Reviews and News:
An essay defending colonialism has been removed from the journal Third World Quarterly: “The essay, ‘The Case for Colonialism,’ was withdrawn at the request of the journal’s editor, Shahid Qadir, and in agreement with the essay’s author, Bruce Gilley, an associate professor of political science at Portland State University, the notice said. The publisher said that it had conducted a thorough investigation after receiving complaints about the essay and found that it had undergone double-blind peer review, in line with the journal’s editorial policy. However, the publisher’s notice continued, the journal’s editor received ‘serious and credible threats of personal violence’ linked to the publication of the essay.”
The life and work of John William Corrington: “He was a poet, a neglected novelist for whom one might hope for a revival, a journalist, a lawyer, a respected college professor at Loyola University, and interestingly the author of five screenplays, including The Omega Man and Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Add to that a philosopher in cowboy boots.”
The rage against Columbus: “Not surprisingly, revisionist accounts of Columbus as evil were common in Soviet textbooks in the 1970s and ’80s. And modern-day Marxists still view Columbus a man driven by a ‘lust for profit’ and condemn the holiday that bears his name as a celebration of ‘the violent and bloody accumulation of capital for the ruling classes.’ But it is not just communists who oppose Columbus. Here, in the United States, the anti-Columbus movement was sparked by white supremacists nearly 100 years ago.”
Derinkuyu, one of the largest underground cities in the world, can hold up to 20,000 people: “Located in Turkey’s Cappadocia region, it’s one of over 200 subterranean cities that were carved into the volcanic rock. In fact, Derinkuyu is connected to some of these subterranean settlements by tunnels that run for miles. Part of what makes it so impressive is the city’s depth of over 250 feet, as well as the organization needed to meet the demands of a population living underground.”
Marilynne Robinson reviews Stephen Greenblatt’s The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.
Victorian novels featuring a Baron Trump cause some people to wonder if “Nicola Tesla had shared time travel research with Trump’s MIT-grad uncle, setting off a chain of events that led to both the 2016 election and the publication of these books.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Gary Saul Morson revisits Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s two great literary works—the Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel:
“Among Solzhenitsyn’s many works, two great ‘cathedrals,’ as one critic has called them, stand out, one incredibly long, and the other still longer. His masterpiece is surely the first cathedral, his three-volume Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation. I suspect that only three post-Revolutionary Russian prose works will survive as world classics: Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag. For that matter, Gulag may be the most significant literary work produced anywhere in the second half of the twentieth century.
“Like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gulag is literary without being fictional. Indeed, part of its value lies in its bringing to life the real stories of so many ordinary people. When I first began to read it, I feared that a long list of outrages would rapidly prove boring, but to my surprise I could not put the book down. How does Solzhenitsyn manage to sustain our interest? To begin with, as with Gibbon, readers respond to the author’s brilliantly ironic voice, which has a thousand registers. Sometimes it surprises us with a brief comment on a single mendacious word. It seems that prisoners packed as tightly as possible were transported through the city in brightly painted vehicles labeled ‘Meat.’ ‘It would have been more accurate to say “bones,”’ Solzhenitsyn observes.”
* * *
“One lesson of Gulag is that we are all capable of evil, just as Solzhenitsyn himself was. The world is not divided into good people like ourselves and evil people who think differently. ‘If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
“The core chapter of Gulag, entitled ‘The Ascent,’ explains that according to Soviet ideology, absorbed by almost everyone, the only standard of morality is success. If there are no otherworldly truths, then effectiveness in this world is all that counts. That is why the Party is justified in doing anything. For the individual prisoner, this way of thinking entails a willingness to inflict harm on others as a means of survival. Whether to yield to this temptation represents the great moral choice of a prisoner’s life: ‘From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. One of them will rise and the other descend. If you go the right—you lose your life; and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.’”
* * *
“The Gulag was the product of the Revolution, but why was there a Revolution? Solzhenitsyn’s second ‘cathedral,’ the multi-volume novel The Red Wheel, attempts to answer that question.”
Photo: Alcatraz
Poem: J. T. Barbarese, “Telephone Poles”
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