'Described with Such Truth and Power'

“Genuine books are always marked with the author’s character and convey the cherished theories, however outlandish, from which he has drawn sustenance himself. It clearly pays to read as M. did: turning only to the best and passing over the bad and bogus.”

M. is Osip Mandelstam and the author of these observations is his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward, 1974). I know adults who take the Harry Potter books seriously and others who take John Ashbery’s books seriously – two reading cliques with, presumably, little overlap. What they have in common is a taste for trash, deeply unserious, time-wasting work certified as fashionable by critics and marketeers. As Mandelstam puts it:

“What about literature, one might ask, which is supposed to reflect the writer’s experience, his search for truth, or the road to it? But, unfortunately, books which really do this are few and far between, and most of the turbid trash that pours from the presses is counterfeit, churned out expressly to please the rulers or pander to the tastes of the masses.”

When I encounter the word turbid I think of a polluted, anaerobic stream. The OED’s second definition is useful in this context: “characterized by or producing confusion or obscurity of thought, feeling, etc.; mentally confused, perplexed, muddled; disturbed, troubled.” In other words, murkiness, the absence of clarity.

The idea of books as time-killers, numbing distractions, entries in a long list of entertainment options, is repellant and deeply ungrateful to the literary traditions we are fortunate to have inherited. Such thought stir as I read Vasily Grossman. I finished Stalingrad and now I’m reading An Armenian Sketchbook (trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, 2013) and The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry (trans. David Patterson, 2003), edited by Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg. As a Soviet war correspondent, Grossman said he read only one book, War and Peace, and he read it twice. In Stalingrad, Commissar Nikolay Krymov visits Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in advance of the Nazis, as did Grossman. He writes:

“Yasnaya Polyana was a living, suffering Russian home—one upon thousand of thousand such homes. With absolute clarity, Krymov saw in his mind Bald Hills [the Bolkonsky estate] and the old sick prince. The present merged with the past; today’s events were one with what Tolstoy described with such truth and power that it had become the supreme reality of a war that ran its course 130 years ago.”