Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Romance of Revolution
To what extent can we equate romance and revolution? I love this passage from "A Tomb For Boris Davidovich," which begins, "A letter from those years, written in Novsky's hand, remains the only authentic document that combines, deeply and mysteriously, revolutionary passion with sensual love..." Perhaps it is too simple of a task to answer my question, or perhaps the answer itself is blatantly obvious. But, I think it could provide for interesting discussion. This question, in relationship to literature and reality, is one with which I have been fascinated for a long time. Think about, even in American literatures, all of the instances when we see revolutionaries "kissing the ceiling"--Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron," for example.
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I'm inclined to agree with you that Kiš portrays many of the revolutionaries in the novel as motivated by an aesthetic feeling and utopian delusions, rather than strictly political concerns. This may also be viewed in the light of bourgeois guilt, as in case of Taube. To join the revolution is to escape the trappings and hypocrisy of bourgeois existence. Of course, this is a familiar trope and "the romance of the revolution" seems to describe it rather well. According to this view, these revolutionaries should have died on the barricades, fulfilling the notion of a beautiful, revolutionary death. It would have confirmed their dedication and self-sacrifice to the cause of the Revolution. Instead they died an anonymous, brutal, and unromantic death in the interrogation rooms and Stalinist labor camps. And consequently, as the story of Novsky suggest, the real violence was done against their biographies. Yet, I wonder to what extent this reduction of the revolution to an aesthetic or a psychological phenomenon serves to discredit it outright and plays precisely in the opponents of the so-called progressive historical thinking, for which revolutions were in Marx's turn of phrase "locomotives of history." Are the people on the streets of Cairo and Tunis motivated purely by aesthetic feelings? Are they romancing with the revolution, if these events can be described as revolutionary in the first place? To my mind, the reduction of revolution to an aesthetic phenomena and its historicization serves to foreclose the revolutionary past once and for all, as if to say: "That's something in the past. Now we have more advanced and conscious ways of enacting political change." I am interested in a reading of Kiš that would go against the grain, that is, against reproducing the trope of "sow that eats her farrow," i.e. every revolution inevitably ends in terror. After all, this is a book about 1930s, and Trotsky still represented an alternative to Stalinism. Thus if we view Stalinism as a counterrevolution, can we read Kiš's book NOT as a monument to the victims of the Revolution, BUT as a monument to the victims of the counterrevolution? At least, this allows us to salvage the revolutionary tradition, although it would decidedly involve a creative misreading or an outright critique of the Tomb for Boris Davidovich.
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