The Touch of the Russian Novelist

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

“We read Russian literature because the novels tell us the truth about who we are and what we are.” —Why You Should Read Russian Literature by Jessica Hooten Wilson, December 13, 2018

A reader remarked that my essays offered truths she could not find elsewhere. How sad and lamentable. Great stories are out there and it is through great stories that you and I better understand one another. My known world, if I do say so, is rich beyond belief. Everyone’s known world is rich and deep beyond comprehension. My soul can be stirred by Bari Weiss’ lecture before the 92Y one day and Autumn in New York by Ella Fitzgerald the next day. I am of the world, not dogma and slogan words.

It is dark outside and I savor the paradox. I couldn’t wait to leave New York City as a young adult in the Big Apple but, at a continent’s distance now in my 60s, I can sip in music honoring New York. There is something about the coming of Spring time on the East Coast. My daughter excitedly shared the other day that Spring was in the air in New Haven. A wonderful feeling, to be young on the brink of Springtime in an Old New England town with the unknown future straight away. The promise of a new season of life.

On to this evening’s essay.

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My topic for this evening is a creative association between the Russian novelist and race in American discourse. At first blush, what could Russian novelists have to offer us? Isn’t race, or more precisely Blackness is Oppression, Nothing Else Matters, unique to the United States of America. Didn’t evil slavery cast out logic and reality from race talk? Are you and I and others who care about these matters cursed to perceive caricatures and stereotypes in people and nothing else?

If this essay comes across as rough around the edges, it is only because my thoughts are nascent. Creative associations are a blend of intuition, conviction and discernment. Ideas have to simmer as they rise to the level of coherence.

Let’s start from this premise.

Logic and reality will not defeat the Woke (or fill in the blank with your favorite word of manipulation). Blind faith is impervious to reason. https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Racism-Religion-Betrayed-America/dp/0593423062 One cannot reason a true believer out of his or her faith. No one could have persuaded my grandmother to abandon her Christian faith, the faith of her parents and grandparents.

Nor could one have reasoned the doomed Jesuit priests in The Mission out of their religious brotherhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mission_(1986_film)

The Mission is the timeless story of faith against logic and reality. Reality asserts itself from the start as non-believing Indigenous people bind a lonely priest to a cross and float the cross into rapidly flowing waters. The cross tumbles over the waterfall and the bound priest passes away in faith. Jesuit priest Father Gabriel is inspired to surmount the raging falls and convert the native people above the falls. Despite all manner of disbelief among the people, Father Gabriel succeeds in building a mission. His faith is never shaken even as larger forces transfer the land from Spain to Portugal and the Portuguese mission becomes enslavement of Indians of faith. Father Gabriel and his fellow priests refuse to turn over their believers to a life of slavery. The priests die in faith with their parishioners above the falls.

In the present-day situation, those who live in faith are willing for institutions to die in faith. We see this unshaken faith with support for former Harvard University President Claudine Gay. That the brand name of Harvard began to die mattered not to those of racial faith in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Jesuit priests were everywhere around Harvard Yard in December of 2023.

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There is an infamous account of faith in American Slavery As It Is by Theodore Weld (1839). https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html [Fun fact: Theodore Weld was the uncle by marriage to pioneer black lawyer Archibald Grimke.]

A slave master swears that a slave preacher on his plantation would never foreswear God and Jesus Christ. Evil in the form of a visitor said faith could be flogged out of the preacher. On a dare, the master administered a flogging until the preacher would forsake his Lord and Savior. Lash after lash and still the man of faith refused to deny his God.

The preacher man died in faith.

What does dying in racial faith look like in the modern era of arguable mental slavery? A world of dogma and slogan words? The resignation of public intellectual Jordan Peterson from the faculty at the University of Toronto reflects the death of moral tolerance for viewpoint diversity at Toronto, I might argue. The same goes for Vanderbilt Law School which lost authentic scholar Carol Swain due to woke pressures. The brutal consumer reaction to the movie Cleopatra suggests commercial death in dollars and cents. Although Cleopatra was of Greek descent, the entire movie imagined a black Cleopatra contrary to logic and reality. Indeed, Disney has acknowledged that producing movies of faith in the narrative has cost one billion dollars over the last four big releases. That is commercial death writ large. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12800623/Disney-Snow-White-woke-SEC-filing-Rachel-Zegler.html

Professor McWhorter has argued those who will not tolerate questions about racial dogma are living in racial faith. We are witnessing the birth of a religion, and like the preacher man who died in faith, many intellectuals, scholars and activists will live in faith to the bitter end.

Faith reveals itself in chanting of slogan words, a series of words said as a magic spell or charm. The generational energy is headed in one direction, ergo, the outlandish support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) despite all manner of evidence of corruption. It is as if the incantation of BLM shuts down the mind. The foreseeable consequences of the death of reason will be a dumber black population, a people more prone to manipulations of slogan words.

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Is there a better way? Can one foresee a more positive future free from dogma and the machinery of self-censorship and group think? Walk with me as I draw a creative association between blacks in London, San Diego and throughout the Western World with the Plastic People of Prague circa 1976.

From 1948 to 1989, the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia held power in the name of the workers. Slogan words of liberation and oppression permeated the landscape to such an extent that slogans became rote and mechanical. The irony was not lost on non-conformers. These slogans professed affinity for the downtrodden but the manipulations of slogan words oppressed everyone. Even those in power had to mouth slogans no one believed in anymore. https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23 https://areomagazine.com/2021/05/21/why-censorship-makes-us-dumb-in-soviet-russia-then-and-in-america-today/

There was one proscribed way to be in Prague. Question dogma and one’s career was placed on ice. Sound familiar?

And yet the Achilles heel of dogma and slogan words remained in plain sight — personal dignity, pure intuition, creative expression.

Enter stage right a rag tag group of long-haired Bohemians who just wanted to play raw, clear and transparent rock music. No politics, no slogan words, no dogma — just pulsating, feel-good music.

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Those who live in dogma and slogan words are always threatened by non-conformers. The dogmatists pursued and harassed The Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastic People went underground and fled into the villages and forests to play their music unencumbered by manipulations. Things came to a head in 1976 when the police arrested The Plastic People and many fans. The official indictment accused their lyrics of “extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism.” Most Czechs self-censored in quiet but imprisoning a rock group was too much. The network of supporters soon evolved into the human rights organization Charter 77 devoted to “life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way.”

The regime of dogma and slogan words would fall in the next decade.

Don’t you wonder why Woke movies are so lousy? A black actor in The Twilight Zone furthered the storyline.

Black actors in movies today play contrived parts that feel, well, plastic and fake. For a striking and triumphant exception, see American Fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Fiction_(film)

Shout out to Snow White and the Seven Diverse Dwarfs.

There is a place for genuine, and authentic, black stories. For example, I have written a novel about the first black lawyer because I wanted to create a better way.

What lessons can we learn from The Plastic People of the Universe in Prague in 1976 - 1978? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plastic_People_of_the_Universe We who are non-conformers must accept that this decade has been captured by the Woke. It is a waste of time and energy and brain cells to counter the Woke capture of institutions with logic and reality.

What is done is done.

I urge my fellow non-conformers to take the long view like my former law professor Derrick Bell did in the 1980s. We must commit ourselves to developing the language tools for the young of the future, the 2030s and the 2040s. We need a groundswell of creativity that shows humanity endures. If humanity is the Achilles Heel of Woke dogma, write your memoir. And use the truest sentences you are capable of. Draft a play and show audiences a real story of race and reconciliation across the color line, not hopeless division. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/21/books/review/benjamin-banneker-and-us-rachel-jamison-webster.html Create a screenplay where character drives the plot, not race.

Dream of a novel and create a vivid, continuous dream of two star-crossed lovers of different races in a world gone mad with race essentialism. Let Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago be your guide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Zhivago_(film)

Write a song about love, not dogma.

Conclusion: For most of my adult life, I have been attracted to the Russian novel. “The best Russian novels, those of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn, dig beneath the surface of the action to reveal the unseen story, where the souls of people are being saved and lost each minute.” Too much of literature about Black Americans is predictable and surface deep. There is more to life than race and oppression and evil policemen. We need more of the touch of the Russian novelist. Remove race from the equation. Bring out the souls of characters who happen to be black. Tell me more stories from the 1970s when Lynyrd Skynyrd was a thing in the hallways in junior high school. Let me see characters exploring the world on their bicycles. Recreate the church sanctuary as a character plays Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on the magnificent organ over and over again. The smell of cutting grass, the sound of raking leaves, the taste of Castor Oil on one’s tongue, the sight of Mom’s beer in the refrigerator, the haunting sight of a failed business sign in the storage room — dig deeper and deeper into characters.

Reveal the human soul and bring life into view.