studeronomy's reviews
97 reviews

 1.
Accidental Czar is a good overview of the U.S. state department’s interpretation of Vladimir Putin, with fun illustrations by Brian “Box” Brown. The book’s author, Andrew S. Weiss, is the kind of guy who worked as an executive director for the RAND corporation. He went to an Ivy League university (Columbia) and then served on the National Security Council, at the State Department, and at the Defense Department. He was a policy advisor for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which should tell you something—the guys who worked for both Clinton and W. were usually 100% down with the policy continuities between those administrations, the continuities that led straight to the Iraq War, woot woot. These were also the guys who pushed hard for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia.

Weiss previously led the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, a think-tank for Russian liberals and their allies to encourage and implement liberal reforms in Russia (the Moscow Center was shut down, but Weiss still works for the Carnegie Endowment). His articles have appeared in the New York Times and Foreign Policy. He has appeared on NPR. He has written papers for the Brookings Institute. He goes to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Is any of that intrinsically bad? No…but when all those meritocratic checkmarks start to accumulate on a single CV, I get suspicious.

Weiss admits that, despite his vast education in Russian and Soviet affairs, there was a lot he didn’t understand about Russia before Putin’s villainous turn. I blame part of that ignorance on Weiss’s ideological commitments: you’ll only get so far in your analysis of Russia if you have centrist-liberal (neoliberal?) priors. Such analysis becomes especially messy when you believe in the benign efficacy of global capital to solve the world’s problems. And according to his biography on the RAND website, “Weiss was a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies, where he worked primarily on global commodities, energy, and foreign exchange markets.”

So yeah, he’s that kind of guy.

2.
Let’s start with the good: Accidental Czar is a lot of fun to read. The accounts of Putin’s upbringing and the myths of Putin’s personal history are entertaining. The histories of Russia that Weiss includes are good overviews of the nation’s origins, development, and ambitions.

Above all, Weiss offers one of the best accounts of “Putin’s brain” that I’ve encountered. An American diplomat once told Weiss that Putin’s entire worldview could be divided into three distinct sources of knowledge: first, there’s the real-world stuff Putin knows that everybody knows (e.g., the American dollar is the global reserve currency; China and the U.S. are locked in a proto-Cold War; the E.U. is facing a reemergence of far-right political parties; the Nazis lost WWII; Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia; etc).

Second, there’s the secret (and real) stuff Putin knows from his firsthand experiences in intelligence and as head of state (stuff you and I aren’t privy to, at least not without Wikileaks).

Third and finally, there’s all the crazy stuff: conspiracy theories about Western homosexuals in Ukraine literally crucifying toddlers on actual crosses, or Obama single-handedly launching the Maidan revolution because Michelle is LGBTQ+, or whatever.

Putin’s brain synthesizes these three types of knowledge through such an extraordinary process of osmosis that, when you’re talking to him, it’s impossible to disentangle the three. You just wind up getting frustrated (like Obama) or played (like Tucker Carlson).

Weiss’s account of Putin’s life and rise to power is mostly accurate, but it has its limits, especially when Putin’s biography begins to intersect with world politics. Weiss portrays American leaders and diplomats as well-intentioned fools and goofs who continually underestimated Putin. These Americans appear naïve and harmless, not political tigers in their own right with their own agendas and their own strategies for global hegemony.

This portrayal is not very plausible.

3.
Alongside Weiss’s American goofs, there are a number of American villains. Take the case of Edward Snowden. Weiss describes the Snowden saga as if the main story was not the wild and flagrant violations of privacy committed by the U.S. government or the terrifying extent of the NSA’s surveillance powers over the entire planet. Weiss brushes over these details and jumps right to Snowden’s flight to Russia—a flight he didn’t exactly choose to make (he was on his way to Latin America and wound up stuck in Russia, which isn’t exactly destination #1 for dissidents).

Snowden has behaved like a weakling and a coward since he wound up in Russia (although I’d challenge you to tell Putin to his face that his domestic surveillance is as pernicious and widespread as America’s). For Weiss, Wikileaks and Snowden are just pawns in Putin’s plan for domination over Eurasia and his scheme to *gasp* deny the presidency to Hillary Clinton (the liberal resentment over Russia’s miniscule role in the 2016 election is pretty thick in Accidental Czar).

You’d never know, reading this book, the extent to which the U.S. lords its surveillance, intelligence, and military agencies over enemies and allies alike…and how little we’d know about America’s covert foreign policy without Snowden’s revelations. For Weiss, Snowden is just another pitstop on the road to the November 2016 U.S. election and the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

4.
Things get a little silly as Weiss moves toward the 2016 election. At the beginning of Chapter Six, Weiss recounts the history of KGB propaganda in the U.S., from spreading lies about the secret origin of HIV in a U.S. lab to spreading obvious non-lies about the fact that Ronald Reagan wanted was taking a militaristic stance against the U.S.S.R., or the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was *gasp* a homosexual. These are the mighty columns of disinformation on which, according to Weiss, Putin built the edifice of the Donald Trump presidency.

Weiss recounts how Putin successfully used asymmetrical warfare in Ukraine in the years between 2014 and 2022. He also recounts how Putin’s allies in London encouraged Brexit; how his media hosted Nigel Farage, Alex Jones, Richard Spencer, and Iowa’s crypto-Nazi former congressman, Steve King; and how his lackeys tried to sow divisions among and within Western nations.

I remember seeing some of this firsthand as a tourist in Berlin in 2014, when far-right demonstrators outside the Bundestag waved Russian flags and placards with slogans like “EU ist nicht Europa” and “BRD ist nicht Deutschland” (one wonders what is Germany, precisely, if not the BRD? Is this some kind of backwards appeal to the deutsches Volk who unsuccessfully invaded the Soviet Union?).

None of this seemed to be working in Germany, where the rise of the far-right had more to do with Syrian refugees than with Putin’s machinations. And if Putin’s machinations succeeded in Ukraine before 2022, it was only insofar as the Kremlin could hack the nation’s physical and digital infrastructure and wreak havoc all over the country. Putin was successful in shutting down the power in Kyiv; he certainly wasn’t successful in winning the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people.

So these brazen, destructive tactics weren’t exactly successful in Ukraine. But Weiss argues that far less powerful tactics were somehow successful in the United States, where Putin’s goons created fake Facebook accounts to rile up American voters (who were already pretty riled up) and leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks (emails that confirmed what most people already knew and/or thought about Hillary Clinton). Weiss complains that Trump used Russian propaganda “to paint Clinton as sleazy and unethical,” which…c’mon, you don’t exactly need Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to make that argument.

Weiss also complains that the American far-right (Donald Trump and his supporters) and the much smaller American far-left (Jill Stein and the weirdos who vote for her) had connections to Russia. Consequently, conservative complaints about American elites after the 2008 financial crisis and leftist complaints about American foreign policy after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are, for Weiss, at least partially Russian in origin.

To be fair, Weiss is careful to point out that the divisions that led to Donald Trump’s victory were homegrown American divisions, and that you didn’t need to be a one-time KGB agent to see with your own eyes that 50% of Americans view the other 50% of Americans as mortal enemies, and vice versa.

In one of the book’s images, we see a meme (based on a real meme) showing Satan arm-wrestling Jesus. Satan says, “If Clinton wins, I win!” Jesus responds, “Not if I can help it!” The meme prompts the viewer to hit “like” to help Jesus win.

As an Orthodox Christian with an Evangelical background, I can tell you that this is pure grade-A ‘Murican-bred religious nationalism, even if it was authored by a cash-hungry teenager in St. Petersburg. This is where policy analysts like Weiss lose track of the plot—they spend lifetimes at elite institutions learning about non-American societies while missing much of American culture and its discontents. (I remember hearing the “Pod Save America” guys talking about how, during the Obama administration, they didn’t understand Evangelicals’ commitment to Israel because they didn’t grow up around Evangelicals. Which, if you live in America and you didn’t know any Evangelicals growing up, you lived a fairly charmed-but-isolated American life.)

All that to say: you don’t need to be a Russian spy to understand the braindead logic of American Christians and deploy that logic in Trump’s favor. You also don’t need RT in order to platform Alex Jones and Richard Spencer, or to smear George Soros. America’s homegrown conservative media is happy to do that without any help from the Kremlin. Steve King didn’t become a Nazi-loving congressman because of Russian hackers in St. Petersburg. He was elected by like-minded racists from Iowa.

Jones and Spencer and King (and Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage) are not, as Weiss claims, “useful idiots” for Moscow. They’re just idiots.

5.
I’m not trying to minimize the effects of Russian propaganda, especially regarding Ukraine. The accusation that Ukraine is overrun with neo-Nazis is, for me, quite serious. First, it’s just not true—there are more flesh-and-blood neo-Nazis in the German Bundestag today than in the Ukrainian Rada (where, if I’ve heard correctly, there are precisely zero extreme-right representatives). Some propagandists point out that Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. But we conveniently ignore the fact that, for every single Ukrainian collaborator with the S.S., there were hundreds (thousands?) of Ukrainians fighting the Nazis in the Red Army.

Second, you hear this talking point about Ukrainian Nazis and Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis repeated in the U.S. all the time…especially (I’m ashamed to say) on the anti-war left, for whom no American military intervention is ever justified. Well, that is, no American intervention except for WWII, but the American left is awfully quick to point out that the Soviets won that war on the West’s behalf.

As for Putin's propaganda in the West: honestly, if Putin is fighting a propaganda war against the United States, so what? As Julia Ioffe said in an interview after the 2022 invasion, we should be very honest about what’s happening in Ukraine. This war is the result of a criminal invasion of Ukraine by Russia first and foremost, but it’s also a war between Russia and the West. And this war started in 2014 at the earliest. So why all the hand-wringing about Russian propaganda and cyberattacks? Because Putin targeted NPR darlings like Hillary Clinton and wrapped his arms around neoliberal bêtes noires like Julian Assange, Steve Bannon, Jille Stein, and (above all) Donald Trump? Is liberal rage against Putin about Ukraine or the 2016 election? Are they angry because Putin is a murderous autocrat or because “orange man bad”?

In any event, Putin is clearly failing at whatever he’s trying to achieve through these manipulations of Western media. Weiss quotes Putin’s old KGB boss, General Kalugin, who says that the KGB’s prime directive “was not intelligence collection, but subversion—active measures to weaken the West, to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO.”

Whelp, mission not accomplished, whether we’re talking about 1989 or 2024.

6.
In Accidental Czar, Weiss includes several entertaining sections (wonderfully illustrated by Brown) on the history of Russia. But these sections rely too much on an interpretation of Russian history that has become popular in Western academic circles, especially since Putin became such a baddie. According to this interpretation, the whole Russian “thing”—the Russian character, the Russian soul, Russian autocracy, Russian bureaucracy, Russian corruption, Russian military resilience—is the consequence of Russia’s unique geographic location: an expanse of difficult-to-defend territory stretching for thousands of kilometers in every direction around Moscow, the center.

Want to understand Russian history and Russian policy? Well, you’ve gotta understand its geography…just as understanding British or American or French or Chinese history and policy requires you to understand their geography.

There’s a lot of truth and power in this kind of analysis, what we call “geopolitics,” but it’s became especially popular after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. In the two years since the full-scale invasion, geopolitical analysis has been positively unavoidable. Ideology is out; realism is in. Nineteenth-century Great Power politics is back—turns out, it never left! And everybody is doing it, on all sides of the Ukraine issue, from John Mearsheimer (realpolitik scholar and opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine) to Stephen Kotkin (centrist scholar who advocates for a partition of Ukraine) to innumerable lesser-known foreign policy experts throughout the world (including in China) and even, at times, Alexandr Dugin (pro-Russian crypto-fascist), Timothy Snyder (pro-Ukrainian liberal historian who personally purchased drones for the Ukrainian army), and Antony Blinken (our internationalist Secretary of State who has never met a Muslim-majority nation he wouldn’t like to invade).

Geopolitical analysis of global politics and economics can be an incredibly powerful tool for understanding why certain nations prefer certain policies. But it can also serve as voodoo cultural studies, especially when you start ascribing ideas about “national personalities,” “historical patterns,” and “cultural characteristics” to the locations of rivers and mountains.

And I worry about the extent to which we’re all overcorrecting toward Great Power theories of history after the (bogus) “end of history” euphoria of the 1990s and the (failed) multi-trillion-dollar construction of American military hegemony in the early 2000s. Now America is just one of three global superpowers playing chess with a bunch of marginal nations full of newly un-colonized brown people whom we don’t exactly trust. Some of those nations, like Brazil and India, are moving up in the world, and for America, now is the time to win them for the West, for liberalism, for international institutions, and for global capital. This is America’s foreign policy project for the twenty-first century, and Putin is making that project a little…complicated.

One last thing...
When Madeline Albright is blurbing your book, you know that you’ve either written a book that Madeline Albright really happens to like or you’ve written state department propaganda. Accidental Czar is the latter. A lot of the material is completely true, but it’s still anti-Russian propaganda. I enjoyed the book, but I don’t trust it. The information is mostly true, but the reason it has been compiled into this graphic novel is to construct a narrative about American naivete and the need for robust action against America’s enemies. As with most stories we tell about Russia, we’re talking about us, not the Russian people or the Ukrainian people. Their diverse and oft-conflicting stories get lost amid our constant storytelling. 

A stunning volume of poems.

From the little I know of Kaveh Akbar’s biography, he has struggled with alcoholism, and nearly all of these poems reflect that and reflect the tensions between his Iranian heritage and American identity. Subjects like alcoholism and immigrant identity are well-worn and risk becoming…boring.

The same is true of the way Akbar weaves these subjects into his success as a poet. At one point the speaker describes himself “rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers/ while they applaud and sip their scotch.” Which, yeah, I get how strange and humiliating that must feel, but if you’re a poet with a sizable audience, then let me play you the world’s smallest violin.

But Akbar continually wins my sympathy back. And he is aware of how he may appear to unsympathetic readers: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry./ This may be me at my best.” The voices in his poems are charming and heartbreaking, and the imagery is awesome. Here are some of my favorite lines and moments from this collection:

“a crimson robe floating/ up from the Gobi/ sand into prophet then back into sand”

“envy is the only deadly sin that’s no fun/ for the sinner”

“We all want/ the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,/ like the first man to hear a parrot speak)”

“You just don’t know yet which parts/ of yourself to value…/ your irises or their mothish obsession/ with light.”

“even our great-grandparents saw different blues owing/ to the rapid evolution of rods and cones”

“Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?/ To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?”

“Mostly I want to be letters—not/ their sounds, but their shapes/ on a page. It must be exhilarating/ to be a symbol for everything at once:/ the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,/ the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.”

“I pictured myself/ reduced to a warm globe of blood/ and yearned to become a sturdy in my end-/lessness, to grow heavy and terrible/ as molten iron poured down a throat.”

“the stomach/ of the girl who ate only hair was filled with hair they cut/ it out when she died it formed a mold of her stomach reducing/ a life to its most grotesque artifact”

“we now know some angels are more terrifying/ than others our enemies are replaceable the stones behind their teeth/ glow in moonlight”

“there were so many spiders/ your mouth a moonless system/ of caves filling with dust/ the dust thickened to tar/ your mouth opened and tar spilled out”

“Come to bed with me, you honest thing—/ let’s break into science. I’ll pluck you from my mouth/ like an apple seed, weep with you over other people’s lost pets./ The strangeness between us opens like a pinhole on the ocean floor:/ in floods a fishing boat, a Chinese seabird, an entire galaxy/ of starfish. We are learning so much so quickly. The sun/ is dying. The atom is reducible. The god-harnesses/ we thought we came with were just our tiny lungs.”

“Plants reinvent sugar daily/ and hardly anyone applauds.”

“There has been a swarm/ of hungry ghosts orbiting my body—even now,/ I can feel them plotting in their luminous diamonds/ of fog, each eying a rib or a thighbone. They are/ arranging their plans like warms preparing/ to rise through the soil. They are ready to die/ with their kind, dry and stiff above the wet earth.”

“sexless as a comma”

“I’m keyless as the language of twins”

“See how/ I am all rosejuice and wonderdrunk? See how/ my throat is filling with salt? Boil me. Divide/ me. Wrap me in paper and return me to earth. One day/ I will crack open underneath the field mushrooms./ One day I will wake up in someone else’s bones.”

“in Islam there are prayers to return almost anything even/ prayers to return faith I have been going through book after book pushing/ the sounds through my teeth I will keep making these noises/ as long as deemed necessary until there is nothing left of me to forgive”

So yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a remarkable, gorgeous collection of contemporary poetry by a poet I can’t help liking, even if the voices he cultivates wear on me a little bit at times. Indeed, the voices in these poems can get exasperating, but the moments of raw beauty more than make up for that. 

More of an essay collection than a single argument with a sustained thesis. I was hoping for the latter—a comprehensive argument for an essential definition of "art." So I was a little disappointed. Still, the first essay—"Wakeful Dreams"—was beautiful and worth reading. 

 Lo Kwa Mei-en’s poetry frames the immediacy and the urgency of personal identity—what it means to be a person—within poems that are spare, wide, and often difficult. By spare, I mean that the structures of many of her poems consist of a few thin threads, letting her syntax flow in the breeze. By wide, I mean that her poems expand and stretch as they flow in the breeze, leaving lots of empty but meaningful space on the page.

And because the forms and syntax of these poems are often difficult, you can feel a little disoriented as you read The Bees Make Money in the Lion. But the volume’s certain images and themes help stabilize and return you to (what I interpret as) Mei-en’s central concern: the way in which citizenship and national identity strip away the experience of being human like skin being stripped from a martyr. It’s about biopolitics, basically, if you want to use a Foucauldian term. If the word “Foucauldian” doesn’t turn you off. God, I sound like a grad student.

The images and themes I refer to brush against the limits of what it means to be a human being. Mei-en incorporates all kinds of references to non-human animal life (or to zoology as such) and to extraterrestrial life (frequently playing on the fact that the word “alien” refers to extraterrestrial beings and to immigrants, migrants, and refugees). “Zoology counts us in,” she writes, “as against them and against joining them, as not a fair choir but chimeras in yellow moods, like a feral cat burying her fleas….” The “us” that zoology taxonomizes so uncharitably could be human beings in general, or it could be an immigrant being interpellated within the American state (which is a huge part of Mei-en’s biography).

In one of the collection’s best poems, “Aubade with Beginning, End, and Zodiac,” Mei-en writes:

Zoophobia predicted my alien romance. In the year of the lam,/ an Earth boy spit out my tooth. It was red like a page of the sun/ yellow as the word he held me down on. He called me a real/ bitch between the streets on fire, flower, and fur. There was no/ xenogenesis in the future and no future in which the schtick/ colonized my cage away.

These quotations are drawn from two of the volume’s later poems, where Mei-en’s arguments become more explicit and the collection’s narrative logic begins to cohere. The above quotation synthesizes the animal and extraterrestrial imagery nicely. Both quotations make surprising use of the word “yellow,” which of course is a loaded word for an Asian American writer. One can feel, within the difficult syntax stretched over the wide/loose structure, the agonizing process of a personal identity being molded and interpellated within a steel vice of political and national systems. “What if a nation is that,” Mei-en writes, “One master/ forger makes love to an old master’s debts One asshole/ tells the difference Sold: self-landscape in old leather/ More power to the broker Let’s grow gold together/ There are lines of beast and boast…”

Mei-en’s wordplay can be a little forced (“let’s grow gold together,” “a real bitch between the streets”), but I do that kind of thing all the time so who am I to judge?

A lot of ink has been spilled in recent years arguing that formally “difficult” or formally “innovative” poetry historically has been weaponized against poets of color. Which, yeah, that’s true. But Mei-en helps demonstrate the potential for difficult poetry to express the voices of people whose identity has been stripped by the politics of nationhood, and to express those voices with perfect clarity. 

 Sitting in his cramped apartment on the seventh floor of the Metropol, Count Alexander glanced at the uneaten red apple balancing atop his copy of Anna Karenina. The clock was approaching twelve, and he dreamily contemplated the sight of the apple upon the book. Could the Greeks or the Romans—Homer or Virgil, Sophocles or Ovid, Pericles or Cato (or, for that matter, Cervantes or Montaigne or Goethe)—debase themselves to serve as the dusty table for a simple Russian folk fruit? The divine Shakespeare may be able to sustain this indignity, but not with the rustic grace of Tolstoy.

These two objects, the Count’s apple and his copy of Anna Karenina, seemed for a moment to speak with each other. They conversed about Russian families, happy and unhappy; about the spires and streets and grand hotels of Moscow that had charmed a million visitors; about the gentle Neva River tracing its way through Saint Petersburg (now Leningrad); about the innumerable lavrii and monasteries and grand cathedrals of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had so comforted the spirits of a hundred million serfs throughout the centuries; about the icons of Andrei Rublev and his acolytes, those awesome masterpieces of world art as moving as the great works of the Italian Renaissance that the Count had observed during his journeys throughout the continent.

Above all, the apple and Tolstoy spoke about the crisp air outside the Count’s dacha among the orchards of Nizhny Novgorod; about Russia’s ancient forests, its steppes, and those vast stretches of Siberia in the East; about the blistering Russian summers and its deadly winters; about the whole of the Russian soul stretching back from this cramped apartment in the Metropol through the glorious, but failed, Revolution of 1905 and the less-glorious, but successful, Revolution of 1917 to the Battle of Borodino and Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, back as far as the waters that baptized Vladimir a thousand years ago.

This Russian soul, the Count concluded, was what had defeated the Mongols, the Golden Horde, and the waves of European armies (Karl XII of Sweden, Napoleon I of France, and Adolf Hitler of the Third Reich), not by the force of Russian armies, considerable though they were, but by the Russian soul’s innate, robust, cynical resistance to the charms of the West. This Russian soul, thought Count Alexander, would survive when the barbarism of the Bolsheviks had long faded from the scene.

Sofia, whose name was transliterated with an “f” and not the traditional Greek-inflected “ph,” because Sofia was a Russian woman and not a Greek woman, had been sitting in the room the entire time, although she had not been contemplating the apple. Interrupting her father’s meditations on the unique role of Russian in world history, Sofia rose to depart for the train station and then on to Stalingrad, where she would perform in a concert with the Red Youth’s Workers’ Brigade Soviet Orchestra to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the great battle in that city against the Nazis. It was 1953. “Da svidanya,” Sofia said in perfect Russian. “Adieu,” replied the Count in perfect French.

*

If you read my above parody, then you’ve basically read A Gentleman in Moscow. Amon Towles’s novel is a love letter to Russian literature and history, but it’s the kind of sappy love letter that a lovesick adolescent writes to his girlfriend (or, better yet, to the girl who marked “no” on the sheet that asked her, “Do you like me?”). At the very least, you’ve just read everything that irritates me about Towles’s prose and his portrayal of Russians in Russia.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a book written by an American novelist, graduate of Yale, and former investment banker who really, really, really loves nineteenth-century Russian literature. And so he has written a novel—an homage to Doctor Zhivago, basically—that romanticizes the Tsarist aristocracy, mocks the zealous earnestness and proletarian bad taste of the Bolsheviks, documents with horror the murderous oppression of Stalinism, and toes the American Cold War position on Khruschev and his era (a few actual Americans show up to do the toeing).

I am generally suspicious of the MFA dictum to “Write what you know” (Towles has an MFA from Stanford), but in this case, Towles might be better off just writing about American graduates of Yale who love Russian literature and quit their jobs in investment banking to write novels. I’d hope that such a book would feel a little more…authentic.

And I say that as someone who doesn’t trust our culture’s emphasis on “authenticity.” But when authenticity is entirely absent, you’re missing something.

Take, for instance, Towles’s obvious affection for the opening lines of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy, like his English contemporary George Eliot, frequently sprinkled little adages like these throughout his novels. (Sentences like these seem undeniably true when you read them but, if you think about it, they don’t say much. I mean, couldn’t you as easily write, “Each happy family is happy in its own way; all unhappy families are alike”? Wouldn’t that feel true, too?) Towles obviously loves these little pearls of wisdom, and he litters his novel with them. Except he doesn’t (surprise!) have the talent of Tolstoy and, consequently, A Gentleman in Moscow is full of sentences like this:

It is a well-known fact that of all the species on earth Homo sapiens is among the most adaptable.

and

Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow.

and

For a thousand years, civilizations the world over have recognized the head of the table as a privileged spot.

For a thousand years…

Or take the many sweeping tangents and digressions by the characters in Towles’s novel, tangents and digressions on Russian identity performed by characters who would never, ever make such statements. For example: the Soviet colonel Osip, one of the novel’s best characters, is fond of American cinema and, late in the novel, he embarks on a long digression about the role of American movies in brainwashing the American proletariat: “Hollywood,” he says, “is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”

Has Osip read Adorno? Probably not. Certainly not. In no universe does an ordinary Red Army officer (as portrayed in the novel) possess the education or forethought or vision to step back and theorize at length about the American Culture Industry.

But Towles has probably read Adorno, and he uses Osip as a vehicle to express Adorno’s ideas about the relationship between the Culture Industry and class struggle, characterization be damned!

I’m reminded here of a scene in the film Mr. Jones (2019). The film is based on the true story (which Towles alludes to in the novel) of a Welsh journalist who uncovers the Holodomor (the 1932-33 manmade famine that killed nearly 5 million Ukrainians) despite the Soviet government and the New York Times’s best attempts to hide the famine from the world. In one absurd scene, the Welsh journalist is standing in a breadline somewhere in Ukraine. He asks a starving woman what was happening. She replies (I’m paraphrasing), “They tried to change human nature.”

In other words, the Marxists came to power in order to change the natural order of human relations (which is global capitalism, apparently), and the result was a famine on an unprecedented scale.

This is an observation that many historians and political theorists have made, that Marxism attempts to change human nature, and the results are unsurprisingly catastrophic. It’s the sort of conclusion you can reach once you step back and look at the Holodomor, the Stalinist purges, the Bolshevik reigns of terror, and the Gulags all together as a synthesis of Marxist policy. It’s not the sort of observation you would hear from a Ukrainian peasant, a woman whose entire world was her Ukrainian village, where information from the outside world was brutally suppressed and who was, therefore, probably unaware of the full scope of Soviet criminality, much less Western intellectual debates about human nature and Marxist praxis.

To be clear: I’m not knocking rural Ukrainians who suffered and/or died in the Holodomor. I’m just knocking storytellers like Agnieszka Holland and Adrea Chalupa (the filmmakers behind Mr. Jones) who use the experiences and voices of those Ukrainians as a megaphone for the filmmakers’ own ideas. The more intimate, more immediate voices of everyday Ukrainians should be enough. But the filmmakers couldn’t resist didacticism and easy morals. They couldn’t resist taking an easy shot at Marxism.

A Gentleman in Moscow is full of moments like this.


*

Let me be obnoxious for a minute: I've been reading Russian novels since I was 14. I studied Russian in college. I have read a lot of Russian history, literature, and political philosophy. I've watched Russian movies. I listen to Russian music. I have many Russian friends. I am a huge Russophile.

But at the end of the day, I know very little about Russia. I'm an American who has never lived in Russia, whose main impressions of and knowledge about Russia are academic, superficial, or distant.

This puts me in a tricky position when reviewing A Gentleman in Moscow, because I suspect that both Towles and I love Russia, and that we possess a similar amount of knowledge about Russia and its history (I'm judging Towles's knowledge based on what appears in the novel). Consequently, I don't want to judge Towles for "not knowing enough" or for "getting it wrong." I also don't want to be a prick and moan about the inauthenticity of Towles's version of Russia based solely on my own ideas about Russia. Nothing is more irritating than a critic who hates a book because the author got some details are wrong about a subject the critic cares a lot about.

And so...I don't know. Towles gets the dates rights and describes the major incidents of Russian history accurately, but the voices, attitudes, and worldviews of most Russians in the novel—proletarian or aristocratic—just feel so...fake. It really hampered my ability to enjoy what should have been a really fun, loving book about Russia.

*

So, will a reader who knows nothing about Russia enjoy Gentleman in Moscow. If you like accessible historical fiction full of romantic paeons to and nostalgia for the past, and especially if you like the romance and pageantry and “soulfulness” of the Russian nineteenth-century, and especially if authenticity isn’t your thing, then this is a book for you.

But in general, I’d recommend reading modern Russian authors instead: Olga Tokarczuk, Alisa Ganieva, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Viktor Pelevin, and many others. Get your Russia from the Russians. 

Edit: Olga Tokaruczkuk is Polish. Idiotic mistake on my part, especially in an essay where I make fun of Towles's superficial portrayal of Russia. I always a) associate Tokarczuk with Russian lit because Russian imperialism comes up so often in her books and b) for reasons completely mysterious to me, I always confuse her with Svetlana Alexievich (who isn't really Russian either, but is from the old Soviet Union and writes in Russian).

Tanya Olson's "Boyishly" (published in 2013) is moving and hilarious. Nearly every poem has something special about it. This is a volume of poetry I'd recommend to anyone who feels intimidated by poetry or who thinks they "don't like contemporary poetry." There are poems written to John Brown; to Gertrude Stein from John Brown; about Muhammad Ali; and from the perspective of the prophet Jonah. Each poem captures something small and precious about living in human skin. Some highlights:

"Gates of Beauty" is a perfect poem, written from the perspective (I think) of a cultural revolutionary from a Communist regime who hopes to implement something called "The People's Act of Love." She has trouble implementing the policy, however, because reality throws all kinds of obstacles at her.

"Lady Wonder" tells the story of a psychic horse who can read the minds of humans. The horse becomes a sensation; she is hired to help people with their problems and to find missing children. Throughout the poem, she reflects on the lives and desires of the people whose minds she reads. At the poem's conclusion, Olson writes:

Lady rubs her rump against a tree,
then gums the apple off the ground.
She wonders of warning the tups and ewes
humans think their grief unique
and the world is mostly water.

And then there's the final line of the volume, from "Absolutely a Particle, Absolutely a Wave," a poem about modern physics and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

This will continue until nothing changes. There are no openings in perfect circles.
It is bittersweet to live by principle; I wonder what it feels like to be victorious in war?

I'm not sure if Olson means that living by principle is bittersweet, or if living itself is, by principle, bittersweet. Either way, it's probably true.

This is a thoughtfully organized, well-paced volume of emotional poetry that gets sadder and more visceral as the book moves along. "I am not afraid of sadness," Hieu Minh Nguyen writes in one of the final poems. But by the end, I was pretty sad. Learning how to love other people, learning how to grieve people who aren't even gone yet, learning what it means to have a body (especially a body other people don't like, or that you don't think other people like): these are some of the themes that came up. The poetry itself isn't always as strong as I'd like—I don't have anything else to say about that, really. But the poems pick up and the themes develop like a painful narrative as the volume progresses. The story isn't pretty, but it's honest. 

Very dense read. Good introduction, and St. Basil's writings on the difference between the "image of God" and the "likeness of God" are beautiful...but I am not theologically equipped to fully understand them, or much of this book. The fault is my own.

 So I’m going to talk a bit about drugs and death and pain, because these topics come up in Diane Seuss’s remarkable frank: sonnets and because these topics touch me personally and inform my reading of Seuss’s poems.

My brother was an addict and we lost him a year ago. It was another death of despair, another death of social negligence and government apathy. According to the CDC, America’s opioid epidemic began in 1999, when deaths from prescription opioids began to rise; or it began in 2010, when deaths by heroin overdose began to spike; or 2013, when fentanyl-induced deaths spiked; or 2017, when the opioid crisis was officially declared a Public Health Emergency. Between 1999 and the day my brother died, at least 700,000 Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses. That’s the same number of Americans who died of HIV-related illnesses. That’s roughly twelve times the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. As with AIDS and Vietnam, the American government waited years and years to intervene in the opioid epidemic in any meaningful way.

A lot of the poems in frank: sonnets are about addiction, poverty, personal pain, and unnecessary death. These are, for many reasons, difficult topics for me (and most other people). Consequently, a lot of the poems in frank: sonnets I skimmed over or skipped altogether, or went back to reread when I was emotionally prepared for them.

But holy shit, these poems are good.

Diane Seuss knows about addiction (her son is a survivor, from what I’ve read), knows about having addiction in your family. She knows about losing friends to AIDS. She knows about poverty. And she knows about sonnets. “The sonnet,” she writes, “like poverty, teaches you what you can do/ without.”

Economy is another thing Seuss knows about. Her sonnets, even the sprawling ones, are cut down to the bone. Take note: these are not the kind of sonnets you may have learned about in school. Like many contemporary poets, Seuss is formally innovative and deviates from the sonnet’s traditional and historic constructions. But she understands how the sonnet's fourteen lines necessarily constrict your writing, and she uses the pressure of that constriction beautifully.

Seuss writes about her childhood Catholicism:

“…even the hospital where I was born was borrowed
from the Catholics, nuns thought I was odd and tried to foist me off
On the Buddhists but they reached through the fog and handed me back.”

She writes about the pain of generational poverty and generational trauma:

“…maybe you’re marked as maudlin, or the one
who marks others as maudlin with a big fat pen. Or a couple hundred years ago
your people were owned. Or your people owned people. Your people were burned.
Or your people lit the match. The evils wriggle through the generations
like corpse worms. My great-great-grandfather beat to death a plow horse
in a field of grain. No wonder everything since has reeked of peasantry and pain.”

And she writes about loss, about losing the people you love through untimely death or through separation, through addiction and anger and broken relationships, through all the unfair and painful tremors that knock people apart from one another. Of a dying friend, she writes:

"... Out of the blue you said that once you were dead I'd never
be able to listen to Blue again, Joni Mitchell's Blue, not just the song but the whole album.
It was a minor curse you lay across my shoulders like a fur dyed blue, and so I listen now
in defiance of you. In the listening the pronouns shift. We are listening. There is no death."