114 years ago today (November 20, 1910), Leo Tolstoy—the author who gave us two major Russian classics Anna Karenina and War & Peace—died at Astapovo, a small, remote train station in the heart of Russia. Pneumonia was the official cause. His death came just weeks after Tolstoy, then 82 years old, made a rather dramatic decision. He left his wife, his comfortable estate, and his wealth, then traveled 26 hours to Sharmardino, where Tolstoy’s sister Marya lived, and where he planned to spend the remainder of his life in a small, rented hut. (Elif Batuman has more on this.) But then he pushed on, boarding a train to the Caucasus. And it proved to be more than his already weakened constitution could handle. Rather amazingly, the footage above brings you back to Tolstoy’s final days, and right to his deathbed itself. This clip comes from a 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, and these days you can still find copies of Clark’s accompanying book kicking around online.
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One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)
Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it.
It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.”
While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unremarked is his characterization of the Italian opposition movement’s unlikely coalitions. The Resistance included Communists who “exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property,” and leaders like Eco’s childhood hero Franchi, “so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a specific feature of an Italian resistance, one not observable across the number of nations that have resisted totalitarian governments. As for the seeming total lack of common interest between these parties, Eco simply says, “Who cares?… Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.”
Here on Halloween of 2024, we have a greater variety of scary stories — and arguably, a much scarier variety of scarier stories — to choose from than ever before. But whatever their relevance to the specific lives we may live and the specific dreads we may feel today, how many such current works stand a chance of being read a couple of centuries from now, with not just historical interest but genuine chills? With each Halloween that brings us nearer to the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s literary debut, the works of that American pioneer of the grotesque and the macabre grow only more deeply troubling.
“The word that recurs most crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror,” writes Marilynne Robinson in the New York Review of Books. “His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that is not characteristic of major literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial” — obsessions that haven’t lost much popularity since his day.
Examined more closely, “the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its revelation a recoil of the mind against itself.” This is true, Robinson writes, of such still-widely-read works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
You can hear all of those stories and more in the Youtube playlist above, narrated by a variety of performers immediately recognizable by voice alone: Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, William S. Burroughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rathbone, and the late James Earl Jones.
Whether read aloud or on the page, Robinson notes, Poe “has always been reviled or celebrated for the absence of moral content in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straightforward moral parables. For a writer so intrigued by the operations of the mind as Poe was, an interest in conscience leads to an interest in concealment and self-deception, things that are secretive and highly individual and at the same time so universal that they shape civilizations.” While there are civilizations, there will be tell-tale hearts; and while there are tell-tale hearts, there will be an audience responsive to Edgar Allan Poe’s brand of horror, on Halloween or any other night.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Haruki Murakami’s hit novel 1Q84features a memorable scene in a taxicab on a gridlocked freeway whose radio is playing Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta. “It is, as the book suggests, truly the worst possible music for a traffic jam,” writes Sam Anderson in aNew YorkTimes Magazine profile of the novelist: “busy, upbeat, dramatic — like five normal songs fighting for supremacy inside an empty paint can.” Murakami tells Anderson that he “chose the Sinfonietta because that is not a popular music at all. But after I published this book, the music became popular in this country… Mr. Seiji Ozawa thanked me. His record has sold well.”
In addition to being a world-famous conductor, the late Ozawa was also, as it happens, a personal friend of Murakami’s; the two even published a book, Absolutely on Music, that transcribes a series of their conversations about the former’s vocation and the latter’s avocation, a distinction with an unclear boundary in Murakami’s case.
“I have lots of friends who love music, but Haruki takes it way beyond the bounds of sanity,” writes Ozawa, and indeed, Murakami has always made music a part of his work, both in his process of creating it and in its very content. His books offer numerous references to Western pop (especially of the nineteen-sixties), jazz, and also classical recordings — fifteen of which you can hear in the video from NTS radio above.
We’ve previously featured NTS, the London-based online radio station known for its deep dives on themes from spiritual jazz to Hunter S. Thompson, for its “Haruki Murakami Day” broadcast of music from his novels. Opening with Le mal du pays from Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage, the NTS Guide to Classical Music from Murakami Novels continues on to “Vogel als Prophet” from Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen, and thereafter includes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 In A Major, Mendelssohn’s Cleveland Quartet, Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer, and much else besides. You may not be able to recall where you’ve seen all of these pieces mentioned in Murakami’s work right away, but you’ll surely recognize the Sinfonietta the moment it comes along.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Kurt Vonnegut’s life was not without its ironies. Fighting in World War II, that descendant of a long line of German immigrants in the United States found himself imprisoned in Dresden just when it was devastated by Allied firebombing. To understand the relevance of this experience to his literary work, one need only know that his captors made him live in a slaughterhouse. It’s not surprising that anti-war sentiments would surface again and again in the books he wrote after coming home. But one would hardly expect him to have spent his time away from the writing desk on a military-themed board game.
“After releasing his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952, to positive reviews and poor sales, he needed other streams of income to support his growing family,” writes the New York Times’ Julia Carmel of the young Vonnegut. Of all his endeavors — which included public relations, a car dealership and a very brief stint at Sports Illustrated — he was most passionate about designing a board game called General Headquarters.” Readers of Vonnegut’s novels might expect a sardonically didactic object lesson on the futility of war, but in fact, “GHQ is a fast-paced two-player battle game in which each player maneuvers military units — infantry, armored vehicles, artillery and an airborne regiment — to capture the other player’s headquarters.”
Vonnegut never did manage to sell the game, which has only just come available for purchase at Barnes & Noble stores. Its long-delayed production was the project of a tabletop game designer called Geoff Engelstein, who ran across a brief mention of GHQ that eventually inspired him to inquire about the game’s status with the writer’s estate. The 40 pages of notes amid Vonnegut’s papers include several revisions of its rules, but also pitch letters to board-game companies suggesting that GHQcould “become the third popular checkerboard game” — and even “be used to train cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.”
Despite probably having missed its chance to enter the standard military-academy curriculum, the game could nevertheless become a must-have among collectors of Vonnegutiana. According to the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library’s online store, “this first edition of GHQ features deluxe wooden pieces and a 24-page commentary booklet, showing Kurt Vonnegut’s actual design notes to give insight into his creative process.” It may “lack the signature dark sense of humor that runs through Mr. Vonnegut’s writing,” as Carmel puts it, but it surely couldn’t be without his less widely acknowledged — but no less characteristic — instinct for entertainment value.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Born 196 years ago, Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s life (1828–1910) spanned a period of immense social, political, and technological change, paralleled in his own life by his radical shift from hedonistic nobleman to theologian, anarchist, and vegetarian pacifist. Though he did not live to see the Russian Revolution, the novelist did see Tsar Alexander II’s sweeping reforms, including the 1861 Emancipation order that changed the social character of the country. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy saw the coming of new recording technology that would revolutionize the direction of his own life’s work—telling stories.
In his later years Tolstoy appeared in the new medium of film, which captured his 80th birthday in 1908, and his funeral procession two years later. He was the subject of the first color photograph taken in Russia (top) also in 1908. And that same year, Tolstoy made several audio recordings of his voice, on a phonograph sent to him personally by Thomas Edison. You can hear one of those recordings, “The Power of Childhood,” made on April 19th, 1908, just above.
You’ll note, of course, that the great author reads in his native language. Most of the recordings he made, which he intended for the edification of his countrymen, are in Russian. Below, however, you can hear him read from his last book, Wise Thoughts For Every Day in English, German, French and Russian. The book collects Tolstoy’s favorite passages from thinkers as diverse as Lao-Tzu and Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Mike Springer wrote in a previous post on this recording, “Tolstoy rejected his great works of fiction” as an old man, “believing that it was more important to give moral and spiritual guidance to the common people.” To that end, he made a series of short recordings, which you can hear at this site, on such subjects as art, law, morality, poverty, nonviolence, and capital punishment.
The story of how Tolstoy came to make these recordings is a fascinating one. Interested in the new technology, Tolstoy made his first recording in 1895, when, writes The Moscow Times, “an Edison representative came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, to record the author’s voice. Those recordings were taken over the border to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Soviet Union after World War II.” When Stephen Bonsal, editor of the New York Times learned of Tolstoy’s interest in recording technology in 1907, he promised to send the novelist an Edison phonograph of his own. Edison himself, hearing of this, refused to accept any payment, and personally sent his own machine to Tolstoy’s estate with the engraved message “A Gift to Count Leo Tolstoy from Thomas Alva Edison.”
Edison asked Tolstoy for many multi-lingual recordings, requesting “short messages” in English and French, “conveying to the people of the world some thoughts that would tend to their moral and social advancement.” Tolstoy diligently made several recordings, some of which were then shipped to Edison in 1908. On February 21 of that year, the New York Times published an article on the exchange titled “Tolstoy’s Gift to Edison. Will Send Record of His Voice—Edison Gave Him a Phonograph.” The world eagerly awaited the world-famous author’s message to its “civilized peoples.” It seems however, that the message never arrived. According to Sputnik News, the fate of that legendary recording “has yet to be found out.” Nevertheless, thanks to Edison, we have several other recordings of Tolstoy’s very well-preserved voice, the record of a life lived to the end with fierce conviction and curiosity.
Copies of Moby Dick can be found in our collection of Free eBooks. Meanwhile, this big reading will be added to our collection of Free Audio Books.
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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Around here we subscribe to the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Orson Welles. In years past, we gave you Welles narrating Plato’s Cave Allegory and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” and, before that, the Welles-narrated parable Freedom River, and the list goes on.
Now, we present The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a 1977 experimental film created by Larry Jordan, an independent filmmaker who tried to marry “the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles.” As Jordan describes it, the film is “a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.” You can watch above.
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