Tea at Trianon: Russian Literature's Prophetic Voice

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, July 10, 2023

Russian Literature's Prophetic Voice

From Law and Liberty:

“The writer as prophet is not someone with a lucky gift of foresight,” wrote the classicist Bernard Knox. He is “someone who foresees only because he sees, sees clearly, unmoved by prejudice, by hopes, by fears, sees to the heart of the present, the actual situation.” It is a poignant irony of intellectual life that novelists often foretell the future more accurately than theorists, because they are not trying to. They are just depicting the human realities of the present moment.

The rest of us are always looking backwards or forwards, fighting yesterday’s wars or anticipating the next likely cataclysm. Great writers, though, see the germs of everything that could happen tomorrow by looking in frank amazement at what is already happening today. As Augustine observed long ago in his Confessions, nothing really exists for us except the present—so the signs of what will come, if they are anywhere, can be found in the here and now. Ideologues can only spin out their doctrines into brittle syllogisms, shrugging off the quirks of real people and the accidents of real life as so much irrelevancy. But for a novelist, the quirks and the accidents are the point.

This contrast—between the ironclad certainties of the revolutionary and the open-hearted observations of the artist—runs through the center of Wonder Confronts Certainty. Assessing the literary contributions of Russian thinkers in Dostoevsky’s generation and afterward, Morson pits the humane wisdom of storytellers against the arrogant declarations of political activists.

Dostoevsky’s own prescience would soon grow legendary. Suffering and misfortune distanced him from the confident radicals of his youth, until he could see what crazed extremists they would become. But Dostoevsky was not alone. Many of the poets and playwrights in Morson’s pages exhibit a veritable second sight, penetrating into the heart of issues that would motivate the rise of Soviet totalitarianism. Through the sheer force of their honesty, these storytellers became visionaries.

Morson refrains from mining his subject matter for contemporary “relevance.” He doesn’t have to: the relevance is there, and he can let it speak for itself. The “timeless questions” of his subtitle really are timeless. But they arose for Russian authors within a particular social context, which gave them a distinctive weight and character. Morson’s way into them is to explain how Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, Solzhenitsyn, and others came to grips with the existential problems of their moment. He does this with such loving care that the concerns of these bygone writers become our concerns. (Read more.)