Culture Making items tagged russia

Mayan playing cards

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Nate: “Or rather, vintage Soviet playing cards featuring Mayan-esque artwork. I'm not sure if there was a specific internationalist/anti-capitalist intent, or if the designers just thought they'd look neat. Which they do—love that cute opossum/squirrel in the queen's hand!”

"Mayan playing cards," posted by Andy B, Design Boom, 20 November 2008

Notes from the Archbishop

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

NYTimes.com Ideas Blog, 12 October 2008

Literature | A reviewer says it’s a good thing the archbishop of Canterbury has written a book about Dostoyevsky. To figure out this Russian fellow, “we need a guide who combines the gifts of a literary critic and a trained theologian.” And like Dostoyevsky, the cleric, through his unruly Church of England, knows what it’s like to juggle “incompatible beliefs.” [TLS]

Already on the ground

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Andy: “One of the pleasures of being away for two weeks is coming back to several issues of the Economist to read at once. (Yes, I am a geek.) In the issue of 7 August is this remarkable article about the decline of Russia's "intelligentsia." Even by the Economist's high standards it is an unusually penetrating study of cultural change, and a reminder that "soft power" is often more effective than brute force—in this case, effective in restraining criticism of the state. And while the situation in the United States could not be more different in some respects, I still find these closing paragraphs worth pondering: a warning for any movement that seeks to be, in Tim Keller's phrase, "a counterculture for the common good."”

The sense of success and inclusion is harder to resist than the wrath of the state. Carrots are more corrupting than sticks. This phenomenon is powerfully described in Vasily Grossman’s novel “Life and Fate” (1960). One of its central characters is Viktor, a talented physicist who stoically defends his science in the face of likely arrest, but becomes weak and submissive when Stalin calls him to wish him success. “Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself—but now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies.” . . .

Russia today is much freer than it was for most of the Soviet era. However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, “Nobody has been commanded to lie down—and everyone is already on the ground.” The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin’s pressure. Nikolai Svanidze, a Russian journalist who works for a state TV channel, admits: “There is no person who tells [me] what you can and what you can’t do. It is in the air. If you know what is permitted and what is not, you’re in the right place. If you don’t, you are not.”

from "The hand that feeds them," The Economist, 7 August 2008

The Gulag Archipelago’s first readers

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

Nate: “I'm always fascinated by discussions (or really just acknowledgements) of the thing-ness of books, that, apart from being texts, they're objects with a feel and smell and a personal, cultural, individual history to them.”

Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript—the first historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system—before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn’s sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose—not an experience anyone was likely to forget.

Members of that first generation of readers remember who gave the book to them, who else knew about it, and to whom they passed it on. They remember the stories that affected them most—the tales of small children in the camps, or of informers, or of camp guards. They remember what the book felt like—the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night—and with whom they later discussed it.

from How The Gulag Archipelago changed the world, by Anne Applebaum, Slate, 4 August 2008

Art is not defiled by our efforts

2009-01-07T10:50:34Z

We, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement — right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another — grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel — for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, 1970