Start the Week

11/04/2011

Tom Sutcliffe talks to Anne Dudley about the new opera, The Doctor's Tale, which with a Monty Python-esque absurdity tells the story of a devoted doctor, who just happens to be a dog. The writer Elif Batuman follows the footsteps of her Russian literary heroes, to see whether their lives and work can influence her own. While the BBC's former Moscow correspondent, Martin Sixsmith takes in a thousand years of Russian history. And David Runciman asks 'Can Democracy Cope?' with what is happening around the world, and looks back to the works of Tocqueville and Nietzsche to help make sense of the state of democracy today. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 11 Apr 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. At King Super's, an annual Boost Membership just got even better. Now you can choose from Disney+ with ads, Hulu with ads, or ESPN+ on us when you sign up. Plus, enjoy unlimited free delivery, double fuel points, exclusive offers, and free items. Sign up for a Boost Membership today. It's an easier way to save, including new streaming options to relax with, while we deliver your groceries. King Super's, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Thank you for downloading the Start The Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello. Churchill once famously said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried." Did he oversell its merits, though? The Russians have never been entirely convinced of its virtues as Martin's Six Method reveals in an epic new Radio 4 history of the country. And David Ronsman is here to suggest that even democracy's most devoted fans may be blind to some of its weaknesses. Also with us this morning is Ellif Bautumen, whose book The Possessed unexpectedly put literary theory onto the New York Times' best seller list. Stay with us if you want to hear about the unexpected connection between Isaac Bible and King Kong. And Ann Dudley, who's later stopper about a doctor who also happens to be a dog, set her the challenge of writing a trio for the canine voice. She's very kindly standing in today for her librettist Terry Jones, who's not able to join us because of a temporary case of distemper. We start with democracy, an ideal that has in the last few weeks bought ordinary people onto the streets in the Middle East and put British jets into Libyan airspace. In these unsettled times, should we be optimistic about democracy's prospects, though, or worry about its limitations? The political theorist David Ronsman is going to be exploring both sides in a lecture he's giving later this week titled 'Can Democracy cope?' And David Ronsman, I want a bit of a cliffhanger here, save the answers of the question until a little later. But first of all, why should we worry? We're used to the idea that democracy is a universal panacea for prosperity, for freedom. Where do the anxieties arise? Well, we're living in a world where part of us believes that democracy is a success story for good reasons because it's had a very successful 100 years, and the Arab Spring is the latest stage in this story. There's lots of grounds for optimism. And then there's this underlying anxiety in the established democracies, that something isn't quite right because they're struggling with these big challenges, climate change, debt, war. We're not successful at war at the moment, a lot of democracies are heavily in debt, some of them have gone bust. And there's this sense that we're being pulled in two different directions. It's the long-term answer to our problems, and yet it's bad at long-term thinking. And there's a puzzle there that I'm interested in. This paradox has a history, doesn't it? I mean, it's not a recent thing. It's been consistent with democracy throughout, from the very beginning. It has. It has. For a long time, people thought democracy didn't work because it was a kind of mob rule. Then in the 19th century, people started to worry about it the other way, and Tocqueville, the great writer about American democracy in the 19th century, was probably the first person to spot this. He went to America, and he thought this isn't a mob rule. This really works. This is a dynamic, vibrant form of politics. The danger is it works too well. The Americans are going to become complacent, he thought. They're going to become the word he used was fatalistic. They'll drift along with their fate rather than taking decisive action to change it. And he thought, therefore, democracies needed crises, occasionally, to wake them up. But he also thought that was dangerous because the thing about a crisis is it's very unpredictable. And then Nietzsche takes an entirely different view. And very often confused you are. Yeah. For example, Francis Fukuyama in the end of history runs together Tocqueville and Nietzsche as these people who worry about democracy. But Nietzsche is the other way. Nietzsche is someone who does think democracy is a kind of sham. It's a con. It makes the world pretty and nice when the world is nasty underneath. Tocqueville was the other way around. Tocqueville thought that democracy wasn't a con. It really worked. It made sense. But its dynamism was going to drift away over time, because if you live in a successful policy democratic, you get comfortable with it and you think it'll be all right in the end. Whatever crisis is coming around the corner. So democracy kind of comes again with chicken. You think, yeah, we know we have to deal with this, but we know we can deal with it. So we'll wait. And it may be we're living in that world now. And then we've also got Thomas Payne. And he's got a subtly different anxiety about it. Again, what's his answer? Yeah. So in my lecture, I say though, this sort of three views of how democracy can go wrong. It's Nietzsche. It's basically a sham. Tocqueville is too good for its own good, if you like. It works too well. And then Thomas Payne is someone who thinks there's a threshold you have to cross. There's a point to which democracy works and there's a point where it doesn't. And a lot of contemporary political sciences obsessed with this, looking at the Middle East, looking at North Africa. What's the cutoff point? If you can get over that threshold, it'll be all right. If you can't get over that threshold, democracy will fall away. And you can become obsessed with the threshold. And I think we live in a world where people think it's an either or thing. It works or it doesn't work. Whereas I think Tocqueville was closer to the truth. It works. And that actually makes us blind to some of its weaknesses. And it makes us obsessed with trying to make other democracies like us. Okay. Well, if Tocqueville was right, then you have to take with you his argument that we need crisis, crisis to keep us honest. You do. And I think that's a council of despair, isn't it? Because it doesn't need to say that despots will always be with us. Now, I don't think it necessarily says that, but I think it's a very dangerous argument. Tocqueville was aware of this himself. What's the right kind of crisis to wake up a democracy? Because you don't want it to blow too hot. You get a real crisis and you might collapse into autocracy. You don't want it to blow too cold. If it's a nice crisis where democracy shows its strengths, and the recent credit crisis and economic crisis is a good example of this, where people want to get it just right, was it serious enough that we've actually addressed the underlying weaknesses of debt? But if it was too serious, we might go bust. And I think democracy's hover in this dangerous middle ground. And there is something really quite creepy about saying a democracy needs a crisis because it's brutal and cruel. And I don't think anyone should say that, but that doesn't mean it's not true. And what about the current financial crisis? We heard Nick Clegg this morning saying, well, we're going to be rewarded in the end. You know, we've taken the right steps. He seems to think this is the right crisis and that democracy will come out a bit stronger. And there will always be democratic opponents who take both positions. There are some people who think America's going bust. Britain has taken the necessary steps, and democracies have to be absolutely ruthless about using these crises to retrench. There are other people who say, well, we're democracies. We're going to be fine. This is panic-mongering. That's the Labour Party position, the position of some people in the United States. Now, what about the currently very interesting situation of the Middle East? And the debates people have about whether democracy is a good fit for certain kinds of society. You talk in your lecture about the necessary conditions of democracy to exist. One of those I thought was interesting because it's catch 22. You said you need a certain level of prosperity. But then since we're told that democracy is the necessary condition for prosperity, we're in a bind here, aren't we? Yeah, we are. And there's a lot of quite solid, hard data that suggests there's a cut-off point of per capita GDP, about $6,000 or $7,000. If you can get above that, democracies are secure. And if you're below that, they're in trouble. The temptation for the politicians with any view of history that says, if there's a winner here, democracy is the long-term winner, is to try and jump the gun to try and accelerate the process. That can be very dangerous. And there's a lot of evidence that Western politicians have got this badly wrong. Not in six, six, and if this relates very closely to you. Well, it does. And I think David's lecture is very timely because I think in the West we've come to assume not only that democracy is the least bad form of government, but that it's the only form of government. And I think we have this sort of Bruce Willis approach to history, that the despots are bad, so we have a revolution, and afterwards everything will be fine. It will be democracy. They'll be like us. And I think it's relevant to point out that there are a lot of places where democracy is not the best fit. Russia being one of them. Well, you talk in your talk, you talk about the demographic having to be right, and you talk about if it's too skewed towards too many young people in a population, democracy might not be the right thing. But surely a lot of these North African countries and Middle Eastern countries where we've seen this Arab Spring have precisely that population of a very large number of young people. They do, and that's one of the reasons for some people to be quite pessimistic about it. But it brings people out onto the streets, it creates a volatile politics, it creates crisis circumstances. There's quite a lot of evidence that when the median age in a country is quite low, the volatility lasts, and democracy is very vulnerable. And the thing about the established democracies with the West is that they have a very different age profile, and it's bridging that gap. And there is some evidence if you can get a democracy up and running, people, apart from anything, change their reproductive behavior and demography shifts. But the problem is getting the process started. It's exactly the same catch 22 as the economic threshold. You know where it is, but knowing how to cross it is very, very hard. You don't have any suggestions then. Well, how do you get exactly as an Egypt, how do you get a young revolution and turn it into a stable democracy? It takes time, it takes patience, and it also takes a certain amount of realism. That's the thing that Martin says that can be dangerous. We know in a way our democracies are incredibly secure now. It's very hard to imagine circumstances in which our democracies would fall apart. And that actually gives us a kind of blind spot about thinking about other parts of the world. We can't really see it from the other side of the threshold, but trying to see it from the other side of the threshold would make us, I think, more sensitive to these problems. And if the human relates a little bit to your book here, I was very struck by reading particularly about Dostoevsky and his views. Not a fan. Not a fan at all, Dostoevsky. No, he wasn't. Well, yeah, while this has been going on, I've been, I've been living in Turkey since the fall and I've just been thinking about about a teacher and how, you know, he brought democracy, but he, he brought democracy through autocracy. I mean, he automatically brought in democracy. And then what did people do? You know, by the time there was a generation that could take advantage of the democracy, they voted in Islamist conservatives who are taking away people's civil liberties, but they are the democratically elected party. And the military who's upholding Ataturk's, you know, civil liberties and the Western-style government that he brought in, a lot of people, still, my parents, the intellectuals, I'm working at a university now, a lot of people still believe that it's up to the military to ensure that democracy keeps on going. So you're stuck in this paradox. He's very striking, too. He's a function in democracy with a cult of personality, a very odd combination. It is not a combination, but it's a familial one, Martin, if you'll tell it. It's not at all about it. I think the democracy we in the West want to impose is the democracy that elects the right people, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. So in Afghanistan and, you know, Iraq, they might not, they might be the wrong people. The democracy isn't a content, it's only as good as what you choose with it. Precisely. That is one of the things that can persuade people to go back to the kind of niche of you and think it's all a sham. There's always that temptation to, particularly in crisis, circumstances when a strong leader emerges. But we think, oh, we're seeing the real side of democracy now. Actually, it's just the rule of the strong man. Well, it's odd, isn't it? Because it means that democracy, you know, one of the tests of democracy is a government that fails on a regular basis and is ejected. We're going to turn to Martin Sixth now, because it's the perfect moment to go to your grand history of Russia. You're doing this hugely ambitious 50-part radio history of Russia on Radio 4. You begin it with a correspondent's mayor, Culpe, reporting from Moscow at the time of 1991, coup. You confess to having been euphoric about the possibilities for change and reform and modernization. It didn't then unwind as you predicted. What had you forgotten about Russia's history? Well, as I say in the book, I've forgotten the lesson of history. But my only excuse, I can say, is that everybody else felt the same. Because if, in August 1991, when communism was on the verge of collapsing after all those years in power, and it had been brought about by the heroic efforts of the Russian people, and if you'd spent that week with them, which I did, you do get swept up in this sort of great moment of catharsis, that we've actually done something, we've changed history, and now everything will be different. But the mayor, Culpe, as you say, is of course, if I'd sort of sat back and thought about history, it's not the first time that in the thousand years of Russian history, autocracy seemed to be on the point of being thrown off. And what I've tried to do in this, in the book, and in the radio series, is to go back and look at the previous points where people were probably very euphoric. They thought that, you know, no, we're going to have proper freedom, democracy, liberal, Western-style government. And in the past, it's never worked out. That's putting it mildly. I mean, reading your book was like watching one of those Saturday morning thrillers, where the heroine is constantly nearly escaping, but then falling back into the clutches of the villain. I mean, it happens again and again, and again, just take us through some of those incidents, because very early on in Kiev, you have examples of the kind of what looks like a proto-democracy beginning to work. - Why, to standing precisely, yes, in Kiev and Rus, it wasn't called Russian those days, they were the Russian lands. There was devolved government, and the city-states were nominally under the big boss man, the grand prince in Kiev, but they actually ran on their own fiefdoms on a very sort of participatory basis. And people, the people, not just the landed gentry, not just the clergy, but everybody would gather, as you say, these vietures, where they were able to give their views on political developments, they were able to elect the local mayor, they were even able to elect and throw out, in certain places like Novgorod and Skov, they could throw out the grand prince. So, you know, that is sort of embryonic democracy, but of course, that all comes grinding to a halt in the 13th century when the Mongols invade, and a very different model of the state is imposed. The state then becomes a very centralised, autocratic, militarised machine, where individual rights and the fate of individuals is subjugated very much to the needs of the state. And it's that collectivist model, which worked in Russia, because Russia was a very vulnerable country, its borders were long and open, very hard to defend. And if you have this sort of rather nice participatory government, there's no centralised authority to defend the country. So, the Mongol system caught on, and it worked very well for the Russians. You characterize that as a kind of fatal moment in Russian history, because it leaves the country permanently poised between the East and the West, and permanently uncertain about whether it's a European country or an Asian country. Indeed, and that's a dichotomy which permeates Russian thought down the ages. This, are we Europeans? The answer is yes, to a certain extent we are, because we have European culture, we have European values, we are looking westward, or are we Asians? And of course, the geography of Russia is that the larger part of Russia is in Asia. So, that's one thing, but it's this mentality of the want of a better phrase, asiatic despotism, which has permeated Russian political thought. And actually, you know, we in the West, we have this sort of immediately recoil that, oh, you know, despotism, bad thing, autocracy, bad thing, democracy, good thing. But if you look at whether it works or not, the lesson is that it, you know, autocracy, centralized autocracy has worked in Russia. And it's, you know, one of these things that you have a very big disparate state, and you can't really govern it by... You have to ask what you mean by work, because in some respects, you know, you don't look at Russia and say that is a kind of leading light for modernization, but on the other hand, the country has held together this great deep-seated fear in the Russian psyche that we are weak, we are vulnerable, and, you know, we have this history of being invaded from the West and from the East. And at least if we have a strong centralized government, so they call it the Tsune Orukad, the strong handle, the Iron Fist, we'd call it, at least that allows us to stand up to these dangerous influences on our borders. In Western terms, maybe it hasn't worked, because actually individual civil rights and, you know, liberties and freedoms do take a backseat in that model. But as the great conservative of the 19th century, Konstantin Povietonosov argued, you can't run a country where there are 100 different nationalities, 150 different languages, by a Western-style parliamentary democracy, because if you try it, the whole thing just tears apart at the seams. You also suggest in your book that there is a kind of popular acceptance of that argument. I mean, you know, there's a very interesting moment where Harrison is arguing about Russia and explaining this paradox that you have a revolution there, and he says, well, it's because we've already know what collective life is like. We've had serfdom, we're ready for a kind of communist autocracy and primed for it. Yes, I think that's right. Not just communist autocracy, but autocracy in general. And when you look at the revolutions in the Middle East, they clearly are, you know, popular, discontent spilling over into violent action against an autocracy, which is imposed on the people. And I've seen commentators saying, well, the next domino to four will be Russia, but it won't, because in Russia, autocracy is popular. If Putin or Medvedev or Putin and Medvedev were to stand for election, they would be elected with a massive majority. And it's because people know that it works. They saw a democracy in the 1990s. They saw the Yeltsin sort of liberal market freedoms and the whole country just fell apart. So in 2000, long comes Putin, autocracy is back. But since then, the country is again stable, it's again prosperous, and it can punch its weight on the world stage. And that is, you know, makes autocracy very popular. And presumably, there's not much distinction between an elective autocracy and a democracy. I mean, well, yes, I mean, I should be more nuanced, of course, because in the last 11 years, there have been elections, you know, so nominally there's elections. But the Putinites call it euphemistically managed democracy. Just quickly, because I want to open it out. But I wanted to round and so one question, your book is some, you know, it's a long big book. The first thousand years of Russian history get the first quarter of the book, the remaining hundred years of Russian history, why is that? Because we're a lot more sources available. It's not that it tells us something about Russian history itself in that it did go into a period of kind of cryonic suspension. Well, it did precisely after the Mongols, you know, look at the literature and art, before the Mongols, we had this great flowering of literature. And then after the Mongols, everything just gets suspended. And then it starts, the culture starts to reemerge really in the 17th century. So there's that long gap where we have no artifacts, we have no sources to figure out what was going on. You know, it's very interesting, in part because it's also history of Western illusions about Russia, you gave your own example of it. And in a way, the template for the classic Western deception about democracy is 1917, the February revolution, the democratic revolution, which was greeted with euphoria in the West because we'd been fighting this war, the First World War, alongside the Tsar. So it couldn't have been a war for democracy. Then the Russians democratized, we think, great, the war is going to be a war for democracy, we're going to win it without noticing that for the Russians, being a democracy meant, they could get out of the war, they wanted to stop fighting the war, that was the popular movement. And that fatal miscalculation by the West had catastrophic consequences. A lot of the tragedies of 20th century come out of that. It's the classic hubris of thinking they're a democracy like us. Yeah, precisely, if you look at that period between February and October 1917, Lenin himself said there is no country in the world, which is as free as Russia. And he was right because in those few months, the government did try to run a Western-style liberal democracy. Sadly, in the middle of a world war with people out on the streets, it's not the best time to experiment with democracy at all, reverted in October. And if the human knew you say interesting things about the relationship between autocracy and Russian creativity, I mean, there's this interesting paradox that Stalin takes time out to sign Isaac Barble's execution order himself, personally. An appalling thing, but also evidence that he takes literature seriously, and Russian writers feel is too, to send it. Yeah, definitely. There's poems where Maikovsky says that he dreams that Stalin will be addressing the Politburo about the production of verse compared to the production of Pig Iron. Yeah, in a way, all that repression was kind of true. It was a dream, but it was also true. And in a way, all of this repression from above did create a flowering of literature. I'm kind of, if I can go back to, I was curious about, to what extent, when you say that there's this Eurasian mass versus the small European, to what extent are Eurasian and European metaphors? And to what extent are they, are they real? Because it seems like the GDP is the more, you know, when Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were down on democracy, what they were dealing with was it was a small, literate overclass speaking French versus these, you know, masses of liberated serfs. And it wasn't really that they were, they weren't Mongols, they weren't really Asiatic. And that was just kind of a metaphor to say that there was a big uneducated mass that couldn't be relied on. It is absolutely a metaphor. And you look at the sliver files and the European ISIS in the 19th, in the 19th century. And it is very much that it's, how do we think of ourselves? Alexander Bloch, right? So are we Scythians? You know, are we these sort of Asiatic Mongols, or are we Europeans? And he, you know, he can't reach a conclusion in the poem. And it's that sort of the self image of Russians, they don't really know. And they're pulled in both directions. And it's a very difficult position to be in, I think. But you studied in Samarkan for a time. So you spent a lot of time in, in, in as it were, one of the colonized Republicans. What was the attitude there to a sense of Russianness? Oh, it was, I was there in 2002. And it was not a very pro-Russian time. I don't imagine it's gotten more pro-Russian since the, well, there were some people who missed the Soviets because matches were very cheap and then they were very expensive when I was there. But a lot of people were saying things like, if only we've been colonized by the British like India, then we would be like India now instead of like Uzbekistan. Yeah. That was the turn of life. I'm going to turn to you and your book now, staying with Russia but changing the subject slightly. Your book, The Possessed Adventures with Russian books and the people who read them is essentially about the study of Russian literature. It had fantastic reviews in the air. So my favorite one said this. If Susan Sontag had coupled with Buster Keaton, their gifted love child might have written this book, fantastic mental picture there, Susan Sontag and Buster Keaton. My mother actually wasn't thrilled about that. I don't think. Probably not. I thought the writer got one thing absolutely wrong though. She's completely adults with Susan Sontag because Susan Sontag famously said interpretation is the revenge of the intellect against art. Your book, it seems to me, says exactly the opposite. Interpretation is an act of love towards art and that's how that's why you engage in it. Oh, thank you for saying that. Yeah, I do feel that very strongly and I sometimes, I'm very flattered when people compare me to Susan Sontag but there's a lot that I feel differently about. So tell us how the book came about. I mean, you describe your passage into Russian literature as almost a sort of chapter of accidents. I mean, certainly in some later respects of it. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of a book about making mistakes. The part about Uzbekistan is a great example. I kind of ended up there because of my own misconceptions about East and West where I thought. I'm my family's Turkish. I was born in the United States and I threw a series of kind of chances and mischances. I ended up studying Russian literature and then at a certain point I found myself in Turkey actually talking to a lot of military people because my aunt at that time was working in the Turkish Secret Service and I had a job working as a-- She put a tail on you. Yeah, she put a tail on me. I was working for a tourist guide that was, I was an undergraduate at Harvard and they have a series of travel guides that are researched by students. So I was wandering around Central Anatolia looking at hostels and stuff like that and pretty much every obscure bus station I would get out at. There would be a representative of the local municipal government or the army. You know, I was supposed to be looking at shoestring cafes and instead I saw all these military resorts and you know. Anyway, so I was having dinner with a with a colonel from the Turkish army and he was asking me about my studies at Harvard which he was very interested in and when I told him I was studying Russian that just made absolutely no sense to him. He was like, "Why are you not studying Turkish literature?" And I had this idea of Uzbekistan in my mind as somewhere that because Uzbek language is a Turkic language and but it's written with a Cyrillic script and it's it's you know where Turkish borrowed French words when it modernized those Uzbek language borrowed Russian words and I felt like it was some place that would have some synthesis of Turkey and Russia which was not an idea that I examined very closely or I would have seen that it was complete nonsense. It was also to do with getting grants. It was because a lot about getting grants. Yeah, it's about it's based on my years as a as a graduate student and a lot of that is is trying to get as much money as you can. And it's extremely good on the the comedy of academic life. The unintentional comedy you have this long chapter barbell in California which is both Isaac Bible but also I think this collision of completely incompatible languages from all of these Isaac Bible scholars who come together. You write that almost as a novel. Have you written a novel before you set out to write? Yes, my plan originally was to write a novel and I basically ran out of money and I went to graduate school to to chase the funding as you pointed out. And I was at this I became involved in this conference about the work of this enigmatic Russian Jewish 20th century writer Isaac Babel at Stanford University and Stanford was a very I'm from the east coast so California was already this completely bizarre place to me where everyone somehow ends up there's this line and the picture of Dorian Gray that you know Basil has disappeared I suppose we'll find out that he's in San Francisco because that's what happens to everyone and it must be because it's all the you know marbles of the afterlife. It's like that everyone turns up there all of these Russians and anyway so there was this incredible conference that took place where Babel's last living relatives were there there were some Chinese filmmakers that the cinematographer who had shot the first Chinese cowboy movie the first Chinese western he was there to re-adapt Babel read cavalry which is a very horse centered series of interconnected stories he was going to adapt it to northern China and you know so there was just a lot of tension between the kind of the old school Russians and the Chinese and that the graduate students like me who were driving around picking these people up from the airport and I really wanted to find a way to write all these things in a form that would capture all of the different languages. Well you get you you write about the academic life has a kind of pathology isn't it it's it involves paranoia it involves some monomation in factuation on a mane you're obsession fetishism even you go to the Tolstoy Conference and or the rather actually it's it's Isaac Babel and somebody has written out a list of all of the objects he he owned including his rubber bath well that was the KGB who did it that was their fetishism that that document was just for the scholar has now got this and thinks it's meaningful. Well yeah but yeah it was part it was one of the a lot of the records of Babel were just came out from the KGB archives in the 90s and that was a list of all the things that had been confiscated from his dacha that yeah included his rubber doc his the things were described very in a lot of detail his old sandals yeah and tell us because people with furious having promised to say the link between Babel and King Kong was an extraordinary bit of 20th century intellectual history. Isaac Babel his his horse centered short stories were written while he was a propaganda officer in the red cavalry during the civil war in 1920 at that point there were there was a unit of American pilots who had been fighter pilots in world war one and they were now flying on behalf of the the Poles and one of the planes was shot down behind enemy lines and Isaac Babel was the interrogator because he spoke all these foreign languages he was the interrogator of the fallen American pilot who's described in his diary as this barefoot with the with the aura of coffee in the west and Conan Doyle and it later turned out that this shot down American pilot was Marian Cooper who later came up with the story of King Kong. And but you you weave it even further you've got scholars then who say oh no this is really significant because there's a connection between is the is the he's the cossack he's the primitive monster so there's a scene in the movie where King Kong is on the top of the empire state buildings shooting down the American planes. Marian Cooper was actually in one of he was one of the actors who was in the plane being shot down and he was an actual pilot who was fighting against the cossacks in this in this war. I loved I learned that you were you were working on an exhibition about Babel at the time you were sent off into the archives to find a suitable propaganda post for all the Bolsheviks as a gorilla. Yeah yeah yeah I showed him a still of that you know of King Kong in the tower and he was like that's Commander Thunov there's a story Commander Thunov where you know involving someone on the ground shooting planes. Yeah David Rumsman. I really enjoyed the book. One of the things that reminded me of was Tom Stoppard in his coast of utopia plays about Russian emigrates in the 19th century at the beginning he says he was drawn to the subject because they were nostalgic relates to what Martin was talking about. They were nostalgic for censorship because Russia was a society where words really matter and then they would move to Paris or London. Everybody was writing everybody was talking and the words disappeared into this babel and academic life is a bit like that. You know it's this kind of nostalgia and you captured that it's a very funny book but the sadness which I can relate to of academic life just awash with all these words and people have drawn back to these writers obsessively in a way fetishistically where it meant so much. I like your reference to the the rubber daku because it's it's funny in a sense but it's slightly poignant in another sense and that really sort of captures that era and his widow Kirashkova when she writes in her memoirs about the day he was arrested. Yes she's dead now but she I knew her when she was very old and when he's taken to the Lubyanka she's allowed to go with him to the door and as they as he's taken away and she's left there she says well who's going to make him his cup of tea in the morning because he can't start the day without a cup of tea and it's just that sort of little detail which gives the poignancy of the whole situation because of course he disappeared into the great moor of the Soviet Gulag and was dead shot as being despite ridiculously. Yes I was interested about a particular incident where Tolstoy meets the critic and and you say and Tolstoy says to the critic your judgment is true about my work but it doesn't say everything I want to say about it if I wanted to express all I meant about Anna Karenina I've already said it that's the book and I think it's sort of ironic that in maybe artists aren't the best people to talk about their work sometime and it seems that this is the way that the world works now I mean it reminded me of Philip Paulman who laments the amount of time that he has to spend talking about his work and indeed he gets paid more sometimes to talk about his work then indeed to do it. Yeah someone promoting a book right now that resonates very strongly you write a book and you were just saying of all the places that you've been to promote your book. Well yeah nobody becomes a writer because of their great love of the spontaneity of the spoken word and then you write a book and you're on the radio all the time. Your book is in part it's a meditation on what a novel is for and that's one of the things that runs all the way through it. You say at one point one likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensive different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that what is it good for? One of the things I liked about the book is that it doesn't become disenchanted. You don't really become disenchanted by academic life because you hold true to what's good about it. Oh thank you for saying that. Well you don't become disenchanted with literature either. So what was your kind of end conclusion about the novel? What does it do for us? Well I mean when I wrote that I was about conveying different kinds of unhappiness. I was talking about kind of an exit from identity politics where you know a lot of different groups have laid claim. This is something that I kind of blame on the culture of the creative writing programs in the US that students are taught to mine their personal past for their historical or personal or racial or economic grievances and then tell those stories. But actually unhappiness is a much more flexible thing you know it's not like because I'm Jewish or because I'm Hispanic or because I'm you know it's we're all miserable. You got ticked off didn't you? Yeah. Not being sufficiently empathetic or you didn't have the ability to be sufficiently empathetic to the problems of Isaac Bobbitt because I'm not Jewish. Yeah I get that occasionally from I get reader mail that's about that which I think yeah is really missing the point of what literature can do which is yeah to to make every atomized experience something that that we can all understand. Okay well we're going to turn now to what music what opera can do and art can do in the opera house with you and Dudley. People have sometimes unkindly compared contemporary opera to cats being neutered. Your new opera The Doctor's Tale which opened the other night at the royal opera house literally and I mean literally literally contains a trio for three dogs that are waiting to be put down. So how did you come to be writing for the canine voice? How did that come about? Well it was a complete surprise really. I had no ambitions really to write an opera it was not something that I had a burning desire to do all my life and I was approached by the royal opera house the ROH2 which is the experimental arm and they said write anything you like just make sure it's quite short because it's for a season called opera shots and we want to do some quite short operas and I approached Terry Jones to write the libretto and I thought I might get something political something sort of satirical and Monty Pythonish and I hadn't anticipated getting dogs and doctors especially not a doctor who is a dog but it turned out to be quite a rich scene for comic invention and operatic passion indeed because we have love at first sight we have sudden death we have life after death and all these. It begins with very very moving set of songs about how wonderful this dog is before you actually fully know that he's a dog you're told about his wonderful virtues his empathy his tenderness how he prescribes exchanges of affection 27 times a day and it's only after that that you find out that he's a dog. Yes it's a very mild take on prejudice I suppose in another era our doctor might have been Jewish he might have been black 150 years ago he might have been a woman and the other very mild undertone is actually it's about love it ends up to being a great sort of love fest and all our eight characters neat neatly. So you say this almost apologetically that it has this content in it is why is that? Well it's not the normal subject of a modern opera I suppose is love. Well of course you're you're bought in partly to do that I mean one presumes it's called opera shots because it's like a shot of whiskey it's short and punchy but it's also a shot in the arm isn't it it's supposed to be a shot in the arm for contemporary opera. I think it is because none of us who have written any of these in this series have really done a lot of opera before and it's not going to be a terribly long evening in the theatre and if you really hate it you're going to be out in an hour so you can still go out and have dinner but hopefully it brings in people who might not have felt inclined to come to the opera house before. I have to say it's a it feels a very short evening which is a good thing in itself and it's a very enjoyable evening too both of both of these operas work in very different ways and what about the one of the reviews you got a nice review described your sailors as being gorgeous I saw and but the critic went on to say she should write a musical. Yes it's going to say to me where is the boundary between an opera and a musical and indeed it's a very blurred boundary I mean it might it used to be with the classical musicals that the main sort of body of the plot would get taken along with the spoken word and then the characters would break into song this is the sort of classic mid 20th century opera South Pacific and Oklahoma and and earlier than that cold port and Jerome Kern but there's always that slightly eggy moment where they feel a song coming on and the sort of intro of the song starts underneath the dialogue and hey ho here we go and it is actually easier in a way to have yourself a whole world of opera where you sing everything you have to sing all the plot and all the all the songs which reflect on the emotion of the time so and then the thing is once we got past past the 70s there's plenty of musicals which are sung through as well so that's blurred from both sides isn't it pretty a bloke and did you find I mean clearly the opera has invited you to do it were there any residual sort of uncertainties that you detected with a kind of fine canine ear a faint sort of standoffishness at all about these experiments or is it you you think it's open to it now no I think not at all actually they've been incredibly open to whatever we wanted to do and the singers themselves when I spent a long time notating these dog howls I can tell you tell us a little bit about that because it's a it's a lovely moment they're all they're all in the pound they're all in the pound there's a headmaster who is an excellent headmaster but he unfortunately he slobbers over his pupils so he's in he's in a cage there's a doctor who has been hauled up by the general medical council for being a dog and then there's a waitress who unfortunately keeps making love to the customers legs yes so she's in there and they're all waiting to be put down and sing this very go go again it is very good going in all sorts of ways yeah yes I suppose it is really and and well they they start howling and this this idea that one dog starts howling and it sets all the others off clearly that's if ever you've been in a company tell us a little bit specifically about composing that because you get the you get a as it were what could be a straightforward comic song from Terry Jones who wrote the libretto you've done something very different well I think well it's very sad and I I think it forces us at the end to question well what right have we got to put down dogs Terry told me of an incident where in in fact the vet came along and put down a dog who was living next door and took him away in a big plastic bag and Terry never quite got over it and I think my song turns into sort of spiritual really so that these people are lamenting their their situation and they're all sort of empathising with each other and and the house lent themselves to that well that the the singers were fantastic with the house and were prepared to try all sorts of different pitches of house until we got exactly the right ones Martin six Smith you were there I enjoy it fantastically and it is goggling but it also puts me in mind of a story by a Soviet author called Mikhail Bogakov called the heart of a dog and he also has a dog who becomes a human but he's as much more sort of aggressive and bitter because it's a satire on the new Soviet man and how the new Soviet man can't work but your dog was lovely I thought he was you know this sort of idea that we can solve the problems by just being nice to each other and it was much more sort of subtle I thought I enjoyed that very much and the the singing of the dogs was absolutely fantastic Tom referred to it and just singing oh oh and it was so musical thank you very much in fact that story that you refers to has recently been set to do not for a dog's heart which was a stunning production at the you know David Ransman I enjoyed the scenes by the general medical counsellor trying to decide whether to strike off this dog never mind put him down and I've always thought there's something odd about the way we treat the GMC with this reverential way you know when politicians passed judgment on other politicians we think it's absurd and fast but somehow we think this is a very august body and I love the way you brought out all of these bodies are slightly absurd I don't know it's what Terry was trying to do but it captured something about the primposity and the absurdity of that as well yes I think there's a lot there's a there's a scene where they rules our rules and we can't we can't throw the raw book out because without rules our society will indeed go on the blink with no respect to Martin's point I suppose it was very moving the end I like the fact that the the general mental council basically goes down to love I mean he was in love with one of the protesters doesn't I don't think I'm giving anything away um Ellith just quickly why is this um we've been talking about Gogol and Bogoakov why is it that the Russian literature is so so attuned to this kind of surreal comedy it's interesting yeah I have a friend who was on the Russian literature job market and one of the questions she got asked was how many works of Russian literature can you mention that involved the sentient dog and it's uh I think I don't know I've been thinking about the dream in Anakurana where there's this peasant who can suddenly speak uh French which is the peasants would normally speak only Russian and only the upper classes would speak uh French so I think there's just some idea of um that you're surrounded by these think that these this huge I mean that the asiatic mass or that the the former serfs or whatever you're you know beings who are sentient but are who are not fully human but are you know passing more attuned to the surreal anyway um thank you to all of our guests um Ellith for humans that possessed adventures with Russian books and the people who read them is out now David Runciman is giving his lecture can democracy cope on Wednesday in London details are on the start the week website Martin six meth series on Russia the wild east will start next Monday on Radio 4 and and Dudley's Opera the doctor's tale is on now at the Royal Opera House next week Andy Mar is back here to talk morality genius and jeans with Sam Harris Lucy we can wink it Masha Gessen and Adam Rutherford but for now goodbye