German Atrocities 1914 A History Of Denial Book

I’m leaving this unfinished for now, breaking off (or merely just pausing) before the portrait of Lenin that concludes this varicolored chronicle of European socialisms. Wilson concedes, in the 1971 preface, that those final chapters are full of starry-eyed bullshit. Wilson’s radiant image of Lenin as the Second Coming, after a slumberous century under the snows of bourgeois reaction, of 1789’s spirit of Liberty (and surely not 1793’s spirit of Terror!), was the major bone of contention in his epistolary sparring with Nabokov over the meaning of the Russian Revolution. Nabokov’s stateless aestheticism should not make us miss the fact that he was as obsessed by The Russian Destiny as any other Russian writer, but in his own cool, Apollonian, Pushkinian kinda way. So while I’m curious, I still don’t want to vex myself with said bullshit right now. Scrawling testy, indignant marginalia makes me feel like my father.

Wilson's method with Marx is strange amalgam of disabused, warts-and-all portraiture and propagandistic hagiography. Illusionless portrayal alternates with fulsome special pleading. Wilson shows Marx as victim of the usual revolutionary contradiction, as the humanitarian who loves The People, but doesn’t like people--an insufferably haughty Herr Doktor, a cantankerous, biting, paranoid, misanthropic pain-in-the-ass who had difficulty getting along with anyone except Engels, a worldly bon vivant who submissively exchanged a “sketching” prose style of humane raconterie for an hermetic cackle much like Marx’s. Marx’s insolent demeanor and sneering style (conversational and literary) are well suited to anarchist dandies like the young Baudelaire (who during the 1848 revolutions helped loot a Paris gunsmith, and then, after outfitting himself to his sartorial standard, cutting quite a bella figura with a handsome hunting rifle and leather cartridge belt, mounted the nearest barricade and began exhorting the now well-armed mob with “We must go and shoot General Aupick!”—-his hated haute bourgeois stepfather), but less so to anyone wishing to make alliances and build organizations. To scenes of this brilliantly cold-eyed literary understanding Wilson then tacks on drooling apologia. Wilson prefers to interpret a crank’s angry irascibility as the Old Testament sternness of an essential prophet. Forgive me if I laugh. I’m too constitutional a cynic to see a given personality as anything other than an engine of self-defeating folly. Wilson shifts abruptly from Marx as Balzac or Flaubert would have written him to Marx as he appeared on a Soviet poster. I didn’t really mind this arrangement, though, because it kept the two sides of Wilson (portraitist and propagandist) easily segregated. When Wilson is really writing, applying his literary talents to picturing the past, the result is a Marx who is human and self-contradictory and real. The sufferings of his family, trapped in the dingiest Dickensian nightmare London had to offer (bailiffs, pawnbrokers, dead newborns), provoke genuine pity; and Marx’s resistance to the Prussian monarchy during the 1848 revolutions was so fearless and manly as to ward-off the eyebrow-arching contempt that usually seizes me whenever I examine his “patchwork of weaknesses.”

To the Finland Station is subtitled “a study in the writing and acting of history,” and it starts with Michelet discovering Vico, which is nice. This book piqued me to think more about the philosophy of history and to spend an hour reading Pushkin’s fragmentary Peter the Great’s Blackamoor, his experiment in fabulous genealogy and historical meditation (Pushkin was official historiographer in the court of Nicholas I) on the meaning of Peter’s cultural innovations—-of which Pushkin’s black ancestor was a symbol and a vessel—-for the future of Russia. Marx’s philosophy of history and predictions of the “inevitable” movements of economics and culture have a slippery vagueness of detail, an utopian avoidance of the crucial questions of psychology and sociology that make him seem a less than serious thinker; then again, he wanted to “change” the world, not just “interpret” it. But even uncontemplative empire builders like Peter the Great are rarely able to change the world directly or intentionally; "worldly philosophers" like Marx even less so. A body of political theory purposefully stripped down for use and action, as his was, turns out to be a pretty poor agent of its author's will, principally because of that purposeful vagueness. The blanks spaces Marx left in his idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” for instance, came to be fleshed out by later revolutionaries, and not in ways that did credit to Marx's reputation. The unpredictable details of politics determine the human shape of abstract systems; the peculiarities of a given culture can alter any theory beyond recognition. Political theory never survives its first contact with politics. (Pushkin asks: what fruits will Peter the Great’s commitment to Westernization bear? It turns out that notable among those fruits were not just worldly prestige and power for Peter’s dynasty, but the intellectual currents that helped topple that dynasty, Marxism, yes, but also the British-style constitutional liberalism of Vladimir Nabokov’s father, author of the abdication letter the last Czar’s brother signed and Minister of Culture in the Provisional Government Lenin later overthrew.)

That Marx became a banner-boy in Russia, a country he regarded as an eternal stronghold of Absolutism, even if its rulers were to become socialists (Marx hated Bakunin for this reason); that Marx became the patron saint of a regime more murderous and soul-destroying than any he opposed in his life of agitation (much as parts of Nietzsche were claimed by the German nationalists he loathed in life) is testimony to the fact that history is not a discoverable Hegelian unfolding of the Absolute Idea, something that only makes sense to Germans anyway, but is instead “a context in which we achieve the contrary of our aspirations, in which we disfigure them unceasingly”—-as E.M. Cioran bottled the tonic awareness that Frenchmen have always dispensed, since Montaigne probably, or perhaps since Tacitus--Nietzsche did say that no literature is more connected to the cold candor of antiquity than French.