'I Looked Through the Book and Threw It Away'

“Once I asked him if he had read Shakespeare, Byron, Molière, or Schiller. I couldn’t get a definite yes or no out of him, but I realized that he hadn’t read any of them. He just hasn’t gone beyond what he had to do at school.”

More than a century later, we all know such people. Reading is a drudgery, a school obligation best shirked. Presumably, CliffsNotes still does a thriving business. Such a life is difficult to imagine. The author of the observation at the top is Nikolay Valentinov (1879–1964), an early Bolshevik who fled the Soviet Union in 1928. His subject is Lenin, one of the most consequential men of the twentieth century. Valentinov writes in Encounters with Lenin (trans. Paul Rosta and Brian Pearce, 1968):

“Lenin knows none of Goethe’s works except Faust. He divides literature into two parts: what he needs, and what he doesn’t need—I don’t quite know what criteria he uses for distinguishing between them.”

After reading Memoirs from the House of the Dead and Crime and Punishment, Lenin refused to read other Dostoevsky titles, which he described as “malodorous works.” Valentinov reports him saying:

“As far as The Possessed is concerned, it is plainly a piece of reactionary filth . . . I have absolutely no desire to waste my time on it. I looked through the book and threw it away. I don’t read such literature—what good is it to me?”

Lenin’s view of literature is binary and strictly utilitarian, not unlike that of ideology-driven readers and critics from any era. Here, Valentinov reports what he says about Ivan Goncharov’s masterpiece:

“I should like to take some of our party comrades—quite a lot of them—lock them up in a room and make them read Oblomov over and over again until they go down on their knees and say: ‘We can’t bear it any longer.’ Then they would have to be put through an examination: ‘Have you understood the essence of Oblomovism?’ Have you realized it is also in you? Have you finally resolved to get rid of this illness?’”

Punitive literature. Books as illness and cure. No sense of pleasure, of what Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” Lenin’s idea of a great Russian writer was Nikolay Nekrasov. Valentinov is witty when it comes to Lenin’s understanding of Tolstoy:

“I happened to hear Lenin say he liked Tolstoy’s War and Peace, although he thought that the moral and philosophical reflections woven into the novel were nonsense. But this was not very enlightening. I have yet to meet a Russian who would admit that he does not appreciate and enjoy this novel.”

Judging literature as literature, not as a means for transporting fashionable ideas, seems beyond a lot of people, maybe most of them.