table of contents

05/16/2012

EO listener Sasha Borovik on Life, Literature, and Lermontov

Sasha was born in western Ukraine when it was a part of the Soviet Union.  In early youth, he recognized the deficiencies of the communist system and found his refuge in the vast corpus of Russian literature.  After a fall-out with the pro-communist administration of his university in Moscow in 1989, he had illegally crossed […]

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[ Music ]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Let me begin today with a declaration of principle or an article of faith,
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which is also a statement of fact, namely that it's not about me, Robert Harrison.
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It's not about my guests, it's not about Stanford.
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My opinion is all about you, the listeners.
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You, the listener, are the main interlocutor of these on-air conversations I conduct,
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weekend and week out because if listening to a show is not worth an hour of your life,
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entitled opinions falls into the void and gets lost in the general noise of our times.
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I'm acutely aware that you cannot just hear these shows, you really have to listen to them.
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That's why as host of this program, I am always listening to the listener.
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I'm always listening to what you are hearing when my guests and I do the talking.
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I may not be hearing your voice inside my head, but believe me, your presence as an interlocutor is palpable in here.
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I can hear your attentive silence all around the studio and soak in my guests.
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It's in that silence, in fact, that the words we speak on air resound.
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Stay tuned, all you listeners. We have a very interesting show coming up because the silence I'm talking about takes on a voice today.
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I have with me in the studio a special guest who, like you, is a listener of entitled opinions, the listener who came in from the cold.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Again, if listening to one of our shows is not worth an hour of your life, in title opinions, may as well pack up and call it quits.
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An hour of your life is a lot to ask. We live in our hours, even more than we live in our days.
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As Emerson once put it, I quote, "to fill the hour and leave no crevice for repentance or an approval.
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To finish the moment, find the journey's end in every step of the way to live the greatest number of good hours that is wisdom."
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And that's what we try to do here to fill the hour and leave no crevice for repentance.
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Today we're going to fill the hour in conversation with an individual who my metin person only yesterday.
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His name is Alexander Bordeaux-Vique, like many of you listeners have done over the years. He wrote me an email a few months back expressing his appreciation for the show.
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He told me something about the circumstances of his life and how he happened upon entitled opinions, and I thought it was all very interesting.
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I heard from him again when he wrote to say that he would be passing through Stanford for a couple of days, and that he would like to drop by my office and say hello if I had the time.
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He dropped by my office yesterday, we spoke for an hour, and here he is on entitled opinions. Sasha, welcome to the program.
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Thank you so much. Silence must be heard, and I'm here to express my appreciation and tell you in person this time that I'm an addicted listener to the entitled opinions.
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I have a group of friends around me, and we have different social and cultural strategies, and we all get together once in a while, and we will listen to your voice.
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So, surreal now, not just to listen to your voice, but also see you here.
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You must have heard some of the old ones too, because silence must be heard was our theme song until a few years ago.
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Exactly.
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So, the circumstances of our doing the show are a little bit unusual or unique, at least for me, because we have a number of things that we are going to cover.
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But you also told me that you're particularly fond of this 19th century Russian writer, Lehr Montove, and we're going to talk about Lehr Montove later in the show.
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First, I'd like to ask you to share with our listeners some details of your personal biography, starting with where you grew up and when.
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All right. I was born in Western Ukraine, in a city just as big as San Francisco. It's called Lehr Follivu, Flembuk.
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And I actually upon how you pronounce the name, I probably will be able to say, "U.S. Nessity" or "political affiliations" your religion.
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The city was changing hands fairly often over the 8th century history. It's a beautiful city on UNESCO list of architectural monuments.
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I was born there during the Soviet Union. I always was in my nori day wherever I lived and it started from my hometown. We were a Russian-speaking minority in Western Ukraine.
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I think that feeling I carry with me through the rest of my life. I then grew up between Lehr Flembuk, however you want to pronounce it.
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And the city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, beautiful city established by French in the 19th century. And also, Riga, the capital of Olatvia.
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And I believe that these three cities had a major effect on what kind of person I became.
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So you did your schooling in Western Ukraine?
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Western Ukraine, correct?
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It was still under the Soviet Union thing. Yesterday you were telling me something about the kind of scarcity that was the general rule in the Soviet Union at the time.
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And it's hard sometimes from our present perspective to recall how recently this was the case. So can you give our listeners some sense of the reality of being a school boy in the Soviet system?
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Well, it was probably happy years in retrospect all considered. But thinking back, it does.
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I sometimes don't believe that was me. At the age of seven I was put in a uniform that was resembling the military way of dressing people.
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Just like all the other kids, I walked to school and they were teaching us the subject that kids of that age would normally go through.
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Except that there was always, there was always, as I realized later in my life, there was a strong machine of brainwashing. And the teachers themselves, they probably not realized that they were brainwashing kids because they were brainwashed before.
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And that's how we lived through all these years. I will be talking about the Letterman to later on. And Letterman to have any other writer, Russian or otherwise, was always presented just from one perspective. It's us versus them, Soviets and how lucky and happy we are here and them, whomever happened to live abroad, how little they understand.
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And whatever whomever was the main character in Letterman to have a case, it will be pejorian. He was always, so they were always presented as victims of a certain social and political economic society. And so it was always us versus them.
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It was particularly close to the end of the Soviet Union. It became hard, not just with close, but with food as well. We could get my karoni bread and rice, but there was no butter, there was no sausage, there was no essentials really.
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You would not even get bread or rice and you would just come to a store and you turn around and you go home. And that was how we lived. It was hard to differentiate yourself, not through the dress, naturally. It was hard to differentiate yourself through the haircut or anything else.
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For kids at that time, we pretty much were set to get our young souls lost, if you will, or get equalized, so to say.
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And to a very large extent that happened when we will talk about Letterman to use the word loss generation. And I think that term applies, for some extent, to my parents who barely see anything outside of their hometown.
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And my generation, that till the age of 18, pretty much was robbed of childhood and had to go through that experience. There are some positive things in that as well. I noticed, for example, I now I don't need many clothes, I have a fairly simple life. I live in Munich now, in Germany, and there's no luxury involved.
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And I don't need that. If I compare myself to how I grew up, in fact, I have the access of things.
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Is it the case as you were telling me then that how many years did you not only go to school in the school uniform, but it was what you wore even outside of school?
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Yeah, the last years was my parents just could not get any clothes. Not that they didn't have money, they even had some money, but it was impossible. The stores were empty, it was nowhere to buy it.
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So one thing was for sure that you'll get the school uniform, so my parents would buy me two uniforms, and I would wear one to school and one outside of school. It was not that usual, but many people had that.
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So when you went on to what we would call high school, then I gathered that people started to notice that you were a very intelligent student, right?
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What happened? Can you tell us what happened at that point?
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Yeah, when I was in the high school, I was approached by some people who stroked me as very intelligent, very sharp. Sometimes they spoke with a slight accent that I could not quite determine where they came from.
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And they watched me, they spoke with me for a while. They suggested that it somehow related to my future military service because there was a compulsory military service in the country.
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But then they started running some tests, checking on my intelligence, and they were checking on my cue and ability to speak.
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I imagine ideological strength from their perspective, and eventually, I believe at the age of 16 or 17, they suggested that I devote my life to the Soviet intelligence.
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Secret intelligence.
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And they painted a very nice perspective from that gloomy Soviet life. They said I will go through rigorous training and education that I would be one of the most educated people in the country, speaking many foreign languages, eventually living abroad.
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I remember from early days they were telling me that I should choose a few African countries that I should specifically look at and develop interest.
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And eventually, when I became a bit older, they invited me to come to Moscow, and I was put into a special program where they trained people to later join the secret intelligence.
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And I went through four years there.
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And what was that like? What did you discover?
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I discovered a lot. I discovered that whatever I heard in school was not correct or other, there were facts that they told us about, but the interpretation was completely different.
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I got access to the archive materials, I got access to classified materials where I could read first and probably foremost the history, the Soviet history, which, as I understood at that time, was pretty much fabricated as it was taught in schools.
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And that felt bad, I felt robbed really, and at the same time I felt privileged, I felt that I am gathering all this intelligence about our society, and it felt special to very large degree.
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So the historical accounts in the archives were very different from those that were in the textbooks, is all.
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And what did you learn about the history of the Soviet Union from the inside, from the secret classifieds?
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I learned that it was not a happy country, as I thought it was, I learned that it was a totalitarian regime, and that people were dying not just in patriotic wars, but trying to be a part of the history of the country.
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But rather, the same amount of people would die in concentration camps, and they were very smart, interesting individuals, writers, teachers, and military people as well, and that was shocking.
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So you would read their interrogations, for example?
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I personally didn't have a taste for the interrogation, I would read reports where the accounts of people's fates and how they held themselves in their prison cells were described.
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And what was real in the indictment, what was fabricated, so that was something.
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And then I also learned a lot about the West, because growing in the Soviet Union, I isolated from knowing anything about the West.
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And so here we had access to all the foreign press, and we were taught by analysts who spent some time abroad, and they were painting,
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painting, apparently from how I see it, now it was a fairly objective description of what the West and society is well like.
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So, in your four years you undergo a disenchantment, and how do you go from the Secret Service to then you emigrate to the... well, you actually escaped?
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I ran away. You ran away? I ran away. To the West.
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I started realizing that I could not deliver what they wanted for me, not because I was not intelligence or intelligent or anything, but rather it was not my cup of tea.
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I didn't believe in the system, I didn't believe that the methods that the agency was using were fair or that they could do them.
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And then I actually became sympathetic to the Western way of living or brother. I became sympathetic to freedom.
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And at that time there were revolutions in the Czech Republic, in Hungary, the wall fell down.
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So, it became hard for the system to keep its soldiers in line, and I think I was one of those who fell off the line.
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But the system had protections, and they immediately, when we agreed that it's not for me and I'm not for them, they sent me to exile of a sword.
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They sent me to the Soviet military. And instead of going to the military, I forged some papers.
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By that time I was trained to do a few things. So I forged papers and I legally crossed the border escaping to the Czech Republic first.
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And that is where I tried to get to a university, to Charles University in Prague.
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I couldn't, because it was expensive, I couldn't pay.
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You didn't speak the Czech? I didn't speak Czech either.
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And I was lucky to meet some interesting people, former dissidents, who were close to President Havel.
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In fact, one of them was a personal secretary to President Havel.
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Vladimir Hanzal and them.
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And Havel wrote a letter to the dean saying, "The more educated Russians we have, the less is a chance of 1968 happening again referring to the Russian-Russia-
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Russian-
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and Czechoslovakia." And that's how I became a law student in Prague.
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And that was my disengagement from the Soviet Union.
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And then the Soviet Union collapsed and no one took interest in what happened to me, because the country had more serious issues to deal with.
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And some run away was not on their agenda.
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So did you complete a law degree at the Czech University?
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Yes, I got a law degree from Charles University in Prague.
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It was difficult, as you said, I didn't speak Czech initially, so I pretty much had to learn the language.
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As I was studying law.
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And then I tried to work for the UN.
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They said that they don't need someone with my set of skills.
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And I then got to Harvard Law School.
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I received scholarship from them.
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How did that work?
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I just wrote an essay describing who I was and what I did in life.
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And they found it interesting.
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And did you speak English at the end of the year?
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And at that time my spoke English as I do now.
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So you go to Harvard and get a law degree.
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You go to Harvard and international laws.
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It's international laws.
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It's international laws.
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Well, I mean, I specialized in my specialties,
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what they call computer law.
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And that is pretty international or internationalized set of rules that
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applies to the internet and computer industry.
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I'm admitted to a bar association in New York and in the Czech Republic.
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And New York law is pretty much used for international work these days.
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So to conclude a little bit with the biography,
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you get the law degree from Harvard.
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You go back to Europe.
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And now you're working for Microsoft Word in Munich.
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I work Germany.
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In Munich from Microsoft, correct?
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For Microsoft.
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And this will be an odyssey that we've only covered.
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Some of the basic facts.
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I'm sure there are all sorts of fascinating things.
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I have episodes within the chapters.
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So before we move on to your passion of their month of,
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and I'm not pronouncing them in the Russian accent, obviously.
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You're doing this well.
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Just at a curiosity, my curiosity, I haven't asked you this,
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but how did you discover entitled opinions?
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I was looking for Plato.
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Plato.
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Plato, right?
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Plato.
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I'm pronouncing it with Russian accent.
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And I came to the podcast site, and I saw a podcast on Camille.
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And we can speak later.
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I see a lot of parallels between Leirmann-Tervand Camille's
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characters.
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And I, instead of listening to what I was looking for,
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I started playing Camille, and I thought that was brilliant.
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And I listened to that again.
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And I wanted to listen to more things.
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And I just went through the impressive list of topics that you
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cover here.
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And I just thought it's Kalondike.
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I learned a lot.
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I thought a lot.
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It was everything I wanted, really.
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I was a wrote to in my initial email.
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I considered-- I started considering you as my teacher.
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And it's a critic where you provoke my thinking by asking
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questions and expressing entitled opinions.
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And so I became addicted.
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It's like, you know, whenever-- and it happens often,
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I look to get some intellectual stimulus to my brain.
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I tune on.
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I develop certain culture around entitled opinions.
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For example, cannot listen to it when I simultaneously do something.
00:24:05.500
That doesn't work for me.
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It works for some other things that I can listen to.
00:24:10.500
But entitled opinions is like a ceremony in a way.
00:24:14.500
It comes late in the evening in Europe.
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And it's more like time when you sit down and prepare yourself
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to listening, something.
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And when I know the subject ahead of time,
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I do some research.
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Some of the shows I listen with my friends.
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I know someone wrote to-- you had this great show in medical
00:24:40.500
vocation.
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And a friend of mine wrote to the Yogast.
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And they were in touch.
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I'm bringing up a 14-year kid, my niece.
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And she also listened to some entitled opinions.
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She didn't understood everything, but she particularly like the
00:25:00.500
Americans in Paris part after watching Woody Allen's.
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She makes films, so she's trying to.
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So she liked that French connection.
00:25:10.500
Well, that's great.
00:25:12.500
That's-- and in your email, you said that it--
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listening to entitled opinions under those circumstances.
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Because I guess if it posts late at night or in the early AM hours,
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you either are listening to it live stream or you're right away.
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But that it reminded you of earlier in your life when in the
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Soviet Union, you would wait up till two in the morning because
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there was one rock-- the only time you could listen to rock music
00:25:35.500
was a show at two AM.
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Yeah, there was a show at two AM that talked about--
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it was rock or other underground music.
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I don't know somehow that person managed to deliver that show.
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And there was no podcast you had to listen to that life.
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And I would put an alarm clock for two o'clock,
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and I would wake up.
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And for an hour, I would listen to that music.
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And it was very monocentric because that time that was the
00:26:14.500
that same feed that I needed for myself for my development.
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And I felt that when I discovered the entitled opinions,
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I was on a similar stage of my life when I needed something
00:26:35.500
that I could not get elsewhere.
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And the circumstances are better this time.
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But I was in the middle of the middle of the middle of the middle.
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And I had to say, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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And I was like, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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And I was like, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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And I was like, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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And I was like, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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And I was like, "Oh, I'm from the middle of the middle of the middle."
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Thank you.
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Going through the kind of background search
00:27:14.820
that other people would probably do.
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So last question about the rock, because I believe that
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this was Russian rock music that showed.
00:27:23.200
Yeah, mainly for the use in theaters.
00:27:24.780
Yes, what was the capital of Russian rock at the time?
00:27:27.380
Right.
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As we were walking to the studio,
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you were telling me a little story about the importance
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that Pink Floyd had in your moment of Christ's existential decision
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in Christ's.
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Can you just say a word about that?
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And then we go on to a little bit.
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It was in January '89, I believe.
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I was walking around Moscow as very cold, very dark.
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There were no street lights.
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Right next to the Moscow University.
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And I was lost.
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I didn't know what to do with my life.
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I certainly felt that I did not want to do what those people
00:28:14.300
who have identified me the years early
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I wanted me to do.
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And I also was afraid.
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I didn't know where I will land.
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So I was walking around listening to Adam Hads' mother.
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And I remember coming to a tree.
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Night time, right?
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That was night time.
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Yeah, I came to a tree in the park.
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And I just held a tree, hugged the tree.
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And I tried to get strength.
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And miraculously, that happened within a few minutes.
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And I started believing in myself.
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And I pretty much convinced myself that I can do whatever
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I want.
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And if I wanted to be out, I should find the way to be out.
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And that being Floyd music went deep into my head.
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And so now I cannot listen to that without remembering
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those days.
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And at the same time, I take courage and strength
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from those tunes.
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That's great.
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Yeah.
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And you obviously heard there are Pink Floyd show.
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I love it.
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Yeah.
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I'm going to do it.
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Terrific.
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So Sasha, you wrote to me when you set the email that you're
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coming through Stanford.
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You suggested it one day you should really
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do a show on that month of and the connection with Kamir
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because I find him very bad.
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And I have to confess that that month of is a name that I know.
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He's obviously a big name in Russian literature.
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But I have not really read him.
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And I thought that it would be interesting to do that.
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But then I figured, why not have you share your ideas
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about why he's such an important writer for you?
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So I'm not going to assume that our listeners know more
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about later month of than I did before yesterday
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or the last few days, let's say.
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Who was that month of?
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And why is he such a great writer for you?
00:30:23.220
Little month of is probably one of the most undiscovered
00:30:27.980
writers, Russian writers, in the West.
00:30:31.700
And it's probably one of the most misinterpreted writers
00:30:34.580
in modern Russia just because of how he was taught in school.
00:30:39.140
He was, in terms of poetry, he is right next to Pushkin.
00:30:45.380
He is right behind Pushkin.
00:30:47.740
In fact, there are very few people from that generation
00:30:51.260
who stand out.
00:30:52.740
And in terms of writing, he was the founder of a literature
00:31:01.940
that many--
00:31:03.780
that I believe you and many of you listen
00:31:05.940
is probably associated with the Russian literature.
00:31:07.780
It's like Dostoyevsky Tolstoy.
00:31:10.620
He was a founder of psychological realism,
00:31:14.820
as they call it, where he would paint
00:31:18.460
a portrait of a person who was a fairly difficult character
00:31:25.380
and made you think the same way as Dostoyevsky's characters
00:31:30.180
make you think and wonder about life.
00:31:33.540
And so it is essentially, in my view,
00:31:36.460
hard to fully understand and appreciate Dostoyevsky
00:31:40.100
without knowing Leirmanntovin, particularly
00:31:43.420
the here of our times.
00:31:45.140
And interestingly, Camu--
00:31:48.980
and again, also, love that show about Camu--
00:31:53.300
interestingly, Camu, in the English edition of the fall,
00:31:58.220
he used an epigraph from Leirmanntov's introduction
00:32:04.460
to here of our times, where he said,
00:32:06.980
"A gentleman I'm not introducing here a character or a person.
00:32:11.100
I'm rather introducing a portrait of a generation,
00:32:15.300
or a lost generation of a sword."
00:32:18.340
And because I kind of consider myself
00:32:20.780
that part of that lost generation in the Soviet Union,
00:32:26.100
the character I see many features that I recognize in myself
00:32:31.420
and in my friends from those times.
00:32:35.460
So, Leirmanntov--
00:32:36.540
Yeah, let's talk about a little bit his life,
00:32:38.900
because he had a brief life, but it
00:32:41.060
was very agitated, and it was full of tensions with the sword
00:32:46.540
and the court note and the intelligence.
00:32:48.580
He was born in 1814, which was two years
00:32:53.820
after French, after Napoleon invaded Russia,
00:32:57.100
and was defeated there.
00:32:58.780
And then he was 11 years old when there
00:33:00.980
was an uprising of Russian officers against its are.
00:33:05.620
And right after the uprising, the repressions had started,
00:33:09.660
and a push can die as a part of those.
00:33:14.140
And the generation was depleted.
00:33:16.620
The generation of writers were depleted.
00:33:21.260
Leirmanntov was brought up in a aristocratic family.
00:33:26.140
His mother died when he was young.
00:33:29.540
His grandmother seems like she was a very strong and charismatic
00:33:33.980
character.
00:33:35.420
She took her grandson away from her father
00:33:39.100
from his father.
00:33:40.380
And when he was sick, she took him to Cocagian mountains,
00:33:45.140
I'll call it Cáfquez, as they pronounce it there.
00:33:47.860
And so Leirmanntov, since then, he fell in love with Cáfquez.
00:33:51.940
He loved the mountains.
00:33:53.420
He loved the people.
00:33:54.300
There are about 50 languages there.
00:33:57.100
He tried to study some of them.
00:33:59.580
He also otherwise lived in the region of Volga,
00:34:03.740
where at that time, many outlaws were sent
00:34:07.380
by the Tsaris to regime for their rebellious activity.
00:34:11.540
And he was exposed to these stories, to songs.
00:34:16.100
And I guess this years with his grandmother,
00:34:23.060
and his time in Cáfquez and then on Volga,
00:34:28.900
that's where he was built.
00:34:33.020
He was a very cultural, very well-educated
00:34:36.500
spoken English, French, German.
00:34:39.820
And he started writing fairly early when he was, I believe,
00:34:49.580
12 years old.
00:34:51.300
And went on, he died when he was 26 in 1941, I believe,
00:35:00.380
and 1841.
00:35:02.020
And he was-- the red two do-els that he
00:35:10.620
is known to participate in.
00:35:12.820
In the first one, it was with the son of a French ambassador,
00:35:16.340
and interestingly, he actually initiated the do-el.
00:35:22.860
But then he was shooting into the air,
00:35:24.940
which kind of added the insult to the son of the French
00:35:31.900
ambassador.
00:35:32.780
And the same happened when, in the second do-el in 1941,
00:35:36.180
when he was killed.
00:35:38.260
There was his old college military college friend,
00:35:42.980
whom he knew very well.
00:35:45.980
He spent one summer with his family,
00:35:48.420
was very much liked by the sisters of the other do-el
00:35:54.460
and ultimately, when they met,
00:35:59.700
the liermont also shooting the air, and the other person,
00:36:03.820
my thing, did not miss.
00:36:06.660
He hit him, and liermont died right there.
00:36:11.020
And liermont was a very-- he could be very abrasive,
00:36:14.660
and insulting.
00:36:16.900
And I was reading that he had actually mocked,
00:36:19.900
and teased this duelist who ended up killing him,
00:36:24.860
rather mercilessly and constantly, and almost left
00:36:28.140
a guy no choice.
00:36:29.340
But--
00:36:29.660
Right.
00:36:30.900
He-- I believe he cold him a mountaineer with the long pocket
00:36:35.740
knife.
00:36:37.020
And that's how the whirl had started.
00:36:41.820
So he was a great poet.
00:36:45.980
And as you said, comes right after Pushkin
00:36:48.300
in terms of the ranks of the--
00:36:49.700
Absolutely.
00:36:49.900
But the book that really fascinates you
00:36:53.340
is the one novel he wrote, a hero of our time.
00:36:58.020
I guess I identify with the last generation, a century later.
00:37:07.820
But what is it that vibrates about the book for you?
00:37:13.100
It's the same as we find Byron attractive.
00:37:19.140
It's-- you see how does the Evesque look
00:37:24.020
at both Byron and liermont of--
00:37:26.980
and I'm very sure that Pichorin in here of our time.
00:37:30.460
Pichorin is the main hero.
00:37:31.900
The main hero.
00:37:32.900
Right.
00:37:33.100
He is a prototype of liermont, a liermont of a associate himself
00:37:38.140
with Pichorin quite a bit.
00:37:41.140
So the Evesque thought that these were both Byron and liermont
00:37:45.980
of where intelligent, cultural, interesting people who
00:37:50.180
never found their place in this society.
00:37:52.260
And they found that the rules of this society are not for them
00:37:56.580
and the rules that they had created for themselves
00:37:58.940
were also not acceptable for this society.
00:38:02.660
And that was their drama.
00:38:05.300
And I think as a part of you, at the lessons,
00:38:07.580
you always feel that you need to understand
00:38:11.980
how you fit into this society and what are those rules.
00:38:15.140
And why, especially if you are idealistic,
00:38:19.100
and I sense a lot of idealism in the entitled opinions,
00:38:23.180
when you idealistic, you are attracted to those same idealistic
00:38:28.900
characters.
00:38:30.100
And then you recognize that that path didn't take them anywhere.
00:38:35.780
They ultimately got lost.
00:38:38.540
They got unrooted.
00:38:40.140
And they became dead before the actual physical death.
00:38:47.820
And that's a drama and tragedy, which you keep in mind
00:38:51.860
as you go along life and you constantly put a check on yourself
00:38:57.100
as to, am I going too far?
00:39:00.620
Am I, when I practice my idealism and my rules
00:39:05.500
that I try to follow?
00:39:08.220
Am I going too far and is it going to be dramatic?
00:39:13.260
And so this, I found that very interesting in my childhood
00:39:19.500
for different reasons, because at that time,
00:39:22.420
when you start understanding that your society doesn't make
00:39:26.300
sense, you feel rebellious.
00:39:28.980
That's your first reaction.
00:39:31.100
And you see this intelligent people you
00:39:35.900
want to be just as intelligent and maybe just as witty
00:39:40.140
when you speak.
00:39:42.780
Pitcheotin was very playful with women.
00:39:47.540
And as you grow up, you wonder what is all that about.
00:39:52.700
And so I was attracted to him initially for his how brave
00:40:00.940
he was, how he wrote his horse.
00:40:03.580
And it seemed like he only lived by his own rules,
00:40:07.060
like nothing else really applied to him.
00:40:09.900
And then at the middle of the book,
00:40:14.100
he starts asking himself what he lived for.
00:40:19.020
And again, everyone, every intelligent person,
00:40:21.780
has that question and tries to answer through the whole life.
00:40:26.860
And you find it dramatic when someone doesn't have the answer
00:40:31.260
and pretty much agrees that he had wasted his whole life.
00:40:35.580
And you think Lermontov was saying something about his own
00:40:37.780
disillusionment through that regard?
00:40:39.540
I think so.
00:40:40.220
I think so.
00:40:40.780
I think Lermontov certainly felt that his life
00:40:45.340
went not in the direction where he would love it to go,
00:40:49.220
though it was not clear what he really wanted from life
00:40:52.020
other than participating in parties and do
00:40:57.100
the yelling and just mocking people.
00:41:00.740
And of course, Lermontov got a song they would say in front.
00:41:05.060
Exactly.
00:41:05.660
And he was the Russian version of that Movega
00:41:08.160
song.
00:41:08.900
And he was probably even more radical in how he lived his life.
00:41:17.300
Well, Sasha, let me ask you this question,
00:41:19.580
because you mentioned idealism as something that is in the
00:41:23.660
equation.
00:41:24.020
But in our little colloquy yesterday and the hour that we had
00:41:28.100
coffee together, you said that Russians tend to be cynical.
00:41:35.940
That is too close.
00:41:37.580
Deeply cynical and that you were saying that you can read
00:41:40.860
Dostoevsky or that Russians can--
00:41:45.460
they know that many of the characters that they're reading about
00:41:48.420
in someone like Dostoevsky, I guess, Lermontov,
00:41:52.420
they're just down the block or on the other side.
00:41:54.820
And too many of them.
00:41:56.220
Too many of them that never actually talk to those characters,
00:41:59.140
but they'll go home and read about them in the literature.
00:42:03.500
Can you say a little bit more about this paradox?
00:42:06.380
Yeah, it's--
00:42:08.140
I frankly don't know how to explain it.
00:42:09.940
I certainly can state it because it's so obvious.
00:42:14.140
Certainly Dostoevsky did not--
00:42:19.780
he did not invent it his characters.
00:42:23.780
He took them from the Russian street.
00:42:25.780
Those characters--
00:42:28.180
the cars have changed a little bit, other things, but people's
00:42:33.220
still remain.
00:42:34.660
And you cannot help but noticing them around.
00:42:38.300
And they're not particularly luring you on the country.
00:42:45.020
They make you want to run away.
00:42:49.940
But then Russians have this tradition of reading.
00:42:54.660
It's so deep.
00:42:55.860
It's--
00:42:58.060
I'm not sure how to explain it even,
00:42:59.780
but it's certainly different than it is in the West, I notice.
00:43:03.540
And so when you read, it's almost like you go on the journey.
00:43:09.660
And if you did not have a chance to go on the journey
00:43:13.620
anywhere, reading was your avenue to travel.
00:43:17.380
And so I guess seeing the things you don't want to see
00:43:23.580
or you don't like on the street, you come back
00:43:26.580
and you take the journey where you know you're not
00:43:29.140
going to be heard other than emotionally.
00:43:32.260
Whereas on the street, you never know what those Dostoevsky
00:43:35.900
characters are going to do to you next.
00:43:38.500
That's great.
00:43:39.220
It's very different.
00:43:40.340
Certainly in America, for example,
00:43:42.140
there is a percentage, a very small percentage
00:43:45.500
of a reading public.
00:43:47.340
And it's getting less and less.
00:43:49.100
It's not a--
00:43:50.300
I don't know what the percentages are,
00:43:52.500
but it's a segment.
00:43:54.860
It's a part.
00:43:56.900
I gather that in Russia reading, it's a much more general
00:44:00.780
activity that it's part of being the citizen.
00:44:04.540
Many Russians just read.
00:44:06.780
And it's where the words matter.
00:44:09.180
Or at least it still did matter.
00:44:11.660
When Solzhenitsyn, I remember when he came to the West
00:44:15.140
after his exile, he said, I left a country where you could not
00:44:22.460
speak to come.
00:44:24.060
And we're not free to say what you wanted to say.
00:44:27.820
And I've come now to a place where you can say anything
00:44:30.500
that you want to say, but nothing matters.
00:44:32.140
Whatever you say is absolutely no consequence,
00:44:34.260
because speaking about America, there are the words
00:44:39.260
of writers don't have consequences.
00:44:41.620
So tragic paradox and irony.
00:44:45.020
Yeah, absolutely.
00:44:47.380
So in Lehrmachtov, would he fit into--
00:44:51.980
you said that he--
00:44:53.220
Doseriski is not possible without a Lehrmachtov behind him.
00:44:58.500
Is it because he gave life to a segment of society that
00:45:06.940
did not have official rights of citizenship
00:45:09.260
in the Republic of Letters, as such?
00:45:12.180
I think what Lehrmachtov did was he took Byron
00:45:17.860
and he developed that concept of rominitism.
00:45:22.020
And he just died when he was translating the romantic ideas
00:45:34.700
from Byron's epoke into Russian reality.
00:45:39.700
And what he did was he must--
00:45:44.340
massively describe those people.
00:45:47.260
And for Doseriski, it was easier than to take those characters
00:45:53.180
and take the rominitism out and just stay
00:45:57.740
on this psychological realism, describing the characters
00:46:02.900
that he wanted to describe.
00:46:05.940
And that is why I believe Lehrmachtov
00:46:13.060
has this unique position of being both romantic and realistic
00:46:17.500
the same at the same time.
00:46:20.340
Doseriski actually--
00:46:23.860
when Doseriski was, I believe, 12 years younger
00:46:27.860
in Lehrmachtov.
00:46:32.460
Doseriski's contemporaries were criticizing Lehrmachtov
00:46:38.180
for being too romantic.
00:46:39.620
Doseriski always defended him.
00:46:41.580
And he believed that Lehrmachtov was
00:46:44.300
right on the path of developing into a real Russian writer
00:46:48.860
who would leave the Byronism behind and would become more
00:46:53.500
of what Doseriski left later became.
00:46:57.740
Well, can I read to you from the translators forward of the translation
00:47:03.980
into English by Nabokov, who translated the hero of our time?
00:47:08.940
And it's a-- rather, I gather it's a controversial understanding--
00:47:15.220
It's interpretation.
00:47:16.340
--interpretation, yeah.
00:47:17.460
So he says he's asking what makes the everlasting charm of this book.
00:47:24.620
Why is it so interesting to read and reread?
00:47:26.740
And he says it's certainly not for its style.
00:47:29.780
Although curiously enough Russian school teachers used to see in it
00:47:33.260
the perfection of Russian prose,
00:47:35.420
this is a ridiculous opinion.
00:47:37.420
Nabokov was--
00:47:38.500
He would have been a good entitled "Defingions"
00:47:40.940
guess, I think, in the real sense.
00:47:43.260
So let me repeat that.
00:47:46.980
This is a ridiculous opinion voiced according to a memoirs
00:47:50.020
by Chekov and can only be held if and when a moral quality
00:47:53.620
or social virtue is confused with literary art.
00:47:57.900
And he goes on, et cetera.
00:47:58.940
So he dismisses style as the reason.
00:48:01.100
He says, but if we regard him as a storyteller,
00:48:04.620
and if we remember that Russian prose was still in her teens
00:48:08.700
and the man still in his middle 20s when he wrote,
00:48:11.940
then we do marvel indeed at the superb energy of the tale
00:48:15.820
and at the remarkable rhythm into which the paragraphs,
00:48:18.500
rather than the sentences, fall.
00:48:21.740
It is the agglomeration of otherwise insignificant words
00:48:25.260
that come to life.
00:48:27.460
Do you agree with him on this?
00:48:30.260
I disagree.
00:48:31.100
I actually find the style of writing very unique and interesting.
00:48:37.100
Also, the structure of the book is quite unusual
00:48:41.420
where you have five chapters not necessarily
00:48:44.940
connected to one to another.
00:48:47.300
And in essence, it's written the same way as Paul Pthiction
00:48:53.940
or before the reign of Macedonian film
00:48:58.700
where the sequence is confusing.
00:49:01.740
It's written that same way.
00:49:03.860
And I think we find that style fairly appealing.
00:49:11.060
I find it very appealing because it makes me wonder a bit
00:49:16.900
more.
00:49:19.500
It's like bit-hovin's music where you don't know,
00:49:22.060
or just the coverage music, where you don't know what
00:49:24.060
to expect next, and that's how it comes.
00:49:27.140
And so I disagree with Nabokah about the style.
00:49:32.500
I find the style very appealing.
00:49:36.100
And the diary part is also very interesting.
00:49:43.100
And it's the same.
00:49:44.100
We spoke about Camuabit.
00:49:46.340
It's like Clemongz is talking about himself
00:49:52.540
as if he were writing a diary in a way.
00:49:55.860
And so here at Pthiction's diary is being shown.
00:50:00.060
And it's very personal.
00:50:03.340
It's very honest.
00:50:05.940
And this paradox of how cynical the man
00:50:11.900
was when he was surrounded by other people
00:50:15.420
when he was in the society and how honest he was with himself
00:50:20.060
as his super ego would just kick in immediately
00:50:23.700
when he was alone and was reflecting on his own life
00:50:26.740
very honestly.
00:50:28.540
I find that quite unique actually.
00:50:31.180
And maybe-- I don't know, maybe Nabokah missed that part.
00:50:36.300
Well, it could be.
00:50:37.140
It wouldn't be the first time.
00:50:39.700
In terms of the correlations between Camuabit's the fall
00:50:44.140
and the character, Clemongz, and--
00:50:46.660
Patrude and Patrude.
00:50:48.380
In Camuiz case, it's a judge.
00:50:52.020
And as you say, it's a monologue.
00:50:54.500
It's kind of like a memoir.
00:50:56.940
And he is brilliantly walking that line between bad faith
00:51:02.100
or lying to himself and to his interlocutor, which
00:51:05.380
is the reader.
00:51:06.460
And at the same time, doing a confession.
00:51:09.020
Right.
00:51:10.020
Of a certain kind of self-deception or bad faith--
00:51:15.380
And being regretful too.
00:51:16.980
You're being regretful.
00:51:18.420
And that there's some sense that through his own damning
00:51:22.580
self-portrait, he's also damning, I believe,
00:51:26.460
a number of the intellectuals of the time.
00:51:31.260
Camuiz fellow colleagues in some cases.
00:51:35.100
And do you see in pitch-owning a similar sort of irony
00:51:43.500
being projected onto the society that
00:51:47.420
the amount of belong to, especially the apparition
00:51:49.940
laws, because--
00:51:50.380
Absolutely.
00:51:51.580
Absolutely.
00:51:51.900
He's description of the story takes place in Kafka's
00:51:58.460
in a small town where people either rest
00:52:01.780
from the nearby war action or they come to drink
00:52:07.380
this mineral waters.
00:52:08.860
And so he mocks the mineral water drinkers
00:52:12.980
and they'll promenade culture and the parties
00:52:17.260
that he was missing.
00:52:18.980
And then he also mocks the military a bit as well.
00:52:25.620
When his counterpart, Bechorne's counterpart
00:52:29.300
in the story Guisinski, who actually has many parallels
00:52:33.700
with Martina of the killer of Learmont of--
00:52:37.500
in fact, one of the interpretations
00:52:40.540
is that Martina of God so angry,
00:52:42.380
recognizing himself in Guisnevsky, or in Guisnevsky
00:52:47.780
that he wanted to finish that walking.
00:52:53.500
So there was a lot--
00:52:55.580
there was a lot of Learmont's reflection of the society.
00:53:00.220
And he was a very unhappy young man.
00:53:04.580
He was remote.
00:53:06.540
He did not like the society.
00:53:08.660
He was not valuing it as much.
00:53:11.980
And he didn't respect it.
00:53:13.860
And so you can pretty much see those same threats--
00:53:17.900
character threats in Bechorne.
00:53:21.460
So when it comes to the duel that he
00:53:24.500
fights as a second duel, you believe
00:53:29.180
to a certain degree that he might have been ready for this death.
00:53:35.980
And that he had attempted suicide
00:53:39.260
previous to that or--
00:53:41.100
No, no.
00:53:41.860
He didn't attempt suicide.
00:53:43.940
But one could argue that going for this duels
00:53:49.060
and shooting in the air was a form of suicide.
00:53:53.420
Again, if you think of Camille and his paradox of absurd,
00:53:57.300
how Camille reflects on every human being
00:54:01.540
with some intelligence should think about suicide,
00:54:04.020
but then should rule it out and should die from someone else
00:54:09.180
hand or a naturally.
00:54:11.060
So in a way, that's what Learmont of did.
00:54:15.340
He was ready to die.
00:54:16.820
He was 26.
00:54:17.980
He was not clear where his life was going.
00:54:20.220
He did everything he wanted to do.
00:54:22.500
He probably could develop as a writer, except that in a gym
00:54:26.500
Morrison's way, he came to the wall.
00:54:30.340
And he was ready to go.
00:54:32.860
And so he came to this duel.
00:54:39.140
They didn't bring any doctor.
00:54:40.860
They didn't bring, apparently, no ways
00:54:44.540
to get back if a person is wounded
00:54:47.620
because everyone thought that they will make peace right there.
00:54:51.460
Learmont of refuse to make peace.
00:54:53.820
He shoot in the air.
00:54:55.740
They were standing just 15 feet from each other.
00:54:58.780
It was hard to miss.
00:55:00.140
And by that time, Martina probably was as upset as he could
00:55:05.580
have and he just killed him.
00:55:08.460
There were speculations and the Soviet scholars
00:55:10.820
like to maintain that.
00:55:12.700
That, in fact, it was the Tsar's way of bringing Learmont
00:55:20.580
to his death.
00:55:22.340
I don't think modern scholars agree with that.
00:55:24.940
I think there are no indications that there was the Tsar
00:55:27.820
seem to be happy with that development.
00:55:30.300
In fact, Martina was not sentenced to almost anything serious.
00:55:37.180
And he walked out fairly free from that.
00:55:41.460
But it seems that Learmont of pretty much
00:55:44.980
ridiculed him and was ready to deal with that.
00:55:50.100
Well, it could be that if he was a bironic figure
00:55:54.140
that you had to die young, if you want to assure your immortality
00:55:57.780
as a legend.
00:55:59.140
And as you mentioned, he went like Jim Morrison,
00:56:03.100
he hits up against a wall.
00:56:04.860
But in that moment of existential darkness and confusion
00:56:08.900
where he didn't know where his life was going
00:56:10.500
and complete disorientation, I was thinking
00:56:13.100
that it's a big pity that he didn't have pink Floyd
00:56:16.340
to listen to.
00:56:17.540
Or anything else or that matters?
00:56:19.260
I think it might have that sort because it might have made
00:56:21.780
a difference.
00:56:22.380
And we could have had a lot more books by what
00:56:25.980
I take to be a great writer in.
00:56:27.580
Who could have been.
00:56:28.420
And he seemed awfully lonely.
00:56:31.100
And pink Floyd is a great way to emphasize
00:56:40.060
how the outside sources can bring strength.
00:56:43.820
Well, that's great.
00:56:45.140
So I want to remind our listeners
00:56:46.580
that you've been listening to entitled opinions.
00:56:48.940
And we have a guest here, a special guest
00:56:51.180
who is visiting us from Munich, although he's originally
00:56:54.460
from the Western Ukraine.
00:56:55.780
And you've heard pretty fascinating biography.
00:56:59.820
Alexander Borovik.
00:57:01.420
Thank you, Sasha, for coming on to entitled opinions.
00:57:03.940
And I'm going to leave us with a pink Floyd song
00:57:08.460
from the wall.
00:57:10.140
And you have a good trip home.
00:57:12.340
Thanks, Your Albert.
00:57:13.660
[MUSIC PLAYING]
00:57:16.660
That is long across the ocean.
00:57:39.060
I'm leaving just steam and more rain.
00:57:43.060
The snapshot in the family album.
00:57:52.860
Hey, what else did you leave for me?
00:58:02.940
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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Daddy, what you're leaving I'm on me?
00:58:13.540
All hell was just a break in the wall.
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All hell had only worked.
00:58:30.020
They'll just break in the wall.
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