifying one that threatens to ruin the art of fiction as we know it.”
I believe the comedian is right. Political correctness has gone too far. It threatens freedom of expression at universities and in publishing.
Thus, the PC people propose we stop studying Shakespeare and Mark Twain. They intimidate writers and publishers by setting off online outrage against books they deem offensive. But the definition of “offensive” is vague. It can be endlessly stretched. This is why hiring “sensitivity readers” will not always work. Someone who looks for cultural stereotypes will find them between the lines.
When in 2009 my book, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography was being published, my editor insisted on removing the word “black” from the following paragraph: “A famous tragedian of the day, the black American actor Ira Aldridge, was on tour in Russia and his performance in Moscow was not to be missed.” Ira Aldridge was playing Othello, so I failed to understand how this could be offensive and did not budge. In the end, my editor, who threatened to delay my book’s publication, backed off.
Today there’s also much ado over the issue of cultural appropriation. I find this issue highly confusing and debatable. A few years ago at a writers’ conference an aspiring Canadian writer, a German immigrant married to an aboriginal man, asked whether she can write a fictional story about her neighbors on an Indian reserve. She said she attempted to publish her stories, but was always refused––not because her stories were bad, but because of the cultural appropriation issue. She argued that she did not write outside her immediate experience: she lived with an aboriginal man next to the reserve. “Does the Canadian government prohibit writers of non-aboriginal ancestry to explore aboriginal subjects?” she asked.
When it comes to cultural appropriation I also want to ask seemingly naïve questions. What does it mean to write outside one’s own cultural experience? Journalists, scholars, artists, and writers have always explored unchartered territories with success. (As in the Shakespearean play cited above.)
The best and most comprehensive nineteenth-century dictionary of the Russian language was compiled by Vladimir Dahl, neither an ethnic Russian nor a trained lexicographer. Dahl, whose father was Danish and whose mother was of mixed German and French ancestry, had served in the Russian Navy and was later trained as a military doctor. Yet, his dictionary of the Russian language informed generations of writers, including Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Some of the most influential books on Ukraine’s famine were written by Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, also the author of the Gulag. Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine has just been named the 2018 world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs.
For centuries foreigners produced illuminating and astute travel accounts. George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia captures ethnographies and histories of Siberia’s native peoples. This book continues to inform audiences, and no one yet complained about cultural appropriation.
Are we traveling less in the age of globalization? Can we travel and can explore another culture but cannot write about it? Was Life of Pi, Yan Martel’s best-selling novel about India, cultural appropriation? The truth is––nobody cares.
Yet, a Canadian editor of Write magazine Hal Niedzviecki was forced to resign for urging white middle-class writers to explore “the lives of people who aren’t like you.” In 2017 a campaign of shaming was launched against him and his supporters.
Would these PC people shame the French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin for his Tahiti paintings?
This March I learned that the Cambridge Dictionary will include the term “cultural appropriation” and will define it as cultural theft.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/...
Actually, writers and artists do not steal from other cultures––they create their own work, which enriches us globally.
Cultural appropriation strikes me as a brainchild of a radical minority, empowered by social media.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and the notion of enforced “political correctness” brings back the memory of political censorship.
Do we want censorship in the free world?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article...
“Novelists are now employing ‘sensitivity readers’ in order to make sure that they don’t portray fictional characters from other communities in an inaccurate way. Note: No one actually knows how to portray a fictional person ‘accurately,’ because fictional people do not exist. In all seriousness, this trend is a terrifying one that threatens to ruin the art of fiction as we know it.”
I believe the comedian is right. Political correctness has gone too far. It threatens freedom of expression at universities and in publishing.
Thus, the PC people propose we stop studying Shakespeare and Mark Twain. They intimidate writers and publishers by setting off online outrage against books they deem offensive. But the definition of “offensive” is vague. It can be endlessly stretched. This is why hiring “sensitivity readers” will not always work. Someone who looks for cultural stereotypes will find them between the lines.
When in 2009 my book, Sophia Tolstoy: A Biography was being published, my editor insisted on removing the word “black” from the following paragraph: “A famous tragedian of the day, the black American actor Ira Aldridge, was on tour in Russia and his performance in Moscow was not to be missed.” Ira Aldridge was playing Othello, so I failed to understand how this could be offensive and did not budge. In the end, my editor, who threatened to delay my book’s publication, backed off.
Today there’s also much ado over the issue of cultural appropriation. I find this issue highly confusing and debatable. A few years ago at a writers’ conference an aspiring Canadian writer, a German immigrant married to an aboriginal man, asked whether she can write a fictional story about her neighbors on an Indian reserve. She said she attempted to publish her stories, but was always refused––not because her stories were bad, but because of the cultural appropriation issue. She argued that she did not write outside her immediate experience: she lived with an aboriginal man next to the reserve. “Does the Canadian government prohibit writers of non-aboriginal ancestry to explore aboriginal subjects?” she asked.
When it comes to cultural appropriation I also want to ask seemingly naïve questions. What does it mean to write outside one’s own cultural experience? Journalists, scholars, artists, and writers have always explored unchartered territories with success. (As in the Shakespearean play cited above.)
The best and most comprehensive nineteenth-century dictionary of the Russian language was compiled by Vladimir Dahl, neither an ethnic Russian nor a trained lexicographer. Dahl, whose father was Danish and whose mother was of mixed German and French ancestry, had served in the Russian Navy and was later trained as a military doctor. Yet, his dictionary of the Russian language informed generations of writers, including Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Some of the most influential books on Ukraine’s famine were written by Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum, also the author of the Gulag. Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine has just been named the 2018 world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs.
For centuries foreigners produced illuminating and astute travel accounts. George Kennan’s Tent Life in Siberia captures ethnographies and histories of Siberia’s native peoples. This book continues to inform audiences, and no one yet complained about cultural appropriation.
Are we traveling less in the age of globalization? Can we travel and can explore another culture but cannot write about it? Was Life of Pi, Yan Martel’s best-selling novel about India, cultural appropriation? The truth is––nobody cares.
Yet, a Canadian editor of Write magazine Hal Niedzviecki was forced to resign for urging white middle-class writers to explore “the lives of people who aren’t like you.” In 2017 a campaign of shaming was launched against him and his supporters.
Would these PC people shame the French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin for his Tahiti paintings?
This March I learned that the Cambridge Dictionary will include the term “cultural appropriation” and will define it as cultural theft.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/...
Actually, writers and artists do not steal from other cultures––they create their own work, which enriches us globally.
Cultural appropriation strikes me as a brainchild of a radical minority, empowered by social media.
I grew up in the Soviet Union, and the notion of enforced “political correctness” brings back the memory of political censorship.
Do we want censorship in the free world?
Of Historical Memory and Forgetting
In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera recalls a comment by the Czech historian Milan Hübl that “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
It was with this intention––to make people forget their country’s history––that on December 28, 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial International. Formed in 1989 during Gorbachev’s glasnost by the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, it was the oldest human rights organization working to uncover the truth about the Soviet past and to commemorate millions of victims of Stalin’s terror.
During its three decades of existence Memorial collected archival information to establish museums and monuments to the gulag victims. The Russian state and its powerful bureaucracy worked against them by prohibiting archival access and hindering efforts to remember.
Despite such hindrance Memorial and its volunteers amassed millions of names in its database and published memory books. I worked at the library of Memorial International in Moscow while researching Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. This library is stacked with memory volumes, produced by every region of Russia and the former Soviet republics––Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The books containing names and brief information about the repressed fill an entire reading room. This is where I first fathomed the scale of Soviet repressions.
In 1996 Putin declared that “Russia’s return to totalitarian past is possible.” Upon becoming president in 2000, he worked to recreate the Soviet Union and Stalin’s image as a great leader. Since then Memorial had been continuously harassed and finally branded a “foreign agent,” a ubiquitous term in Putin’s Russia, used against members of the political opposition, NGOs, independent media, and historians and meant to put their activities outside the law. The pretext for shutting down Memorial was its alleged failure to display the “foreign agent” label on some of its materials. The real charge brought up during the December hearings by the Prosecutor General’s representatives was that Memorial was “creating a falsified image of the USSR as a terrorist state.”
Russian authorities still refuse to recognize the obvious fact that throughout seventy years of its existence the USSR WAS A TERRORIST STATE. (Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow, and Anne Applebaum's Red Famine provide plentiful evidence.) Nations tend to embellish their pasts, but in Russia a coherent Soviet history has never existed. There is always a newer version crafted to suit a current leader.
Totalitarian states prohibit thinking and remembering. Keeping a memory becomes a crime. Under Stalin people were physically annihilated and airbrushed from group photographs. Under Putin Stalin’s crimes are being erased from public memory and books are written to praise the dictator and his secret police.
Yuri Dmitriev, historian and former head of Karelia’s chapter of Memorial, had uncovered thousands of names of Stalin’s terror victims. He located mass graves in the forests Sandarmoh (where fifty-eight nationalities lie buried) and Krasnyi Bor, and turned these places into public memorials. In December 2016 Dmitriev was imprisoned on trumped-up charges https://dmitrievaffair.com/. During his third trial, which took place on the eve of Memorial’s liquidation, his jail term was extended to 15 years.
In her book Never Remember Masha Gessen tells a story of a woman, Elizaveta, who was a baby when her parents were exterminated under Stalin. Elizaveta’s terrified relatives destroyed family photographs. All she had left from her family was an album with no pictures inside. Elizaveta spent decades searching for information about her parents, eventually discovering that her mother, an actress, was killed during a mass execution in Sandarmokh. In Russia her story is typical.
Gessen had traveled to the killing grounds of Sandarmokh and through major sites of Russia’s extended gulag. Her book is dedicated to historical memory, the subject she discusses with Irina Flige, head of St. Petersburg’s chapter of Memorial. As Flige remarked, in Russia there is no “clear line separating the present from the past. That’s when you can say, ‘After the Holocaust,’ for example. But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.”
Proper remembering hasn’t happened, so Russia remains trapped in its past. The nation is again prevented from learning its history. How will it fare without a historical memory? The answer is suggested in the opening of this blog post.
It was with this intention––to make people forget their country’s history––that on December 28, 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of Memorial International. Formed in 1989 during Gorbachev’s glasnost by the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, it was the oldest human rights organization working to uncover the truth about the Soviet past and to commemorate millions of victims of Stalin’s terror.
During its three decades of existence Memorial collected archival information to establish museums and monuments to the gulag victims. The Russian state and its powerful bureaucracy worked against them by prohibiting archival access and hindering efforts to remember.
Despite such hindrance Memorial and its volunteers amassed millions of names in its database and published memory books. I worked at the library of Memorial International in Moscow while researching Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century. This library is stacked with memory volumes, produced by every region of Russia and the former Soviet republics––Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The books containing names and brief information about the repressed fill an entire reading room. This is where I first fathomed the scale of Soviet repressions.
In 1996 Putin declared that “Russia’s return to totalitarian past is possible.” Upon becoming president in 2000, he worked to recreate the Soviet Union and Stalin’s image as a great leader. Since then Memorial had been continuously harassed and finally branded a “foreign agent,” a ubiquitous term in Putin’s Russia, used against members of the political opposition, NGOs, independent media, and historians and meant to put their activities outside the law. The pretext for shutting down Memorial was its alleged failure to display the “foreign agent” label on some of its materials. The real charge brought up during the December hearings by the Prosecutor General’s representatives was that Memorial was “creating a falsified image of the USSR as a terrorist state.”
Russian authorities still refuse to recognize the obvious fact that throughout seventy years of its existence the USSR WAS A TERRORIST STATE. (Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow, and Anne Applebaum's Red Famine provide plentiful evidence.) Nations tend to embellish their pasts, but in Russia a coherent Soviet history has never existed. There is always a newer version crafted to suit a current leader.
Totalitarian states prohibit thinking and remembering. Keeping a memory becomes a crime. Under Stalin people were physically annihilated and airbrushed from group photographs. Under Putin Stalin’s crimes are being erased from public memory and books are written to praise the dictator and his secret police.
Yuri Dmitriev, historian and former head of Karelia’s chapter of Memorial, had uncovered thousands of names of Stalin’s terror victims. He located mass graves in the forests Sandarmoh (where fifty-eight nationalities lie buried) and Krasnyi Bor, and turned these places into public memorials. In December 2016 Dmitriev was imprisoned on trumped-up charges https://dmitrievaffair.com/. During his third trial, which took place on the eve of Memorial’s liquidation, his jail term was extended to 15 years.
In her book Never Remember Masha Gessen tells a story of a woman, Elizaveta, who was a baby when her parents were exterminated under Stalin. Elizaveta’s terrified relatives destroyed family photographs. All she had left from her family was an album with no pictures inside. Elizaveta spent decades searching for information about her parents, eventually discovering that her mother, an actress, was killed during a mass execution in Sandarmokh. In Russia her story is typical.
Gessen had traveled to the killing grounds of Sandarmokh and through major sites of Russia’s extended gulag. Her book is dedicated to historical memory, the subject she discusses with Irina Flige, head of St. Petersburg’s chapter of Memorial. As Flige remarked, in Russia there is no “clear line separating the present from the past. That’s when you can say, ‘After the Holocaust,’ for example. But we don’t have that break—there is no past, only a continuous present.”
Proper remembering hasn’t happened, so Russia remains trapped in its past. The nation is again prevented from learning its history. How will it fare without a historical memory? The answer is suggested in the opening of this blog post.
