THE SHINING FUTURE.

I recently finished Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, a superb piece of reporting—David Remnick was one of the few American reporters in Russia who actually knew the language and could go out and talk with ordinary people, and it shows. Anyone who wants to know what the last years of the USSR felt like from the perspective of an informed outsider will want to read this book. Here’s a bit about Dmitry Likhachov:

When he was a boy, Likhachev watched the February and October revolutions from his window. A decade later he had an even closer view of the rise of Soviet civilization, courtesy of a five-year term in a labor camp. Likhachev was arrested in 1928 for taking part in a students’ literary group called the Cosmic Academy of Sciences. The club posed about as great a threat to the Kremlin as the Harvard Lampoon does to the White House. For election as an “academician,” Likhachev presented a humorous paper on the need to restore to the language the letter “yat.” The Bolsheviks banned the letter as part of a campaign to “modernize” Russian after the revolution. Later, one of Likhachev’s interrogators railed at him for daring to waste his time on such things.
“What do you mean by language reform?” the interrogator shouted. “Perhaps we won’t even have any language at all under socialism!”

(For more on yat, see Bezyatie, and nominally Orfografiya and Orfografiya II.)

Comments

  1. I was disappointed by the book when I read it, thought it was superficial. Except perhaps his observations on the rise of nationalism.
    The yat’ could never be quite eliminated during the Soviet period for one awkward reason: revolutionary posters and history book illustrations with the slogan ‘All power to the Soviets’ had the letter in the word Soviet.

  2. Well, sure it’s superficial—reporters are by definition superficial, in the sense that they’re trained to focus on the here and now. They leave the whys and wherefores to historians (or should, anyway), and obviously if you want a deep analysis of what happened to the USSR you’ll want to go elsewhere. But he talks to lots of interesting people and paints memorable pictures of what it was like.

  3. Pushed into a meander buy this post I started looking at Orwell quotes. This one fits reaonably well.
    “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
    That took me to a page that suggested 1984 was ‘based on’ the Book ‘We’ by Yevgeny Zamyatin which is new to me and seems quite a claim. Has anybody around here read it?

  4. I wrote about it here. The claim of influence is pretty widely accepted; I wrote in my post: “This prescient book, from which Huxley and Orwell swiped shamelessly for their own dystopias…”

  5. ‘I wrote about it here.’
    I should have known…

  6. Huxley always credited Zamyatin, and Orwell didn’t, right? That’s what I remember at least.
    I was very impressed with ‘Lenin’s Tomb’, but still haven’t read Remnick’s (much less lauded) follow-up ‘Resurrection’. Keep meaning to track it down.
    LH: have you read Jack Womack’s ‘Let’s Put the Future Behind Us?’ Currently whacking away at it now. Mid-90s pitch black comedy set in ‘everyone’s-a-criminal’ Moscow. One of the few novels, besides ‘Absurdistan’, I can think of that deal with the time and place. At least available in English. Don’t even think Pelevin addressed the subject…
    Any suggestions for a required reading list of early Post-Communist budding-oligarch novels?

  7. Huxley always credited Zamyatin, and Orwell didn’t, right?
    Other way around. In a review of We in 1946, Orwell conjectured that it was an influence on Brave New World. However, Huxley denied this and literary scholars are split on whether the style implies it as a source or that they have some common one, like Wells.
    Since 1984 was published several years later, Orwell was hardly in a position to deny having known about it.

  8. LH: have you read Jack Womack’s ‘Let’s Put the Future Behind Us?’ Currently whacking away at it now. Mid-90s pitch black comedy set in ‘everyone’s-a-criminal’ Moscow. One of the few novels, besides ‘Absurdistan’, I can think of that deal with the time and place.
    I have not, and now I want to. Thanks! (I believe Martin Cruz Smith dealt with the period in one of his later Arkady Renko novels; I’ve only read Gorky Park and Polar Star, which were set in the ’80s.)

  9. MMcM: DOH! Thanks for the correction…
    LH: It’ll be interesting to see what you think of it, since it’s an American trying to get the Russian voice right… I’ve only read ‘Gorky Park’ as well. Will look up the later ones… Thanks!

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