***
2023.2.18. | 23:17
I fell in love with “Anna Karenina” because of how clearly it showed that no character was wrong—that even the unreasonable-seeming people were doing what appeared right to them, based on their own knowledge and experiences. As a result of everyone’s having different knowledge and experiences, they disagreed, and caused each other unhappiness. And yet, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, instead of creating a chaos of non-meaning, somehow worked together to generate more meaning.
When I learned that some critics considered “Anna Karenina” to be a continuation of Pushkin’s verse novel, “Eugene Onegin,” I decided to read that next. It opens with the title character, a world-weary cosmopolitan, inheriting a large country estate. There, he meets Tatiana, a provincial, novel-obsessed teen, who writes him a declaration of love.
It had started in 2017, the year I turned forty, began identifying as queer, published “The Idiot,” and went on a book tour amid the swirling disclosures of #MeToo. Like many women, I spent a lot of 2017 rethinking the story of my own romantic and sexual formation.
(..) Rich identifies a tendency in Western literature to suggest “that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal . . . it is still an organic imperative.”
I thought back to “Anna Karenina” and “Eugene Onegin.” How clearly Tolstoy and Pushkin had shown that, by falling in love with men, Anna and Tatiana foreclosed their already direly limited life choices! And yet, that ruinous, self-negating love was made to seem inescapable and glamorous. Anna dies, but looking fantastic,
When I learned that some critics considered “Anna Karenina” to be a continuation of Pushkin’s verse novel, “Eugene Onegin,” I decided to read that next. It opens with the title character, a world-weary cosmopolitan, inheriting a large country estate. There, he meets Tatiana, a provincial, novel-obsessed teen, who writes him a declaration of love.
It had started in 2017, the year I turned forty, began identifying as queer, published “The Idiot,” and went on a book tour amid the swirling disclosures of #MeToo. Like many women, I spent a lot of 2017 rethinking the story of my own romantic and sexual formation.
(..) Rich identifies a tendency in Western literature to suggest “that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal . . . it is still an organic imperative.”
I thought back to “Anna Karenina” and “Eugene Onegin.” How clearly Tolstoy and Pushkin had shown that, by falling in love with men, Anna and Tatiana foreclosed their already direly limited life choices! And yet, that ruinous, self-negating love was made to seem inescapable and glamorous. Anna dies, but looking fantastic,
leave a comment
***
2023.2.18. | 23:22
Tatiana’s love letter to Eugene Onegin causes nothing but heartache—but what a great letter! Had such novels encouraged me to view women’s suffering over men as an irreducible, even desirable part of the human experience—as something to be impartially appreciated, rather than challenged?
It made me think: if the books I loved so objectively were actually vehicles of patriarchal ideology, why wouldn’t the ideology of expansionism be in there, too?
The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I realized, was the logic of imperialism.
“Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed much to Dostoevskyism,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in an essay last April, after the massacre in Bucha. She called the invasion “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long-suppressed hatred and envy,”
Dostoyevsky didn’t, of course, endorse Raskolnikov’s views.
the solution isn’t to keep consuming Austen’s novels in a geopolitical vacuum. Instead, we need to find new, “contrapuntal” ways of reading.
Russian literature as a two-hundred-year festival of misplaced sympathy for criminals,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2
It made me think: if the books I loved so objectively were actually vehicles of patriarchal ideology, why wouldn’t the ideology of expansionism be in there, too?
The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I realized, was the logic of imperialism.
“Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed much to Dostoevskyism,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in an essay last April, after the massacre in Bucha. She called the invasion “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long-suppressed hatred and envy,”
Dostoyevsky didn’t, of course, endorse Raskolnikov’s views.
the solution isn’t to keep consuming Austen’s novels in a geopolitical vacuum. Instead, we need to find new, “contrapuntal” ways of reading.
Russian literature as a two-hundred-year festival of misplaced sympathy for criminals,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2
leave a comment [10]
***
2023.2.18. | 23:56
no gultiņas apakšējā stāva: mamma, es grāmatā uzzināju, ka esmu sociālists