Volume 37, Number 4 · March 15, 1990
The Fire Next Time
By John Bayley
The Fur Hat
by Vladimir Voinovich, translated by Susan Brownsberger
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 122 pp., $17.95
Siberia on Fire: Stories and Essays
by Valentin Rasputin, selected, translated, and with an introduction by Gerald Mikkelson, by Margaret Winchell
Northern Illinois University Press, 230 pp., $12.50 (paper)
Walter Benjamin made a once famous claim that the Nazis had 'aestheticized' politics. Their emblems, uniforms, and parades were not just the sign of their beliefs and policies but identical with them. The Nazis were an obvious case, but it could be argued that the French revolutionaries saw themselves, and have subsequently been seen, in the same light: persons and styles of life that embodied, as well as expressed, the New Order and the New Man. Lenin was not in this sense an aesthete, but the system he founded rapidly acquired the same characteristics, grafted on to more ancient Russian reflexes; it became obsessed with the outward and visible signs of being Soviet Man, perpetually decent, heroically overfulfilling the norm, but also intensely status conscious, living in a world of aesthetic degree where badge and rank were all-important.
Review, 2510 words
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