Are the better angels of our nature winning out? Are we, as we achieve higher levels of civilisation, becoming any less violent? I hadn’t intended it this way but violence has been an undercurrent throughout almost all my summer reading. My blog’s name may be Zenpolitics but there are no easy rides.
I’ve been back, with the wonderful John Stoner and his novel ‘Augustus’, to the life and times of Caesar Augustus and his immediate precursors. (Books by Mary Beard and Tom Holland, serious non-fiction, underline just how bloody life could be in ancient Rome). Moving on 1400 years, to the decades either side of 1400 (a neat symmetry!), Helen Castor’s ‘The Eagle and the Hart’ (not a novel but narrative non-fiction) focuses on Richard II, a lover of peace assailed by violence on his home soil and over the Channel. His successor, Henry IV, copes better. A little more than a century later we’ve Luther nailing his theses on a Wittenberg door and precipitating the Reformation, and its appalling immediate aftermath, the German Peasants’ War, as wonderfully described (in ‘Summer of Fire and Blood’) by Lyndal Roper.
We’re visiting France next month so I read Emile Zola’s novel ‘Debacle’, about the Franco-Prussian War by way (a curious way, I admit – the book happened to be on my shelves) of preparation: the victors of the battle of Sedan in 1870 would return to France less than fifty years later.
I stayed with roughly the same period, moving on to 1874, when I picked up another John Stoner novel, ‘Butcher’s Crossing’. (Now a film.) If I was hoping for respite the title should have warned me. It’s about a journey from Kansas to the Rockies where they hunt buffalo (for their hides) in a high mountain valley, shooting thousands, with a view to leaving none behind. A direct route to extinction.
I found respite in a wonderful book, ‘Left Bank’, by Agnes Poirier about Paris in the 1940s and how its intellectual and cultural and café life survived the Nazi occupation. It’s the world of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and fighting is in-fighting, literary and artistic. But there is a looming threat. Their opponents once the Germans are driven out are the hard-core Soviet-aligned, toe-the-socialist-realist-line Communists.
The dangers, as they might have been, to Paris and to France of hardline Soviet Communism are spelt out in a graphic way in Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, ‘Red Terror’. Its subject is Ukraine in the inter-war years. By 1921 the various attempts to establish independence in the aftermath of World War One had all failed. Soviet power was firmly established. (It’s curious to read how in the years 1921-22 American aid had been enlisted to combat famine.)
Ukrainian language and culture were for a while encouraged as a way the Soviets saw of binding Ukrainians to a new Marxist dispensation. But by 1929 Stalin was in charge and the mood was changing. A trial of that year referred to ‘Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. The brutal introduction of land reform, the obliteration of the kulaks as a class, and at the same time the requisitioning of the grain, on which the peasants survived, for the cities and for export, led to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33, during which up to five million people died. Stalin’s paranoia was by this time deep-rooted. His purges of the late 1930s all but wiped out Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural life.
There’s so much more I could say. Read the book. For my next book, something that’s maybe an easier read? Maybe, maybe not. Take each book as it comes.
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