Growing up during the Cold War, I envisioned Eastern Europe as a vague collection of entities between Germany and the Soviet Union, the two important countries of the region. Poland, to me, was a land over which German and Russian armies fought, and Ukraine and Belorussia (as it was then) were just bits of the Soviet Union that the Kremlin pretended were independent enough to be member states of the UN. This year all that changed when I read Timothy Snyder’s The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. Snyder is well known now for his 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (which I have not yet read), but the earlier book completely reoriented my ideas about the history of the region. Snyder does not view the countries he writes about as sideshows, and he does not treat any one of them as central (with the others viewed from that perspective) – he takes all sides equally seriously and presents all points of view simultaneously, which doesn’t make for easy reading but is invigorating and winds up leaving the reader far better informed. Furthermore, he keeps pointing out the potential futures that people saw as real possibilities but that we have forgotten about (example: Stalin almost gave Vilnius/Vilna/Wilno/Vil’nya to Belorussia instead of Lithuania; he seems to have changed his mind at the last moment and had all the Belorussian activists sent to the Gulag instead of put in high official posts), and he reminds us of the effects of self-deluding propaganda (to quote Snyder: “When Lithuanian troops marched into Vilnius on 28 October 1939, they were shocked to find ‘instead of the princess of their fairy tales, the streets of alien Wilno, unknown, speaking a foreign language’”). And once you’ve read Snyder, you’ll be equipped for Oksana Zabuzhko’s novel The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, a suspenseful, sexy, funny, and occasionally devastating look at the last seventy years or so of the history of western Ukraine (much of which was part of Poland in the earlier years) through the eyes of an ambitious young woman dedicated to advancing her career as a television journalist while digging up difficult truths about the past, her family’s and her country’s.
Leaping across European Russia to the Urals and beyond, we come to another book that changed my view of history this year, Yuri Slezkine’s Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what European colonization of the Americas was like; I suspect most people are far less familiar with how Russia wound up ruling the vast area between its heartland and the Pacific and what its relations with the various natives of the region have been. I know I was, and I’ve been reading about Russian history for a long time now. This book does not give you the view from the other side (for that, you’ll want James Forsyth’s A History of the Peoples of Siberia, which I haven’t read, or anthropological looks at specific peoples, like Bruce Grant’s In the Soviet House of Culture, about the Nivkh of Sakhalin, and Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer’s The Tenacity of Ethnicity: A Siberian Saga in Global Perspective, about the Khanty of northwest Siberia, both of which I have read and can recommend), but it lays out in gripping detail, with plenty of quotes from contemporary sources, what the Russians were up to and the various ways they dealt with the people they ran into as they headed east. A couple of extracts will give you an idea of how he sets local events in a larger context. In the first chapter, he compares the Cossacks who carried out the conquest with Westerners like William of Rubruck, who visited the region and felt themselves in a new world: “The Cossacks, however, never entered a new world because unlike William, they had not been sent to a new world and because they had no ‘public’ that wanted to hear about new worlds. Most important, however, the Cossacks’ own world was not as starkly divided into the Christian and non-Christian spheres as was William’s. Rather, it consisted of an apparently limitless number of peoples, all of whom were assumed to have their own faiths and languages. This was not a temporary aberration to be overcome through conversion or revelation — this was a normal state of affairs whereby foreigners were expected to remain foreigners.” And on the change of attitude in the early nineteenth century: “More important, by the late 1840s both Siberians and Circassians — as well as Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, and numerous aliens and exotic sons of nature — had become largely irrelevant to the world as conceived by the Russian intelligentsia. The increasingly alienated cultural elite of Moscow and St. Petersburg had discovered a noble savage with whom it would concern itself to the exclusion of most others: the Russian peasant.” Most of the book is concerned with the Soviet period, and it does a great job of untangling the competing approaches (all proclaiming themselves unimpeachably Marxist-Leninist) and the ways (almost uniformly unpleasant) in which decisions reached in the Kremlin wound up affecting people trying to make their livings as they always had, from hunting and herding and fishing. The book focuses on Siberia, but uses it as a lens with which to view Russia, the Soviet Union, and humanity.
Ian Frazier has no need of my recommendation, and his Travels in Siberia got enough rave reviews and awards that you’re very likely aware of it, but just in case: it’s one of the best travel books I’ve ever read. Frazier was so fascinated with Russia he learned the language and read all the histories and early accounts he could find, and he makes the people he travels with and encounters as three-dimensional and vivid as the characters in a good novel. Don’t miss this book.
More from A Year in Reading 2012
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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From where I’m sitting I can see the galleys of Maggie Nelson’s incredible The Argonauts, which will come out this spring from Graywolf, and Aaron Kunin’s brilliant, Cold Genius, just out from Fence. Chris Nealon’s Heteronomy, published by Edge, has been supporting me all fall. Nealon taps into the energies of popular culture without condescension or self-congratulation or (easy) irony; his poems are at once totally well-wrought and unaffectedly conversational; he is clear-eyed about the catastrophe of the present but refuses to descend into mere melancholy; he has no illusions about poetry’s practical power but he is not in love with — or particularly tortured by — its marginality; Nealon — an accomplished literary critic — neither disavows his learning or retreats into it. Please read this book with me because everybody who reads it gets to enter a meadow where we can dance and die together:
is this some kind of joke?
No, it’s not. These two have been fellating each other across the internet for the last couple of months. She’s thanked in the acknowledgements of his new book, then she reviews said book for the Los Angeles Review of Books, then he picks her book as his favorite books of the year and I’m sure if she gets a chance she’ll pick his book as her favorite book. I’m starting to get used to this logrolling. It’s what the internet is about. There’s no point in fighting it. Just recognize it for what it is and take every recommendation witha grain of salt.
Lerner and Kunin are also friends (per an old Believer interview). Hilarious. Doubt Lerner even read the Nelson or Kunin. “From where I’m sitting I can see the galleys…” Congrats on your ability to see!
Thank you! The meadow conceit is lovely and makes me eager to discover the rest of Nealon’s book.
I must also say I’m aghast at the crudeness, rudity, and absurd presumptiousness of the previous commenters. This whole series is a gift to readers, and a wonderful one, and it will be taken away from us, because who on earth would contribute again after responses like these?
I don’t think someone telling you to read their friends books is a gift. It’s PR. Don’t be so melodramatic. The people who are using this exercise to be thoughtful and recommending interesting books are being thanked; the logrollers are not, as they shouldn’t be. Ben Lerner’s recommending Maggie Nelson is the equivalent of Uncle Eddie’s handing his already half-drunk can of beer to Clark Griswold. “I bet you could use a cool one, huh?” “Now you’re talking.” That’s what kind of gift that is.
It’s a gift in the same sense a television advertisement is a gift.
In res: Wyatt’s comment
What is “rudity” supposed to mean? Is that a new alternative spelling for “rudeness”? And for “presumptiousness” – shouldn’t that be spelled “presumptuousness”?
Condescending to other commentators (particularly if they have a point which you don’t even address) by using fancy words usually works better if you use words that actually exist and if you spell them correctly.
Claudia,
The crudity rudiness of your commentarity is sickning!
All,
Newsflash, half of these year-end lists are PR for writers’ friends or their own publications. There’s no need to break out the fainting couch over this, it’s just a silly year-end exercise. Also, it’s possible to like a friend’s book in good faith. It isn’t, however, a “gift,” let’s be clear on that…
So far, Lerner gets the Matt Bell logroller of the year award, but we have yet to see Bell’s contribution, so until then, the champion holds the belt.
Wow, quick to the throat, aren’t we, and so witty! Rudity may have been a mistake, but it is fine by Webster’s online. Condescension was not what I intended, at least no more so than when my 4-year-old daughter angrily shouts at my 5-year-old son the most potent insult she knows: “You’re rude!” (She hasn’t learned yet how to mock style.) The comments here are unwarranted and unappreciated. They are self-congratulatory and mean, and completely out of the spirit of this series. These are the personal recommendations and reading experiences of authors. Truly, what does Mr. Lerner owe to you?
Would The Millions please offer some of our esteemed commenters a Year In Reading of their own? This is not a joke! I am really curious.
Or maybe you dumbasses could consider that having a personal relationship with the authors increases their impact?
Tom
Your question is incoherent. Learn how to properly write a sentence, dumbass.