Tyler Cowen: recommendation

Transcript context

…I’m going to do more than one. The first I would recommend is Zuleikha by Guzel Yakhina. It’s a novel about a Tatar woman in the 1920s and ’30s when her village is collectivized and people are forced into collective farms. It tells a story that you don’t often hear about, definitely not in Russia. When you hear about collectivization and the horrors that it led to famine and people being sent to prison camps in the Gulag, you mostly hear about Russian farmers, Ukrainian farmers. You hear about the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, but it also hit the Central Asian republics really hard, and it hit the enclaves like Tatarstan very, very hard. This novel is long, like a lot of Russian novels, but it’s pretty extraordinary, and I could not put it down. I would also recommend—it’s not really a novel even though the author won the Nobel prize for literature in 2015, Svetlana Alexievich. People may know her as the author of the Chernobyl Diaries which was basically pillaged by the makers of the HBO show, Chernobyl. The book Secondhand Time completely turned my head around and made me realize that I had been writing about Russia all wrong. I would specifically recommend her book The Unwomanly Face of War, which is about these teenage Soviet girls joining the fight in World War II as machine gunners, as fighter pilots, as paratroopers. What’s amazing about it is it shows these young girls, they’re 16, 17, they’re girls, doing these very male things. If you’re talking about gender essentialism, what more male thing than being a soldier. Here you have these teenage girls doing all these things, and they don’t see it at all as, “Here I am doing a boy thing. I’m just doing my thing.” Because of how they were raised, because they were the first generation born after 1917, after the revolution, after all these radical reforms, they don’t see it as anything out of the ordinary, that this is something girls do too. I think it’s an absolutely extraordinary book. Then, the third that I would recommend is Mary by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s a book I’ve been discussing a lot with my friends from Russia, so many of whom are in exile and who miss home and want to go home. I think it’s also a book that I’m sure a lot of my friends who are Iranian exiles would appreciate. I think it’s one of the first novels Nabokov wrote in exile when he was still in Berlin. It’s about living with your head turned and wanting to go back to a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Going back to a place, a person, a time that exists in your memory that just doesn’t exist anymore. What does that mean for being happy, for living your life? It’s a really poignant, beautiful, heartbreaking book. Before my last question, just to plug your book again, which I enjoyed very much, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, coming in paperback. Finally, what else would you like to write about? Oh, I would love to write about what’s happening on the American right with women, about the Erica Kirks, about the trad wives, about how there are some American women, but I suspect more American men than women, who want to embrace this traditionalism, these traditional gender norms. We’re seeing this implemented at the policy level under the Trump administration, people championing this new traditionalism, this return to men are men and women are women. Because so much of what I was writing about at the end of Motherland, my American readers, first my editors, my agent, and then people who read the book once it was released into the wild, were saying, “Oh, my God, this is so scarily prescient. It seems like this is the path we’re on in the US. Is this where we’re going to end up in the US?” I said, “I don’t know, but it’s not looking good.” I would love to write about that from the American perspective, but I’m doing other things now.…

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