Review: And Quiet Flows The Don (Part 1) by Mikhail Sholokhov

This review is for Part 1 and the first 9 chapters of Part 2 only. Unbeknownst to me, my library had only this portion available on audiobook, and I haven’t been able to track down an audiobook for the rest. I’m reminded of the time I took The Name of the Wind as my cottage book, not realizing it was only book one in an unfinished trilogy. I hunted through every used bookstore in rural Canada until I found its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. Ah well.

As a starting point for this review, let’s begin with its setting, evoked in the title: a small village on the banks of the Don river at the start of the 20th century. The Don flows constantly throughout the novel, the backdrop to emotional conversations or quotidian life. This is an area with a long history, and its people, the Cossacks, view themselves that way too; before the narrator can start with the story of Gregori, he first tells us of the unusual circumstances of his grandparents’ marriage. She was a Turkish war bride, was accused of witchcraft by the locals and was killed by a lynch mob, leaving behind a premature infant. He spent twelve years in a penal colony for avenging her death. Already in just this vignette, we have the unfurling of many themes of the book: match-making and love, nationality, patriarchy, community ties and community violence, the way war changes men’s lives. 

Gorky compared this novel to War and Peace, and the similarity is likely intentional on Sholokov’s part. Like Tolstoy’s work, And Quiet Flows the Don is a dramatic epic spanning times of peace and war. It also introduces us to a varied cast of people trying to navigate the waters of love and social expectations, following them through the heartbreaks of these decisions. But Tolstoy’s characters navigate the world of the aristocracy, while Sholokov's characters plow fields and work in mills.

Though agrarian, the Cossacks are relatively free: they are proud of their history as escaped serfs. The Cossack sense of national identity is explored chiefly through the eyes of Gregori, who is self-consciously aware of being only three-quarters Cossack. The Cossacks are particularly proud of their horsemanship — the lack thereof in outsiders is remarked upon, and the shame of not being able to acquire a suitable horse hangs over Gregori’s head. The emotion of a scene is often conveyed through the characters’ awareness of their horses: exhaustion, urgency, readiness.

The patriarchal and parochial Cossack society is romantically and sexually restrictive, and the tension of the novel comes from the characters rearing at these reins. Economic considerations and social shame weigh differently on men and women. Aksinia, a victim of sexual abuse at home, flees a violent husband to be with her lover, Gregori. Gregori is unsatisfied in his marriage with Natalia — a marriage negotiated as a business deal under the gaze of a portrait of the Tsar. Feeling no love for his young and devoted bride he leaves his family, like his grandfather, to be with Aksinia. But Gregori is a cold partner to her too, doubting the true paternity of his daughter with Aksinia. His military summons come as a form of relief, a promise of honour. Later, grieving the loss of her baby alone while Gregori is at war, Aksinia is coerced into sex by a wealthy lord. Gregori is aware of the powerlessness of women to economic and violent coercion: he fights off a squad of his fellow soldiers to save the woman they were raping. But Gregori cannot accept Aksinia’s lack of faithfulness nor the shame of being unable to compete with a wealthier man, and he returns to his wife. Although the reader spends the most time with Gregori, Aksinia and Natalia, we see glimpses of how all the other villagers manage their own quiet gender struggles: they are jilted lovers, bear unwanted pregnancies, or despair at the loneliness of an absent partner. 

Abuse, unhappy marriages, infant mortality. These tragedies are shaped by social structure and economic hardship. Although devastating for the people involved, these dramas remain domestic: their ripples aren’t felt past the banks of the Don. In the meantime, Europe comes to a boil. Rumours of a possible war with Austria start trickling into the village and are met with incredulity — how could they go to war with us? We supply all their grain! As another auger, an educated stranger moves to the village, and takes up playing cards with the mill workers in the evenings. He is arrested for possessing banned books, and is discovered to be a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (a precursor to the Bolsheviks). For the villagers, he is the first person they have seen “[dare] to act against the Tsar himself.”

The military summons finally arrive, and families are torn apart. War throws men into a deadly meat grinder — and into the company of others from distant parts of the country. Discontent and political education spread through the camps.

“You think you’re fighting for the Tsar, but what is the Tsar? The Tsar’s a nobody, and the Tsarina’s a chicken; but they’re both a weight on our backs. Don’t you see? The factory-owner drinks vodka, while the soldier kills the lice. The capitalist takes the profit, the worker goes bare. That’s the system we’ve got. Serve on, cossack, serve on!”

Russia is a tinderbox ready to explode, but the novel stops here.

Review: Canada's Long Fight Against Democracy by Yves Engler and Owen Schalk

Washington’s role in destabilizing and otherwise interfering in democratic governments in the imperial periphery has been well-documented (see, for example, Manufacturing Consent, Washington Bullets, or The Jakarta Method). Canada has curated an image as a friendlier, more peaceful version of its southern neighbour, while aiding the US in its regime-change efforts (or sometimes playing a leadership role in such efforts, as in the anti-Venezuelan Lima Group). Canada’s role in geopolitics is under-explored, and Canadians should be more informed of the real foreign policy of their state. Engler and Schalk aim to address this need, but I found the book disappointing.

One of the most important tasks for a work of this sort is to draw out the tactics and repeated themes underlying western interference in global south politics. In Manufacturing Consent, the authors present their propaganda model, then show its application through several examples of American interventions. In Washington Bullets, Prashad presents a manual for regime change, and explores how intervention has shifted from one of “boots on the ground” and assassinations to economic warfare and lawfare, again providing a slew of examples from American interventions. Excepting three paragraphs or so in the brief conclusion to his work, the authors provide no such structural analysis to the events they recount. 

Another angle for a work of this sort is to educate the reader on a small handful of examples with enough context that the reader really understands the conflict. Vincent Bevins takes this approach in The Jakarta Method, using a combination of archival research and witness interviews to show the reader how Washington pushed for regime change in Indonesia in the 1960s, and then applied this same method to later interventions. In contrast, Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy covers 22 conflicts in 210 pages, providing just a cursory summary of each event.

The result is essentially a listicle in book form. The authors seem to hope to convince via a fire-hose of facts rather than providing their readers with the structure and context needed to remember or recognize Canadian regime change operations. And even this approach could serve a useful function in being a repository of resources for deeper research, however the small handful of references I investigated out of curiosity were of low quality. (Clicking through the footnotes did introduce me to Canada in the World by Tyler A. Shipley, which seems to be a more promising read.)

The real prize for a Canadian writer would be to put forward something like the “manual for regime change” or the “propaganda model” but for Canada. Is there a difference at all between Ottawa’s approach and Washington’s approach? How does Canada distribute its aid dollars and diplomatic resources differently? Does its media apparatus — just as concentrated in the hands of billionaires as the US, but also with a prominent public broadcaster — manufacture consent any differently? Canada’s focus appears to be drawn towards the locations of its mining operations, but protecting its corporations alone cannot explain its involvement in countries like Ukraine; is its goal in geopolitics the same as the US’s, or are there slight differences? Canada is far less likely to deploy troops abroad: is military capability and expense the sole explanation or is there more to it? The answers to these questions are not in this book.

Review: Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

"There is still one [city] of which you never speak. ... Venice," the Khan said. Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about? .... Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Are cities defined by their people? Their buildings? Their history? Their rhythms? Are cities designed? Or organic? Is a city knowable, or is a city really a thousand different cities all at once depending on whose eyes you see through? The answer to all of these contradictory questions is “yes, and they’re also so much more!”

Calvino sets all these facets of cities aglow through a series of vignettes of fantasy cities strung between a thin frame story of Marco Polo describing his travels to Kublai Khan. The cities are imbued with magical realism, sometimes veering towards surrealism and the absurd. 

The highs of the book stood out, but as a whole, it didn’t quite come together for me. I found the dynamic between Polo and Khan a little uninteresting. Some of the vignettes didn’t spark much in me. But the ones that did sparkle made me think, “yes, cities are just like that, and they’re beautiful.” It’s a book for city lovers. 

I highlighted a number of lines, here are a few I'll append for safe-keeping:

“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:”

“In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.”

“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. [Very Jane Jacobs!] At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.”

“However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it.”

“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. … Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”

“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

And my favourite vignettes that don’t work in excerpts:

• Trading Cities 4, on a city that is an intricate spider web of relationships
• Cities & Signs 5, on a city whose prosperity floats atop sooty wretchedness.
• Cities & the Dead 3, on two parallel cities of the living and the dead

Review: The Social Safety Net by Nora Loreto

Between Canada’s relatively tiny population and the concentration of media in the hands of very few major corporations, there's a paucity of people's histories of our own country. Nora Loreto’s book on the decline of Canada’s social safety net attempts to fill this crucial vacuum. After all, how do we improve the systems we have — from education to housing to healthcare and beyond — if we don’t understand how we got here?

This work is broad in scope, and provides an approachable overview. I’d therefore recommend it to a curious leftist hoping to get caught up to speed on the basic beats of Canada’s history. How were social services organized before the welfare state was created? How did the welfare state come about? What were the major turning points in Canada’s neoliberal journey (particularly the Mulroney government of the 1980s and the 1995 Chrétien-Martin budget)? What sorts of rhetoric and political strategy does neoliberalism harness to push through its unpopular reforms?

Loreto focuses on the welfare state, and I understand the need for a writer to draw boundaries around their work somewhere. However, by not discussing production of resources and focusing only on expenditure of resources, Loreto’s polemics read a little utopian. Every subsidy to a corporation and every tax cut is criticized because the money could have gone to direct transfers to lower income people or other social programs. Questions of money are dismissed as unreal:

The deficit, the result of a fiscal imbalance between state revenues and state expenses, became as important, if not more important, than things that actually mattered and were real, like whether or not someone could afford groceries or access surgery. 

I agree with Loreto that it is deplorable that our government has aided the accumulation of massive amounts of wealth in the hands of the few. However, to meet the needs of everyone in our country, we need to ensure the long-term health of our country’s economy. I would have liked to see more discussion of state-owned enterprises or other investments that would lead to improved productivity so that we can reduce our working hours and care for those who cannot work. We cannot leave “thinking seriously about the economy as a whole” to the neoliberals while we get dismissed as unserious thinkers who just want welfare handouts. That does not garner trust in our ability to govern.

A further boundary is quietly drawn geographically. The US's gravity means it cannot be excluded from this history, however — puzzlingly — most of the rest of the world is. The demoralization of the left and the increased aggressiveness of neoliberalism after 1990 (both noted by Loreto) should both be viewed in the context of the dissolution of the world's first worker state (that is, the USSR), an event Loreto mentions only in passing. Canada is so small, we have to understand our history in a global context and not as a nation that just occupies the shadow of the US because our future certainly lies in international cooperation, not tying ourselves to a sinking empire.

Still, this book fills a void. Although its economic analysis falls somewhat short of what I had hoped for, as a history of Canadian rhetoric around social services it succeeds quite well. I smiled when Loreto turned one of neoliberalism’s favourite values on its head, concluding “Yes, sometimes even radical ideas are common sense.”

Review: Ludwig Fuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy by Friedrich Engels

This is a breezy read that starts with Hegel’s philosophical context, and traces the development of philosophical thought through Fuerbach to Marx. It fits a similar niche as Plekhanov’s The Development of the Monist View of History (1895), except that Plekhanov starts earlier and ends later (from 18th century French materialists to Plekhanov’s contemporaries), and comes in at something like six times the length. Engels’s chapter on Hegel is an excellent overview, and although his chapter on Marx’s historical materialism doesn’t have too much that can’t be found elsewhere, is clear and elegant and to the point. It is perhaps noteworthy that Engels introduces the dialectics of nature before he shows how dialectics applies to history.

The middle chapters I found less useful. Unlike foes like Proudhon, I do not see clear modern-day versions of Fuerbach. Though I haven’t read him directly, Fuerbach seems to have less depth and rigor compared to Hegel. As a result, understanding the Hegel-Fuerbach-Marx pathway feels like it adds less to my toolkit compared to works that focus on a greater number of thinkers (e.g., Plekhanov, or Losurdo’s historical contextualization of Hegel).

The difference between materialism and idealism and the development of the dialectical method are so important for marxist philosophy. There’s a real need for a modern overview, something with the scope of Plekhanov, but perhaps with more of the conciseness of Engels and some of the practicality of Mao’s On Practice, that teaches the controversies and brings us up to the current era.

Review: True Grit by Charles Portis

I'll remember this book for its lively and distinctive narrator voice, and the way it (unintentionally?) captures so much of the American psyche.

Mattie Ross is headstrong, principled, and speaks in folksy idioms. She narrates her story as if called to the witness stand. She regularly caveats information she knows only secondhand or scenes she cannot recall with great certainty. Those moments she recalls with great precision she states her willingness to swear on. Her narrative voice reflects her worldview: except for her close ties with her family, her relationships with people are largely transactional and her assessment of morality emphasizes its consistence with the law.

Lawful society versus the state of nature is a major theme of the work. Mattie's worldview comes into conflict with her life experience when she underestimates a bandit's willingness to defy her arrest and overpower her physically, thrusting her into a state of nature. In an effort to escape her captors she finds herself in a pit filled with snakes and bats. Forced by necessity, she rips the arm off a corpse (an act she views as unlawful desecration) and fights her way out.

The story itself is quintessentially American, both in the positive and negative sense. Mattie's quest symbolizes the importance of fighting for justice, although it is a retributive justice. Mattie values grit, and because of grit even a trigger-happy and vindictive bad cop may be the key to achieving justice. It's important to live by your principles, and everyone is unscrupulous and out to get you. Perhaps there is a work out there that venerates these positive qualities without also promoting these negative qualities; America is unlikely to fix its problems while instilling True Grit morality.

Review: Democracy or Bonapartism by Domenico Losurdo

This is an incredibly relevant work for understanding modern day democracy and its discontents. Losurdo traces history from the French Revolution through the 1992 US Presidential election to show the development of Bonapartism. We see how soft Bonapartism of the US and other countries of the West (versus the war Bonpartism of fascism) is remarkably stable, and yet fails to deliver on the emancipation and social welfare one might expect would come of universal suffrage.

Bonapartism is a political structure characterized by a powerful and charismatic executive, who legitimizes their power through the support of the masses, and who becomes the interpreter of the nation — that is, power is personalized. To pave over internal strife between economic classes within a nation, conflict is externalized, and the Bonapartist leader is imbued with a mandate to protect (and expand) the lofty ideals of the nation. Soft Bonapartism is able to shift from states of exception to states of normality, and part of its stability comes from its ability to change out heads of state when the current Bonapartist leader no longer can point to popular support. This is accomplished by having competitive elections between multiple factions of a single party.

Along with the increasing power of the Bonapartist leader comes a reduction of the power of political parties, if not through overt legal means, via the implementation of single-member districts over proportional representation. We also see increased monopoly over theoretical production, i.e., the consolidation of mass media under the control over a few billionaires. Though soft Bonapartism comes with universal suffrage (first for just white men, and now for nearly all adults), we also see a disemancipation in our ability to participate in political decision-making and debate.

Readers may be particularly curious about Losurdo’s assessment of the socialist states of the twentieth century. Losurdo argues that none of these leaders were Bonapartist figures (though Mao at one point came closest), in part due to the role political parties play in mediating power. Because political parties act as forums for political education and debate, they maintain the political engagement of the masses and act as insulation against the personalization of power.

Losurdo notes that we are currently in a wave of disemancipation, and that the end is not yet in sight. He has few answers for the steps going forward, although reading between the lines it seems like fighting for proportional representation and re-taking control over the means of information dissemination (education, news, etc) are likely bets. I’d recommend this book as a good introduction to Marxist critique of modern political structures, and as a first book by this author.