This is one of your very best essays, Professor Snyder. “We Americans speak lightly of freedom of speech, contenting ourselves with the notion that giving voice to this or that impulse means that we are free,” you write. My hairdresser of about 15 years and her husband, are U.S. naturalized citizens from Novosibirsk. About 3 years ago, when we were talking about Stalin as she was cutting my hair, she told me that her great-grandfather was killed in a hospital. I told her it sounded to me like someone was trying to meet a quota, and she said, “Yes, that’s what we think, but my great-grandmother refuses to talk about it.” She said that her family had just returned from a visit to Novosibirsk and, while there, desperate to know something—anything—about him, she decided she would broach the subject in a novel way. She would first ask her great-grandmother about her childhood, and then, working her way up chronologically, she reasoned, she would eventually get to the subject. Her great-grandmother was happy to talk about her childhood, but the moment Tatiana mentioned Stalin, the look on her face changed. Without saying a word, she stood up, walked out of the room and into her bedroom, and closed the door, where she stayed for hours, until after dark. All Tatiana knows is that he was about 30 years old, was a rich shop owner, was killed in 1937 or 1938, and for some unknown reason was in a hospital in, of all places, Odessa. She has no idea why he was so far away from home. “His name was Mihail Vnukov. Михаил Внуков,” Tatiana emailed me. When I asked her if she had heard/read about NKVD Order 00447, she told me she hadn’t, so I emailed her a scanned version of the original document in Russian, and pointed out to her the number of people to be killed in Odessa Oblast, but also explained to her that he might not have been killed under that order.
As I watched the storming of the Michigan statehouse on April 30, 2020, the first thing I thought of was not just Tatiana’s great-grandfather, but her great-grandmother who, very young and in a state of shock, had to raise her children alone. She lived with it every day, decade after decade. Only in death was she granted a reprieve from her sorrow. And then there is Tatiana, who still yearns for her great-grandfather, a man she never knew, and when her great-grandmother died, so did her hope of ever knowing and understanding.
O, America! You have no idea of what freedom means, and what it is like to lose it. You praise Putin without having any understanding of what it would mean for you to live in Russia. You cheapen the word daily with your talk of “freedom fries” and freedom from: “No one is going to tell me,” “no one is going to make me,” “no one, no one, no one!” “No one is going to tell me what to think!” you shriek—for the whole world to hear—even as you strut about as though you were living, breathing collections of talking points. And you don’t even see the inanity of such a contradiction.
There is a quotation from William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” (1954) that has been repeated quite a lot lately, much like a talking point, that is, without any real understanding of its meaning: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is a reference to an individual, Temple Drake, who, in an earlier life (“Sanctuary,” 1931) was a prostitute, and later became a respectable, middle-class woman who strove to hide her past. For me, the central element in Faulkner’s writing is time: “The past is always present,” he wrote (I’ve forgotten which novel) and, in “Intruder in the Dust” (1948), he writes, “yesterday, today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One.” And even when he is not referencing time specifically, the narrative jumps back and forth from present to past and back again, and not just in the stream of consciousness writing in Benjy’s and Quentin’s chapters in “The Sound and the Fury,” but in his non-stream of consciousness writings as well, past and present are one. Time is never linear for Faulkner; the past always weighs heavily on the present. This inability of humans to escape an unhappy past and their refusal to come to terms with it is (I think), Faulkner’s most brilliant insight. And the history about which he is most concerned is, of course, U.S. southern history. America is a tangled mass of history that whites strive mightily to forget. “We don’t want to talk about our history!” say white Americans, as they unconsciously live that history daily. Although most white Americans know very little about their own history, it is odd indeed that the past is unconsciously always present for them, even as they work endlessly to fill the void with pleasing myths and pass memory laws designed to make them forget. Are we surprised, then, that such shallowness can never lead to a proper understanding of freedom?
On another perhaps unrelated note I celebrate the English translation publication of Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob. Already out in Britain this month, will be published in the US in February. I mention it here for anyone who might be interested.
Putin and Company are never without some diabolical plan to skew anything regarding “truth”. Our evidence in the US is the illegal hiring of TFG as the leader of our once beloved country.
This is one of your very best essays, Professor Snyder. “We Americans speak lightly of freedom of speech, contenting ourselves with the notion that giving voice to this or that impulse means that we are free,” you write. My hairdresser of about 15 years and her husband, are U.S. naturalized citizens from Novosibirsk. About 3 years ago, when we were talking about Stalin as she was cutting my hair, she told me that her great-grandfather was killed in a hospital. I told her it sounded to me like someone was trying to meet a quota, and she said, “Yes, that’s what we think, but my great-grandmother refuses to talk about it.” She said that her family had just returned from a visit to Novosibirsk and, while there, desperate to know something—anything—about him, she decided she would broach the subject in a novel way. She would first ask her great-grandmother about her childhood, and then, working her way up chronologically, she reasoned, she would eventually get to the subject. Her great-grandmother was happy to talk about her childhood, but the moment Tatiana mentioned Stalin, the look on her face changed. Without saying a word, she stood up, walked out of the room and into her bedroom, and closed the door, where she stayed for hours, until after dark. All Tatiana knows is that he was about 30 years old, was a rich shop owner, was killed in 1937 or 1938, and for some unknown reason was in a hospital in, of all places, Odessa. She has no idea why he was so far away from home. “His name was Mihail Vnukov. Михаил Внуков,” Tatiana emailed me. When I asked her if she had heard/read about NKVD Order 00447, she told me she hadn’t, so I emailed her a scanned version of the original document in Russian, and pointed out to her the number of people to be killed in Odessa Oblast, but also explained to her that he might not have been killed under that order.
As I watched the storming of the Michigan statehouse on April 30, 2020, the first thing I thought of was not just Tatiana’s great-grandfather, but her great-grandmother who, very young and in a state of shock, had to raise her children alone. She lived with it every day, decade after decade. Only in death was she granted a reprieve from her sorrow. And then there is Tatiana, who still yearns for her great-grandfather, a man she never knew, and when her great-grandmother died, so did her hope of ever knowing and understanding.
O, America! You have no idea of what freedom means, and what it is like to lose it. You praise Putin without having any understanding of what it would mean for you to live in Russia. You cheapen the word daily with your talk of “freedom fries” and freedom from: “No one is going to tell me,” “no one is going to make me,” “no one, no one, no one!” “No one is going to tell me what to think!” you shriek—for the whole world to hear—even as you strut about as though you were living, breathing collections of talking points. And you don’t even see the inanity of such a contradiction.
There is a quotation from William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” (1954) that has been repeated quite a lot lately, much like a talking point, that is, without any real understanding of its meaning: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It is a reference to an individual, Temple Drake, who, in an earlier life (“Sanctuary,” 1931) was a prostitute, and later became a respectable, middle-class woman who strove to hide her past. For me, the central element in Faulkner’s writing is time: “The past is always present,” he wrote (I’ve forgotten which novel) and, in “Intruder in the Dust” (1948), he writes, “yesterday, today and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One.” And even when he is not referencing time specifically, the narrative jumps back and forth from present to past and back again, and not just in the stream of consciousness writing in Benjy’s and Quentin’s chapters in “The Sound and the Fury,” but in his non-stream of consciousness writings as well, past and present are one. Time is never linear for Faulkner; the past always weighs heavily on the present. This inability of humans to escape an unhappy past and their refusal to come to terms with it is (I think), Faulkner’s most brilliant insight. And the history about which he is most concerned is, of course, U.S. southern history. America is a tangled mass of history that whites strive mightily to forget. “We don’t want to talk about our history!” say white Americans, as they unconsciously live that history daily. Although most white Americans know very little about their own history, it is odd indeed that the past is unconsciously always present for them, even as they work endlessly to fill the void with pleasing myths and pass memory laws designed to make them forget. Are we surprised, then, that such shallowness can never lead to a proper understanding of freedom?
Thanks for this superb piece.
On another perhaps unrelated note I celebrate the English translation publication of Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob. Already out in Britain this month, will be published in the US in February. I mention it here for anyone who might be interested.
Thank you. Freedom of Speech, freedom to discover and speak the truth.
Thank you for helping us see ourselves.
Putin and Company are never without some diabolical plan to skew anything regarding “truth”. Our evidence in the US is the illegal hiring of TFG as the leader of our once beloved country.