Russ Roberts: evaluation

Transcript context

…Dante, with the rungs of hell — obviously, we’re seeing the 20th-century version of the rungs of hell, and so on. Yes. It’s really a nice way to put it. There’s no clean narrative thread, and it captures the chaos of war that way. The characters who move away come back. They’re often homeless. They’re thrown out of their own houses. They’re forced to take in a boarder who’s richer than they are, more connected than they are, and they’re pushed into a smaller room in the back. They leave their family and yearn to come back. There is this constant theme of journey and home, and everyone in the book is unsettled, [laughs] not just by the war. Their own emotional journey is troubled. Viktor’s marriage — as Grossman’s marriage was — is deeply complicated. There’s a lot of betrayal in the book as well, and at the same time, there’s a lot of kindness. You say, “maybe the most powerful passage of the book.” There are so many. One of my favorite passages — I’m not going to read it, I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s about an act of senseless kindness, an act of kindness that a Russian woman does for a German soldier. She actually says out loud to her friends that she can’t explain it. This idea of senseless kindness standing in the universe up against evil — it says that explicitly. Let me see if I can find this passage. Hang on. Here it is. He says, “The private kindness of one individual towards another, a petty, thoughtless kindness, an unwitnessed kindness, something we would call senseless kindness, a kindness outside any system of social or religious good, but if we think about it, we realize that this private, senseless, incidental kindness is, in fact, eternal. It is extended to everything living, even to a mouse, even to a bent branch that a man straightens as he walks by.” That’s another theme of the book. Even when we might weight evil in its magnitude, dwarfing these small acts, he takes them and he elevates them. He makes them shine for us so that, in his view, they’re the whole thing. Tanner Greer said on Twitter that he thinks kindness is the central theme of the novel. There’s also a part on page 283 where Grossman gives what I think is his intellectual, ideological solution to the whole mess, and of course, he cites Chekhov. Let me just read a short part here. “Chekhov is the bearer of the greatest banner that has been raised in the thousand years of Russian history, the banner of a true, humane, Russian democracy, of Russian freedom, of the dignity of the Russian man. Our Russian humanism has always been cruel, intolerant, sectarian.” And he talks about the partisans, the fanatics, and he thinks Tolstoy is also an intolerant fanatic. But Chekhov says, “Let’s put God and all these grand, progressive ideas to one side. Let’s begin with man. Let’s be kind and attentive to the individual man.” That, I think, is his bottom line, and that, too, comes from Chekhov. Then he cites Chekhov’s book about prison camp, Sakhalin Island, which is also a fantastic story.…

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