Thanksgiving Vaction!

Finally, Fall break! After a long weekend of partying -- I even went to the Yale-Princeton tailgate -- I've been sick all week. Up all night coughing, I haven't been able to get much work done, and I didn't particularly feel up to writing. I'm feeling a bit better now, though, since my dad is coming to pick me up. Luckily it seems like I didn't miss anything terribly important in my classes this week (I hardly went to them), and so I won't have to catch up on too much work over the break. Most importantly, I have to prepare my presentation on The State and Revolution and begin work on my paper on the February Revolution. I'll be looking at a selection of V.D. Nabokov's memoirs, edited by Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons and published as Vladimir D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Nabokov, father of the famed author of Lolita, served as Head of the Chancellory under the Russian Provisional Government. Most interesting for me is his characterization in his memoirs of the February Revolution as a "coup." Was it a coup? That's the million dollar question...

For now, though, I'm heading home to enjoy a good Thanksgiving dinner!

The Russian Revolution

Concomitant with my course on Cuba, I have been taking a seminar, "The Russian Revolution," on...the Russian Revolution! Approaching Thanksgiving break, we have now traced the roots of revolution all the way from the revolutionary terrorism of the 1870s and 1880s through October 1917. Of particular interest have been Vera Zasulich's memoirs, in Five Sisters: Women Against the Tsar; Leon Trotsky's histories 1905 and The Russian Revolution; Abraham Ascher's great book The Revolution of 1905: A Short History; and the unbelievable collection The Russian Revolution and Bolshevik Victory: Visions and Revisions.

At the end of the month, I'll be presenting on Lenin's The State and Revolution and a series of shorter articles written by various Bolshevik authors on revolutionary culture. Needless to say, my enthusiasm for Lenin has waned over time, although I do continue to find his writing and theoretical contributions (along with those of Trotsky) extremely interesting. Friends in the ISO have been encouraging me to join; although flattered, I have had to tell them that, with my ambivalent attitude toward Lenin and Leninism, I don't know if they're the right organization for me. Vanguards, dictatorship, dogmatic and sectarian devotion to the "party line" frighten me. I'm far from an anarchist, but democratic centralism, at least as it is generally practiced, seems to me more about "centralism" and less about "democracy." For now, I'm happy with my political independence. And hopefully I'll have some time to get back to building an SDS chapter before too long!

Before Night Falls II

So, after coming down pretty harshly on Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas' controversial memoirs, in a seminar on the Cuban Revolution, I now think, having neared the end of the book, that Arenas may have swayed me. After a point his vanity, self-indulgence, and incessant "erotic adventures" -- the main themes of the first two-hundred or so pages -- faded into the background (perhaps I just learned to read through them) as a more powerful, and more harrowing, tale came to light: the story of his persecution, arrest, prison sentence, and flight from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift in 1980. The humanity and sincerity found in the introduction, written shortly before Arenas' suicide in 1990 and in which he describes in the most graphic and terrible detail what it is like to watch oneself waste away, dying from AIDS -- the pain, the weakness, the tubes coming into and out of the body -- returns as we near the end of the story. Even more powerful than his description of the abuse which he suffered under the Castro regime, however, is Arenas' incredible portrayal of the corruption of the human soul and heart under such a dictatorial system: his friends, mostly turned informers for State Security in an effort to protect themselves, are truly changed by the end of Arenas' "tale" (it is, after all, a stylized memoir replete with exaggerations and half-truths), and their betrayal pains him greatly. I think more than anything else, the story of figures such as Hiram Prado, the former friend instrumental in Arenas' arrest and subsequent ostracization, serves as a poignant warning of the dangers to the supporters, as well as the opponents, of the socialist experiment gone wrong. There is little left of my former enthusiasm for Cuba or my admiration for the successes of the Revolution, achieved at such a high price to freedom and the human spirit.

Death Sentence for Saddam

So the Saddam Hussein trial is over at long last, and it looks like, unless his sentence is successfully appealed, the ex-dictator will hang. I'm certainly no apologist for Hussein -- I'll leave that to Ramsey Clark -- but the verdict makes me sick. Although for a brief moment at the outset of the war in Iraq I succumbed to the temptation of "left-interventionism" a la Christopher Hitchens -- the idea that the West can and ought to actively enforce human rights through intervention, combat dictators, and export liberal/progressive ideals around the world -- I quickly recanted and have ever since been a firm believer that the war in general, and our government's efforts at state-building in particular, will fail horrendously. Hussein's death sentence seems to me an indication of that failure -- we've now fought a war to build a state that, in the 21st century, maintains the death penalty, enacting it no less by use of the gallows! So much for progressive values. I can't wait to read what the (anti-death penalty) European press has to say about this one...

Before Night Falls

I've just begun to read Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, and although I find some parts of the work to be a bit much, there are some exceedingly beautiful passages. The following, for example, is an incredible meditation on nature and on life drawn from Arenas' childhood:

...I wanted to fly, to fly like those birds, alone in the downpour. I would go as far as the river, a river that roared under the spell of violence let loose. The power of the overflowing current would sweep away almost everything in its path: trees, stones, animals, houses. It was the mystery of the law of destruction, but also of the law of life. I did not know then where that river was headed, where that frenzied race would end, but something was calling me to go with it, saying that I too had to throw myself into those raging waters and lose myself, that only in that torrent, always on the move, would I find some peace... (16-17)

While I do not necessarily agree with everything Arenas writes, there is no denying that this is simply one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read. I hope to find more like it!