Tatyana Tolstaya, Pushkin's Children: Writing
on Russia and Russians
An interim review
Pushkin's Children is a collection of essays by Tatyana Tolstaya - sprawling book reviews published in the NY Review of Books, pieces from the New Yorker, and other such. I have not read all of them, and this review will get updated once I do that. But she made a strong enough impression on me that I feel a need to write something now.
The essays are quite wonderful - well written, opinionated, and convincing even if you ultimately don't agree with them. Perhaps this is a testimony to my lack of experience with Russian writers, but Tolstaya managed, for example, to put together the first convincing explanation for why Russians hate Gorbachev. I have seen the hatred more times than I can count - my mother made an extremely contemptuous remark about him when I told her, enthusiastically, that Gorbachev was giving a talk at Harvard and, of course, I was going. Most people felt no need to explain the feeling at all - and were surprised when I asked. The explanations I did receive left me singularly unimpressed.
"The Great Terror and the Little Terror" is the essay that has so far resonated with me the most. It is ostensibly a review of Robert Conquest's Great Terror, in its Russian translation. But the essay is not about the Great Terror, of the 1930s, institutionalized, well-described, and now well-studied, but about "little terrors" - something deep within the Russian soul that makes the nation prone to tyranny. In page after a gripping page, Tolstaya brings up other historical examples of "Great Terrors" - like the time of Ivan the Terrible - and small everyday tyrannies that are sometimes considered unique to the Soviet period of Russian history, but that actually repeated themselves throughout Russia's history. As I was reading the essay, the historian in me complained loudly - there was not a single footnote - and, of course, how could there have been? - and I've been well trained to see sweeping generalizations are unjustified, harmful, almost shameful. But the generalizations rang true, and part of me is grateful to have seen them in print. For a few minutes, the essay validated my dislike of Russians. It mentioned xenophobia, servility, reliance on chance, and favoring emotions over reason, and made me feel a bit better about the fact that when I talk to almost any Russian, no matter how nice they seem, a little voice inside me inquires skeptically how big a can of worms I'd open by mentioning, say, an issue of gay marriage.
I needed this book. I'll go read the rest of it now. There will be more coming.