Date: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 20:05:06 -0500 From: jeff sommers <jsommers at lynx.dac.neu.edu> Organization: World HIstory Center X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.07 (Macintosh; I; PPC) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "lbo-talk at lists.panix.com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Subject: Lenin and delong Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Just a note on Lenin.... George Seldes, the anti-bolshevik iconoclast US journalist remarked that on his one encounter with Lenin he found him quite good humored in the presentation the witnessed Lenin delivering to Bolshevik activists. In fact (excuse the pun for those knowing Seldes' journal of the same name), that was the very topic of the speech Seldes saw; the dangers of being too serious and too dogmatic. Seldes reported that in a later private meeting with Lenin that Lenin was quite jovial.
I would go further and suggest there are many similarities between Lenin and DeLong. Both smart and both propagandists.
Regards,
Jeff Sommers
Date: Sat, 02 Jan 1999 15:32:09 -0600 From: "Daniel F. Vukovich" <vukovich at students.uiuc.edu> Subject: Re: DeLong on Lenin
At 08:01 PM 31-12-98 -0800, you wrote:
>>This is not a defense of Lenin, Mao, etc.; it is a tired frustration
and
>>bemusement at our ([Ehrenreich's], in this case) collective ignorance
>>about these
>>histories. Contemporary accounts of Lenin (and to a lesser extent of
>>Trotsky) depict him as a warm, humane, and inspiring fellow (c.f.
>>Lunacharsky, Gorky, Mayakovsky
>
>Hmmm....
>
>Maxim Gorky reports a short monologue he once heard from Lenin:
>
> "I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata
> [by Beethoven,]; I'd like to listen to it every day
> [Lenin said]. It is marvelous superhuman music. I
> always think with pride--perhaps it is naive of me--
> what marvelous things human beings can do!
>
> "But I can't listen to music too often. It affects your
> nerves, makes you want to say stupid nice things, and
> stroke the heads of people who could create such
> beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you
> must not stroke anyone's head: you might get your
> hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head,
> without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use
> force against anyone.
>
> "Hm, hm, our duty is infernally hard."
>
>Fun guy...
>
>Brad DeLong
Do you have a degree in transhistorical pop-psychoanalysis, or are you just psychic? Or just a scientist? It must be fun. Potshots always are.
Perhaps you might next intuit the date of this conversation, and even the referent of Lenin's remark about those "anyones"? If we take the referent here to be "the bourgeoisie" (or is that too vulgar a word these days?),
and the context to be that of the Soviet regime's desperate war for survival, then that complicates this little out-of-context quote. Context determines the utterance. I suspect you are merely pulling it from E. Wilson's Finland Station book, which is a fine book, but also problematic during its moments of intuiting the essence of "the revolutionary personality." I now know that Cornel West's psyche/soul/being is a simple matter, so I
should not be surprised too hear that so too is Lenin.
Gorky actually wrote an entire book -- Days With Lenin -- about his good friend Lenin, whom he often argued with, but whom he nevertheless "loved" (in his own damn words). This is the book Wilson quotes from here, and which you then completely de-contextualize or reify, without being so good as to actually comment on it for us. Perhaps if you are serious about delving into the mystical waters of Lenin's or anyone else's essential and true revolutionary personality, you might actually read this whole conversation with Gorky, as well as the damn book. Or just tell us why and how Lenin's quote proves that he was a remorseless puritan who could not
tolerate "fun."
How do you define the "fun" Type Personality anyway? Is there a handbook I am missing, and does it provide all the correct interpretations of my dreams too?
Lenin was indeed a prude and a cultural conservative in many ways, in terms of gender, sexuality, and art and culture generally; these traits no doubt in part derive from the fact that he was born into a late victorian and a bourgeois era himself. Barbara E's point was different; she was spoutting gibberish about *the* (?!) Leninist "personality type" and about Lenin; the very notion of personality-typing is stupid and insulting. She offered no "proof" or substantiation to this or to any of her other sloppy generalizations about the state of the world wide left. Still, your post makes her look like Einstein. I gave my reasons for not liking these things, as well as my stance in re Lenin. I would have thought that marxist "types" can see the pitfalls of transhistorical psychologizing, and moreover can see that the more important questions are about practices and about contexts -- that that is where we begin.
- ---------------------------------------------------- Daniel Vukovich English; Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 vukovich at uiuc.edu ph. 217-344-7843 - ----------------------------------------------------