The Books of My Life: Natasha’s Dance

I have long had an interest in Russian history, Russian culture, Russian literature, and Russian music and, once upon a time, I lived in Moscow so I suppose it was inevitable that at some point I would get around to reading Natasha’s Dance (New York: Metropolitan, 2002). Natasha's Dance is yet another massive book from Birkbeck College (not Birbeck as the Metropolitan Books author bio on the inside of the jacket sleeve has it) Russian historian Orlando Figes. It explores the cultural history--the selective cultural history--of Russian art, music, literature, architecture, and religion.

I have put off reading Figes’s book, I suppose, because of the controversies swirling around Natasha’s Dance, Figes’s 2007 book The Whisperers, and Figes's Amazon review posts written under a nom de plume. As Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen point out in their 2012 Nation essay several people have taken Figes to task for several failings. British Russian scholar Rachel Polonsky claimed, in a 2002 review of Natasha’s Dance in the Times Literary Supplement, that Figes’s book was characterised by various defects including Figes’s careless borrowing of words and ideas of other writers without adequate acknowledgment. Another British academic, T.J. Binyon, claimed that Natasha’s Dance was full of “[f]actual errors and mistaken assertions on many of its pages. American academic Priscilla Roosevelt asserted that Figes appropriated memoirs she had used in her book Life on the Russian Country Estate (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1995) while changing their content and messing up the references. Still others have taken Figes to task for his reviews as “Historian” on Amazon including one review giving Rachel Polonsky’s Molotov’s Magic Lantern (2011) one star, a review that seemed to some as payback for Polonsky’s negative review of Natasha’s Dance.

I have not had access to the Polonsky or Binyon reviews of Natasha’s Dance, I am not a specialist in the area of Russian history, and my Russian is barely passable, but I do want to make a few observations on the controversy surrounding Figes and his books. Native Russian speakers take non-native Russian speakers to task for their translations to such an extent that such claims now constitute a genre. Figes, of course, is not the only academic to have flubbed some of his citations and I am sure that Emile Durkheim would have appreciated the cultural rituals associated with deviance in modern and postmodern academic bureaucracies. In Figes's defence, he cites those who influenced him in the further reading section and in the endnotes of Natasha's Dance. I have no problem with people reviewing books or CD’s as themselves or anonymously on Amazon. My problem with Figes’s Amazon reviews was his attempt to cover up the fact that he was the reviewer after he was outed by Polonsky. There has been a long history of academic concern about those academics who aim at and sometimes get a wider readership. Natasha’s Dance was aimed at a broader audience than a few hundred academics and apparently Figes appears to make money from his books. I don't, by the way, intend these rejoinders to be the basis for a dismissal of the serious charges against Figes. I do intend them to be things that we must think about when we explore academic feuds.

Though it is hardly novel, I didn’t and don’t have a problem with the central interpretive thrust of Natasha’s Dance, the assertion that modern post-Peter the Great Russian national identity revolved around several "mythic" or invented discourses that sometimes interwove and intertwined: Russian Europhilism and Europhobism, Russia as Slavic, Russia as Scythian, Asian, or "oriental", Russia as European, and peasantophilism and peasantophobism. I didn’t and don’t have a problem with Figes’s emphasis on culture and its symbols and rituals and his use of Russian literature, Russian art, Russian architecture, Russian film, and Russian religion to argue for that thesis. What I did and do have a problem with, though this didn't entirely ruin the book for me, is the fact that Figes’s book, with its far too common, even in academic circles, confusion of the descriptive and the normative, its problematic romantic, dramatic, tragic, triumph of Russian soul, and use of personal vignettes, particularly in the introductory section of each chapter, modes of writing or narrative strategies which make Figes's book seem like the product of a nineteenth century historian who somehow got hold of Tardis and time travelled to 20th  century where he picked up a bit of 20th century cultural studies culture and gave us a mash-up. But hey, we do live in a postmodern world.

The Books of My Life: Beyond Chutzpah

Norman Finkelstein often goes to places where other academics and intellectuals fear to tread. Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso) explored the polemical use of the Shoah, the Holocaust, as a political, economic, and cultural weapon in the apologetic and polemical war over Israel and its behaviour toward Palestinians. Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) explores, in part one, the rise of a new anti-Semitism in the works of people like Nathan and Ruth Perlmutter (The Real Anti-Semitism), Abraham Foxman (Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism), Phyllis Chester (The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It), and, Alan Dershowitz (The Case for Israel). Part two explores, the claims at the heart of Dershowitz's book, their incompatibility with human rights reports, and, in an appendix, Dershowitz's citation failings.

There are a number of things I liked about Beyond Chutzpah. Finkelstein clearly shows that the "new Anti-Semitism" is, in its attempt to link any kind of criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism, a "new" kind of apologetic and polemic aimed at demonising Israel's "enemies" in order to win the discourse war. One has to distinguish anti-Semitism from criticism of Israel. Finkelstein nicely shows how Dershowitz's The Case for Israel is an apologetic and polemic that is generally at odds with the reports of Israeli and international human rights organisations. But then Dershowitz is a lawyer, a "profession" that is inherently apologetic and polemical. Finkelstein nicely shows that Dershowitz's book is full of citation problems. Finkelstein nicely notes that the "empty land" and "primitive inhabitant" discourses of  Israel's apologists and polemicists are the same ones used by European settlers in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to dispossess the First Peoples, the First Nations, the aboriginals, and the Maori.

All this said, I found Beyond Chutzpah somewhat disjointed. Finkelstein's focus on the new anti-Semitism doesn't always sit well with his often devastating take down of Dershowitz's claims that Israel, which seems the saintliest of nations in Dershowitz's apologetics and polemics, is following international law when it demolishes the houses of Palestinians, targets Palestinians for assassination, "tortures" Palestinian prisoners it holds in its gaols and detention centres, and "annexes" Palestinian land.  I also found the book somewhat repetitive. Still Finkelstein's book is definitely worth a read if you have any interest in apologetics and polemics, how ideology constructs reality, conservatism, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the modern and post-modern world.