COMRADE ARTEM. PART II.

...He was born in 1883, as Fedor Andreevich Sergeev, into a family dynasty of church builders, whose fame spread all across Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine, where they had been building churches for several generations on record, since at least the reign of Catherine the Great.

At the age of eighteen, in 1901, Fedor was sent to Moscow, to study at one of the best and most prestigious technical schools in Russia, Moscow Technical Imperial School, currently The Bauman State Technological University. His father Andrei always preferred the ancient city of Moscow to the upstart Russian capital of St. Petersburg, and now his preference determined his school choice in this case, too. It was not long before Fedor became an activist revolutionary.

To the modern ear, the word revolutionary sounds like something exceptional and extraordinary, but in the times I describe, being a revolutionary was the standard rite of passage. Nearly all students at all Russian colleges, male and female, were militant radicals. Political conservatives among them, such as my maternal grandfather Mitrophan, were the rarest of exceptions. (Even Konstantin Pobedonostsev, known as the Gray Eminence of Russia's ultra-reactionary forces near the turn of the century, used to be something between an ultra-liberal and a radical reformer himself, in his younger years.)

Fedor Sergeev enjoyed being a revolutionary and went through the routine with flying colors. At the age of nineteen he was first arrested, expelled from his college, and, to his delight, served a short jail sentence. His next step was going abroad, for which reason he emigrated to Paris in 1902. He was much more fascinated with the French capital, which was by no means a usual place of emigration for the Russian revolutionaries, than with the traditional places of exile, like London and Geneva, where most of them dwelled. However, he was fond of traveling in Europe, and in the fall of 1904 (where else but in Geneva?) he, predictably, but still fatefully, met Comrade Nicholas, alias Lenin, whose fame as a one-of-a-kind eccentric iconoclast had been constantly growing and spreading.

Lenin showed an immediate interest in Artem. He happened to know Artem’s real name, and what it meant. Although every revolutionary résumé was always shamelessly padded, their company not excluded, certain details could not be invented. Like the Sergeev name. It was not a household name in Europe, of course, but Lenin shrewdly appreciated its broad recognition in the south of Russia, home of Russia’s authentic blue-collar working class, whom he, Lenin, claimed to represent.

Following Lenin, Artem remained very much his own man, just like Lenin, who never viewed his own undercover police work as a job in which he was the employee. The two aspiring revolutionaries intended to use each other shamelessly, and were always ready to part their ways, as soon as one of them had outlived his usefulness to the other.

But for now, their relationship got into a full swing. In early 1905, Artem was back in Russia, working the crowds on Lenin’s orders in his home base of the coal-rich South. Soviet sources list his impressive titles during this period. He is elected head of the Bolshevik organization in Kharkov, one of the largest cities of the Russian Empire, even before his twenty-second birthday (!!!), and leads a massive uprising in Eastern Ukraine in December 1905.

The next step on his road to revolutionary greatness is an exile to Siberia. Then he ought to escape back to Europe, and so on, according to the script. In early 1906, in recognition of his fast progress, he is chosen to be a delegate to the Fourth Congress of the RSDLP, in Stockholm. Soon thereafter, he is arrested and sent to Western Siberia. He does not waste any time escaping, and soon finds himself in the city of Perm, where he is instantly declared the head of the Perm RSDLP Committee. Now is his time to go back to Europe, to attend the Fifth RSDLP Congress in London. But in March 1907 he is arrested again, and now sent farther East, into another Siberian exile.

This new exile proves much tougher than the first one, and lasts three whole years. Eventually, Artem gets his chance to escape, and in 1910, via Korea and China, finds himself in Australia, of all places. He quickly takes control of the Russian blue-collar community in Queensland, and loses no time in becoming a union leader, a newspaper publisher, a British citizen, and… a married man… Everybody calls him Big Tom these days. Despite his relatively small physical stature this is hardly an exaggeration. After all, as an amateur boxer he has always been second to none…

(This is the end of Part II. Part III will be posted tomorrow.)

COMRADE ARTEM. PART I.

…The story of the life and death of my grandfather Comrade Artem (Fedor Andreevich Sergeev), the least known great leader of the Russian Revolution.

This account of Artem’s life, largely taken from my book Stalin, and Other Family, dates back to the 1990’s, when the Internet was non-existent. The world has changed quite radically since then, information-wise. A properly interested reader has a much better chance to visit the previously rarely or never visited chambers of history today than ever before, and I encourage my reader to such exploits. Please, be aware, however, that too many articles posted on the Web do not pass the standards of credibility, even those coming from official sites and allegedly reputable sources. But still, the window of informational opportunity has been thrust so much wider open that the Internet phenomenon must be greeted with great appreciation, although not without some serious caveats.

The most serious caveat is of course that the problem of history unknown, ignored and misunderstood, has not received a radical solution with the invention of the Internet, as the latter, not being much different from an encyclopedia (although, as some would justifiably argue, it is often qualitatively inferior to one), remains a mere information tool, and does not solve the deep-seated chronic problems of knowledge.

With this preamble, let us venture forward with our entry’s central subject.

Comrade Who?... Never heard of him!.. No wonder. His name is conspicuously absent from every Western name index in the standard historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917. And yet, the man did exist, and held very high posts, sufficiently documented in all Soviet reference books. Six cities are named after him in Russia and Ukraine, and his remains have been laid to rest in Soviet Russia’s most sacred cemetery near the Kremlin Wall, a few feet from Lenin’s Mausoleum, alongside Stalin, and some other top leaders of Soviet Russia.

I have no problem with Western historians’ ignorance of Comrade Artem. Our modern age is drowning in information. Unless you know what you are looking for, you will be lost in an infinite space. In their place, I, too, would have seen no reason to look beyond the standard cast of characters, recognized by the world as the founding fathers of the Soviet system in Russia. That cast is in itself a handful. Why, then, spread your limited personal resources of time and energy, going across the vast expanse of uncharted seas, when you can comfortably go along with whatever you already have as a given?

On the other hand, I do have a problem with Soviet and post-Soviet historians. They should have corrected the ignominious mistake of drowning the memory of Artem in ignorance. In the recent national poll for the Greatest Russian, under the title Imya Rossiya, he ought to have been included in the starting lineup of 500, at the very least, and the fact that he was not there speaks not very well both of the organizers of the project, and generally of the unsatisfactory state of Russian history of the Soviet period even in the present time.

But I am a different story. After all Comrade Artem was my grandfather. And so, I was compelled and eager to find out what happened to him, and I did. The answer is a dark mystery. After his violent death in 1921 at the age of thirty-eight, he was effectively erased as a major historical figure. Why did he have to be falsified and diminished? Was it because the very last job he held right before his death, officially made him Lenin’s immediate successor, and Comrade Stalin, who most probably had him assassinated and had taken over his job, hated all competition, even from a dead man. (The fact that Lenin saw Comrade Artem as his successor has now been verified in the memoirs of my father General Artem Fedorovich Sergeev-Artem.)

Fortunately, Artem was a big man, and, even though obliterated, both literally and politically, many traces of him are still scattered around. They say that it takes a small bone fragment, for a professional to reconstruct the whole body of an obliterated ancestor of our human race. In Artem’s case, I have much more than that...

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

CHRONOLOGICAL REFERENCE LIST FOR THE HISTORY ENTRIES. PART I.

I have this list on my blog now as the best way out of the serious predicament caused by sporadic postings of historical entries, to the detriment of chronological continuity.

Origins Of Russian History. Rurikovichi. 862-1505. Composite entry posted on January 28^th, 2011.

Gostomysl The Wise. Gostomysl, Rurik. 862 AD. Posted on January 28^th, 2011.

Kievan Rus. Yaroslav Mudry. 882-1054 AD. Posted on January 28^th, 2011.

Saint Prince Alexander Nevsky. Alexander Nevsky. 1236-1263 AD. Posted on January 28^th, 2011.

The Two-Headed Eagle. Ivan III the Great, Sophia Paleolog. 1462-1505. Posted on January 28^th, 2011.

Ivan Grozny And The Alternative. Ivan IV Grozny. 1547-1584. Posted on October 24^th, 2011.

Boris Godunov. Boris Godunov. 1585-1605. Posted on October 25^th, 2011.

Grishka Otrepyev. False Dmitri I. 1605-1606. Posted on October 26^th, 2011.

The Romanov Duumvirate. Mikhail I Fedorovich, Patriarch Philaret. 1613-1645. Posted on October 27^th, 2011.

The Second Duumvirate. Alexei I Mikhailovich, Patriarch Nikon. 1645-1676. Posted on October 28^th, 2011.

Petrus Primus Et Catharina Prima. Peter I, Catherine I. 1682-1727. Posted on October 29^th, 2011.

Dearly Beloved. Anna Ioannovna, Elizaveta Petrovna. 1730-1762. Posted on October 30^th, 2011.

The Odd Couple. Peter III, Catherine II. 1762-1796. Posted on October 31^st, 2011.

Russia’s Royal Sphinx. Alexander I. 1801-1825. Posted on November 1^st, 2011.

Nikolai Palkin. Nicholas I. 1825-1855. Posted on November 2^nd, 2011.

Cooperating With Destiny. Alexander II, Alexander III, Nicholas II. 1855-1917. Composite entry posted on January 29^th, 2011.

March The First 1881. Alexander II. 1855-1881. Posted on January 29^th, 2011.

Some Royal Superstitions. Nicholas II. 1894-1917. Posted on January 29^th, 2011.

Rasputin’s Prophesy. Nicholas II, Grigori Rasputin. 1905-1917. Posted on January 29^th, 2011.

The Wrecking Balls Of Russian History. Nicholas II (+Gorbachev). 1917 (+1991).) Posted on January 26^th, 2011.

La Forza Del Destino. Nicholas II, Kerensky. 1917. Composite entry posted on January 26^th, 2011.

A Prequel To Lenin. Alexander Ulyanov. 1887. Posted on January 30^th, 2011.

Lenin’s Progress. Lenin. 1870-1924. Composite entry posted on January 30^th, 2011.

Comrade Nicholas. Lenin. 1887-1917. Posted on January 30^th, 2011.

Veni, Vidi, Vici. Lenin. 1898-1917. Posted on January 30^th, 2011.

From The Ridiculous To The Sublime. Lenin, Kerensky. 1917. Posted on January 30^th, 2011.

Lady And The Tramp. Lenin. 1917-1921. Composite entry posted on January 31^st, 2011.

When Democracy Is A Terrible Choice. Kornilov (+Hindenburg). 1917 (+1933). Posted on January 31^st, 2011.

David Among Goliaths. Lenin. 1917. Posted on January 31^st, 2011.

Bolshevism As A Necessity. Lenin. 1917. Posted on January 31^st, 2011.

Interfering With The Enemy Destroying Himself. Lenin. 1918-1921. Posted on January 31^st, 2011.

My next entry in this list Comrade Artem will be posted beginning tomorrow.

A MORSEL OF HISTORY

“A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.”

(Thomas Jefferson: Letter to John Adams, 1817)

PREFACE TO RUSSIAN HISTORY

Should I venture to say that of all world history, Russian history is probably the least known, and even less understood, it may sound like a self-serving overstatement. Come on, all histories have their mysteries, and the fact that you are privy to one of them does not make it world-historically special!

This is not actually true. All histories have indeed their fair share of mysteries, but not all of them have an equal significance for our time, and beyond. Using Nietzsche’s famous title, the “Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben” acquires a very special meaning in the context of Russian history. No other history can do as much harm, when distorted, to our knowledge of the larger picture, and, conversely, knowing the truth of what happened, and how-- at certain critical points of Russian history-- would be greatly beneficial not only for our general historical knowledge, but for the wellbeing and the very future of our world.

General knowledge of Soviet history is particularly deficient, which yawning gap I will be attempting to fill very shortly. But there are certain aspects of the preceding Russian history which may be no less important, considering that they have found their fixed place in the very heart of the historically-conscious Soviet and post-Soviet history.

The story of Gostomysl The Wise, for one, is essential to the understanding of the nature and the rationale of Soviet totalitarianism, and it will be the first one we shall tackle, after this convenient reference.---

(The reference to follow next.)

A SHORT HISTORY OF MY HISTORY-PUBLISHING BUSINESS

In attempting to present to the world my highly unorthodox version of history, I used to be much bothered by the standard scientific requirement to ‘prove my allegations.’ (After all, this is my very peculiar personal vision of history, and even though I am entitled to it, I can’t escape the judgment of the “objective” critics! Getting myself into the position of one against all, I also realized my big handicap. Although the history of scientific thinking tells us that genuine revolutions mostly occur when everybody is wrong, and only one is right, the public is customarily convinced that there is a truth in numbers, that is if everybody has been repeating the same thing over and over again, they must know what they are talking about, and whoever contradicts them, does not.

“How is it possible that everyone says one thing and you alone say another?!,” I was routinely asked, when I offered my audiences my controversial facts and interpretations, and then I would become defensive, and I would tell them essentially the same thing that no, I cannot prove my allegations but at least they do make a lot of good sense and that they are new and they are fresh and finally that they, my audience, are certainly free to make up their own mind about them…

But, nevertheless, I still cared about my handicap of proof and tried to go around it to the best of my ability. I wanted to give the public my version of history in such a way that the critics would not be able to assail it for being unconventional and me for rewriting history without any formal documents to prove me right.

Initially, I tried to present my version of history in the form of a fictional novel, titled The Lost Russia. No matter how prejudiced anybody could be against my historical material, at least they could not dismiss its lawful right to exist under the constitutional protection afforded to all work of fiction. I wish I would have stuck to my guns, but, unfortunately, Mike Bessie’s (he was then Chairman of the Board of Harper & Row) basso ostinato, to the effect that what I know “non-fictionally” was more interesting to the publishers and to the public than anything that I could give offer as fiction, and ergo, the publishers would always be tempted to put pressure on me to extract my nonfiction with the bottom line being that they would thus conspire (the word conspire is not his, but a part of my recap) to block any work of fiction coming out of my hands until I had sufficiently whetted their appetites with my precious nonfiction. (Apparently, Bessie was taking a cue in this from his wife Cornelia Bessie, whose celebrated dictum: “If you can say to yourself, when that manuscript goes to the printer’s, this is the best book that this person can write at this time, then you’ve done your job,” meant, in my case, that a work of fiction was not “the best book” expected from me at that time.

Having seen my Lost Russia thus hopelessly blocked I decided to change my tactic presenting them with an acceptable compromise: my Secret History of Soviet Russia where history spurted out of me as a “stream of consciousness” (for the record, this last phrase was introduced into literary psycho-parlance by the graces of my by now good, albeit flawed friend William James, who actually coined it, but didn’t apply it to literature in its most common sense) with no footnotes, no attributions, and-- hopefully-- no need to prove anything to anybody. This ploy, however, did not work out, either. It was explained to me that my effort wasn’t going to be rewarded by publication, unless I spelled out scrupulously and unflinchingly all my exceedingly splendid sources, whose illustrious names the public was going to be most anxious to hear and use as its authority on what had really happened.

Eventually, I caved in again, with Stalin, and Other Family being the fruit of my labor. The agents and the publishers were dutifully satisfied with Molotov said this and Voroshilov said that, but the book was never published for another reason, perhaps, the most important of all. The dust of history was a “sacred” dust that was sanctified by the official historical accounts of what had happened, and no “intruder in that dust” (yes, it is an allusion to William Faulkner, unless anyone thought I wanted to sneak this phrase in without proper attribution!) was to be ever allowed to commit such a sacrilege with impunity.

Now that my books have failed to be published anyway, I have repented my former compromises, and that old “burden of proof” business doesn’t bother me anymore. As Bob Dylan so adorably nasalizes, “I used to care, but things have changed…”

ME AND HISTORY

Here is another passage from my book Stalin, and Other Family, elucidating how history had become my very personal preoccupation. Why strive to put the same substance into a different form, when this passage encapsulates it so succinctly, and so adequately:

“As I was growing up, I naturally wanted to find out more about myself, my family, and my circumstances. I learned from my parents, grandparents, friends, and relatives. Then I discovered the strangest thing. My growing knowledge was both a blessing and a curse... Yes, I claimed to know and understand history. But what I had come to know as history was not what the outside world called history. My life and knowledge did not fit into any history textbook.

“No question, my life was weird. But it was real and I was living it. Then something must be wrong with the textbooks! And then it dawned upon me. The books were politically correct. The truth was not.

“Searching for answers, I had to drop my bib and tucker and to enter naked into the raw sewage of history, poking her unimaginable filth with my rosy finger… Thus history became my life’s preoccupation. I would never call it business, because it was always too personal.”

Several other entries in this small subsection will throw additional light on this theme of “me and history.” I am well aware that the personal element which is getting front and center in this batch, is normally assigned to the Mirror section. But in this case, Lady (History) first!

UNKNOWN, IGNORED, AND MISUNDERSTOOD

Continuing my analogy from the previous entry, I now have three underwater hostages to rescue. So, welcome to history, unknown, ignored, and misunderstood!

As far as my primary mission of the poet-historian goes, only the first of these three hostages, namely, the unknown history, is properly mine. The all-important stories of, say, the Atomic Espionage, or the story of Castro’s Communization of Cuba and of the Cuban Missile crisis having been subjected to gross historical falsification, definitely belong here. By the same token, Stalin’s game with the West and with Hitler, in the prelude to World War II, needs to be told here as well. These and many other such eye-opening revelations, thus constitute my proper quarry, history unknown.

But there are other types of important history stories that need to be told, not because they have never been told, but because, for different reasons, they have somehow become uncomfortable, and once they had been told, historians had conveniently made them “forgotten,” that is neglected and ignored. Such for instance, is the story of the late Academician Andrei Sakharov, the by now immortal symbol of Soviet dissent. The fact that he had been associated with many mysterious and inexplicable “accidents,” resulting in deaths of some genuine Soviet dissidents, had led Western reporters of that time to suspect Sakharov of collaborating with the KGB, and essentially serving as a sticky-paper Flycatcher (which is the title of my entry about him and about the whole Soviet dissident movement of that era). Such articles filled with bewildered suspicion had become a standard fare in Western reporting, and similar, but much stronger allegations of this nature were made by the Soviet dissidents themselves. As a matter of fact, the same goes for the most notorious case of Anatoly (Nathan) Shcharansky, the acknowledged inspirer of the George W. Bush Administration’s foreign policy. Shcharansky, too, was accused of serving as a KGB snitch, built up as a Soviet disinformation agent for the West, so accused not by the reporters, but by his own dissident buddies, who furthermore dared to furnish some pretty hard evidence in substantiation of their claims. All this was once open to the public, but later, when the persons at issue had been turned into propaganda symbols--- and thus sanctified--- these facts had become inconvenient, and were swept under the rug in the hope that by ignoring them, while raising the hallowed myths of official propaganda to the level of an infallible Scripture, they could set people’s minds in the right groove about all these new icons.

And, finally, history misunderstood covers all such cases, when the basic facts are generally known, but the interpretations of these facts have been so wide of the mark, either deliberately or fortuitously, that the truth of the facts themselves has become distorted beyond all recognition. Naturally, this category often overlaps with the history unknown set of tales. Thus, everybody over the age of forty knows about the Cuban missile crisis, being one of the staple cold war legends, but the truth of this whole matter has never been told, and I now doubt that it ever will. The same goes about the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939, and so on, and so forth.

Among the stories, not unknown, but definitely misunderstood, is Khrushchev’s famous warning to America “We shall bury you!” There is nothing much behind these words, except for their very biased interpretation, and I will try to rectify the situation--- not by revealing an unknown truth, but by simply providing my own interpretation, which will hopefully take some sting out of the Western bias. As we all know, interpretations are everything, but we just cannot allow them to substitute for facts themselves.

HISTORIAN AND THE POET

I do not have to be pressed hard-- in fact, I do not have to be pressed at all-- to admit that in too many cases where my versions of historical events sharply differ from the “facts in evidence,” there is no way for me to independently corroborate my stories. Most of my counter-conventional sources are dead by now, but, had they been alive, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The stories which I am telling have been known to a fairly substantial number of people, and the fact itself that these people have not come out with them so far, tells me in no uncertain terms that they may never surface, unless I unbind these other people’s underwater hostages just like Harry Potter tries to do it in The Goblet of Fire.

But, ironically, had any of my silent sources, by sheer magic, admitted to their veracity, and even produced a document or two, in their corroboration, their essential veracity would not have been soundly established even then, as history by its nature relies on a mixture of spurious fact and enlightened fiction, and the only solid truth about it is that nothing about it can ever be trusted as what really-really happened.

But this is all a purely casuistic dilemma. There is actually no need to dig up the unknowable truth, as long as the fiction it stands for, rises to the level of greatness and fits in seamlessly into the overall consistency of the big picture. Those truth-digging laborers of history, whom I have mentioned before, in my comment on Nietzsche’s critical historians, are in fact no better than nitpickers, in so far as they miss that big picture in their quest for some official confirmation, which no one can successfully obtain, as I have also observed before. In this respect, no historian, even the most thorough of all, can ever rise to the level of the poet imagining history, unless he wishes to stand side by side with the poet, learn from him, and then, and only then, venture to write about it.

One of the best treatises on this point belongs to Schopenhauer in his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which I am delighted to quote at some length here, due to this passage’s enduring importance:

“The poet from his deliberate choice represents significant characters in significant situations; the historian takes both as they come. He must regard and select the circumstances and the people not with reference to their inward significance which expresses the Idea, but according to the outward, apparent and relatively unimportant significance, with regard to the connection and the consequences. He must consider nothing in and for itself in its essential character and expression, but must look at everything in its relations, in its connection, in its influence upon what follows, and especially upon its own age.

“Therefore he will not overlook an action of a king, though of little significance and in itself quite common because it has results and influence. And, on the other hand, the actions of the highest significance of very eminent individuals are not to be recorded by him if they have no consequences. For his treatment follows the principle of sufficient reason, and apprehends the phenomenon, of which this principle is the form.

“But the poet comprehends the Idea, the inner nature of man apart from all relations, outside all time, the adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, at its highest grade. Even in that method of treatment, which is necessary for the historian, the inner nature and significance of the phenomena, the kernel of these shells, can never be entirely lost. He who seeks for it, at any rate, may find it. and recognize it. Yet that which is significant in itself, not in its relations, the real unfolding of the Idea, will be found much more accurately and distinctly in poetry, than in history, and therefore, however paradoxical it may sound, far more really genuine inner truth is to be attributed to poetry than to history.

“For the historian must accurately follow the particular event according to life, as it develops itself in time in the manifold tangled chains of causes and effects. It is however impossible that he can have all the data for this; he cannot have seen all and discovered all. He is forsaken at every moment by the original of his picture, or a false one substitutes itself for it, and this so constantly, that I think that I may assume that in all history the false outweighs the true. The poet, on the contrary, has comprehended the Idea of man from some definite side which is to be represented; thus it is the nature of his own self that objectifies itself in it for him. His knowledge is half a priori; his ideal stands before his mind firm, distinct, brightly illuminated and cannot forsake him; therefore, he shows us, in the mirror of his mind, the Idea, pure and distinct, and his delineation of it down to the minutest particular is true as life itself. (Compare this to my idea of truth in creation!)

“The great ancient historians are, therefore, in those particulars, in which their data fail them, for example, in the speeches of their heroes, poets; indeed, their whole manner of handling their material approaches to the epic.” (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, #51.)

Compare this luminous deliberation to a similar idea, also expressed by Nietzsche, as a recurring leitmotif throughout his writings, but certainly finding its spiritual source in this passage from Schopenhauer. There is no indignity then in walking in the footsteps of these two inspired giants, and in expressing my desire to write history along their lines, namely, as a creator, a poet, rather than a simple recorder of other people’s recollections.

Therefore, I am willing to make one additional step forward in my current presentation, hereby attesting to the fact that I am assuredly representing my history not as some odd bits and pieces, some scraps collected from others, but as a vision of history entirely of my own. In doing this, I am the only authority behind my effort, and consequently I am in no need of any footnotes or attributions otherwise required, but in my case required not.

ANTIQUARIAN OF THE MONUMENTAL

As I have pointed out already, history is not a book to me. It is a very personal preoccupation. I would even call it my life. What kind of historian am I, then, and what makes me unique?

Nietzsche, as always, obliges, distinguishing between three kinds of historians, and from among these three I will be making my choice.

“History belongs to the living man in three respects: it belongs to him so far as he is active and striving, so far as he preserves and admires, and so far as he suffers and is in need of liberation. To these correspond three kinds of history: monumental, antiquarian and critical.” (Unzeitgemäßen: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, 2-4.)

Because Nietzsche’s line of thinking on this key subject is so important, I am taking the liberty of quoting it at some length. Here is how he describes the monumental historian:

“History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, to him who fights a great fight, who requires models, teachers and comforters and cannot find them among his associates and contemporaries.

“What is the advantage to the present man of the monumental view of the past? It is the knowledge that the great which once existed was possible. As long as the soul of historiography is found in the great incentives a powerful man receives from it, as long as the past is described as worthy of imitation, so long is the past in danger of being distorted and brought closer to fiction. Consequently, whenever the monumental vision of the past rules over the antiquarian and the critical, the past itself suffers damage. Monumental history deceives with analogies: the courageous are enticed to rashness, the enthusiastic to fanaticism, and if this history is in the hands and heads of talented egoists and enraptured rascals, empires are being destroyed, princes murdered, wars and revolutions instigated, and the number of historical effects-in-themselves, that is, effects without sufficient causes, is further increased.”

In other words, our historian risks turning himself into a poet, a creator of fiction, with no big harm done, however, as my next entry Historian And The Poet will demonstrate, with Schopenhauer’s help, I might add.

Now, here comes the second type, the antiquarian:

“With antiquarian history, the past suffers too. To use a metaphor, the tree feels its roots more than it can see them. This feeling measures them by the size of its visible branches. The tree may already be in error here, but how much greater will the error be about the whole forest, which surrounds it! The antiquarian sense has an extremely limited field of vision; by far, the most is not seen at all, and the little that is seen is seen too closely and in isolation; it cannot apply a standard, and therefore, takes everything as equally important, and therefore, each individual thing is too important. Under these circumstances, there are no differences in value, and no proportions, to do justice to those things of the past in relation to each other. Antiquarian history understands how to preserve life, but not how to generate it. It hinders the resolve for new life, paralyzing the man of action who, as such, will and must always injure some piety or another.”

Before I venture forth with my own take on each type of historian, let us have the third type, according to Nietzsche:

“Here it becomes clear how badly man needs a third kind of seeing the past, the critical: and this, again, in the service of life as well. He must have the strength to shatter something, to enable him to live, and this he achieves by dragging the past to the bar of judgment, interrogating it, and finally condemning it. But every past is, indeed, worth condemning, for, that is how matters stand in human affairs: human violence and weakness have always contributed strongly to shaping them. It is not justice, which here sits in judgment, but life alone, that dark, self-desiring power. Its verdict is always unmerciful, always unjust; but, in most cases, the verdict would be the same were justice itself to proclaim it. For, (as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust says) “whatever has a beginning, deserves to have an undoing; it would be better if nothing began at all.”

Having thus revisited Nietzsche’s idiosyncratically poetic description of the three basic types of historian, allow me now to bring these types into my concrete universe with my own specific and occasionally light-hearted annotations: The monumental historian sees the rather clouded big picture, and bravely repaints it, filling in the missing pieces with his personal inspired vision of what might have happened, and possibly had. Look at the picture now: it used to be blurred and fuzzy, but, as a result of his effort, it has become sharp and bright, like a Bilibin watercolor. His work can be easily called mythology. It has large national and world-historical implications, and in this sense it is probably the most valuable type of history, as it blends with literature and folklore, to constitute the very quintessence of national culture.

The antiquarian is much more down to earth, and he does not care that much about the big picture. He goes around with a large magnifying glass, looking through it at the things which he can actually see for himself, and touching them with a trembling hand, having smelled them first with his nose, recognizing that smell as the sweet smell of history.

The critical historian is, perhaps, a useful breed, but, having familiarized myself with his work of late, I can hardly feel any sympathy or appreciation for him and for his ilk. For me, he is but a nitpicking nitwit. While the monumental historian sees history with the eyes of his mind and the antiquarian looks at her through his magnifying lens, the critic does not even look at history: he carries a magnifying glass exclusively to look at the historians around him, or at those who had come before his time. He himself is a historian by proxy, like those philosophers who learn philosophy not from the raw source, but from the recyclers of philosophy, who write not about ideas, but about others, with (or without) ideas.

And now, it is time to return to my original question: What kind of historian am I?

I cannot possibly call myself a critical historian. I do not read modern historians’ tomes, to begin with. My attitude to modern history books is like to a set of cookie-cut houses, suffering from the same architectural fatal flaw. One doesn’t bother to criticize the floor carpeting in condemned buildings waiting to collapse by themselves or to be justifiably demolished. Rather than touching such houses, I am building ones entirely of my own. As if the old ones did not exist.

But with regard to monumental and antiquarian historians, I might say that in one sense, I am neither, but in another sense, I am both of them. Like the former, I can see the big picture, but, like the latter, I am holding a magnifying lens to it.

My uniqueness, however, results from an antiquarian microscopic preoccupation with things closest to me, which, under normal circumstances, happen to be little things, thus enlarged beyond their due proportion, which, then, starts to constitute their main irresistible charm, yet-- because of their inherent littleness-- also their core defect. In my special circumstances, though, the closest things I am examining with my personal magnifying lens are great, monumental things, the gods and titans of the historical universe. I was born in Valhalla. And, therefore, Nietzsche’s description of the antiquarian myopia (the antiquarian sense has an extremely limited field of vision) does not apply to me.

There is nothing in my Valhalla that can be taken in exaggeration of its importance, no limit to the field of vision, where purified greatness and historical infinity happen to be involved. I am truly an antiquarian of the monumental!

STALIN AS A PHILOSOPHER KING

(The following short quotation is from the book Conversations About Stalin, based on Ekaterina Glushik’s conversations with my father Artem.----)

Artem: “Stalin was never carried away by a specific theme. He was a man of a comprehensive grasp. When there was a conversation about something, it gradually acquired a broad significance, the circle of subjects broadened, so that many problems would become involved. Thus the conversation would never stay narrow around the initial subject, but it would grow around it into a discussion of all factors impacting the problem: those which helped its solution and those which impeded it.”

From my personal “conversations about Stalin” with my father, I clearly saw that Stalin’s thinking pattern was that of a natural-born philosopher, or at least of a very serious deep philosophizer. Aside from the rather primitive explanation Artem gave to Glushik, his explanation to me was far more sophisticated. Among the many reasons of my father’s admiration for Stalin was the philosophical universality of all Stalin’s notions. They represented a complete self-contained mathematical system, where everything, even nonsense, made a lot of sense.

Stalin saw this ability as consummate statesmanship. “A statesman does not build rockets, like an engineer, nor does he sew boots like a shoemaker, but he possesses the knowledge and skill to make the engineer and the shoemaker work to the best of their abilities and with the greatest efficiency for the needs of the State.”

In Stalin’s system, all human knowledge could be reduced to a small number of basic principles. Once these principles, whatever they were, had all been grasped, you had attained a penetrating insight into the whole wide range of problems facing humanity. Like an honest magician, always loyal to his trade, Stalin never revealed what exactly those principles were; as a practical application of his philosophical discovery, however, he prided himself in his ability to provide very simple solutions to very complicated problems. In this authoritarian approach to life, he was, once again, like Peter the Great, who, each time he saw someone with a swollen jaw, would reach into his pocket for his tooth-extracting pincers... “Now, open your mouth! ...et voilà!” It was a sheer matter of principle for Stalin to deal with the people who had not measured up to the expectations, like Peter had dealt with those rotten teeth.

His method of “cutting through the crap” was indeed extremely effective. Whenever he appointed people to positions of national responsibility, especially in the military-industrial areas, the rewards were always great (best housing with almost decadent comfort, best foods, a personal limousine, household servant; all other needs promptly taken care of, at government's expense), but the tasks were superhuman and the punishment for failure was swift and merciless. If you had agreed to accept the job (was there a choice?, I wonder...), but failed to deliver, you and your family were instantly stripped of all your privileges, you were most likely declared a saboteur, an enemy agent, and sent to the gulag for minor failures, or else, for major ones, tortured and shot.

And, quite understandably, Stalin’s method worked like magic. Russia became an industrial power in record time, propelled to the unprecedented heights by the superhuman effort of her citizens, fueled by sheer mortal fear.

Cruel? Yes! Unusual? Yes! Great? Yes! Quoting my father once again, “But look at what we achieved under Stalin, and what we have achieved since then!”

HELEN THOMAS: IN MEMORIAM

…Helen Thomas died today. I never particularly liked her. She was not exactly pleasant, and oftentimes outright obnoxious. But then, what would you expect of a topnotch journalist? She was an honor to her profession, and I admired her for that.

We had something in common. I hate political correctness: as Tartuffery in individuals, and as the greatest threat to freedom in free society. And--- oh boy!--- how often did she slap this abominable monster in the face! And whether I agreed with her or not, I always loved her for that. As long as she could do it with impunity, freedom was alive and well. She was to me the epitome of American Journalism, a powerful symbol of American freedom.

Today she is dead. Having physically outlived by three whole years her alter ego: the journalistic profession in America. Indeed, on that fateful day three years ago, when she was punished for being politically incorrect and none of her colleagues raised hell in her defense… on that fateful day in 2010 American Journalism died, then and there…

In memoriam: Helen Thomas.

In memoriam: American Journalism.

…Kyrie eleison…

FEAR MEANS RESPECT

(This entry is an offshoot of the previous entry, which mentioned Stalin’s filmography.)

For some reason (I think it was an oversight), Stalin’s filmography skips Ivan the Great with his two-headed eagle, jumping from St. Alexander Nevsky straight to Ivan Grozny, and then to Peter the Great.

Stalin, curiously, saw himself as a royal reincarnation of Ivan IV and Peter I, and lived his life accordingly. Consequently, whatever I have to say in this section about these two monarchs will be closely connected to Stalin, and fall chronologically into Stalin’s time frame. But one special point about Ivan Grozny is about to be made here, and it revolves around the special significance of the name Grozny, meaning awesome and also fear-inspiring.

In the movie Ivan Grozny, an exceptional dialogue takes place between two Russian noblemen, during the coronation of Tsar Ivan in the Kremlin:

“Will they (foreigners) respect us?” asks one of them, looking at the imposingly stern figure of the Tsar.

“Let them fear us. Where there is fear, there will be respect!” replies the other one, instantly catching the drift of the question.

One may argue that such reasoning is nonsense, and that fear is actually the opposite of respect, but to no avail. In so far as the Russians themselves are concerned, the little dialogue contains the blueprint of Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War era. The whole Red Scare thing, culminating in Khrushchev’s legendary “We shall bury you,” was never so much about Soviet supremacy and aggression, as it was about respect!

STALIN AS ROYALTY. PART II.

…Stalin’s manner of dress paralleled that of Peter the Great. The latter’s well-observed penchant for dressing much simpler, and even poorer, than his courtiers, was of course only to make the point that real power had no need for resorting to outward characteristics. Even though Stalin’s “Soviet court” by definition had none of Peter’s resplendence, Stalin managed to remain conspicuously “humble” even against the backdrop of his lackluster “proletarian” blots.

(According to my father’s reminiscences to Ekaterina Glushik (Conversations About Stalin), Stalin dressed in simple, plain clothes all the time, including special days and holidays. “Soft boots, straight pants, tucked inside the boot tops, buttoned up jacket, or “french.” Everything simple, spacious, comfortable. Beria, for instance, wore [fashionable] square-toe boots, but Stalin’s boots were neither square, nor pointed, only slightly rounded: nothing eye-catching, nothing fashionable, nothing loud…”)

This supremely arrogant exhibition of royal humility (sic!) can be further substantiated by a few entertaining examples.---

Unlike Peter, Stalin saw no need in building a new capital for himself, but the Russian cities renamed after him since 1924 each had a special significance. For instance, the city of Stalino (today’s Donetsk) had been Comrade Artem’s Southern stronghold (as you see, Stalin appropriated his dead rival’s city too). Another city, Stalingrad (formerly, Tsaritsyn), had been the place where, during the Civil War, Stalin had tested his private army in action. Even more significantly, this peculiar royal combination Stalingrad-Tsaritsyn had an exceptionally sweet ring to Stalin’s ear, and, with Comrade Voroshilov happily leading the way, people were subtly encouraged to refer to “Stalin’s City” in this highly unusual, but definitely regal, fashion.

But then it happened in the late 1930’s, in the midst of the Great Terror, that some loyal idiot in the Central Committee of the Communist Party proposed at an official event to rename the Soviet capital Moscow after Comrade Stalin. According to Voroshilov, this suggestion had “emanated” from the infamous NKVD Chief Yezhov, known as the “Bloodthirsty Dwarf.” Yezhov immediately seconded his protégé’s motion, and the fate of poor Moscow seemed to be decided then and there.

At this point, instead of gently accepting the honor with an amused benevolence, Stalin had a fit of terrific rage. Voroshilov later told my father that, in his opinion, Yezhov’s unwelcome initiative had contributed to, if not precipitated, his ensuing crashing downfall. It was, of course, rather more complicated than that, but the story itself is good and quite revealing. Stalin’s logic was, again, impeccable: How dare these brainless idiots so cheapen Comrade Stalin’s accomplishments! Stalin was a legitimate and well-recognized master of Russia, and of her ancient capital. Changing the hallowed name of Moscow into anything else would have created a hideous fake and turned Stalin’s historic rule into a historical aberration… Stalin knew his place very well!

STALIN AS ROYALTY. PART I.

(With this entry I am briefly returning to the Stalin theme. I have numerous Stalin entries already posted on this blog. In particular, see the entries of February and March 2011, but of course many others were posted at other times.)

Throughout my father’s reminiscences of Stalin, as well as permeating the impressions of every objective foreign visitor Stalin ever received, Stalin’s special presence, statesmanlike dignity, poise had always come out. He came across as natural royalty, with no affectation whatsoever, but always with a clear sense of his personal position as not only the leader of the USSR, but as the foremost national symbol, which enormous responsibility he never let down. One cannot achieve such a feat by practice, it has to be nurtured out of an innate feeling of personal chosenness by national destiny, and Stalin possessed this feeling in abundance. In fact, as a bona fide great Russian ruler, he felt an organic connection to the great Russian rulers of the past. He was Russian royalty…

Stalin loved cinema, and appreciated its mass appeal. He was himself a “movie-junkie,” especially hooked on American Westerns. However, this last frivolous detail is superfluously beside the point here.

Three great movies were made under his towering personal supervision with detailed instructions given to the scriptwriters, directors, actors, and even to the composer of the music Sergei Prokofiev who must have thoroughly enjoyed thus being taught his trade. Not surprisingly, the titles of these movies were Alexander Nevsky, Ivan Grozny (a two-part masterpiece), and Peter I. Each time, as you watch these movies, you can hear Comrade Stalin personally talking to you from the screen.

For, as I said before, Stalin saw himself as Russia’s supreme royalty, hereditary not by flesh (although, on this particular point, see my entry Of Georgian Princes And Russian Tsars later in this subsection), but by spirit. Apparently, he was a kind of re-embodiment of his great predecessors, and lived his life accordingly, seeking personal explanations of the present and instructions for the future in his “past lives.”

Such an approach had surprisingly sound logic behind it. Like Stalin,-- Alexander, Ivan, and Peter had been fighting against great odds, and all three of them had most spectacular historical successes. If Stalin, now, should design his life after theirs, he might, too, meet with similar success!

This preoccupation with great ancestors does not originate with Stalin, of course. Peter I also venerated St. Alexander Nevsky, and also regarded himself as the direct descendant of Ivan Grozny, bypassing his questionable father and grandfather, the Romanovs, whose lifestyle, laws, and even children (Peter’s own half-siblings), he had unhesitatingly renounced.

Stalin’s assimilation into his regal status was comprehensive and penetrating into the minutest detail. The most stunning feature about him was his overwhelming presence. Short in stature, pockmarked, crippled, with a shriveled arm, he spoke Russian with some difficulty and had a laughable accent. Yet as soon as he entered the room, he would always become its centerpiece, and even his defects were working in his favor. His shortcomings in speaking Russian would be transformed into slowly measured, dignified speech. His limited vocabulary created conciseness of style: he talked in maxims and dictums, impressing his listeners with the simplicity of form, combined with sophisticated and subtle substance…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)

BLUE LILY

The Gumilev miniseries continues in a different, Sonnets, section now (the present entry originally followed Gumilev’s Tragic Giraffe, currently retained in the Russian section), with my translation of another one of his poems (this time in full), but it is now making a different point.

Conquistador.

A conquistador clad in iron armor,

I’m on my way, and happy are my steps,

Sometimes I rest in an enchanted garden,

Sometimes I bow to yawning chasms and depths.

At times the starless sky breathes mist and murmur,

I laugh and wait for dangers from afar,

I’m a believer in my lucky star,

I, conquistador clad in iron armor.

And if this soulless world allows me not

To triumph in life, and certain death’s my lot,

I call for death, it’s coming willy-nilly.

I promise that I’ll fight it to the end,

And then perhaps with my dead, stiffened hand

I’ll clutch at last that heavenly blue lily.

...This is not another Gumilev entry, entered here by mistake… To be sure, this is an offshoot of Gumilev’s poem The Conquistador, but it is an independently functioning offshoot. It is all about the… Blue Lily.

(Now, before we get to the lily, what do Gumilev, Cortez, and Pizarro have in common?-- Easy: this entry!) Francisco Pizarro’s adventurous life would have made an exciting action-adventure story and a megamovie to boot, but, unfortunately, depicting him as any kind of hero would be considered politically incorrect. On the contrary, he is usually painted as a villain, the destroyer of the Incan civilization, and there is no chance, really, that either Hollywood or the even more multiculturalism-sensitive Europeans may ever reverse this neo-historical verdict.

But fortunately these pages have not been blanched by the acid of political correctness. I can certainly write pretty much whatever I please on them and, in fact, I do. Pizarro to me can be many things, the destroyer of the Incas being one of them. But on the other hand, he was also a hero of those very cruel times responsible for far greater cruelties than he himself had ever perpetrated. And seeing him as a hero, a conquistador clad in iron armor, in the words of Gumilev’s poem, creates a different mindset, and a different take on his life and death. The conqueror of the Peruvian Incas may indeed have found Gumilev’s blue lily, as suggested by the iconic story of Pizarro’s violent death, making a pointed case for his Catholic faith. We are told that, having been under attack by the rebellious followers of his recently executed former partner, and later rival, Almagro, mortally wounded, he drew a cross of his own blood on the floor of his palace, kissed it, and died, crying out “Jesus!” with his last breath… “And then perhaps with my dead, stiffened hand I’ll clutch at last that heavenly blue lily.”

What a perfect sonnet! What a perfectly iconic painting (and how delightfully politically incorrect!) of our fallen hero Pizarro!

Not every conquistador clad in iron armor is of course entitled to his blue lily. Hernando Cortez conquered Mexico for Spain, but he failed to end his life as a hero, which kind of death Gumilev’s poem implies. He died, instead, a vilified, broken, and embittered man. Like Pizarro, he was a conquistador in the most literal sense of the word, but, unlike Pizarro, he fell short of the Gumilevian quest for the Blue Lily. He is however welcome in this Blue Lily entry, just because sometimes failure is even more telling than success… What if, with Cortez, such has indeed been the case?…

CREATION OF NONSENSE

Here is a riddle: God created nonsense, and saw that it was good…

I think that there are many such kinds of nonsense that are indeed good. Truth can be nonsense, a good person’s life can be nonsense, a nonsense idea can be very good, etc…
Ironically, what is bad can never be nonsense...
There are two kinds of nonsense: rational and deliberate, on the one hand, and irrational and spontaneous, on the other. Another name for nonsense is the absurd. See my several entries on absurdity and absurdism in the Philosophy section. This entry is their echo.

EPITAPH FOR A BURNT LIBRARY

The ancient library of Alexandria, Egypt, was, perhaps, the greatest library of the ancient world. Built at the beginning of the third century BC, it may have counted as many as 500,000 scrolls in its collection, before it was accidentally burned down by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. In 2002… AD, a new Bibliotheca Alexandrina was built, in commemoration of the old library, but such a nice gesture notwithstanding, it should be plain ridiculous to compare this new reality to the irreality of the real thing.

What is the use of a library that does not exist? This question, worthy of a Jeremy Bentham, reduces value to utility, and, in this sense, becomes rhetorical. On the other hand, real value is not to be consumed by the consumer, or even by a multitude of consumers. Its worth is larger than that of being a commodity; its spark sets off a powerful brainstorm, sculpts a beautiful fantasy, crystallizing as a radiant Platonic Idea behind the drab shadow of reality, and begets morality as such.

…I have a weakness for libraries filled with old books, illuminated manuscripts, tangible relics of the past. My wife and I used to have a large private library, which itself has become a memory. These days, as we can no longer hold any of those beauties in our hand, we are happy still to be the lifetime owners of their splendid ghosts, and, in our case, the radiant Idea that is, is so much stronger than the reality of shadows, that once was.

Most of those great ancient libraries of the world have disappeared from the face of the earth, even though some may have partially survived as archaeological finds, in the form of, say, clay tablets, which have been enthusiastically unearthed and reverently studied. Such is the case with the great Library of Ashurbanipal, which was the subject of my entry The Librarian King in the Genius Section. But the greatest of them all--- the Library of Alexandria--- was burned down to its foundation more than two thousand years ago, long before there was a Russia to appreciate it.

During my memorable month-long trip to Egypt in 1970, I was very fortunate to visit the magnificent city of Alexander, where I admired its natural beauty, the color of the Mediterranean Sea washing its beaches, its impressive large buildings, its still surviving ancient monuments, the most remarkable of these being the 100-foot-tall “Pompey’s Pillar”…

But even more I marveled at what I could not see, yet felt. The Pharos lighthouse, long destroyed, known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But, above all, I marveled at the spirit of the great Library-- not the present-day Library of Alexandria (built three decades after my time), which is often represented as a successor to the old glory, although I had somehow missed that purported connection, but the real thing--- the Great Library that does not exist.

Which brings me back to the question I have already been to, of how our memories and mental associations prove more valuable than the everyday reality surrounding them. There is a pretty reasonable explanation for this phenomenon, of course. Our memory, being selective, retains only the best, most profound experiences,  and thus acquires a rich perennial value, which everyday reality does not and cannot possess. Should I be blessed with something on that side of the grave, I would not want that something to be somehow deprived of the memories I cherish, so sweet that I would hate to see them die with me; but that I may rather live on, just to have them all live on with me…

RELIGION BEFORE THE AGE OF DOUBT

So sweet is the forbidden fruit! Such was the miracle that saved Russian Orthodox Christianity from the sad fate of European Christianity, destroyed by complacency and trivialization… Some will say that the price was too high, and I am often saying that myself, about the year 1917, and of course about the 1990’s.

But objective history has a different set of ethics than a compassionate individual, and it judges people and events by its own standards of good and bad, right and wrong. And who are we to quarrel with history?..

Religion was part of me growing up, and going to church was always a delightful magical experience. There was a mildly conspiratorial element there too: the separation of Church and State meant only one thing, that having icons in the home, going to church services, and talking about God, were very special activities of a far higher rank than anything mundane, such as going to school, or reciting those square Soviet slogans, for instance. It was also a necessary part of being a Russian, and the bond tying together “us Russians” was that much stronger, being sanctified by God and the Batyushka, the Russian Orthodox priest.

It is incredibly important to develop such a comprehensive socio-religious experience early on in the age of childhood innocence, that is, before the age of doubt sets in. I am afraid that religion all by itself without the national-cultural element can hardly withstand the assault of an iconoclastic all-doubting mind, except when that mind is rather feeble, or else under very special circumstances when that mind is strong and mysticism-prone. Otherwise, religion’s inability to answer the rational questions asked of knowledge, will quickly put it at a disadvantage, before the young mind had a chance to reach the level of adult maturity.

The Russian Orthodox are particularly fortunate in this respect, because the fact that your religion is tightly linked to your national and cultural identity is a logically comprehensible argument, and as such it is bound to withstand the assault of the inquisitive mind.

Anyway, as this applied to my spiritual experience, I was a strongly religious person in my childhood, and I remained perhaps an even stauncher believer in my young adulthood, as, for me, the Russian Orthodox faith had developed into an indispensable part of being a Russian.

SUCCESS AND WILLIAM JAMES

First, this reference note, taken from my Webster’s Biographical Dictionary:

“James, William. 1842-1910. Son of Henry James [American philosopher] (1811-1882); brother of Henry James [American novelist] (1843-1916). American psychologist and philosopher, born in New York City. Grad. Harvard Medical School (1869). Taught anatomy, physiology and hygiene at Harvard (from 1872); professor of philosophy (1881). Known esp. as one of the founders of pragmatism. Author of The Principles of Psychology (1890), The Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Pragmatism (1907), The Meaning of Truth (1909), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).”

Bertrand Russell dedicates a whole chapter to William James in his classic History of Western Philosophy. He is obviously of the highest opinion of the man, and here is how he introduces him in his seminal book:

“William James (1842-1910) was primarily a psychologist, but was important in philosophy on two accounts: he invented the doctrine which he called ‘radical empiricism,’ and he was one of the three protagonists of the theory called ‘pragmatism’ or ‘instrumentalism.’ In later life he was, as he deserved to be, the recognized leader of American philosophy.”

Apart from these references, there is of course the authoritative Atlantic Monthly List of the Most Influential Figures in American History, where William James takes the very high rank of #62:

“62. William James. The mind behind Pragmatism, America’s most important philosophical school.”

Having thus established William James’s gloriously shining bona fides, and adding to these that I do have a very large, yet unposted, properly philosophical entry on William James under the title Radical Empiricism As An American Experience, I shall now proceed with the limited subject of the present entry, which focuses on one particular quote from the great man.---

In my days as a Soviet citizen, there was a well-traveled propagandist byword, They say it themselves! This very effective tool has nothing to be ashamed of, even if used for propaganda purposes: its legitimacy is not questioned, as long as their quotes are quoted correctly, which, as a rule, they were.

In my case for this entry, William James’s invective against material success, identifying it as an American disease, is taken from his letter to Herbert G. Wells, dated 10 July 1906. It is indeed a severe condemnation of America’s materialistic values, and a tribute to William James himself, who, by exposing America at her worst, thus represents America at her best. Alas, William James has now been dead for a whole century and the failure of a new crop to take his place in the new millennium represents the Twilight’s Last Gleaming, as I call modern America’s decline, in my American section.

And now, the title treat of this entry, Success And William James:

“…The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease.”

My hat is off to you, William James! As for you, my reader, please take it not from me, but from America’s preeminent psychologist and philosopher. Ipse dixit!

IN AMBULARE VERITAS

(The title is a Latinism of my own making, conceived after the famous Alcaeus/Pliny-the-Elder line “in vino veritas,” already paraphrased by me elsewhere as "in vita veritas.")

As I said before, I always wanted to see myself as a philosopher (a better word should be a philosophizer), but I never really understood what philosophy was about. However, in at least one aspect of my philosophical pursuits I was a bona fide philosopher in the best Aristotelian tradition.-----

I have always loved… walking... As a matter of fact, should I choose to reduce all my essential activities to the minimum of one, with respect to affording me the greatest pleasure, that  must be walking. Since early childhood, walking was the best time for my thinking, when I could utterly liberate myself from all other activities, requiring concentration, and dedicate myself to thinking. “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking,” says Nietzsche, and I have always, even before I had read any Nietzsche, said Amen to that.