Monday 01 April 2024
While drafting last week’s blog “PROFESSOR, WHY AREN’T WE READING ‘___’?” (25 March 2024), I at once planned for a new blog series on other experiences from my classrooms. Last semester a precocious student asked me whether I was cynical. In what was to be this week’s blog, I started writing about the spoken exchange I had with the student. I entitled this working draft, “Professor, Are You Cynical?”
The premise intrigued me. The student’s question didn’t come out of nowhere. Her question was her response to my question, directed to the entire class, about Anna Politkovskaya, the slain Russian journalist and enemy of Vladimir Putin. My question: “Was Politkovskaya foolish, irresponsible, incautious?”
So, you know, I consider Politkovskaya to be among my most cherished heroes. Before Alexei Navalny, there was Politkovskaya. She exposed Putin’s corruption, war crimes, and overall misanthropy—not only for Russia’s neighbors but toward his own fellow Russians. She was arrested and tortured by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution; she wrote about this ordeal in A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya (2002 in Russian, 2003 in English). In 2002, she unsuccessfully negotiated with Chechen terrorists to release over 900 hostages held in the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow; the Russian state security services mismanaged the scene, thus making Politkovskaya’s efforts ineffective. In 2004, during a flight to North Ossetia to negotiate with Chechen separatists who took hostage more than 1,100 people, including 777 children, during the Beslan school siege, Politkovskaya was poisoned by whom many believe to be Putin’s FSB; she survived this assassination attempt. She was directly threatened by Ramzan Kadyrov, the war criminal, human rights violator, and dictator of Chechnya in 2004; she published articles detailing this intimidation. Ordinary Chechens viewed Politkovskaya as their advocate. Her journalism defended their humanity, and her Novaya Gazeta news articles, along with her nonfiction books, fought with Russians not to lose their humanity. Her writing was tough love; however, she worried that Putin had already encouraged her fellow Russians to lose their morality and souls, while supporting his “war on terror.”
If you can persevere through the “My Country’s Army and Its Mothers” chapter, the heartbreaking account of Russian military recruits being severely bullied and callously murdered by their superiors and of Russian parents and grandparents being heartlessly disrespected and brutishly humiliated by the Russian military establishment for asking questions about their murdered sons and grandsons, I encourage you to keep reading the rest of Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia (2004). Before her 2006 murder and long since after, I have taught her journalism and biography.
Reader, you might think: “If Politkovskaya is his hero, then why did he ask that kind of question in his classroom? He must really be a cynic.” The first draft of that blog-to-be answered your question, easing your doubt about me. While drafting it, I realized that the blog was quickly becoming something profoundly different. I know, I know… some of my blogs are long; however, this “Professor, Are You Cynical” draft was evolving into a deeper, more complicated piece. It was beyond the confines of even my longest blogs. My eulogy series on Steve and even my Navalny blogs have high word counts. Nonetheless, they fit, albeit the outer limits of my blogsite. Nonetheless, the proposed Cynical Professor blog, if I had finished writing it and then had published it here, would have been strangely too long, and perhaps oddly out-of-place.
Sometimes, Reader, we have experienced a sense of cynicism, the resignation that things are forever doomed, no matter how much we try or cling to a “hopeless hope” (to borrow an idea from American playwright Eugene O’Neill); we throw our hands up, saying, “To hell with it!” And for some of us, that desperate, sardonic, and jaded defeatism is our ironic acceptance of evil’s power in the world. The Cynical Professor blog draft wrestled with this nihilistic and self-wounding submission to evil’s predominance.
By nine-hundred words (roughly 3 pages), the “Professor, Are You Cynical?” draft was creatively and intellectually too short, too underdeveloped. It called out for mandatory rhetorical asides, philosophical questions that required addressing other intellectual problems. My creative but threatening animus began quoting Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and other artists and philosophers I have long stopped teaching because their works were too emotionally exhausting. Last week’s blog, “PROFESSOR, WHY AREN’T WE READING ‘___’?” addressed those dilemmas.
Hearing the voice of my animus repeating certain lines describing evil from Levi and Borowski’s works, I needed not only to revisit those intellectual and emotional battles but confront them. Resolve them? Ha! Dostoevsky’s brilliantly formidable character, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, drove himself mad venturing to solve that mystery of iniquity, the very one I have been fighting with during my entire scholarly career. I wasn’t ever alone in that pursuit. The love of my wife and sons keeps me afloat, and my dog stands guard, protecting me. Steve taught me well, and I am forever his student. Additionally, King Arthur is here, making sure I don’t go mad, chasing my Moby Dick. I am not a cynic!
The blog draft about my assumed cynicism seemed more like a short introduction than an outright blog essay. I needed to say more. I didn’t want to break up a long piece into multiple parts. It needed to be one whole piece. I sensed the extra material I would end up writing for the cynical professor blog would have exceeded the intentions of just writing a blog. In other words, I had a revelation.
This “Holy Shit!” moment I experienced disclosed to me that this Cynical Professor blog draft was a fertile seedbed for the Afterward, the (new) final section of my Katyn book manuscript. Back in January 2024, King Arthur and I had finished going through the “big read” of my manuscript. You can read about it in my January 12, 2024 “FIRST STAGE OF THE POST-WRITING OF THE MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE!” blog. What I didn’t say or emphasize in that January blog, was that he confessed that “something was missing” from the manuscript. The video conference we held last week continued this discussion: “You need an Afterward. I don’t know what it should be about, or how long it should be; however, you need something,” he insisted. I agreed.
Back in January, I, too, couldn’t imagine what this proposed Afterward would be about; however, in late March, I saw what was needed for this Afterward. There was the unresolved issue of evil and Katyn in my manuscript. Part of that irresolution over the concept of evil was there was no finale with King Arthur. Throughout the narrative action found in the manuscript, King Arthur and I debated over realpolitik, war crimes, and evil. If I hadn’t made it clear earlier elsewhere, King Arthur is also a non-fiction character in my Katyn manuscript. During pivotal scenes, we argued, like two ancient philosophers, about philosophy, morality, and history from competing points of view. As a writer, I didn’t complete this part of the storyline.
Eureka! I discovered the purpose and content for the Afterward: I would finish the manuscript with a critical debate with King Arthur. The previous manuscript chapter, which at the time when I wrote it, was to be the manuscript’s conclusion, and it resolved a key conversation about Katyn with King Solomon, Steve’s literary alter-ego in the manuscript. The conclusion also wrestled with the nature of evil and the Katyn executioners.
Now, the blog draft exploring whether I was a “cynical” professor has been grafted to an already sketched out, rough (very rough) draft of the Katyn manuscript’s Afterward, where King Arthur and I would have one last Socratic debate on the nature of evil and the Katyn war crime. I don’t want to give away too much here, but the cynicism question (and, more importantly, the answer to that question) is crucial to my artistic resolution in the manuscript on the problem of evil and Katyn.
Without this venue, my blogsite, I wonder if I would have uncovered such an invaluable, decisive, and thrilling insight into how to complete the revision of my Katyn manuscript. Writing for this blog has motivated me to keep writing, an important act to keep at bay writer’s block. And while writing the blog that turned into a book chapter for an entirely different purpose and audience, I have reconfirmed (for myself) the value of freewriting. Additionally, I have reaffirmed the need to be open to replanting writing projects elsewhere.
I have typed over 1,400 words right now. I wasn’t planning for another long blog, like this one. Regardless, I needed to unburden myself of some intellectual tensions before tackling the revision sessions for the Katyn manuscript. And I was holding back in this blog, truly not trying to answer my student’s question here. I haven’t scratched the surface. The Katyn manuscript’s Afterward is beneath the surface. I am still Melville’s student. I haven’t abandoned you, Melville. And as I am finishing the final lines of this blog, I am listening repeatedly to Black Sabbath’s song, “Heaven and Hell;” over and over… a song I listened to while completing the Katyn manuscript last spring and summer. I am not a cynic.