Rocking bears, dancing goats, gift elephants

I don't know why the editors of Russia in 1839 included this picture. Custine went to the giant commercial fair in Nijni Novgorod, but he never mentions any dancing goats or heavy metal bears

He does see an elephant. Retuning from the fair to Moscow, his coach moving at the typical Russian speed (as fast as the whip can make the horses go), he comes across, just on the highway in the middle of nowhere, a fully decorated Indian elephant, accompanied by a sort of caravan with camels, horses, and their riders. Custine's horses are spooked and he's nearly killed. The elephant turns out to be a gift from the Shah of Persia, on its way to St. Petersburg. How much time must the whole trip, walking the elephant from Persia to the Baltic, have taken? 6 months? How much did it cost.

This trip would be a good subject for a short story, about the Iranian elephant keeper and his trip to St. Petersburg. Or it could be a 500 page novel from the point of view of the elephant. Whatever.

predictions, shmredictions

We give to much credit to predictions. Tocqueville has a single paragraph predicting that the two great powers in the future would be Russia and the United States. And he was right! For a while, at least. But people used this trivial sliver of his work to bolster his authority.

Similarly, Marx and Malthus made some terribly wrong predictions, which has undermined their authority among a lot of people. In the case of Marx, I am tempted to say, good. Anyway, other thinkers have pulled out the more valuable ideas. Malthus's mistakes certainly led to a lot of insights by later demographers and economists.

So predictions don't matter that much. The search for authority is a distraction from taking ideas seriously. Still, this is a good shocker from the Marquis de Custine:

"If ever they should succeed in creating a real revolution among the Russian people, massacre would be performed with the regularity that marks the evolutions of a regiment. Villages would change into barracks, and organized murder would stalk forth armed from the cottages, form in line, and advance in order…"

The Empire of the Tsar, p. 293.

600 pages of aphorisms

As I read more Custine, it becomes easier to see why he's difficult to read than the typical travel writer. He is always striving for the pithy saying.

"To make a great nation is infallibly to create an architecture."

That's buried in the middle of a paragraph, when it should either begin or end one. Plus, I'm not sure it's true. His point is that the architecture of St. Petersburg is all borrowed from other countries, is not an authentic expression of the Russian culture. He's probably right about that.

Maxim de la Rochefoucauld and Nicolas de Chamfort are two of the greatest aphorists in history. Pascal and Voltaire weren't bad either. They make it look so easy. But they didn't bury their gems in 600 page tomes.

Astolphe de Custine, bad traveller

The Marquis Astolphe de Custine was an interesting fellow. His grandfather was one of the greatest Revolutionary generals, behind Lafayette, which did not save him from the guillotine. Custine's father also died on the guillotine. His mother barely escaped it, and was famous as a sort of Revolutionary martyr. Mme de Stael’s novel Delphine is named after her. Custine himself was a friend of Heine, Balzac, and the rest of literary Paris.

Custine made a 3 month trip to Russia that was in some sense inspired by the publication of the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. A comparison between the two writers is inescapable, but what damage it does to Custine. Tocqueville was a brilliant thinker, gifted at generalizing. A real social scientist. If Democracy in America is not the most exciting book to read today, it is because many of Tocqueville’s insights have been so thoroughly absorbed by modern political science and sociology.

Custine, by contrast, oh boy. Custine is an entirely conventional thinker, with no original ideas at all. Which does not stop him from constantly interrupting himself with the meaning of this and that aspect of Russia. The edition I am reading is abridged by about 15%. There’s another edition available that cuts the book down to 50%. I should have gone with that one.

Because Russia in 1839 is a very interesting book when read as a conventional travel book, an account of anecdotes and adventures in a strange place. Democracy in America has virtually no conventional travel writing, but is a book of ideas. Custine, not having enough ideas, tells a lot of good stories.

Custine is a sour traveler. He hates Russia and everything about it. This can be tiresome, but also fun. A few years earlier, Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (short version: Americans have no manners) had been a huge hit in England. Custine’s book has a similar character. On one page he criticizes Russian flower arranging (“the flowers are not placed in such a manner as may render the interior of the apartment more agreeable, but so as to attract admiration from without”), then two pages later he attacks Russian furniture-moving (“the roads and bridges crowded with carriages, drowskas, and carts engaged in the removal of furniture, all the different kinds of which are heaped together with a slovenliness and disorder natural to the Slavonian race”). There is attention to detail in his dislike.

Arriving at his inn, Custine, exhausted, throws himself on the sofa, where he rests for three minutes before the bugs become unbearable. The innkeeper tells him every sofa in Russia is like that, of course you don’t sleep on the sofa. From then on, Custine sleeps with a bowl of water under each leg of his bed.

Russia in 1839 has been popular to readers interested in the Cold War as a way to see which aspects of Soviet culture were really just Russian. For example, Custine can’t enter the country until just the right official arrives, which doesn’t stop a dozen other officials from going through his baggage. Then he is assigned a completely inescapable “guide” for his entire trip. Sounds familiar.

The edition I am reading includes a woodcut of a bear playing a sort of heavy metal guitar. I have not gotten to that part yet, I guess.