Why are we fascinated by twins? One reason is they seem to embody an ideal of human relationships—“one soul, as Aristotle put it, spread over two bodies”: “We generally reserve this ideal for sexual relationships—‘Nelly,’ Cathy wails, ‘I am Heathcliff!’—yet surely part of what captivates us about twins is that they seem to embody it too. Arguably, they embody it more purely. Maybe one reason soul-mate twins have to die in literature is that they make singletons morbidly envious.”

Adam Kirsch reviews Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School—“a story about what happens when a Jewish intellectual gets born in the wrong place”: “For Adam Gordon, the author’s alter ego, the best way to reconcile his native inclination toward verbal creativity with the social imperative to toughness and aggression is competitive debate. Much of The Topeka School takes place in the world of high school debate, with its baroque forms of verbal peacocking. “The problem for him in high school,” Adam reflects, “was that debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy—even if both could help you get to the vaguely imagined East Coast city from which your experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony.” The Topeka School is the book that the teenage Adam dreamed of escaping to write. But its irony is profound rather than merely satirical, and it is directed at Adam himself as much as at the society that fostered him.”

James Flynn’s book on free speech has been dropped by his publisher because it might “incite racial hatred and stir up religious hatred” in the United Kingdom. “Clearly you have no intention of promoting racism,” Emerald’s director wrote him informing him of the decision, “but intent can be irrelevant. For example, one test is merely whether it is ‘likely’ that racial hatred could be stirred up as a result of the work. This is a particular difficulty given modern means of digital media expression. The potential for circulation of the more controversial passages of the manuscript online, without the wider intellectual context of the work as a whole and to a very broad audience—in a manner beyond our control—represents a material legal risk for Emerald.” Flynn asks: “If the book is sober and responsible, and if Emerald’s letter is correct, that poses a question: Does Britain have free speech?”

In National Affairs, Ian Lindquist writes about the promise of classical education in America: “The story of this movement and its origins should chasten even the most despairing of today’s cultural Cassandras. Not only does it demonstrate that renewal is possible, but it also helps us see exactly how it might come to be, and why a countercultural patriotism — a love of our country’s capacity to resist its own worst impulses and to balance its regard for freedom with a desire for the good — might hold the secret to our culture’s future.”

Visiting Arthur Rimbaud’s hometown.

A slain Jewish girl’s diary of life under the Soviets and the Nazis to be published in English: “She was a Jewish teenager in a small trade city in southeastern Poland when she began writing her diary, months before the advent of World War II. By the time she was shot in the head by Nazi soldiers, she had chronicled life under two totalitarian regimes: the Soviets who advanced from the east and the Nazis who came from the west. Her journal, hidden in a safe deposit box in New York City for decades, has been described as a counterpart to Anne Frank’s diary, a valuable historical document and a poignant coming-of-age story. Now, the journal of the teenager, Renia Spiegel, all 700 perfectly preserved pages, is to be published in English for the first time.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New York Review of Books, Gary Saul Morson takes stock of Vasily Grossman:

“Since Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was first published, posthumously, in 1980, it has earned praise as one of the most significant books of our time. Leon Aron called it ‘the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century.’ Linda Grant wrote in The Guardian that it was the only book that ever changed her worldview: ‘It took me three weeks to read it and three weeks to recover from the experience, during which time I could barely breathe.’

“What makes this book so remarkable? Modeled on Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, Life and Fate recounts the adventures of soldiers and civilians during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Focusing on the Battle of Stalingrad, it also depicts Russian POWs in a Nazi death camp, a group of Jews on their way to the gas chamber, Nazi officers defending their ideology, and Soviet commissars defending theirs. Like War and Peace, Life and Fate centers on a single family, in this case the Shaposhnikovs. The family matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova, sets the moral tone for her numerous children and grandchildren. For her, basic decency and family loyalty matter more than ideology. A Jewish physicist, Viktor Shtrum, married to Alexandra Vladimirovna’s daughter Lyudmila, struggles to solve the mysteries of the atomic nucleus without violating Marxist-Leninist metaphysics and while attempting to justify his compromises with the regime. His brother-in-law Nikolai Krymov, formerly married to Lyudmila’s sister Yevgenia, exemplifies the dedicated Bolshevik. Unflinchingly devoted to an ideology demanding mass killing, he himself is eventually arrested, interrogated under torture, and forced to weigh his conscience against his political beliefs.

“The conflict between ideology and human decency shapes the novel from start to finish. As Krymov’s faith in Bolshevik cruelty totters, the German officer Bach’s attachment to Nazi cruelty strengthens. The two ideologies confront each other directly when the Bolshevik Mostovskoy, imprisoned in a Nazi camp, argues with the Russian-speaking SS officer Liss, who points out the uncanny parallels between Nazi and Soviet philosophy, ethics, and political practice. Mostovskoy also argues with an old-fashioned humanist, Ikonnikov, who has transcended his former faith in Christianity and Tolstoyanism to arrive at an ethical stance opposed to ideological thinking. If we regard the twentieth century as an age of ideology, we grasp why Life and Fate has struck many readers as so important.

“Although it can be read on its own, Life and Fate is actually the second part of a ‘dilogy.’ It continues the story of Grossman’s earlier novel, Stalingrad, which he was forced to publish under the title For a Just Cause, a phrase that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had used to describe the Soviet war effort when he announced the German invasion. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s new translation of Stalingrad allows us to trace the earlier trajectory of Life and Fate’s many real and fictional characters. First published when Stalin was still alive, Stalingrad is considerably less explicit than Life and Fate about its ethical and political themes. Even so, it was, by Soviet standards, remarkably bold.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Assos

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