February 12, 2025 • 73 mins
Boris Pasternak’s life exemplifies the struggle between art and tyranny, highlighting how literary expression can serve as an act of resistance against oppression and a journey toward spiritual rediscovery. Through his experiences, Pasternak challenges listeners to reflect on authenticity in a culture dominated by superficial fame and public expectation.
• The essence of creation and self-surrender in artistic expression
• The cultural and historical backdrop of Russia during Pasternak’s life
• The spiritual evolution that informs "Dr. Zhivago"
• The impact of Stalin's regime on artists and truth-tellers
• The significance of “Dr. Zhivago” in the context of global literature
• The tension between recognition and artistic integrity in Pasternak's life
• A call to discover authenticity in a fame-driven culture
• The enduring power of literary voices in times of crisis
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Creation calls for self-surrender, not loud noise
and cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face.
Live so that, in the finalcount, we draw unto ourselves
love from space.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
That is a divine obscurity, isn't it?
Something we don't know in ourpublicity-seeking?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, influencer social media world.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
It's the opposite.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Right.
You go underground, into yoursoul and into your connection
with all humanity.
You think slow to think fast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(01:05):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to get down?
And every time I ask, heteaches me the same thing Just
(01:48):
bleed over your head.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
What happens when a poet's pen becomes a weapon
against tyranny and hismasterpiece shakes the
foundations of a regime?
Boris Pasternak's life was astory of pride, sorrow and
defiance.
A man who dared to write oflove, faith and freedom in a
world determined to silence him.
Boris Pasternak was born inMoscow in 1890 to a cultured
(02:13):
Jewish family.
His father, leonid, was aprominent painter, and his
mother, rosa, was a giftedconcert pianist.
Their home was a haven forcreativity, frequented by
writers, musicians and artists,including Leo, tolstoy and
Rachmaninoff.
Pasternak grew up immersed inart, but he did not find his
voice right away.
(02:33):
As a young man he pursued musiccomposition, studying under the
renowned Alexander Scriabin.
But music wasn't his calling.
Philosophy followed, first inMoscow, then in Germany, at the
University of Marburg.
Still, he felt restless.
By his early 20s he turned topoetry, discovering the medium
that would define his life.
(02:53):
His 1922 collection my SisterLife was a revelation, marking
him as one of Russia's leadingpoets, with its vivid imagery
and emotional depth.
The 1920s brought about theBolshevik Revolution, a seismic
shift in Russian life.
Pasternak adapted outwardly butremained inwardly free.
The communist regime demandedart serve the state, but
(03:17):
Pasternak resisted, quietly andsubtly.
His work celebrated theindividual nature and beauty,
values at odds with Sovietideology.
To survive, he translated theworks of Shakespeare, goethe and
others, mastering the art ofbringing foreign voices into
Russian while shielding his own.
Faith came to Pasternak slowly,almost imperceptibly.
(03:40):
He was raised in an agnostichousehold with no real
connection to religious belief.
Yet the turbulence of the war,revolution and the deep
questions posed by humansuffering led him to
Christianity.
In his 40s His poetry began toreflect his faith, a quiet but
profound trust in Christ as asymbol of love and redemption.
This spiritual journey wouldculminate in his masterpiece Dr
(04:04):
Zhivago, where faith becomes acentral theme.
The 1930s were a time of terror.
Stalin's purges swept throughthe Soviet Union and many of
Pasternak's friends andcontemporaries.
Writers like Osip Mandelstam,were arrested, sent to gulags or
executed.
Pasternak himself was underconstant surveillance.
Executed.
(04:26):
Pasternak himself was underconstant surveillance.
His work drew suspicion, but heescaped imprisonment, likely
because of his fame and hisability to steer clear of overt
political dissent.
Still, the pressure was immenseand he was forced to write
cautiously.
During World War II, pasternakremained in the Soviet Union,
writing patriotic poems andtranslations.
Stalin's death in 1953 brought abrief thaw in Soviet life,
(04:47):
allowing Pasternak to write withgreater freedom.
It was during this period thathe completed Dr Zhivago.
The novel was an epic tale oflove, war and the search for
meaning, set against thebackdrop of the Russian
Revolution.
It was also deeply spiritual,reflecting Pasternak's Christian
faith and his belief in theenduring power of the human soul
(05:07):
.
The Soviet Union refused topublish the book.
It was smuggled to Italy andpublished in 1957.
The West hailed it as amasterpiece and in 1958,
pasternak was awarded the NobelPeace Prize for Literature.
He's quoted as saying I am proudof being born in Russia, but my
refusal to accept the prizeshould not be misinterpreted.
(05:28):
My independence and freedom asa writer are more important to
me than my honors.
The Soviet regime saw this asan act of betrayal.
Pasternak was vilified in thepress, branded a traitor and
forced to publicly decline theprize.
(05:51):
He said I strain broke hisalready fragile health.
Isolated, hounded andostracized, he spent his final
years in his country house 20miles outside of Moscow.
He died on May 30, 1960, at 70years old, just a year after the
Nobel Prize debacle.
Thousands attended his funeral,despite the government's
(06:13):
efforts to suppress it, chantinglines from his poetry in
defiance of Soviet censorship.
Pasternak's life was extremelyresilient, a man who clung to
his art and faith even as theworld around him prohibited.
Both His words outlived theregime that sought to silence
him.
A testament to the power ofliterature and the enduring
human spirit.
(06:33):
Pasternak's poem Hamlet,written as part of Dr Zhivago,
captures this sense of duty,faith and the weight of
individual responsibility in theface of immense adversity.
The tempest roars against thedarkened sky.
The final moment tolls.
My fate draws near.
I'm on the stage, alone,beneath the eye.
(06:55):
I live to bear this cross, topersevere.
To all I give the gift ofliberty, but I must bow before
the end and die.
Now I'd like to welcomeProfessor Larry back to the show
.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Hello Tavis, how are you?
I'm doing great.
I'm doing great, and it'salways great to have an
opportunity to talk about BorisPasternak and his wonderful
witness and his work and theconfusions that attend a writer
(07:35):
who became famous during themiddle of the Cold War and spent
his whole life being labeled byother people and misunderstood
life being labeled by otherpeople and misunderstood, except
by his contemporaries and thoseother writers in Russia who
were living very much the samelife.
He was living in internal exile.
They used to call it People whowere living under a regime that
(07:59):
was totalitarian andauthoritarian and wouldn't allow
them to have a public voice.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
So his and that's probably very relevant to today
in various countries, and maybesome people feel that way, even
in our own country, underwhichever governments in power,
even though it's nottotalitarian by these real
standards, but some people areclaiming that on, you know, on
the right and the left, atdifferent times.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, I think a lot of writers feel that way all the
time, especially since whenyou're living in a country whose
business is business and notwhose business is prophecy or
truth-telling, which is probablymost countries of the world it
(08:48):
always makes writers and artistsa little bit countercultural
all the time.
It's just that, with Pasternakand the Russian writers of his
generation and the one thatfollowed, it are extreme
examples of this and so becomereally good object lessons in
(09:12):
courage and in, you know, faithand in dedication to their art
and their poetry and things likethat.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, like fortitude.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yes and fortitude, yes and fortitude.
And you know Pasternak died theyear after A lot of the.
There's a wonderful anthology.
I don't know if we have it onthe podcast yet, but Yevgeny
Yevishenko's 20th centuryRussian poetry Silver and Steel
(09:50):
20th century Russian poetrySilver and Steel is a collection
of all the poets from the twogenerations, the Silver Age up
to the end of the 20th century,and Yerushchenko writes short
biographies before each of thewriters and there are hundreds
of them some of whom only hadone poem published in their
(10:12):
lifetime or no poems publishedin their lifetime and lived in
obscurity and were only laterrecovered by Yevashenko as
spokesman for their generationand included in this over
1,000-word anthology, which is amasterpiece.
(10:33):
I'd recommend it to anybodyinterested in poetry or 20th
century literature or theRussian experience, and just the
little biographies alone arejust eye-opening.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Now, on that note of Silver and Steel.
So that's the anthology thatcollected all these poets, that
most of them had to live prettyunderground, or their poetry was
even underground, and then heput it together.
You told me one incrediblestory.
If you might, would you mindsharing that again?
Do you remember the detailsabout the street fighter?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
uh, well.
Well, there there are.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I don't know who you're referring to, um one guy
started as a street fighter andthen he said you know, he had
one poem in there.
And it's like how many did thisguy?
May have, may have had, butsomehow this one poem made it.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yes, a lot of them were were started as street
fighters, because a lot of themwere were revolutionaries at the
beginning of the 20th centuryand they they united in a
collective endeavor to overthrowthe czar.
But then, after the revolution,when the Bolsheviks took over,
(11:49):
there was a purge andauthoritarian regime got rid of
Trotsky and Lenin died.
And then Stalin became theauthoritarian force that united
the country Well, didn't unitethe country, but took over the
country behind his extremeauthoritarianism.
And a lot of these people thatsupported the revolution found
(12:13):
themselves enemies of the state,and so their stories are told
in the Sun and sun and steelanthology, the uh, silver and
steel anthology, 20th centuryrussian poetry, and there is a
guy I I I was looking for himthe other night and I can't find
(12:33):
him in there.
But a lot of them are similar inthat they they fought in the
russians, they fought in therussian civil war and then they
were uh during World War II andfought against the Nazis in
World War II.
And then, because they wereconsidered enemies of the state,
because they had said thingsagainst Stalin, they got sent to
(12:57):
the gulag that Solzhenitsynwrote so eloquently about and
lived a life in prison there.
And then, when they werereleased, they would move back
to Russia and then get deportedto France or Germany and live
the rest of their lives in exileand their poetry was sometimes
(13:23):
published, sometimes not, orsometimes only found after the
fact, and so there's a lot ofstories like that ended up
(13:53):
becoming famous, you know, andinstalled in.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Russian textbooks as examples of great Russian poetry
during the World War II.
And then you told me that BorisPasternak was in that anthology
right.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yes, he was in that anthology, but they didn't at
the time when Stalin was stillalive.
They didn't want him, theydidn't want to acknowledge him.
So they listed the poem as atraditional folk poem.
Oh really.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, because it was a Wait.
So there's only one poem ofPasternak in the anthology, and
it was.
They wouldn't even say his name.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Wait.
So there's only one poem ofPasternak in the anthology and
they wouldn't even say his name.
Well, in the one that wasbefore Yevyshenko's anthology,
yes, oh, okay, the symphony thatwas based on the Battle at
(14:49):
Leningrad became a nationalpatriotic epic symphony, but it
had nods to dissidents and nodsto the anti-authoritarian
tradition within the Russianrevolutionary movement, which
made him, you know, a little bitcontroversial.
(15:10):
But when Stalin died in 53,there was, and Khrushchev took
over.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, you're getting too far ahead.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
We got to talk about Pasternak.
Yeah, let's talk about.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Pasternak, because he's a great example of that
part of the Russian literarymovement.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, I want to talk about a few of the claims about
him before Stalin was dead.
Yeah, but here's two of thequotes from your book by other
people about Pasternak which arereally, really cool, quotes
From Thomas Merton saying, fromThomas Merton's literary essays
(15:48):
Pasternak's Christianity issomething very simple, very
rudimentary, deeply sincere,utterly personal and yet, for
all its questionable expressions, obviously impregnated with the
true spirit of the Gospels andthe liturgy obviously
impregnated with the true spiritof the gospels and the liturgy.
And then how do you say Marina'slast name?
(16:09):
Tetsatavia, tetsatavia,tetsatavia?
Yeah, in Art, in the Light ofConscience, I love her quote
about him.
She says Myakovsky, myakovsky,myakovsky, myakovsky, myakovsky
acts upon us Pasternak within us.
(16:29):
Pasternak isn't read by us, hetakes place in us.
I mean, that's quite a profoundthing to say about another poet
.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, Myakovsky and Pasternak were the two great
poets of the revolution.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
So he's getting that compliment from the other great
poet of his time.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yes, and Mayakovsky.
Maybe I'll read the littlesummary of Mayakovsky's life
from the Yevyshenko anthologysummary of Mayakovsky's life
from the Yevyshenko anthology.
But Mayakovsky was the publicvoice of the revolution and he
(17:16):
wrote poems that could berecited over loudspeakers at
rallies and he wrote poems formovie scripts and public
propaganda, rallies and thingslike that.
So his voice was kind of onewith the revolution and
(18:09):
Pasternak was.
You would read his poetries andyou would walk off by yourself
and have a spiritual, meditativeexperience, whereas Mayakovsky
you would hear at a rally andyou would feel like one with the
revolution.
And so they were kind offrenemies.
They both admired each other'swork but at the same time they
(18:37):
were like polar opposites whenit came to what they represented
in Russian poetry, in thepolitical aspects of the
revolution, that he ended updying very young, whereas
Pasternak survived, as you sowell described him oh, I'm
disappearing as you so welldescribed him, and ended up only
(19:03):
emerging after Stalin's death.
Ended up only emerging, youknow, after Stalin's death, and
not even known in the West untilafter he won, pretty much till
after he won the Nobel Prize.
But here's what Yelishenko saysyeah, as a boy Mayakovsky would
(19:28):
climb into a huge clay wine vatand read poetry aloud, trying
to swell the power of his voicewith the vat's resonance.
Mayakovsky was not onlyMayakovsky, but the powerful
echo of his own voice.
Oratorical intonation was notjust his style, but his very
(19:49):
character.
While in Bukov, a president inMoscow, in 1909, when he was
only 16, mayakovsky becameengrossed in the Bible, one of
the few books available to himthere, and his early, thunderous
verses were strewn withbiblical metaphors whimsically
tied to his boyish blasphemies.
(20:11):
He intuitively perceived thatthe street will convulse this is
a line from Mayakovsky thestreet will convulse, tongueless
, with no means to cry out andspeak.
And so he gave the word to thestreet and thus revolutionized
Russian poetry.
There was no question forMayakovsky about whether to
(20:35):
accept the October Revolution.
He was himself the revolution,with all its power, its excess,
its epic vulgarity and evenbrutality, its errors and
tragedies.
Mayakovsky's revolutionary zealis evident in that this great
(20:55):
love lyric poet committed hisverse to the service of
ideological limericks,advertising billboards of
politics.
In this zeal, however, lay histragedy, for he consciously
stood on the throat of his ownsong, a position he once
underscored brilliantly.
I want to be understood by mynative land, but I won't be
(21:20):
understood, I will be passedthrough my native land like a
slanting rain.
His despondency and personalaffairs, as much as his
disillusionment with Stalinistpolitics, led him to shoot
himself with a revolver he hadused as a prop in a movie 12
years earlier.
Because he was both revered andreviled, his death held,
(21:46):
profound though, variousmeanings for everyone in Russia.
Tens of thousands of peopleattended his funeral.
Mayakovsky was canonized byStalin, who said about him
Mayakovsky was and remains thebest and most talented poet of
our time.
Best and most talented poet ofour time.
(22:08):
Indifference to his poetry is acrime.
This was, in Pasternak's view,mayakovsky's second death, but
he died only as a political poet, as a great poet of love and
loneliness.
He survived and is stillrevered in Russia today.
Wow, that's really cool.
(22:29):
So they were the two voices ofthe revolution, but Mayakovsky
was gone.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Mayakovsky was basically kind of co-opted by
Stalin for a while.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, he was named as a Stalinist poet and then he
couldn't stand thecontradictions and apparently he
was embroiled in a complicatedlove affair.
So they don't really know themotivation for his suicide.
But, as a lot of these poets inthe anthology have deaths that
(23:01):
are either suicides or Naziconcentration camps or Soviet
concentration camps, or MayaTsevotavia killed herself in
anticipation of her city beingtaken over by the Nazis, and it
turned out that the invasion bythe Nazis had been repulsed by
(23:26):
the Soviet army, so she didn'treally even need to do that.
But it's another one of thesetragic events where people are
driven to despair against theirown better interests.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Something to mention is that in the Silver and Steel
anthology I just found thesethere's about four honorable
mentions.
I don't know if there's one youcould find by Osip Mandelstam.
Oh yeah, but it says his poemwas so defiant against Stalin it
led to his exile and death.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
He got killed for a poem.
Yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
It sounds like one poem that was so defiant run by
(24:31):
the state, and I think one ofthe things about that that's
kind of hard for us tounderstand is how important
these poets were and still arein the Russian cultural
imagination.
The poets were kind of like thephilosophers and social critics
of their time, so when theywrote a poem people took it
seriously, and we don'tparticularly take our poets that
(24:51):
seriously.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, I was just about to say that After our
first couple episodes, a buddyof mine and I I went backpacking
with six guys, five guys andone of them had listened to the
episodes and he had aconversation with his dad or
somebody and they were sayinghow, um, they had heard.
you know, in america, a poem youknow might be thought about or
(25:17):
taught in a literature class orwhatever, but in russia a poem
could get you killed and rightthey take, they take poetry,
which is a real difference incultures which I actually
appreciate because I love.
I love poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Well.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
I don't know how you know we got.
So I think modern American lifeis pretty far from poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
As a normal, thing that always blew my mind was I
was reading a book on the Battleof Leningrad, which was one of
the bloodiest battles in WorldWar II in which the Russians
took tremendous casualties, butalso part of the turning point
(26:04):
in World War II, and throughoutthe entire battle they kept the
libraries open so that peoplecould find spiritual sustenance
by reading Russian literatureand poetry.
And I know that during COVID weclosed down a lot of our
(26:27):
libraries here.
Wow, and I'm thinking, if you—that's a crazy contrast.
We closed down our libraries,like even in the college where I
taught.
You know they've had thelibrary closed for remodeling
now for almost two years and theSoviets in World War II
(26:52):
wouldn't even close it down forthe battle that's taking over
six months to complete.
That is crazy.
So it is a difference inpsychology and how these people
look about what they valued.
Yeah, I wanted to read you oneI was looking for.
(27:13):
You asked me to look for someof the religious or faith
dimension to Pasternak, which wegot a little bit with Merton's
essay on essays on Pasternak.
But in the life you may, yousay may be your own, an American
(27:36):
pilgrimage.
Paul Ely writes about ThomasMerton, dorothy Day, walker,
percy and Flannery O'Connor andthere's this wonderful like
three-page description of ofThomas Merton's relationship
with Boris Pasternak that I canread you a little bit from.
(27:59):
But I'll just paraphrase alittle bit of what happened and
then I'll read you from bothMerton's letters to Pasternak
and also his essays on Pasternak.
It's kind of interestingbecause Merton was corresponding
(28:20):
with Boris Pasternak.
He got an FBI file in theUnited States.
Oh yeah, because J Edgar Hooverthought he was corresponding
with a communist.
I just love that.
Whereas you know, I love when aChristian monk gets a FBI file
(28:42):
in Russia.
Boris Pasternak, who was indanger of being thrown in prison
at any moment, would be thoughtof as a communist contact that
Merton would be talking to.
But anyway, to get back to.
So, in LA's book, you know, theLife you Save May Be your own.
(29:04):
If any of you have that book,it's on page 258 through 261.
And it turns out that Mertonwrote a letter to Pasternak
because he had read the poetrycollection what is it?
(29:26):
My Sister Life.
My Sister Life, yeah, which iskind of an autobiographical as
well as lyric work.
And he connected with Pasternakand saw in Pasternak a kindred
soul.
So he wrote a personal letterto Pasternak and this was before
(29:49):
Dr Zhivago had even beentranslated into English.
So he hadn't read Dr Zhivagoyet, he had just read the
translated poetry in my SisterLife.
And so he wrote this in hisletter to Pasternak.
(30:10):
This is Merton to Pasternak.
Although we are separated bygreat distances and even greater
barriers, it gives me pleasureto speak to you as to one whom I
feel to be a kindred mind.
It may surprise you when I sayin all sincerity that I feel
much more kinship with you inyour writing than with most of
(30:33):
the great modern writers in theWest.
When you write of your youth inthe Urals, in Marburg, in
Moscow, I feel as if it were myown experience, as if I were you
.
With other writers I can shareideas, but you seem to
communicate something deeper.
It's as if we met on a deeperlevel of life, on which
(30:57):
individuals are not separatebeings.
In the language familiar to meas a Catholic monk, it is if we
were known to each other in God.
And then the Illy says at thetime, dr Zhivago, pasternak's
(31:19):
only novel was soon to appear inEnglish.
Although he was nearly 70 yearsold and had an eminence in
Russia since the 1920s, his lifestory was just becoming known
in the West, told in such a waythat he seemed to be Merton's
perfect double state a mystic ina secular society, a religious
(31:48):
artist whose embattledJudeo-Christian faith was vital
to his work.
A wise man whose dacha, anartist's retreat at the
outskirts of Moscow, was a placeof pilgrimage for writers from
Russia and the West alike, notunlike Merton's Hermitage.
(32:12):
And then this was so.
Then Pasternak responds toMerton's letter and says I,
really I connected with yourletter.
You know, it seemed like youand I are kindred souls and I
(32:37):
hope you know we stay in contactand blah blah blah was very
excited as having made thisconnection with somebody who he
wouldn't normally think of asbeing a compatriot in the faith.
Yeah, and so he writes in hisjournal I think this is from.
(33:04):
No, this is from another letterto Pasternak after he read Dr
Zhivago, and Merton says thegreat business of our time is
this for one man to find himselfin another one who is on the
other side of the world.
The novel was full of sentencesthat might have been written in
(33:28):
characters Merton felt he knew.
In fact, he confided DrZhivago's faithful companion,
laura, was a woman he hadalready met and went on to share
the scandalous secret of a monkwho is in love with a girl, and
a Jew at that, and what he wastalking about, what Merton's
(34:00):
talking about there, is that hehad a dream where he met a girl
and her name was Proverb, andshe became an image of biblical
wisdom and also Merton's sort ofmuse for some poems about the
Lady Sophia of the Bible, wisdomcommentaries.
(34:20):
And so he's sharing that withPastor Knnak as finding that
same character in Laura.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
It's such a special connection between them.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, not to accept the Nobel Prize because the
Soviets claimed that it was apropaganda stunt by the West to
celebrate a minor poet againsttheir Soviet great writers, who
were just yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
An amateur poet.
That doesn't stand up to ourpropaganda.
Yeah, I mean that does stand upto our propaganda.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, I mean that does stand up to our propaganda.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Two things I want to say.
Pasternak, I do want to ask youthe question of telling this
backstory of him describinghimself as an atheist who lost
his faith in atheism.
Yeah, I want to hear that story.
But before we do that, I dowant to share.
I did find Osip Mandelstam.
Oh, you did find osipmandelstam.
Oh, you did find the intro.
I found the poem that got himkilled.
(35:30):
Okay, well, why don't we readthat?
That this is on a, on a blog bya kathy young who says says
she's a russian journalist andshe did her own work on
translating it into english witha friend.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Uh, because it's very clunky coming from russian
english, because it rhymes inrussian yeah and doesn't rhyme
in english right, you probablypronounce the names correctly
too yeah, and I won't be doingthat um, also, also, it sounds
like there's a lot of russian Imean a lot of english versions,
and none of them were good, shesaid right
Speaker 1 (36:00):
so here's.
This is osip mandelstam'sdefiant poem against stalin that
led to his exile and death.
Uh, apparently it's calledstalin epigram.
So it says with no land feltbeneath us, we live day to day.
(36:21):
Our speech barely carries 10paces away each half snatched
conversation Remembering theHighlander.
Up in the Kremlin, his fingersare greasy as overfed worms and
final as cast iron weights arehis words.
Cockroach whiskers are laughingand winking and his boot tops
(36:42):
are gleaming and twinkling.
There's a rabble around him ofchiefs with thin necks.
That's awesome.
He plays.
He plays with half humans.
He's got at his Beck somemewling, some whimpering and
some hissing.
He goes poke, he goes boom, andthey listen like horseshoes.
He drops one by his, one by one, his decrees to the groin, to
(37:05):
the head, to the groin, to thehead, to the eye, to the knees.
Every killing's a sweetcelebration and stands tall.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
The broad-chested.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Osation Osation O-S-S-E-T-I-A-N.
Yeah, I guess.
So I don't know that yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
So, yeah, that got him killed, basically mocking
him right, which is, you know,our politicians take much, much
more grief than that.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, no this is not.
Yeah.
So when people, when people sayfascist and authoritarian, I
mean there's a huge spectrum.
Yeah, yeah, I mean we don'treally know about that.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
It's almost a little disingenuous to say that these
days yeah, yeah, because uh,that, that was, that was truly,
uh, a reign of terror was stolenyeah, you mean you're, you're
arrested and imprisoned all thetime for nothing.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I mean that's, that's authoritarianism yeah and
fascism.
Yeah, um, you know, a lot ofpeople today accusing that of
our current president would say,well, it's a slippery slope, it
all starts somewhere.
That's kind of the argument,but still to call it the same
thing is just not very genuine.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Also, there's a reading from these figures are
interesting because with Russianhistory in the 20th century is
the story of that entire sweepright From ecstatic revolution
to reign of terror, to thaw, tonew reign of terror, you know,
(38:41):
and to have these people's livesand their poetry and their work
, like Pasternak, pass throughall of these historical moments
with integrity and honesty andstatements of conscience.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
That's a great observation.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah.
Like the moral calm andcenteredness lasted through
various iterations of theirgovernment, up and down, the ups
and downs and takeovers animportant figure and his voice
(39:33):
fits into a tradition that wedon't know as much about in the
West, because his voice, thatvoice in those final journal
entries that were published inthe New Yorker this year or last
year, august, sound a lot likeSolzhenitsyn, sound a lot like
Pasternak and it sounds a lotlike Yuri Zhivago in Pasternak's
(39:55):
work of a person of integritywho refused to remake his vision
of the world in terms of thepolitical ups and downs of
particular movements and partiesand terrorist organizations.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Yeah, well, here I have our next three steps here.
I want to show you something Ifound where I see an echo
between Pasternak and WendellBerry.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
And I found it off of reading back to the part of a
poem you quoted in your book onPasternak and then remembering
this Wendell Berry poem and Ijust pulled them up side by side
and I see this little clue andI wonder if Wendell Berry was
influenced by this poem ofPasternak.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Okay, read the part from Pasternak and Berry and
we'll see.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
And then after that I want to get the backstory on
how, on how he lost his faith inatheism.
And then I want to move on toAlexi.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So here's.
Here's the poem from Pasternak,captured the quiet courage of
his fellow poets in this poem,in his poem on the anonymity
required of those who refuse totow the party line.
So this is him talking aboutthe anonymity required to deal
in the situations he had to livethrough.
(41:25):
He says creation calls forself-surrender, not loud noise
and cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face.
Live so that in the final countwe draw unto ourselves love
from space.
So plunge yourself intoobscurity and conceal there your
(41:46):
tracks, but be alive.
Alive, your full share, aliveuntil the end.
I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
That is a divine obscurity, isn't it Something we
don't know in our publicityseeking?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah, influencer social media world.
It's the opposite.
It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Right.
You go underground, into yoursoul and into your connection
with all humanity.
You think slow to think fast.
You don't think fast to thinkslow.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, and as the funny thing about influencers
right now, like what, whatdominates the young people my,
my age and younger is socialmedia influencers and they they
have a thousand youtube videosand blogs and everything about
how to build their brand and howto make themselves influencers,
just like the guys teaching uh,you know how to write in front
(42:41):
of solzhenitsyn, he's so annoyedbut, but here's pasternak, with
no social media, no internet,no email, interacting with
Merton from across the globe inan obscure, quiet conversation
through letters.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
And he said I'm going to read it again, because just
if you think of social media andmedia in general now think of
and and news cycles, you knowall that noise.
Just think about this poemagain creation calls for
self-surrender, not loud noiseand cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face, lived so that, in
(43:23):
the final count, we draw untoourselves love from space.
So plunge yourself intoobscurity and conceal there your
tracks, but be alive.
Alive, your full share, aliveuntil the end.
It totally resonates with mebecause I felt like I was in
obscurity for a while because ofsocial media making me feel
(43:46):
like, oh, I'm not doing enough,no one even knows who I am, like
the fame, fame of um, ourculture.
It's like if you're not famousand you're just kind of some
dude, you know yeah right,celebrity or nothing yeah, and
here's wendell, here's wendellberry, kind of echoing a similar
sentiment.
Let's hear that it's at the endof his uh manifesto of the mad
(44:08):
farmer liberation front.
That's great, which is probablyhis most at the end of his uh
manifesto of the mad farmerliberation front.
That's great, which is probablyhis most famous poem.
One of his most famous poemsand we'll get into window berry
down the road.
But yeah I love this, thislittle echo here.
He said it's in the middle tothe end of the of this paragraph
.
Go with your love to the fields, lie down in the shade, rest
your head in her lap, swearallegiance to what is nighest
(44:31):
your thoughts, and this is themain part.
As soon as the generals and thepoliticos can predict the
motions of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark thefalse trail the way you didn't
go.
Be like the fox who makes moretracks than necessary.
Summon the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
(44:54):
But the idea of making thefalse tracks sounded like
sounded like Pasternak sayingconceal your tracks.
Yes, pretty cool.
Yeah, that is kind of like.
Intentionally subvert all thenoise and powers that be in a
quietness.
Yes, they both are saying that.
It's kind of awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
And and and Merton is an interesting co-conspirator
because he became a monastic andand ultimately a hermit because
his order wasn't isolatedenough for his tastes.
(45:37):
And so then he comes acrossPasternak and finds a kindred
soul and writes him a letter onsnail mail and they have like
maybe three letters and thenthings get crazy for pasternak
and he, he writes back and says,uh, I can't write you anymore
(45:57):
for a while.
Um, don't write me.
Uh, I'll write you, but youknow, wait for my next letter
because I'm dealing with a lotof stuff.
Wow, and that was the last heheard from him.
Oh, man, and so those you canget Merton's side of that
correspondence in a collectionof his letters to writers called
(46:22):
A Courage for Truth.
But unfortunately that doesn'tinclude the other writers'
responses back to him, so youhave to kind of chase those down
, if they even exist in English.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Now one more thing I want to tell you about Pasternak
before we ask the question howdid he lose his faith in atheism
?
There's a modern day currentpodcaster called Lexx friedman.
He's actually russian, he'sfrom a couple towns I cannot
pronounce, and he's he'samerican.
He moved here when he was 11after the collapse of the soviet
(46:58):
union uh-huh to chicago area.
He's extremely smart, like he'sa super computer scientist, but
you can just tell he's a brainof brains.
He's going to be a biginfluence from MIT and stuff.
He's 41 and he's on the JoeRogan podcast and I'm hearing
him quote Pasternak.
(47:19):
He's reading a poem that somefighter, a Russian fighter named
Bavazir Satiev.
This Russian fighter, a Russianfighter named Bavazir Satiev.
This Russian fighter I believehe's Russian he quotes this poem
before every fight.
Oh really.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, by going to the library during the Battle of
Leningrad right Getting thespiritual sustenance he needs.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, it's pretty awesome the way he read the poem
in English.
He's like it's hard to read itin English.
Yeah, it didn't sound.
I couldn't quite grasp the poembased on the English.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
I would love to see it in writing so I could grasp
it better.
But yeah, so tell me about howpastor knacks and then maybe
chime in or back and forth withsolstice.
But how did pastor knack losehim his uh, faith in atheism?
Speaker 2 (48:20):
now as to uh pastor knacks uh losing his faith in
atheism.
He was born into a Jewishfamily but, as you point out,
they were not particularlyreligious.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic.
But he had a nanny who was aRussian Orthodox nanny, oh yeah,
and she would take him tochurch with her and she would
sort of proselytize him with hersort of peasant form of Russian
Orthodoxy which stuck withPasternak as a primitive but
(49:10):
moving expression of faith.
And so as he slowly began to bemore skeptical of dialectical
material, you know, like theconventional dialectical
materialism which would be sortof the conventional materialism
in the West, you know thatpeople embrace skepticism with a
(49:40):
faith that once they becomeskeptical of skepticism then
that opens them up to maybe someother ways of looking at the
world.
They become less dogmatic and alittle bit more reflective.
And that same experiencehappened to Pasternak and you
can see that it's not so much anevolution in the poetry as in
(50:05):
the character of Zhivago.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Do you feel like he told his conversion story in
Zhivago?
Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, I think he did.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
That'd be awesome to read.
I still haven't read it yet.
I just learned about it fromyou.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah, and he's trained as a doctor, he's
trained as a skeptic, ascientist, and yet he finds this
Soviet political faith sort oftaking over his own skepticism.
And then he falls in love withLaura and he begins to see
through the ideology of hisfriends who became military
(50:46):
leaders in the revolution and sohard-nosed Bolsheviks, and so
that kind of turned him like inDr Zhivago, that would be
Strelnikov, who is now amilitary guy who toes the party
(51:11):
line, in fact is an agent ofrevolution.
And there's a passage oh yeah,it is in Paul Elie's book from
Dr Zhivago, I think where he isdescribing I think it's here,
maybe it's in Merton's essaywhere he's describing Strelnikov
(51:43):
and what happens to his friendthey were college friends who's
become a leader of the military.
Let's see here Okay, here it iswhat Zhivago opposes to
communism.
This is Merton's essay.
(52:04):
What Zhivago opposes tocommunism is therefore not a
defense of Western democracy,not a political platform for
some kind of liberalism, andstill less is it a track in
favor of formal religion.
Zhivago confronts communismwith life itself and leaves us
(52:25):
in the presence of theinevitable conclusions itself
and leaves us in the presence ofthe inevitable conclusions.
Communism has proposed tocontrol life with a rigid system
and the tyranny of artificialforms.
Those who have believed in thisdelusion and yielded themselves
up to it as a superior forcehave paid the penalty of ceasing
(52:47):
to be complete human beings, byceasing to live in the full
sense of the word, by ceasing tobe men or women.
Even the idealistic and devotedStrelnikov becomes the victim
of his own idealisms, becomesthe victim of his own idealisms.
(53:13):
And Laura says of him and thenthis is a quote from Dr Zhivago
it was as if something abstracthad crept into his face and made
it colorless, as if a livinghuman being had become the
embodiment of a principle, theimage of an idea.
I realized that this hadhappened to him because he had
(53:36):
handed himself over to asuperior force that is deadening
and pitiless and will not sparehim in the end.
It seemed to me that he was amarked man and that this was the
seal of his doom.
The beast in man is not tamedby threats, but must be brought
(53:58):
into harmony with life and madeto serve creativeness and love
by the influence of inner andspiritual music.
And then this is another quotefrom Dr Zhivago but what you
were just reading was Merton,right?
Speaker 1 (54:15):
Yeah, that was Merton Talking about Zhivago.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Except for that quote about Strelnikov, that was from
Dr Zhivago.
Yeah, and then this is from DrZhivago.
What for centuries raised manabove the beast?
And the centuries you couldassume as a reference to
(54:38):
Christendom?
Raised man above the beast isnot the crudgel, but an inward
music, the irresistible power ofunarmed truth, the powerful
attraction of its example.
It's always been assumed thatthe most important things in the
(54:59):
gospel are the ethical maximsand commandments, but for me the
most important thing is thatChrist speaks in parables taken
from life, that he explains thetruth in terms of everyday
reality.
The idea that underlies this isthat communion between mortals
is immortal and that the wholeof life is symbolic because it's
(55:24):
meaningful.
That's from Dr Zhivago.
And then here's Martin, kind offollowing that through.
Everyone has been struck, not tomention embarrassed, by the
overpowering symbolic richnessof Dr Zhivago.
(55:48):
In fact, pasternak, whether heknows it or not, is punched
fully into the mainstream of thelost tradition of natural
contemplation which flowed amongthe Greek fathers after it had
been set in motion by origin.
Of course, the tradition hasnot been altogether lost and
(56:10):
Pastor Knack has come upon it inthe Orthodox Church.
The fact is clear.
In any case, he reads thescriptures with the avidity and
spiritual imagination of acontemplative, and he looks on
the world with the avidity andspiritual imagination of a
contemplative, and he looks onthe world with the illuminated
(56:31):
eyes of a Coppadesian fathers,but without their dogmatic and
ascetic preoccupations.
So it's sort of like the.
(56:57):
It's sort of that the Pasternakcomes to faith again through
being a writer in natural andnatural contempl, and and and
subsequent speeches that he gave, however, and his letters to to
Merton, however secret thosewere, having not even made
(57:19):
themselves public until, youknow, maybe two years before he
died.
Yeah, which is prettyinteresting there.
Speaker 1 (57:27):
Well, the, the pasternak story.
I mean well, first of all,before I transition um what I
see in pasternak and javaga, Imean uh and merton, just from
the, just from the brief amountof writings I've come across so
far with you, and what we'rereading is super deep souls.
Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
This stuff does not come out of somebody who just
hasn't spent time with God,spent time in contemplation,
spent time observing the worldwith an honest heart.
Yeah, spent time observing theworld with a honest heart.
Yeah, there's a nobility that'sso deep to like a faithful
person.
It's so noble and so beautiful,like.
(58:11):
Those are the kind of men Iwant to be.
That's why I was so drawn tothis whole, this whole book.
Every person in it just hassuch a depth and and vastness.
The way they have something tosay to the culture.
Yeah, they have something tosay the culture that the culture
needs.
It's not like they're trying topush a religion on the culture.
What I mean is they have thegoods.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yes, yeah, it's sort of like, uh, gravitas what they
like they call gravitas uh, youknow, uh, an awaited authority
in their witness comes fromhaving paid a price.
I mean, they, they, these arepeople that paid price for for
(58:57):
being, for being able to say thethings they do.
They don't.
They don't just, you know, lookit up in a wikipedia article
and then claim it as their ownand then change their point of
view 15 minutes later as the asthe situation changes.
These are entire lifetimes,entire generations of writers,
(59:18):
um, and, and the Yevishanko'santhology is a testimony to
these unknowns that shaped himthat he, as a writer, discovered
as echoes of his own kind ofpoetry, that he wants to write.
(59:38):
He wants to write, and I thinkwe see this in Solzhenitsyn's
voice and in Navalny's prisonjournals, where he holds himself
to the same standards.
He's holding these other peopleand he keeps asking him am I any
different than these guys?
(59:58):
You know, I just was followingalong.
I just thought I understoodmyself.
I was naive to think that Icould just say what I believed
and nobody would call me on it,or that I wouldn't either have
to live for this or die for this.
What was I kidding.
You know I was kidding myselfand it's you know, he's saying
(01:00:22):
the same thing.
You know, because he's writingit in retrospect and he's
looking back on his arrest andhe's saying what was I thinking,
you know?
Thinking that I could just goturn myself in and they would
treat me fairly.
Did I really think that I wasliving in a country that was not
(01:00:42):
so corrupt to the core that itno longer knew what it stood for
?
And that was part of hispolitical awakening?
I think in both their cases wastied to their spiritual
awakening and I think in bothcases the spiritual awakening
came first.
That's so cool.
(01:01:06):
And it was forced.
Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
It was forced upon them by being honest with
themselves about you know wellthe the way I heard it I don't
know where I heard it, if it wasin your book or somewhere else,
as I was researching it um, thekind of the mechanism that led
solzhenitsyn to Christ was tosee the people that would get
(01:01:28):
the regular prisoners.
I think you might have told methis Regular prisoners would get
elevated to like a guard helperor a guard, and then they would
turn into animals against theirown people, their fellow
inmates.
And then he just saw this lackof like.
There was just nothing to thesepeople.
And then he saw these likeorthodox christians in the gulag
and they seemed to be steadyand have a moral fortitude and
(01:01:51):
an honesty about him that he wasimpressed with yes, and and and
they and the thing that kind of.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
I think really um got now that you're bringing this
back to me now.
So, yeah, I think you told methat but I'm not sure it's in
the sections in the Gulag abouthis first prison experiences and
he normally thought of these.
A lot of these guys that becameexemplars for him became
(01:02:28):
exemplars for him were of a veryrigid religious sects that were
like Baptists and Mennonitesand folk that he didn't really
think of as being thatsophisticated philosophically or
in terms of literature orphilosophy and yet founded him,
exemplary people of characterwho wouldn't let their lives be
(01:02:50):
turned around by the presentexperience and that got him
reconsidering what religion wasall about and who these people
were and what his own experienceof faith was with his nanny and
all of that stuff seemedthrough his own personal.
(01:03:19):
His conversion was not areformation in the in the Soviet
sense of, of finding hispolitical feet Right.
It was kind of like theopposite, you know, finding,
finding why he didn't have anypolitical feet to fall on
because he was pursuing adifferent kind of identity,
(01:03:47):
identity um one, and that he was.
He was going to write thisstory someday when he got out uh
, if only.
And so he had to memorize itwhile marching on the tundra,
not not trying to please hiscaptors or trying to find his
way out, out by some sort ofcapitulation of character, yeah,
and that's what makes the moraldimension of the gulag so
powerful, and also Navalny'sprison diaries, because it's the
(01:04:10):
same voice, you know.
Yeah, I wanted to come backbecause this is my country and I
didn't want to give in, becausegiving up would be to give in
and to give in would be given totheir corruption.
Yeah, and to lose my soul now.
Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
So like, like, like Solzhenitsyn, and like the
Russian poets and dissidents andPasternak.
I'm happy to tell you, audience, that there is a modern day
version of this that happened,which professor has referenced a
couple times now alexei nalvani, um, which some of you may have
heard about um in pieces or maynever heard the whole story.
(01:04:51):
I just found out the rest ofthe story.
I did hear about him.
I did hear about a characterwith a russian name getting uh
nerve, nerve, attacked by whatwas, you know, assumed to be
putin's powers uh years ago, andthat's him.
So let me tell you a little bioon him and then one of his
(01:05:11):
prison readings and um the.
The end of the story is thatone year ago, this month, he was
killed in basically a modernday russian gulag, a prison camp
, um in siberia.
So he had a different outcome,a worse outcome than
solzhenitsyn under stalin um.
(01:05:31):
He is now um dead and it isbecause of the current russian
regime.
So this is uh the bio.
This is from the new yorker.
They did an article on himrecently and um in october, and
it's his own writings, but theydid write a um.
The new yorker didn't give a anauthor's name for this little
(01:05:55):
intro, so let me just give youthat, because it kind of tells
his story really well.
On august 20th 2020, during a aflight from the Siberian city of
Tomsk to Moscow, the Russianopposition leader and
anti-corruption campaigner,alexei Navalny, thought he was
dying.
He was disoriented and felt hisbody shutting down.
The plane made an emergencylanding in Omsk and Navalny was
(01:06:18):
hospitalized hospitalized Twodays later.
Thanks to the persistence ofhis wife, yulia Novani, and
international pressure, theRussian authorities allowed a
German plane to take him toBerlin for treatment.
Novani emerged from a coma onSeptember 7th.
A week later, he announced hisintention to return soon to
Russia.
Despite the obvious danger,doctors concluded that novani
(01:06:43):
had been poisoned with a deadlynerve agent called novichik
novichok.
While recovering in the germancountryside, he began writing
his memoir patriot, which is abook that's out now you can read
his memoir and investigatingthe attempt on his life.
He had no doubt that it hadbeen the decision of vladimir
putin and the works of the FSBthe Russian security services
(01:07:05):
but he was determined to uncoverthe details.
During an unforgettable phonetelephone call which was filmed
for a documentary about his lifeuh, navalny was duped, or no?
Navalny duped an FSB agent intodescribing how agents had
broken into his hotel room inTomsk and doused his clothing
with the poison.
(01:07:27):
On January 17, 2021, alexei andYulia flew back to Moscow.
Navalny was arrested at theairport, despite international
protests on his behalf.
Navalny immediately entered anetherworld of trumped-up
criminal charges, embezzlement,fraud, extremism, etc.
Prison cells and solitaryconfinement by the end of 2023.
(01:07:48):
He landed in this quote-unquotespecial regime colony, known as
polar wolf, north of the arcticcircle.
In captivity he managed to keepa diary and even had his team
post some entries on socialmedia.
In one Facebook post heexplained why he refused to live
out his life in the safety ofexile.
I have my country and myconvictions.
(01:08:09):
I don't want to give up mycountry or betray it.
If your convictions meansomething, you must be prepared
to stand up for them and makesacrifices if necessary.
So this was published in thefall, but the but he died one
year ago in February, and one,one section from his diaries I
(01:08:32):
wanted to read.
It's been, it was told to methat his faith kind of came out
in these diaries.
It wasn't so, it wasn't soobvious, it wasn't so forward
with it in his protesting ofputin and campaigning against
him and calling out hiscorruption right writers.
Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
It's that way, like uh uh, yuri, zhivago and
pasternak as well.
Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Yeah, yeah.
So in in hindsight, then yousee where all the power came
from from his spiritualfortitude.
So here's, here's a part of hiswriting from march 26th I'm
guessing this might have beenfrom 2022 or 23, having died in
2024.
Um, it says march 26th and hesays I have the second technique
(01:09:21):
.
He's talking about techniquesof like surviving in this prison
.
The second technique is so oldyou may roll your eyes
heavenward when you hear it.
It is religion.
It is doable only for believers, but does not demand zealous,
fervent prayer by the prisonbarracks window three times a
day, a very common phenomenon inprisons.
I've always thought and saidopenly that being a believer
(01:09:43):
makes it easier to live yourlife and, to an even greater
extent, engage in oppositionpolitics.
Whoa, faith makes life simpler.
The initial position for thisexercise is the same as for the
previous one.
You lie in your bunk, looking upat the one above you and ask
yourself whether you are aChristian in your heart of
(01:10:05):
hearts.
It is not essential for you tobelieve some old guys in the
desert once lived to be 800years old or that the sea was
literally parted in front ofsomeone, but are you a disciple
of the religion whose foundersacrificed himself for others,
paying the price for their sins.
Do you believe in theimmortality of the soul and the
rest of that cool stuff?
(01:10:26):
If you could honestly answeryes, what is there left for you
to worry about?
Why, under your breath, wouldyou mumble a hundred times
something you read from a heftytome you keep in your bedside
table?
Don't worry about the morrow,because the morrow is perfectly
capable of taking care of itself.
My job is to seek the kingdom ofGod and his righteousness and
(01:10:48):
leave it to good old Jesus andthe rest of his family to deal
with everything else.
They won't let me down and willsort out all my headaches.
As they say in prison.
Here, they will take my punchesfor me.
Wow, that's something else.
It is something else.
It's really, really.
I don't even know what the wordis.
Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Well, on that note, Travis, we come to the end of
our reflection here today, Ithink.
Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
And next time we're going to go back in time a
little bit and see where thiskind of prophetic tradition has
its roots.
We're going to check into avisionary by the name of William
Blake.
All right, well, thank you,professor.
Ok, looking forward to it.
Travis, really appreciate it.
Have a great day.
Ok, you too.
(01:11:40):
Bye, bye, bye, bye, appreciateit.
Have a great day.
Okay, you too.
Bye-bye, bye-bye.
There's something here for allof you, whether you're a skeptic
or a believer or somewhere inbetween.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
(01:12:01):
nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been a SubversiveOrthodoxy podcast with Travis
Mullen and Professor Nchasti.
Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff without a
parachute, like I'm high oncannabis.
Podcast with Travis Mullen andProfessor Nchosti Outro Music.
Creation calls for self-surrender, not loud noise
and cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face.
Live so that, in the finalcount, we draw unto ourselves
love from space.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
That is a divine obscurity, isn't it?
Something we don't know in ourpublicity-seeking?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, influencer social media world.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
It's the opposite.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Right.
You go underground, into yoursoul and into your connection
with all humanity.
You think slow to think fast.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Welcome to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast.
I'm your host, travis Mullen,and I'm excited to have you with
us.
This is a podcast aboutphilosophy and meaning.
It is about how we as humanswithstand the challenges of our
cultures.
It is about the generalJudeo-Christian revelation of
God in the world and how thebloodiest century ever recorded
(01:05):
couldn't kill that revelation.
It's also about how thatrevelation, tossed aside as
archaic, outdated and obsolete,may be the very life-giving
power we need to resist thisdistracted techno state we're
living in full of anxiety,depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It's great entertainment, thrilling
entertainment.
It's the inside story packedwith drama.
Sometimes, when I get bored, Ilike to fly above the clouds and
I ask the Lord what does ittake to get down?
And every time I ask, heteaches me the same thing Just
(01:48):
bleed over your head.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
What happens when a poet's pen becomes a weapon
against tyranny and hismasterpiece shakes the
foundations of a regime?
Boris Pasternak's life was astory of pride, sorrow and
defiance.
A man who dared to write oflove, faith and freedom in a
world determined to silence him.
Boris Pasternak was born inMoscow in 1890 to a cultured
(02:13):
Jewish family.
His father, leonid, was aprominent painter, and his
mother, rosa, was a giftedconcert pianist.
Their home was a haven forcreativity, frequented by
writers, musicians and artists,including Leo, tolstoy and
Rachmaninoff.
Pasternak grew up immersed inart, but he did not find his
voice right away.
(02:33):
As a young man he pursued musiccomposition, studying under the
renowned Alexander Scriabin.
But music wasn't his calling.
Philosophy followed, first inMoscow, then in Germany, at the
University of Marburg.
Still, he felt restless.
By his early 20s he turned topoetry, discovering the medium
that would define his life.
(02:53):
His 1922 collection my SisterLife was a revelation, marking
him as one of Russia's leadingpoets, with its vivid imagery
and emotional depth.
The 1920s brought about theBolshevik Revolution, a seismic
shift in Russian life.
Pasternak adapted outwardly butremained inwardly free.
The communist regime demandedart serve the state, but
(03:17):
Pasternak resisted, quietly andsubtly.
His work celebrated theindividual nature and beauty,
values at odds with Sovietideology.
To survive, he translated theworks of Shakespeare, goethe and
others, mastering the art ofbringing foreign voices into
Russian while shielding his own.
Faith came to Pasternak slowly,almost imperceptibly.
(03:40):
He was raised in an agnostichousehold with no real
connection to religious belief.
Yet the turbulence of the war,revolution and the deep
questions posed by humansuffering led him to
Christianity.
In his 40s His poetry began toreflect his faith, a quiet but
profound trust in Christ as asymbol of love and redemption.
This spiritual journey wouldculminate in his masterpiece Dr
(04:04):
Zhivago, where faith becomes acentral theme.
The 1930s were a time of terror.
Stalin's purges swept throughthe Soviet Union and many of
Pasternak's friends andcontemporaries.
Writers like Osip Mandelstam,were arrested, sent to gulags or
executed.
Pasternak himself was underconstant surveillance.
Executed.
(04:26):
Pasternak himself was underconstant surveillance.
His work drew suspicion, but heescaped imprisonment, likely
because of his fame and hisability to steer clear of overt
political dissent.
Still, the pressure was immenseand he was forced to write
cautiously.
During World War II, pasternakremained in the Soviet Union,
writing patriotic poems andtranslations.
Stalin's death in 1953 brought abrief thaw in Soviet life,
(04:47):
allowing Pasternak to write withgreater freedom.
It was during this period thathe completed Dr Zhivago.
The novel was an epic tale oflove, war and the search for
meaning, set against thebackdrop of the Russian
Revolution.
It was also deeply spiritual,reflecting Pasternak's Christian
faith and his belief in theenduring power of the human soul
(05:07):
.
The Soviet Union refused topublish the book.
It was smuggled to Italy andpublished in 1957.
The West hailed it as amasterpiece and in 1958,
pasternak was awarded the NobelPeace Prize for Literature.
He's quoted as saying I am proudof being born in Russia, but my
refusal to accept the prizeshould not be misinterpreted.
(05:28):
My independence and freedom asa writer are more important to
me than my honors.
The Soviet regime saw this asan act of betrayal.
Pasternak was vilified in thepress, branded a traitor and
forced to publicly decline theprize.
(05:51):
He said I strain broke hisalready fragile health.
Isolated, hounded andostracized, he spent his final
years in his country house 20miles outside of Moscow.
He died on May 30, 1960, at 70years old, just a year after the
Nobel Prize debacle.
Thousands attended his funeral,despite the government's
(06:13):
efforts to suppress it, chantinglines from his poetry in
defiance of Soviet censorship.
Pasternak's life was extremelyresilient, a man who clung to
his art and faith even as theworld around him prohibited.
Both His words outlived theregime that sought to silence
him.
A testament to the power ofliterature and the enduring
human spirit.
(06:33):
Pasternak's poem Hamlet,written as part of Dr Zhivago,
captures this sense of duty,faith and the weight of
individual responsibility in theface of immense adversity.
The tempest roars against thedarkened sky.
The final moment tolls.
My fate draws near.
I'm on the stage, alone,beneath the eye.
(06:55):
I live to bear this cross, topersevere.
To all I give the gift ofliberty, but I must bow before
the end and die.
Now I'd like to welcomeProfessor Larry back to the show
.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Hello Tavis, how are you?
I'm doing great.
I'm doing great, and it'salways great to have an
opportunity to talk about BorisPasternak and his wonderful
witness and his work and theconfusions that attend a writer
(07:35):
who became famous during themiddle of the Cold War and spent
his whole life being labeled byother people and misunderstood
life being labeled by otherpeople and misunderstood, except
by his contemporaries and thoseother writers in Russia who
were living very much the samelife.
He was living in internal exile.
They used to call it People whowere living under a regime that
(07:59):
was totalitarian andauthoritarian and wouldn't allow
them to have a public voice.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
So his and that's probably very relevant to today
in various countries, and maybesome people feel that way, even
in our own country, underwhichever governments in power,
even though it's nottotalitarian by these real
standards, but some people areclaiming that on, you know, on
the right and the left, atdifferent times.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, I think a lot of writers feel that way all the
time, especially since whenyou're living in a country whose
business is business and notwhose business is prophecy or
truth-telling, which is probablymost countries of the world it
(08:48):
always makes writers and artistsa little bit countercultural
all the time.
It's just that, with Pasternakand the Russian writers of his
generation and the one thatfollowed, it are extreme
examples of this and so becomereally good object lessons in
(09:12):
courage and in, you know, faithand in dedication to their art
and their poetry and things likethat.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Yeah, like fortitude.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yes and fortitude, yes and fortitude.
And you know Pasternak died theyear after A lot of the.
There's a wonderful anthology.
I don't know if we have it onthe podcast yet, but Yevgeny
Yevishenko's 20th centuryRussian poetry Silver and Steel
(09:50):
20th century Russian poetrySilver and Steel is a collection
of all the poets from the twogenerations, the Silver Age up
to the end of the 20th century,and Yerushchenko writes short
biographies before each of thewriters and there are hundreds
of them some of whom only hadone poem published in their
(10:12):
lifetime or no poems publishedin their lifetime and lived in
obscurity and were only laterrecovered by Yevashenko as
spokesman for their generationand included in this over
1,000-word anthology, which is amasterpiece.
(10:33):
I'd recommend it to anybodyinterested in poetry or 20th
century literature or theRussian experience, and just the
little biographies alone arejust eye-opening.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Now, on that note of Silver and Steel.
So that's the anthology thatcollected all these poets, that
most of them had to live prettyunderground, or their poetry was
even underground, and then heput it together.
You told me one incrediblestory.
If you might, would you mindsharing that again?
Do you remember the detailsabout the street fighter?
Speaker 2 (11:11):
uh, well.
Well, there there are.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
I don't know who you're referring to, um one guy
started as a street fighter andthen he said you know, he had
one poem in there.
And it's like how many did thisguy?
May have, may have had, butsomehow this one poem made it.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
Yes, a lot of them were were started as street
fighters, because a lot of themwere were revolutionaries at the
beginning of the 20th centuryand they they united in a
collective endeavor to overthrowthe czar.
But then, after the revolution,when the Bolsheviks took over,
(11:49):
there was a purge andauthoritarian regime got rid of
Trotsky and Lenin died.
And then Stalin became theauthoritarian force that united
the country Well, didn't unitethe country, but took over the
country behind his extremeauthoritarianism.
And a lot of these people thatsupported the revolution found
(12:13):
themselves enemies of the state,and so their stories are told
in the Sun and sun and steelanthology, the uh, silver and
steel anthology, 20th centuryrussian poetry, and there is a
guy I I I was looking for himthe other night and I can't find
(12:33):
him in there.
But a lot of them are similar inthat they they fought in the
russians, they fought in therussian civil war and then they
were uh during World War II andfought against the Nazis in
World War II.
And then, because they wereconsidered enemies of the state,
because they had said thingsagainst Stalin, they got sent to
(12:57):
the gulag that Solzhenitsynwrote so eloquently about and
lived a life in prison there.
And then, when they werereleased, they would move back
to Russia and then get deportedto France or Germany and live
the rest of their lives in exileand their poetry was sometimes
(13:23):
published, sometimes not, orsometimes only found after the
fact, and so there's a lot ofstories like that ended up
(13:53):
becoming famous, you know, andinstalled in.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
Russian textbooks as examples of great Russian poetry
during the World War II.
And then you told me that BorisPasternak was in that anthology
right.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Yes, he was in that anthology, but they didn't at
the time when Stalin was stillalive.
They didn't want him, theydidn't want to acknowledge him.
So they listed the poem as atraditional folk poem.
Oh really.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, because it was a Wait.
So there's only one poem ofPasternak in the anthology, and
it was.
They wouldn't even say his name.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Wait.
So there's only one poem ofPasternak in the anthology and
they wouldn't even say his name.
Well, in the one that wasbefore Yevyshenko's anthology,
yes, oh, okay, the symphony thatwas based on the Battle at
(14:49):
Leningrad became a nationalpatriotic epic symphony, but it
had nods to dissidents and nodsto the anti-authoritarian
tradition within the Russianrevolutionary movement, which
made him, you know, a little bitcontroversial.
(15:10):
But when Stalin died in 53,there was, and Khrushchev took
over.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Well, you're getting too far ahead.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
We got to talk about Pasternak.
Yeah, let's talk about.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Pasternak, because he's a great example of that
part of the Russian literarymovement.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Yeah, I want to talk about a few of the claims about
him before Stalin was dead.
Yeah, but here's two of thequotes from your book by other
people about Pasternak which arereally, really cool, quotes
From Thomas Merton saying, fromThomas Merton's literary essays
(15:48):
Pasternak's Christianity issomething very simple, very
rudimentary, deeply sincere,utterly personal and yet, for
all its questionable expressions, obviously impregnated with the
true spirit of the Gospels andthe liturgy obviously
impregnated with the true spiritof the gospels and the liturgy.
And then how do you say Marina'slast name?
(16:09):
Tetsatavia, tetsatavia,tetsatavia?
Yeah, in Art, in the Light ofConscience, I love her quote
about him.
She says Myakovsky, myakovsky,myakovsky, myakovsky, myakovsky
acts upon us Pasternak within us.
(16:29):
Pasternak isn't read by us, hetakes place in us.
I mean, that's quite a profoundthing to say about another poet
.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, Myakovsky and Pasternak were the two great
poets of the revolution.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
So he's getting that compliment from the other great
poet of his time.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yes, and Mayakovsky.
Maybe I'll read the littlesummary of Mayakovsky's life
from the Yevyshenko anthologysummary of Mayakovsky's life
from the Yevyshenko anthology.
But Mayakovsky was the publicvoice of the revolution and he
(17:16):
wrote poems that could berecited over loudspeakers at
rallies and he wrote poems formovie scripts and public
propaganda, rallies and thingslike that.
So his voice was kind of onewith the revolution and
(18:09):
Pasternak was.
You would read his poetries andyou would walk off by yourself
and have a spiritual, meditativeexperience, whereas Mayakovsky
you would hear at a rally andyou would feel like one with the
revolution.
And so they were kind offrenemies.
They both admired each other'swork but at the same time they
(18:37):
were like polar opposites whenit came to what they represented
in Russian poetry, in thepolitical aspects of the
revolution, that he ended updying very young, whereas
Pasternak survived, as you sowell described him oh, I'm
disappearing as you so welldescribed him, and ended up only
(19:03):
emerging after Stalin's death.
Ended up only emerging, youknow, after Stalin's death, and
not even known in the West untilafter he won, pretty much till
after he won the Nobel Prize.
But here's what Yelishenko saysyeah, as a boy Mayakovsky would
(19:28):
climb into a huge clay wine vatand read poetry aloud, trying
to swell the power of his voicewith the vat's resonance.
Mayakovsky was not onlyMayakovsky, but the powerful
echo of his own voice.
Oratorical intonation was notjust his style, but his very
(19:49):
character.
While in Bukov, a president inMoscow, in 1909, when he was
only 16, mayakovsky becameengrossed in the Bible, one of
the few books available to himthere, and his early, thunderous
verses were strewn withbiblical metaphors whimsically
tied to his boyish blasphemies.
(20:11):
He intuitively perceived thatthe street will convulse this is
a line from Mayakovsky thestreet will convulse, tongueless
, with no means to cry out andspeak.
And so he gave the word to thestreet and thus revolutionized
Russian poetry.
There was no question forMayakovsky about whether to
(20:35):
accept the October Revolution.
He was himself the revolution,with all its power, its excess,
its epic vulgarity and evenbrutality, its errors and
tragedies.
Mayakovsky's revolutionary zealis evident in that this great
(20:55):
love lyric poet committed hisverse to the service of
ideological limericks,advertising billboards of
politics.
In this zeal, however, lay histragedy, for he consciously
stood on the throat of his ownsong, a position he once
underscored brilliantly.
I want to be understood by mynative land, but I won't be
(21:20):
understood, I will be passedthrough my native land like a
slanting rain.
His despondency and personalaffairs, as much as his
disillusionment with Stalinistpolitics, led him to shoot
himself with a revolver he hadused as a prop in a movie 12
years earlier.
Because he was both revered andreviled, his death held,
(21:46):
profound though, variousmeanings for everyone in Russia.
Tens of thousands of peopleattended his funeral.
Mayakovsky was canonized byStalin, who said about him
Mayakovsky was and remains thebest and most talented poet of
our time.
Best and most talented poet ofour time.
(22:08):
Indifference to his poetry is acrime.
This was, in Pasternak's view,mayakovsky's second death, but
he died only as a political poet, as a great poet of love and
loneliness.
He survived and is stillrevered in Russia today.
Wow, that's really cool.
(22:29):
So they were the two voices ofthe revolution, but Mayakovsky
was gone.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Mayakovsky was basically kind of co-opted by
Stalin for a while.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, he was named as a Stalinist poet and then he
couldn't stand thecontradictions and apparently he
was embroiled in a complicatedlove affair.
So they don't really know themotivation for his suicide.
But, as a lot of these poets inthe anthology have deaths that
(23:01):
are either suicides or Naziconcentration camps or Soviet
concentration camps, or MayaTsevotavia killed herself in
anticipation of her city beingtaken over by the Nazis, and it
turned out that the invasion bythe Nazis had been repulsed by
(23:26):
the Soviet army, so she didn'treally even need to do that.
But it's another one of thesetragic events where people are
driven to despair against theirown better interests.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Something to mention is that in the Silver and Steel
anthology I just found thesethere's about four honorable
mentions.
I don't know if there's one youcould find by Osip Mandelstam.
Oh yeah, but it says his poemwas so defiant against Stalin it
led to his exile and death.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
He got killed for a poem.
Yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
It sounds like one poem that was so defiant run by
(24:31):
the state, and I think one ofthe things about that that's
kind of hard for us tounderstand is how important
these poets were and still arein the Russian cultural
imagination.
The poets were kind of like thephilosophers and social critics
of their time, so when theywrote a poem people took it
seriously, and we don'tparticularly take our poets that
(24:51):
seriously.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Yeah, I was just about to say that After our
first couple episodes, a buddyof mine and I I went backpacking
with six guys, five guys andone of them had listened to the
episodes and he had aconversation with his dad or
somebody and they were sayinghow, um, they had heard.
you know, in america, a poem youknow might be thought about or
(25:17):
taught in a literature class orwhatever, but in russia a poem
could get you killed and rightthey take, they take poetry,
which is a real difference incultures which I actually
appreciate because I love.
I love poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:31):
Well.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
I don't know how you know we got.
So I think modern American lifeis pretty far from poetry.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
As a normal, thing that always blew my mind was I
was reading a book on the Battleof Leningrad, which was one of
the bloodiest battles in WorldWar II in which the Russians
took tremendous casualties, butalso part of the turning point
(26:04):
in World War II, and throughoutthe entire battle they kept the
libraries open so that peoplecould find spiritual sustenance
by reading Russian literatureand poetry.
And I know that during COVID weclosed down a lot of our
(26:27):
libraries here.
Wow, and I'm thinking, if you—that's a crazy contrast.
We closed down our libraries,like even in the college where I
taught.
You know they've had thelibrary closed for remodeling
now for almost two years and theSoviets in World War II
(26:52):
wouldn't even close it down forthe battle that's taking over
six months to complete.
That is crazy.
So it is a difference inpsychology and how these people
look about what they valued.
Yeah, I wanted to read you oneI was looking for.
(27:13):
You asked me to look for someof the religious or faith
dimension to Pasternak, which wegot a little bit with Merton's
essay on essays on Pasternak.
But in the life you may, yousay may be your own, an American
(27:36):
pilgrimage.
Paul Ely writes about ThomasMerton, dorothy Day, walker,
percy and Flannery O'Connor andthere's this wonderful like
three-page description of ofThomas Merton's relationship
with Boris Pasternak that I canread you a little bit from.
(27:59):
But I'll just paraphrase alittle bit of what happened and
then I'll read you from bothMerton's letters to Pasternak
and also his essays on Pasternak.
It's kind of interestingbecause Merton was corresponding
(28:20):
with Boris Pasternak.
He got an FBI file in theUnited States.
Oh yeah, because J Edgar Hooverthought he was corresponding
with a communist.
I just love that.
Whereas you know, I love when aChristian monk gets a FBI file
(28:42):
in Russia.
Boris Pasternak, who was indanger of being thrown in prison
at any moment, would be thoughtof as a communist contact that
Merton would be talking to.
But anyway, to get back to.
So, in LA's book, you know, theLife you Save May Be your own.
(29:04):
If any of you have that book,it's on page 258 through 261.
And it turns out that Mertonwrote a letter to Pasternak
because he had read the poetrycollection what is it?
(29:26):
My Sister Life.
My Sister Life, yeah, which iskind of an autobiographical as
well as lyric work.
And he connected with Pasternakand saw in Pasternak a kindred
soul.
So he wrote a personal letterto Pasternak and this was before
(29:49):
Dr Zhivago had even beentranslated into English.
So he hadn't read Dr Zhivagoyet, he had just read the
translated poetry in my SisterLife.
And so he wrote this in hisletter to Pasternak.
(30:10):
This is Merton to Pasternak.
Although we are separated bygreat distances and even greater
barriers, it gives me pleasureto speak to you as to one whom I
feel to be a kindred mind.
It may surprise you when I sayin all sincerity that I feel
much more kinship with you inyour writing than with most of
(30:33):
the great modern writers in theWest.
When you write of your youth inthe Urals, in Marburg, in
Moscow, I feel as if it were myown experience, as if I were you
.
With other writers I can shareideas, but you seem to
communicate something deeper.
It's as if we met on a deeperlevel of life, on which
(30:57):
individuals are not separatebeings.
In the language familiar to meas a Catholic monk, it is if we
were known to each other in God.
And then the Illy says at thetime, dr Zhivago, pasternak's
(31:19):
only novel was soon to appear inEnglish.
Although he was nearly 70 yearsold and had an eminence in
Russia since the 1920s, his lifestory was just becoming known
in the West, told in such a waythat he seemed to be Merton's
perfect double state a mystic ina secular society, a religious
(31:48):
artist whose embattledJudeo-Christian faith was vital
to his work.
A wise man whose dacha, anartist's retreat at the
outskirts of Moscow, was a placeof pilgrimage for writers from
Russia and the West alike, notunlike Merton's Hermitage.
(32:12):
And then this was so.
Then Pasternak responds toMerton's letter and says I,
really I connected with yourletter.
You know, it seemed like youand I are kindred souls and I
(32:37):
hope you know we stay in contactand blah blah blah was very
excited as having made thisconnection with somebody who he
wouldn't normally think of asbeing a compatriot in the faith.
Yeah, and so he writes in hisjournal I think this is from.
(33:04):
No, this is from another letterto Pasternak after he read Dr
Zhivago, and Merton says thegreat business of our time is
this for one man to find himselfin another one who is on the
other side of the world.
The novel was full of sentencesthat might have been written in
(33:28):
characters Merton felt he knew.
In fact, he confided DrZhivago's faithful companion,
laura, was a woman he hadalready met and went on to share
the scandalous secret of a monkwho is in love with a girl, and
a Jew at that, and what he wastalking about, what Merton's
(34:00):
talking about there, is that hehad a dream where he met a girl
and her name was Proverb, andshe became an image of biblical
wisdom and also Merton's sort ofmuse for some poems about the
Lady Sophia of the Bible, wisdomcommentaries.
(34:20):
And so he's sharing that withPastor Knnak as finding that
same character in Laura.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
It's such a special connection between them.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, not to accept the Nobel Prize because the
Soviets claimed that it was apropaganda stunt by the West to
celebrate a minor poet againsttheir Soviet great writers, who
were just yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
An amateur poet.
That doesn't stand up to ourpropaganda.
Yeah, I mean that does stand upto our propaganda.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Yeah, I mean that does stand up to our propaganda.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Two things I want to say.
Pasternak, I do want to ask youthe question of telling this
backstory of him describinghimself as an atheist who lost
his faith in atheism.
Yeah, I want to hear that story.
But before we do that, I dowant to share.
I did find Osip Mandelstam.
Oh, you did find osipmandelstam.
Oh, you did find the intro.
I found the poem that got himkilled.
(35:30):
Okay, well, why don't we readthat?
That this is on a, on a blog bya kathy young who says says
she's a russian journalist andshe did her own work on
translating it into english witha friend.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Uh, because it's very clunky coming from russian
english, because it rhymes inrussian yeah and doesn't rhyme
in english right, you probablypronounce the names correctly
too yeah, and I won't be doingthat um, also, also, it sounds
like there's a lot of russian Imean a lot of english versions,
and none of them were good, shesaid right
Speaker 1 (36:00):
so here's.
This is osip mandelstam'sdefiant poem against stalin that
led to his exile and death.
Uh, apparently it's calledstalin epigram.
So it says with no land feltbeneath us, we live day to day.
(36:21):
Our speech barely carries 10paces away each half snatched
conversation Remembering theHighlander.
Up in the Kremlin, his fingersare greasy as overfed worms and
final as cast iron weights arehis words.
Cockroach whiskers are laughingand winking and his boot tops
(36:42):
are gleaming and twinkling.
There's a rabble around him ofchiefs with thin necks.
That's awesome.
He plays.
He plays with half humans.
He's got at his Beck somemewling, some whimpering and
some hissing.
He goes poke, he goes boom, andthey listen like horseshoes.
He drops one by his, one by one, his decrees to the groin, to
(37:05):
the head, to the groin, to thehead, to the eye, to the knees.
Every killing's a sweetcelebration and stands tall.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
The broad-chested.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Osation Osation O-S-S-E-T-I-A-N.
Yeah, I guess.
So I don't know that yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
So, yeah, that got him killed, basically mocking
him right, which is, you know,our politicians take much, much
more grief than that.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, no this is not.
Yeah.
So when people, when people sayfascist and authoritarian, I
mean there's a huge spectrum.
Yeah, yeah, I mean we don'treally know about that.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
It's almost a little disingenuous to say that these
days yeah, yeah, because uh,that, that was, that was truly,
uh, a reign of terror was stolenyeah, you mean you're, you're
arrested and imprisoned all thetime for nothing.
Speaker 1 (37:59):
I mean that's, that's authoritarianism yeah and
fascism.
Yeah, um, you know, a lot ofpeople today accusing that of
our current president would say,well, it's a slippery slope, it
all starts somewhere.
That's kind of the argument,but still to call it the same
thing is just not very genuine.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
Also, there's a reading from these figures are
interesting because with Russianhistory in the 20th century is
the story of that entire sweepright From ecstatic revolution
to reign of terror, to thaw, tonew reign of terror, you know,
(38:41):
and to have these people's livesand their poetry and their work
, like Pasternak, pass throughall of these historical moments
with integrity and honesty andstatements of conscience.
Speaker 1 (39:01):
That's a great observation.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah.
Like the moral calm andcenteredness lasted through
various iterations of theirgovernment, up and down, the ups
and downs and takeovers animportant figure and his voice
(39:33):
fits into a tradition that wedon't know as much about in the
West, because his voice, thatvoice in those final journal
entries that were published inthe New Yorker this year or last
year, august, sound a lot likeSolzhenitsyn, sound a lot like
Pasternak and it sounds a lotlike Yuri Zhivago in Pasternak's
(39:55):
work of a person of integritywho refused to remake his vision
of the world in terms of thepolitical ups and downs of
particular movements and partiesand terrorist organizations.
Speaker 1 (40:17):
Yeah, well, here I have our next three steps here.
I want to show you something Ifound where I see an echo
between Pasternak and WendellBerry.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
And I found it off of reading back to the part of a
poem you quoted in your book onPasternak and then remembering
this Wendell Berry poem and Ijust pulled them up side by side
and I see this little clue andI wonder if Wendell Berry was
influenced by this poem ofPasternak.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
Okay, read the part from Pasternak and Berry and
we'll see.
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
And then after that I want to get the backstory on
how, on how he lost his faith inatheism.
And then I want to move on toAlexi.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
So here's.
Here's the poem from Pasternak,captured the quiet courage of
his fellow poets in this poem,in his poem on the anonymity
required of those who refuse totow the party line.
So this is him talking aboutthe anonymity required to deal
in the situations he had to livethrough.
(41:25):
He says creation calls forself-surrender, not loud noise
and cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face.
Live so that in the final countwe draw unto ourselves love
from space.
So plunge yourself intoobscurity and conceal there your
(41:46):
tracks, but be alive.
Alive, your full share, aliveuntil the end.
I love that.
Speaker 2 (41:55):
That is a divine obscurity, isn't it Something we
don't know in our publicityseeking?
Speaker 1 (42:02):
Yeah, influencer social media world.
It's the opposite.
It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
Right.
You go underground, into yoursoul and into your connection
with all humanity.
You think slow to think fast.
You don't think fast to thinkslow.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Yeah, and as the funny thing about influencers
right now, like what, whatdominates the young people my,
my age and younger is socialmedia influencers and they they
have a thousand youtube videosand blogs and everything about
how to build their brand and howto make themselves influencers,
just like the guys teaching uh,you know how to write in front
(42:41):
of solzhenitsyn, he's so annoyedbut, but here's pasternak, with
no social media, no internet,no email, interacting with
Merton from across the globe inan obscure, quiet conversation
through letters.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
And he said I'm going to read it again, because just
if you think of social media andmedia in general now think of
and and news cycles, you knowall that noise.
Just think about this poemagain creation calls for
self-surrender, not loud noiseand cheap success.
Life must be lived withoutfalse face, lived so that, in
(43:23):
the final count, we draw untoourselves love from space.
So plunge yourself intoobscurity and conceal there your
tracks, but be alive.
Alive, your full share, aliveuntil the end.
It totally resonates with mebecause I felt like I was in
obscurity for a while because ofsocial media making me feel
(43:46):
like, oh, I'm not doing enough,no one even knows who I am, like
the fame, fame of um, ourculture.
It's like if you're not famousand you're just kind of some
dude, you know yeah right,celebrity or nothing yeah, and
here's wendell, here's wendellberry, kind of echoing a similar
sentiment.
Let's hear that it's at the endof his uh manifesto of the mad
(44:08):
farmer liberation front.
That's great, which is probablyhis most at the end of his uh
manifesto of the mad farmerliberation front.
That's great, which is probablyhis most famous poem.
One of his most famous poemsand we'll get into window berry
down the road.
But yeah I love this, thislittle echo here.
He said it's in the middle tothe end of the of this paragraph
.
Go with your love to the fields, lie down in the shade, rest
your head in her lap, swearallegiance to what is nighest
(44:31):
your thoughts, and this is themain part.
As soon as the generals and thepoliticos can predict the
motions of your mind, lose it.
Leave it as a sign to mark thefalse trail the way you didn't
go.
Be like the fox who makes moretracks than necessary.
Summon the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
(44:54):
But the idea of making thefalse tracks sounded like
sounded like Pasternak sayingconceal your tracks.
Yes, pretty cool.
Yeah, that is kind of like.
Intentionally subvert all thenoise and powers that be in a
quietness.
Yes, they both are saying that.
It's kind of awesome.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
And and and Merton is an interesting co-conspirator
because he became a monastic andand ultimately a hermit because
his order wasn't isolatedenough for his tastes.
(45:37):
And so then he comes acrossPasternak and finds a kindred
soul and writes him a letter onsnail mail and they have like
maybe three letters and thenthings get crazy for pasternak
and he, he writes back and says,uh, I can't write you anymore
(45:57):
for a while.
Um, don't write me.
Uh, I'll write you, but youknow, wait for my next letter
because I'm dealing with a lotof stuff.
Wow, and that was the last heheard from him.
Oh, man, and so those you canget Merton's side of that
correspondence in a collectionof his letters to writers called
(46:22):
A Courage for Truth.
But unfortunately that doesn'tinclude the other writers'
responses back to him, so youhave to kind of chase those down
, if they even exist in English.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Now one more thing I want to tell you about Pasternak
before we ask the question howdid he lose his faith in atheism
?
There's a modern day currentpodcaster called Lexx friedman.
He's actually russian, he'sfrom a couple towns I cannot
pronounce, and he's he'samerican.
He moved here when he was 11after the collapse of the soviet
(46:58):
union uh-huh to chicago area.
He's extremely smart, like he'sa super computer scientist, but
you can just tell he's a brainof brains.
He's going to be a biginfluence from MIT and stuff.
He's 41 and he's on the JoeRogan podcast and I'm hearing
him quote Pasternak.
(47:19):
He's reading a poem that somefighter, a Russian fighter named
Bavazir Satiev.
This Russian fighter, a Russianfighter named Bavazir Satiev.
This Russian fighter I believehe's Russian he quotes this poem
before every fight.
Oh really.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, by going to the library during the Battle of
Leningrad right Getting thespiritual sustenance he needs.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Yeah, it's pretty awesome the way he read the poem
in English.
He's like it's hard to read itin English.
Yeah, it didn't sound.
I couldn't quite grasp the poembased on the English.
Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
I would love to see it in writing so I could grasp
it better.
But yeah, so tell me about howpastor knacks and then maybe
chime in or back and forth withsolstice.
But how did pastor knack losehim his uh, faith in atheism?
Speaker 2 (48:20):
now as to uh pastor knacks uh losing his faith in
atheism.
He was born into a Jewishfamily but, as you point out,
they were not particularlyreligious.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic.
But he had a nanny who was aRussian Orthodox nanny, oh yeah,
and she would take him tochurch with her and she would
sort of proselytize him with hersort of peasant form of Russian
Orthodoxy which stuck withPasternak as a primitive but
(49:10):
moving expression of faith.
And so as he slowly began to bemore skeptical of dialectical
material, you know, like theconventional dialectical
materialism which would be sortof the conventional materialism
in the West, you know thatpeople embrace skepticism with a
(49:40):
faith that once they becomeskeptical of skepticism then
that opens them up to maybe someother ways of looking at the
world.
They become less dogmatic and alittle bit more reflective.
And that same experiencehappened to Pasternak and you
can see that it's not so much anevolution in the poetry as in
(50:05):
the character of Zhivago.
Speaker 1 (50:09):
Do you feel like he told his conversion story in
Zhivago?
Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, I think he did.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
That'd be awesome to read.
I still haven't read it yet.
I just learned about it fromyou.
Speaker 2 (50:19):
Yeah, and he's trained as a doctor, he's
trained as a skeptic, ascientist, and yet he finds this
Soviet political faith sort oftaking over his own skepticism.
And then he falls in love withLaura and he begins to see
through the ideology of hisfriends who became military
(50:46):
leaders in the revolution and sohard-nosed Bolsheviks, and so
that kind of turned him like inDr Zhivago, that would be
Strelnikov, who is now amilitary guy who toes the party
(51:11):
line, in fact is an agent ofrevolution.
And there's a passage oh yeah,it is in Paul Elie's book from
Dr Zhivago, I think where he isdescribing I think it's here,
maybe it's in Merton's essaywhere he's describing Strelnikov
(51:43):
and what happens to his friendthey were college friends who's
become a leader of the military.
Let's see here Okay, here it iswhat Zhivago opposes to
communism.
This is Merton's essay.
(52:04):
What Zhivago opposes tocommunism is therefore not a
defense of Western democracy,not a political platform for
some kind of liberalism, andstill less is it a track in
favor of formal religion.
Zhivago confronts communismwith life itself and leaves us
(52:25):
in the presence of theinevitable conclusions itself
and leaves us in the presence ofthe inevitable conclusions.
Communism has proposed tocontrol life with a rigid system
and the tyranny of artificialforms.
Those who have believed in thisdelusion and yielded themselves
up to it as a superior forcehave paid the penalty of ceasing
(52:47):
to be complete human beings, byceasing to live in the full
sense of the word, by ceasing tobe men or women.
Even the idealistic and devotedStrelnikov becomes the victim
of his own idealisms, becomesthe victim of his own idealisms.
(53:13):
And Laura says of him and thenthis is a quote from Dr Zhivago
it was as if something abstracthad crept into his face and made
it colorless, as if a livinghuman being had become the
embodiment of a principle, theimage of an idea.
I realized that this hadhappened to him because he had
(53:36):
handed himself over to asuperior force that is deadening
and pitiless and will not sparehim in the end.
It seemed to me that he was amarked man and that this was the
seal of his doom.
The beast in man is not tamedby threats, but must be brought
(53:58):
into harmony with life and madeto serve creativeness and love
by the influence of inner andspiritual music.
And then this is another quotefrom Dr Zhivago but what you
were just reading was Merton,right?
Speaker 1 (54:15):
Yeah, that was Merton Talking about Zhivago.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Except for that quote about Strelnikov, that was from
Dr Zhivago.
Yeah, and then this is from DrZhivago.
What for centuries raised manabove the beast?
And the centuries you couldassume as a reference to
(54:38):
Christendom?
Raised man above the beast isnot the crudgel, but an inward
music, the irresistible power ofunarmed truth, the powerful
attraction of its example.
It's always been assumed thatthe most important things in the
(54:59):
gospel are the ethical maximsand commandments, but for me the
most important thing is thatChrist speaks in parables taken
from life, that he explains thetruth in terms of everyday
reality.
The idea that underlies this isthat communion between mortals
is immortal and that the wholeof life is symbolic because it's
(55:24):
meaningful.
That's from Dr Zhivago.
And then here's Martin, kind offollowing that through.
Everyone has been struck, not tomention embarrassed, by the
overpowering symbolic richnessof Dr Zhivago.
(55:48):
In fact, pasternak, whether heknows it or not, is punched
fully into the mainstream of thelost tradition of natural
contemplation which flowed amongthe Greek fathers after it had
been set in motion by origin.
Of course, the tradition hasnot been altogether lost and
(56:10):
Pastor Knack has come upon it inthe Orthodox Church.
The fact is clear.
In any case, he reads thescriptures with the avidity and
spiritual imagination of acontemplative, and he looks on
the world with the avidity andspiritual imagination of a
contemplative, and he looks onthe world with the illuminated
(56:31):
eyes of a Coppadesian fathers,but without their dogmatic and
ascetic preoccupations.
So it's sort of like the.
(56:57):
It's sort of that the Pasternakcomes to faith again through
being a writer in natural andnatural contempl, and and and
subsequent speeches that he gave, however, and his letters to to
Merton, however secret thosewere, having not even made
(57:19):
themselves public until, youknow, maybe two years before he
died.
Yeah, which is prettyinteresting there.
Speaker 1 (57:27):
Well, the, the pasternak story.
I mean well, first of all,before I transition um what I
see in pasternak and javaga, Imean uh and merton, just from
the, just from the brief amountof writings I've come across so
far with you, and what we'rereading is super deep souls.
Speaker 2 (57:48):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (57:49):
This stuff does not come out of somebody who just
hasn't spent time with God,spent time in contemplation,
spent time observing the worldwith an honest heart.
Yeah, spent time observing theworld with a honest heart.
Yeah, there's a nobility that'sso deep to like a faithful
person.
It's so noble and so beautiful,like.
(58:11):
Those are the kind of men Iwant to be.
That's why I was so drawn tothis whole, this whole book.
Every person in it just hassuch a depth and and vastness.
The way they have something tosay to the culture.
Yeah, they have something tosay the culture that the culture
needs.
It's not like they're trying topush a religion on the culture.
What I mean is they have thegoods.
Speaker 2 (58:34):
Yes, yeah, it's sort of like, uh, gravitas what they
like they call gravitas uh, youknow, uh, an awaited authority
in their witness comes fromhaving paid a price.
I mean, they, they, these arepeople that paid price for for
(58:57):
being, for being able to say thethings they do.
They don't.
They don't just, you know, lookit up in a wikipedia article
and then claim it as their ownand then change their point of
view 15 minutes later as the asthe situation changes.
These are entire lifetimes,entire generations of writers,
(59:18):
um, and, and the Yevishanko'santhology is a testimony to
these unknowns that shaped himthat he, as a writer, discovered
as echoes of his own kind ofpoetry, that he wants to write.
(59:38):
He wants to write, and I thinkwe see this in Solzhenitsyn's
voice and in Navalny's prisonjournals, where he holds himself
to the same standards.
He's holding these other peopleand he keeps asking him am I any
different than these guys?
(59:58):
You know, I just was followingalong.
I just thought I understoodmyself.
I was naive to think that Icould just say what I believed
and nobody would call me on it,or that I wouldn't either have
to live for this or die for this.
What was I kidding.
You know I was kidding myselfand it's you know, he's saying
(01:00:22):
the same thing.
You know, because he's writingit in retrospect and he's
looking back on his arrest andhe's saying what was I thinking,
you know?
Thinking that I could just goturn myself in and they would
treat me fairly.
Did I really think that I wasliving in a country that was not
(01:00:42):
so corrupt to the core that itno longer knew what it stood for
?
And that was part of hispolitical awakening?
I think in both their cases wastied to their spiritual
awakening and I think in bothcases the spiritual awakening
came first.
That's so cool.
(01:01:06):
And it was forced.
Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
It was forced upon them by being honest with
themselves about you know wellthe the way I heard it I don't
know where I heard it, if it wasin your book or somewhere else,
as I was researching it um, thekind of the mechanism that led
solzhenitsyn to Christ was tosee the people that would get
(01:01:28):
the regular prisoners.
I think you might have told methis Regular prisoners would get
elevated to like a guard helperor a guard, and then they would
turn into animals against theirown people, their fellow
inmates.
And then he just saw this lackof like.
There was just nothing to thesepeople.
And then he saw these likeorthodox christians in the gulag
and they seemed to be steadyand have a moral fortitude and
(01:01:51):
an honesty about him that he wasimpressed with yes, and and and
they and the thing that kind of.
Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
I think really um got now that you're bringing this
back to me now.
So, yeah, I think you told methat but I'm not sure it's in
the sections in the Gulag abouthis first prison experiences and
he normally thought of these.
A lot of these guys that becameexemplars for him became
(01:02:28):
exemplars for him were of a veryrigid religious sects that were
like Baptists and Mennonitesand folk that he didn't really
think of as being thatsophisticated philosophically or
in terms of literature orphilosophy and yet founded him,
exemplary people of characterwho wouldn't let their lives be
(01:02:50):
turned around by the presentexperience and that got him
reconsidering what religion wasall about and who these people
were and what his own experienceof faith was with his nanny and
all of that stuff seemedthrough his own personal.
(01:03:19):
His conversion was not areformation in the in the Soviet
sense of, of finding hispolitical feet Right.
It was kind of like theopposite, you know, finding,
finding why he didn't have anypolitical feet to fall on
because he was pursuing adifferent kind of identity,
(01:03:47):
identity um one, and that he was.
He was going to write thisstory someday when he got out uh
, if only.
And so he had to memorize itwhile marching on the tundra,
not not trying to please hiscaptors or trying to find his
way out, out by some sort ofcapitulation of character, yeah,
and that's what makes the moraldimension of the gulag so
powerful, and also Navalny'sprison diaries, because it's the
(01:04:10):
same voice, you know.
Yeah, I wanted to come backbecause this is my country and I
didn't want to give in, becausegiving up would be to give in
and to give in would be given totheir corruption.
Yeah, and to lose my soul now.
Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
So like, like, like Solzhenitsyn, and like the
Russian poets and dissidents andPasternak.
I'm happy to tell you, audience, that there is a modern day
version of this that happened,which professor has referenced a
couple times now alexei nalvani, um, which some of you may have
heard about um in pieces or maynever heard the whole story.
(01:04:51):
I just found out the rest ofthe story.
I did hear about him.
I did hear about a characterwith a russian name getting uh
nerve, nerve, attacked by whatwas, you know, assumed to be
putin's powers uh years ago, andthat's him.
So let me tell you a little bioon him and then one of his
(01:05:11):
prison readings and um the.
The end of the story is thatone year ago, this month, he was
killed in basically a modernday russian gulag, a prison camp
, um in siberia.
So he had a different outcome,a worse outcome than
solzhenitsyn under stalin um.
(01:05:31):
He is now um dead and it isbecause of the current russian
regime.
So this is uh the bio.
This is from the new yorker.
They did an article on himrecently and um in october, and
it's his own writings, but theydid write a um.
The new yorker didn't give a anauthor's name for this little
(01:05:55):
intro, so let me just give youthat, because it kind of tells
his story really well.
On august 20th 2020, during a aflight from the Siberian city of
Tomsk to Moscow, the Russianopposition leader and
anti-corruption campaigner,alexei Navalny, thought he was
dying.
He was disoriented and felt hisbody shutting down.
The plane made an emergencylanding in Omsk and Navalny was
(01:06:18):
hospitalized hospitalized Twodays later.
Thanks to the persistence ofhis wife, yulia Novani, and
international pressure, theRussian authorities allowed a
German plane to take him toBerlin for treatment.
Novani emerged from a coma onSeptember 7th.
A week later, he announced hisintention to return soon to
Russia.
Despite the obvious danger,doctors concluded that novani
(01:06:43):
had been poisoned with a deadlynerve agent called novichik
novichok.
While recovering in the germancountryside, he began writing
his memoir patriot, which is abook that's out now you can read
his memoir and investigatingthe attempt on his life.
He had no doubt that it hadbeen the decision of vladimir
putin and the works of the FSBthe Russian security services
(01:07:05):
but he was determined to uncoverthe details.
During an unforgettable phonetelephone call which was filmed
for a documentary about his lifeuh, navalny was duped, or no?
Navalny duped an FSB agent intodescribing how agents had
broken into his hotel room inTomsk and doused his clothing
with the poison.
(01:07:27):
On January 17, 2021, alexei andYulia flew back to Moscow.
Navalny was arrested at theairport, despite international
protests on his behalf.
Navalny immediately entered anetherworld of trumped-up
criminal charges, embezzlement,fraud, extremism, etc.
Prison cells and solitaryconfinement by the end of 2023.
(01:07:48):
He landed in this quote-unquotespecial regime colony, known as
polar wolf, north of the arcticcircle.
In captivity he managed to keepa diary and even had his team
post some entries on socialmedia.
In one Facebook post heexplained why he refused to live
out his life in the safety ofexile.
I have my country and myconvictions.
(01:08:09):
I don't want to give up mycountry or betray it.
If your convictions meansomething, you must be prepared
to stand up for them and makesacrifices if necessary.
So this was published in thefall, but the but he died one
year ago in February, and one,one section from his diaries I
(01:08:32):
wanted to read.
It's been, it was told to methat his faith kind of came out
in these diaries.
It wasn't so, it wasn't soobvious, it wasn't so forward
with it in his protesting ofputin and campaigning against
him and calling out hiscorruption right writers.
Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
It's that way, like uh uh, yuri, zhivago and
pasternak as well.
Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Yeah, yeah.
So in in hindsight, then yousee where all the power came
from from his spiritualfortitude.
So here's, here's a part of hiswriting from march 26th I'm
guessing this might have beenfrom 2022 or 23, having died in
2024.
Um, it says march 26th and hesays I have the second technique
(01:09:21):
.
He's talking about techniquesof like surviving in this prison
.
The second technique is so oldyou may roll your eyes
heavenward when you hear it.
It is religion.
It is doable only for believers, but does not demand zealous,
fervent prayer by the prisonbarracks window three times a
day, a very common phenomenon inprisons.
I've always thought and saidopenly that being a believer
(01:09:43):
makes it easier to live yourlife and, to an even greater
extent, engage in oppositionpolitics.
Whoa, faith makes life simpler.
The initial position for thisexercise is the same as for the
previous one.
You lie in your bunk, looking upat the one above you and ask
yourself whether you are aChristian in your heart of
(01:10:05):
hearts.
It is not essential for you tobelieve some old guys in the
desert once lived to be 800years old or that the sea was
literally parted in front ofsomeone, but are you a disciple
of the religion whose foundersacrificed himself for others,
paying the price for their sins.
Do you believe in theimmortality of the soul and the
rest of that cool stuff?
(01:10:26):
If you could honestly answeryes, what is there left for you
to worry about?
Why, under your breath, wouldyou mumble a hundred times
something you read from a heftytome you keep in your bedside
table?
Don't worry about the morrow,because the morrow is perfectly
capable of taking care of itself.
My job is to seek the kingdom ofGod and his righteousness and
(01:10:48):
leave it to good old Jesus andthe rest of his family to deal
with everything else.
They won't let me down and willsort out all my headaches.
As they say in prison.
Here, they will take my punchesfor me.
Wow, that's something else.
It is something else.
It's really, really.
I don't even know what the wordis.
Speaker 2 (01:11:10):
Well, on that note, Travis, we come to the end of
our reflection here today, Ithink.
Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
And next time we're going to go back in time a
little bit and see where thiskind of prophetic tradition has
its roots.
We're going to check into avisionary by the name of William
Blake.
All right, well, thank you,professor.
Ok, looking forward to it.
Travis, really appreciate it.
Have a great day.
Ok, you too.
(01:11:40):
Bye, bye, bye, bye, appreciateit.
Have a great day.
Okay, you too.
Bye-bye, bye-bye.
There's something here for allof you, whether you're a skeptic
or a believer or somewhere inbetween.
With some deconstructionjourney, we're going to be
exploring what this means tohave a life of deep meaning in a
world that feels increasinglyfragmented and dealing with
(01:12:01):
nihilism.
We hope you'll join us on thisongoing conversation.
Until then, thank you forlistening to the Subversive
Orthodoxy podcast.
Don't forget to subscribe andshare this with anyone who might
find these conversationsmeaningful.
This has been a SubversiveOrthodoxy podcast with Travis
Mullen and Professor Nchasti.
Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff without a
parachute, like I'm high oncannabis.
Podcast with Travis Mullen andProfessor Nchosti Outro Music.
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