03.17.11THUNDERTOME II: ROUND 1SURVIVOR: anna karenina (leo tolstoy)
CHALLENGER: just kids (patti smith)
though i'm inordinately fond of several russian writers (and any number of nonlethal soviet-era oddities) and took a few grueling quarters of first-year russian in college,* count leo and i didn't cross paths until i saw
the last station (the '09 movie about tolstoy's life at
yasnaya polyana with his wife and followers; it's excellent) in the run-up to last year's academy awards. truth be told, i didn't really understand the scope of his cultural significance; i knew he was a heavyweight, sure, but the idea that he was ben franklin plus jonathan franzen plus oprah plus, like, elmo to nineteenth-century russians...was new.
reader, i grok that now. one disappears with a
shoomp,
coke-bottle-into-the-burren-like, into tolstoy's personalities and relationships: as i marveled to
paul when i first finished the book (long ago, when cthulhu was young enough for justin bieber), he separates his characters' interactions and reactions into their component urges, like, teaspoon by teaspoon. moscow, st. petersburg, and the russian countryside are plush settings, as satisfying in tolstoy's hands as england ever was in jane austen's - but his characters come to life in a way that's shockingly modern. here are anna and her husband, just after her admission that she loves vronsky:
'Perhaps I am mistaken,' said he. 'In that case I beg your pardon.'
'No, you were not mistaken,' she said slowly, looking despairingly into his cold face. 'You were not mistaken. I was, and cannot help being, in despair. I listen to you but I am thinking of him. I love him, I am his mistress, I cannot endure you, I am afraid of you, and I hate you....Do what you like to me.'
i'd have overturned my samovar and started a fight if i read that sort of thing in 1875;** it's devastating, and it more than compensates for tolstoy's lengthy meditations on collective farming (which he supported quite energetically in his life beyond the page). it should be noted that the noodly agricultural solos had their fans; in an 1875 letter, turgenev wrote that
I don't like Anna Karenina, although one finds some truly magnificent pages (the race, the mowing, the hunt), but it is all sour; it smells of Moscow, of incense, of old maidishness, of Slavophilism, aristocratism, and so on.
more for me, turgenev; more for me. i've even arrived at a sort of peace about resenting anna at the end of the book because she reminds me of the overcooked heroine i imagined myself to be in my late teens and early twenties; meeting real people in one's reading, even and perhaps especially the sort of people who make one realize one was a shit, is the best sort of reading i know. the only thing keeping me from being unequivocally team
anna karenina is the absence of an equally detailed account of anna's first days with vronsky; while we hear all about their affair's middle age and death throes, we're denied the delirious early scenes we get with charming foils like kitty and levin. where's the beef [tea], count leo?
speaking of delirious early scenes, here's what it was like to be miniature
patti smith in chicago in the '50s, according to
just kids, her national-book-award-winning account of being young in new york with
robert mapplethorpe.
Not contented with my child's prayer, I soon petitioned my mother to let me make my own. I was relieved when I no longer had to repeat the words If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take and could say instead what was in my heart. Thus freed, I would lie in my bed by the coal stove vigorously mouthing long letters to God. I was not much of a sleeper and I must have vexed him with my endless vows, visions, and schemes. But as time passed I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.
i found patti smith's
easter in the bargain cassette bin at the ratty old tower records on bay and columbus in san francisco, the same tower records to which i sprinted one night when joe and i had a huge fight and i needed a copy of
let it bleed to play over and over while i chain-smoked inside and made all of our stuff stink (see the aforementioned anna karenina phase). the stones CD is still with me, but god knows where
easter ended up; i listened to it straight through on a road trip which became by virtue of its awful patti smith soundtrack the mathematical opposite of a road trip in a volkswagen commercial (even the one with nick drake's "pink moon," which...do your research, madison avenue), and i put as much distance between it and my person as i could.
why, then, did i shell out for her memoir? because
one of my favorite blog-ladies loves patti to pieces. because
just kids won the national book award. because i wanted to qualify for
super saver shipping. one finishes tolstoy and, satisfied, needs to feel...cheated?
We did not have enough money to pay our bill. At first light I woke Robert, helped him dress, and walked him down the fire escape. I left him there on the sidewalk so I could climb back up and get our portfolios. All we had in the world.
When I looked up I saw some of the woebegone residents waving handkerchiefs. They leaned out of windows calling "goodbye, goodbye" to the children who were escaping the purgatory of their existence.
I hailed a cab. Robert slid in, followed by the portfolios. Before ducking into the taxi, I tood a last look at the sad splendor of the scene, the waving hands, the Allerton's foreboding neon sign, and the morphine angel singing from the fire escape.
Robert rested his head on my shoulder. I could feel some of the stress leave his body. "It's going to be all right," I said, "I'll get my job back and you'll get better."
"We're going to make it, Patti," he said.
We promised we'd never leave one another again, until we both knew we were ready to stand on our own. And this vow, though everything we were yet to go through, we kept.
"Chelsea Hotel," I told the driver, fumbling through my pockets for change, not completely certain I could pay him.
in a recent review of a new modigliani biography, peter schjeldahl notes that
No starving-artist myth ever propogated lacks a case in point involving Modigliani. [His biographer] notes, "Occasionally he curled up in the street, as his friends discovered one morning. He had found a cozy corner underneath a table on the terrace of the Lapin Agile and was dead to the world." Getting thrown out of a restaurant for causing a scene (as by stripping naked, on more than one occasion) beat having to pay the check. He ran up boundless tabs, or paid with then-worthless drawings, at establishments that valued his charm.
[...]
A spoiled mother's boy, Modigliani was a magnet for parental impulses. Such dependency was readily dissembled, in the imagination of the day, as an artist's superior claim on the world's solicitude. Nietzschean Supermen don't do dishes.
just kids reeks of that entitlement, the sort of entitlement that makes me hate penniless artists and then hate myself for hating penniless artists. i would like to be the sort of person who could thrill to the tale of how twentysomething patti nursed hustlin' robert through a crippling bout of fever, gonorrhea, and trench mouth (seriously?), but i twisted up with disdain:
if you called your dad, as jarvis cocker
put it,
he could stop it all. i can respect the fact that leaning on her conservative parents would have compromised patti's integrity - very well, starve for your art - but i can't imagine it was especially fun to be, say, a cab driver in new york in the seventies, and getting stiffed by artistic types like patti and robert must have made it even better. what made their needs more important than their creditors'?
then there's the dress-up, and the weird lifestyle plagiarism. i respect borrowing from your heroes - lord knows the night i swanned around as david bowie was one of the highlights of my life in new york to date - but smith's rote mimicry of brian jones, rimbaud, and others reads like bad fashion blogging, and i think her pilgrimages to charlesville (rimbaud's birthplace) and paris's
pere-lachaise*** (where jim morrison is buried) actually shrank my soul. on that pere-lachaise scene, where she meets an old woman cleaning the graves:
[The woman] shook her head, muttering. I was amazed at her disregard for the torrential rain. Suddenly she turned and gruffly cried in English: "American! Why do you not honor your poets?"
I was very tired. I was twenty-six years old. All around me the messages written in chalk were dissolving like tears in the rain. Streams formed beneath the charms, cigarettes, guitar picks. Petals of flowers left on the plot of earth above Jim Morrison floated like bits of Ophelia's bouquet.
"Ehh!" she cried again. "Answer me, Américaine! Why do you young people not honor your poets?"
"Je ne sais pas, madame," I answered, bowing my head.
"I do not know."
the violence of my snort as i read that scene in bed frightened both of the cats and roused joe from sleep. "whuh?" "patti smith. jim fucking
morrison."
VICTOR: anna could take patti with one plump white arm tied behind her back. i think kitty scherbatsky could take patti, to be honest.
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if you've read anna karenina, does it rank among your favorite books?
02 do you think cthulhu would appreciate justin bieber?
03 why doesn't tolstoy tell us more about how anna and vronsky fall in love?
04 in his new yorker review of the pevear/volokhonsky AK, james wood contends that "Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina, while carrying the germs of male blame, produce their own antibodies, so that their doomed heroines are finally sympathized with rather than judged, written into rather than written off." do you agree? (as i recall, i pitied tess.)
05 would you drink beef tea?
06 do you own any patti smith albums? do you play them?
07 were patti and robert justified in skipping out on their bills?
08 if you've read just kids, did you find the prose purple?
09 have you ever been to jim morrison's grave?
*i've mostly stopped pretending to speak russian, though i can still read cyrillic and occasionally have dreams about meat salad.
**AK was published in russky vesnik, a monthly, between 1875 and 1877.
***full disclosure: i insisted on visiting jim morrison's grave when i went to paris. i was sixteen.
