“ We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. ”
Human relationships used to be easy: you had friends, boy- or girlfriends, parents, children, and landlords. Now, thanks to social media, it’s all gone sideways. I decided to try to index these new entities—to draft a sort of Social Media Bestiary. Here it is, so far:
Andrey Ternovskiy talks to Julia Ioffe, who profiled him earlier this year, about the future of his site:
“’I’m lazy,’ he told me. ‘But I am not worried about my future. I know what it will look like. It will be disorganized, things won’t always work. I will always radically change my direction, which will give me momentum to do something until I get bored of it. I’ll never build the perfect company, like Apple. Whatever I build will be this half-broken thing, Russian-style.’”
For some reason this made me think of that line in Greenberg when he quotes Bernard Shaw: “Youth is wasted on the young…. and I’d go even further to say that life is wasted on people.”
It’s interesting that every piece written on Orlando Figes from now on will include some coded reference to that time that he went crazy and got himself into an Amazon.com scandalous review scandal.
In my opinion, it’s not only that embarrassment that he has to atone for. Natasha’s Dance was hardly a real history book, and though I didn’t bother reading The Whisperers, I happen to know that he farmed the research out to some team to comb through the archives for him. A historian who doesn’t do his own research? Gasp. The critics scoffed and Figes was forced to defend himself against these “guardians of scholarship”. I read and enjoyed A People’s Tragedy, which is a very thorough narrative account of the Russian Revolution and weighing in at about 5 pounds and 1000 pages was commonly referred to as “A Student’s Tragedy” by many at my undergraduate institution, but I have been skeptical ever since. Given that Crimea is very much “my period,” I will read it… but with a due sense of skepticism since even this sympathetic reviewer in The Guardian doesn’t think that Figes does much to shed light on the origins of the war and does nothing more than reiterate it’s commonly stated outcomes.
It’s no secret that Gary Shteyngart is one of my favorite contemporary authors. His first novel, A Russian Debutante’s Handbook, was based on his own experiences working in an organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or HIAS (in the novel it’s called the Emma Lazarus Society for newly arrived immigrants). Anyway, HIAS has now started an Oral History project that documents the immigrant experiences of those who arrived from the 1970s on and received assistance from the society…. (I’m not sure about the last part). The source material is even being translated into English - ostensibly for undergraduate’s use.
Personally, I would prefer to listen to Boris Timanovsky podcasts from The Moth … but with this kind of source material, anyone can write a great immigrant novel!
