Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #3: Losing Faith In Atheism: Boris Pasternak
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.
Creation calls for self-surrender, not loud noise and cheap success. Life must be lived without false face. Live so that, in the final count, we draw unto ourselves love from space.
Speaker 2:That is a divine obscurity, isn't it? Something we don't know in our publicity-seeking?
Speaker 1:Yeah, influencer social media world.
Speaker 2:It's the opposite.
Speaker 1:It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:Right. You go underground, into your soul and into your connection with all humanity. You think slow to think fast.
Speaker 1: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 about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
Speaker 3:It's great entertainment, thrilling entertainment. It's the inside story packed with drama. Sometimes, when I get bored, I like to fly above the clouds and I ask the Lord what does it take to get down? And every time I ask, he teaches me the same thing Just bleed over your head.
Speaker 1:What happens when a poet's pen becomes a weapon against tyranny and his masterpiece shakes the foundations of a regime? Boris Pasternak's life was a story of pride, sorrow and defiance. A man who dared to write of love, faith and freedom in a world determined to silence him. Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890 to a cultured Jewish family. His father, leonid, was a prominent painter, and his mother, rosa, was a gifted concert pianist. Their home was a haven for creativity, frequented by writers, musicians and artists, including Leo, tolstoy and Rachmaninoff. Pasternak grew up immersed in art, but he did not find his voice right away. As a young man he pursued music composition, studying under the renowned Alexander Scriabin. But music wasn't his calling. Philosophy followed, first in Moscow, then in Germany, at the University of Marburg. Still, he felt restless. By his early 20s he turned to poetry, discovering the medium that would define his life. His 1922 collection my Sister Life was a revelation, marking him as one of Russia's leading poets, with its vivid imagery and emotional depth.
Speaker 1:The 1920s brought about the Bolshevik Revolution, a seismic shift in Russian life. Pasternak adapted outwardly but remained inwardly free. The communist regime demanded art serve the state, but Pasternak resisted, quietly and subtly. His work celebrated the individual nature and beauty, values at odds with Soviet ideology. To survive, he translated the works of Shakespeare, goethe and others, mastering the art of bringing foreign voices into Russian while shielding his own.
Speaker 1:Faith came to Pasternak slowly, almost imperceptibly. He was raised in an agnostic household with no real connection to religious belief. Yet the turbulence of the war, revolution and the deep questions posed by human suffering led him to Christianity. In his 40s His poetry began to reflect his faith, a quiet but profound trust in Christ as a symbol of love and redemption. This spiritual journey would culminate in his masterpiece Dr Zhivago, where faith becomes a central theme.
Speaker 1:The 1930s were a time of terror. Stalin's purges swept through the Soviet Union and many of Pasternak's friends and contemporaries. Writers like Osip Mandelstam, were arrested, sent to gulags or executed. Pasternak himself was under constant surveillance. Executed. Pasternak himself was under constant surveillance. His work drew suspicion, but he escaped imprisonment, likely because of his fame and his ability to steer clear of overt political dissent. Still, the pressure was immense and he was forced to write cautiously. During World War II, pasternak remained in the Soviet Union, writing patriotic poems and translations.
Speaker 1:Stalin's death in 1953 brought a brief thaw in Soviet life, allowing Pasternak to write with greater freedom. It was during this period that he completed Dr Zhivago. The novel was an epic tale of love, war and the search for meaning, set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. It was also deeply spiritual, reflecting Pasternak's Christian faith and his belief in the enduring power of the human soul. The Soviet Union refused to publish the book. It was smuggled to Italy and published in 1957. The West hailed it as a masterpiece and in 1958, pasternak was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.
Speaker 1:He's quoted as saying I am proud of being born in Russia, but my refusal to accept the prize should not be misinterpreted. My independence and freedom as a writer are more important to me than my honors. The Soviet regime saw this as an act of betrayal. Pasternak was vilified in the press, branded a traitor and forced to publicly decline the prize. He said I strain broke his already fragile health. Isolated, hounded and ostracized, he spent his final years in his country house 20 miles outside of Moscow. He died on May 30, 1960, at 70 years old, just a year after the Nobel Prize debacle. Thousands attended his funeral, despite the government's efforts to suppress it, chanting lines from his poetry in defiance of Soviet censorship.
Speaker 1:Pasternak's life was extremely resilient, a man who clung to his art and faith even as the world around him prohibited. Both His words outlived the regime that sought to silence him. A testament to the power of literature and the enduring human spirit. Pasternak's poem Hamlet, written as part of Dr Zhivago, captures this sense of duty, faith and the weight of individual responsibility in the face of immense adversity. The tempest roars against the darkened sky. The final moment tolls. My fate draws near. I'm on the stage, alone, beneath the eye. I live to bear this cross, to persevere. To all I give the gift of liberty, but I must bow before the end and die. Now I'd like to welcome Professor Larry back to the show.
Speaker 2:Hello Tavis, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm doing great, and it's always great to have an opportunity to talk about Boris Pasternak and his wonderful witness and his work and the confusions that attend a writer who became famous during the middle of the Cold War and spent his whole life being labeled by other people and misunderstood life being labeled by other people and misunderstood, except by his contemporaries and those other writers in Russia who were living very much the same life. He was living in internal exile. They used to call it People who were living under a regime that was totalitarian and authoritarian and wouldn't allow them to have a public voice.
Speaker 1:So his and that's probably very relevant to today in various countries, and maybe some people feel that way, even in our own country, under whichever governments in power, even though it's not totalitarian by these real standards, but some people are claiming that on, you know, on the right and the left, at different times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of writers feel that way all the time, especially since when you're living in a country whose business is business and not whose business is prophecy or truth-telling, which is probably most countries of the world it always makes writers and artists a little bit countercultural all the time. It's just that, with Pasternak and the Russian writers of his generation and the one that followed, it are extreme examples of this and so become really good object lessons in courage and in, you know, faith and in dedication to their art and their poetry and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like fortitude.
Speaker 2:Yes and fortitude, yes and fortitude. And you know Pasternak died the year after A lot of the. There's a wonderful anthology. I don't know if we have it on the podcast yet, but Yevgeny Yevishenko's 20th century Russian poetry Silver and Steel 20th century Russian poetry Silver and Steel is a collection of all the poets from the two generations, the Silver Age up to the end of the 20th century, and Yerushchenko writes short biographies before each of the writers and there are hundreds of them some of whom only had one poem published in their lifetime or no poems published in their lifetime and lived in obscurity and were only later recovered by Yevashenko as spokesman for their generation and included in this over 1,000-word anthology, which is a masterpiece. I'd recommend it to anybody interested in poetry or 20th century literature or the Russian experience, and just the little biographies alone are just eye-opening.
Speaker 1:Now, on that note of Silver and Steel. So that's the anthology that collected all these poets, that most of them had to live pretty underground, or their poetry was even underground, and then he put it together. You told me one incredible story. If you might, would you mind sharing that again? Do you remember the details about the street fighter?
Speaker 2:uh, well. Well, there there are.
Speaker 1:I don't know who you're referring to, um one guy started as a street fighter and then he said you know, he had one poem in there. And it's like how many did this guy? May have, may have had, but somehow this one poem made it.
Speaker 2:Yes, a lot of them were were started as street fighters, because a lot of them were were revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century and they they united in a collective endeavor to overthrow the czar. But then, after the revolution, when the Bolsheviks took over, there was a purge and authoritarian regime got rid of Trotsky and Lenin died. And then Stalin became the authoritarian force that united the country Well, didn't unite the country, but took over the country behind his extreme authoritarianism. And a lot of these people that supported the revolution found themselves enemies of the state, and so their stories are told in the Sun and sun and steel anthology, the uh, silver and steel anthology, 20th century russian poetry, and there is a guy I I I was looking for him the other night and I can't find him in there.
Speaker 2:But a lot of them are similar in that they they fought in the russians, they fought in the russian civil war and then they were uh during World War II and fought against the Nazis in World War II. And then, because they were considered enemies of the state, because they had said things against Stalin, they got sent to the gulag that Solzhenitsyn wrote so eloquently about and lived a life in prison there. And then, when they were released, they would move back to Russia and then get deported to France or Germany and live the rest of their lives in exile and their poetry was sometimes published, sometimes not, or sometimes only found after the fact, and so there's a lot of stories like that ended up becoming famous, you know, and installed in.
Speaker 1:Russian textbooks as examples of great Russian poetry during the World War II. And then you told me that Boris Pasternak was in that anthology right.
Speaker 2:Yes, he was in that anthology, but they didn't at the time when Stalin was still alive. They didn't want him, they didn't want to acknowledge him. So they listed the poem as a traditional folk poem. Oh really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it was a Wait. So there's only one poem of Pasternak in the anthology, and it was. They wouldn't even say his name.
Speaker 2:Wait. So there's only one poem of Pasternak in the anthology and they wouldn't even say his name. Well, in the one that was before Yevyshenko's anthology, yes, oh, okay, the symphony that was based on the Battle at Leningrad became a national patriotic epic symphony, but it had nods to dissidents and nods to the anti-authoritarian tradition within the Russian revolutionary movement, which made him, you know, a little bit controversial. But when Stalin died in 53, there was, and Khrushchev took over.
Speaker 1:Well, you're getting too far ahead.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:We got to talk about Pasternak. Yeah, let's talk about.
Speaker 2:Pasternak, because he's a great example of that part of the Russian literary movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to talk about a few of the claims about him before Stalin was dead. Yeah, but here's two of the quotes from your book by other people about Pasternak which are really, really cool, quotes From Thomas Merton saying, from Thomas Merton's literary essays Pasternak's Christianity is something very simple, very rudimentary, deeply sincere, utterly personal and yet, for all its questionable expressions, obviously impregnated with the true spirit of the Gospels and the liturgy obviously impregnated with the true spirit of the gospels and the liturgy.
Speaker 1:And then how do you say Marina's last name? Tetsatavia, tetsatavia, tetsatavia? Yeah, in Art, in the Light of Conscience, I love her quote about him. She says Myakovsky, myakovsky, myakovsky, myakovsky, myakovsky acts upon us Pasternak within us. Pasternak isn't read by us, he takes place in us. I mean, that's quite a profound thing to say about another poet.
Speaker 2:Well, Myakovsky and Pasternak were the two great poets of the revolution.
Speaker 1:So he's getting that compliment from the other great poet of his time.
Speaker 2:Yes, and Mayakovsky. Maybe I'll read the little summary of Mayakovsky's life from the Yevyshenko anthology summary of Mayakovsky's life from the Yevyshenko anthology. But Mayakovsky was the public voice of the revolution and he wrote poems that could be recited over loudspeakers at rallies and he wrote poems for movie scripts and public propaganda, rallies and things like that. So his voice was kind of one with the revolution and Pasternak was. You would read his poetries and you would walk off by yourself and have a spiritual, meditative experience, whereas Mayakovsky you would hear at a rally and you would feel like one with the revolution. And so they were kind of frenemies. They both admired each other's work but at the same time they were like polar opposites when it came to what they represented in Russian poetry, in the political aspects of the revolution, that he ended up dying very young, whereas Pasternak survived, as you so well described him oh, I'm disappearing as you so well described him, and ended up only emerging after Stalin's death. Ended up only emerging, you know, after Stalin's death, and not even known in the West until after he won, pretty much till after he won the Nobel Prize. But here's what Yelishenko says yeah, as a boy Mayakovsky would climb into a huge clay wine vat and read poetry aloud, trying to swell the power of his voice with the vat's resonance. Mayakovsky was not only Mayakovsky, but the powerful echo of his own voice. Oratorical intonation was not just his style, but his very character.
Speaker 2:While in Bukov, a president in Moscow, in 1909, when he was only 16, mayakovsky became engrossed in the Bible, one of the few books available to him there, and his early, thunderous verses were strewn with biblical metaphors whimsically tied to his boyish blasphemies. He intuitively perceived that the street will convulse this is a line from Mayakovsky the street will convulse, tongueless, with no means to cry out and speak. And so he gave the word to the street and thus revolutionized Russian poetry. There was no question for Mayakovsky about whether to accept the October Revolution. He was himself the revolution, with all its power, its excess, its epic vulgarity and even brutality, its errors and tragedies.
Speaker 2:Mayakovsky's revolutionary zeal is evident in that this great love lyric poet committed his verse to the service of ideological limericks, advertising billboards of politics. In this zeal, however, lay his tragedy, for he consciously stood on the throat of his own song, a position he once underscored brilliantly. I want to be understood by my native land, but I won't be understood, I will be passed through my native land like a slanting rain. His despondency and personal affairs, as much as his disillusionment with Stalinist politics, led him to shoot himself with a revolver he had used as a prop in a movie 12 years earlier. Because he was both revered and reviled, his death held, profound though, various meanings for everyone in Russia.
Speaker 2:Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral. Mayakovsky was canonized by Stalin, who said about him Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our time. Best and most talented poet of our time. Indifference to his poetry is a crime. 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 still revered in Russia today. Wow, that's really cool.
Speaker 2:So they were the two voices of the revolution, but Mayakovsky was gone.
Speaker 1:Mayakovsky was basically kind of co-opted by Stalin for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was named as a Stalinist poet and then he couldn't stand the contradictions and apparently he was embroiled in a complicated love affair. So they don't really know the motivation for his suicide. But, as a lot of these poets in the anthology have deaths that are either suicides or Nazi concentration camps or Soviet concentration camps, or Maya Tsevotavia killed herself in anticipation of her city being taken over by the Nazis, and it turned out that the invasion by the Nazis had been repulsed by the Soviet army, so she didn't really even need to do that. But it's another one of these tragic events where people are driven to despair against their own better interests.
Speaker 1:Something to mention is that in the Silver and Steel anthology I just found these there's about four honorable mentions. I don't know if there's one you could find by Osip Mandelstam. Oh yeah, but it says his poem was so defiant against Stalin it led to his exile and death.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He got killed for a poem. Yeah, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:It sounds like one poem that was so defiant run by the state, and I think one of the things about that that's kind of hard for us to understand is how important these poets were and still are in the Russian cultural imagination. The poets were kind of like the philosophers and social critics of their time, so when they wrote a poem people took it seriously, and we don't particularly take our poets that seriously.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just about to say that After our first couple episodes, a buddy of mine and I I went backpacking with six guys, five guys and one of them had listened to the episodes and he had a conversation with his dad or somebody and they were saying how, um, they had heard.
Speaker 1:you know, in america, a poem you know might be thought about or taught in a literature class or whatever, but in russia a poem could get you killed and right they take, they take poetry, which is a real difference in cultures which I actually appreciate because I love. I love poetry.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:I don't know how you know we got. So I think modern American life is pretty far from poetry.
Speaker 2:As a normal, thing that always blew my mind was I was reading a book on the Battle of Leningrad, which was one of the bloodiest battles in World War II in which the Russians took tremendous casualties, but also part of the turning point in World War II, and throughout the entire battle they kept the libraries open so that people could find spiritual sustenance by reading Russian literature and poetry. And I know that during COVID we closed down a lot of our libraries here. Wow, and I'm thinking, if you— that's a crazy contrast.
Speaker 2:We closed down our libraries, like even in the college where I taught. You know they've had the library closed for remodeling now for almost two years and the Soviets in World War II wouldn't even close it down for the battle that's taking over six months to complete. That is crazy. So it is a difference in psychology and how these people look about what they valued. Yeah, I wanted to read you one I was looking for. You asked me to look for some of the religious or faith dimension to Pasternak, which we got a little bit with Merton's essay on essays on Pasternak. But in the life you may, you say may be your own, an American pilgrimage.
Speaker 2:Paul Ely writes about Thomas Merton, dorothy Day, walker, percy and Flannery O'Connor and there's this wonderful like three-page description of of Thomas Merton's relationship with Boris Pasternak that I can read you a little bit from. But I'll just paraphrase a little bit of what happened and then I'll read you from both Merton's letters to Pasternak and also his essays on Pasternak. It's kind of interesting because Merton was corresponding with Boris Pasternak. He got an FBI file in the United States. Oh yeah, because J Edgar Hoover thought he was corresponding with a communist. I just love that.
Speaker 2:Whereas you know, I love when a Christian monk gets a FBI file in Russia. Boris Pasternak, who was in danger of being thrown in prison at any moment, would be thought of as a communist contact that Merton would be talking to. But anyway, to get back to. So, in LA's book, you know, the Life you Save May Be your own. If any of you have that book, it's on page 258 through 261.
Speaker 2:And it turns out that Merton wrote a letter to Pasternak because he had read the poetry collection what is it? My Sister Life. My Sister Life, yeah, which is kind of an autobiographical as well as lyric work. And he connected with Pasternak and saw in Pasternak a kindred soul. So he wrote a personal letter to Pasternak and this was before Dr Zhivago had even been translated into English. So he hadn't read Dr Zhivago yet, he had just read the translated poetry in my Sister Life. And so he wrote this in his letter to Pasternak.
Speaker 2:This is Merton to Pasternak. Although we are separated by great distances and even greater barriers, it gives me pleasure to speak to you as to one whom I feel to be a kindred mind. It may surprise you when I say in all sincerity that I feel much more kinship with you in your writing than with most of the great modern writers in the West. When you write of your youth in the Urals, in Marburg, in Moscow, I feel as if it were my own experience, as if I were you. With other writers I can share ideas, but you seem to communicate something deeper. It's as if we met on a deeper level of life, on which individuals are not separate beings. In the language familiar to me as a Catholic monk, it is if we were known to each other in God. And then the Illy says at the time, dr Zhivago, pasternak's only novel was soon to appear in English.
Speaker 2:Although he was nearly 70 years old and had an eminence in Russia since the 1920s, his life story was just becoming known in the West, told in such a way that he seemed to be Merton's perfect double state a mystic in a secular society, a religious artist whose embattled Judeo-Christian faith was vital to his work. A wise man whose dacha, an artist's retreat at the outskirts of Moscow, was a place of pilgrimage for writers from Russia and the West alike, not unlike Merton's Hermitage. And then this was so. Then Pasternak responds to Merton's letter and says I, really I connected with your letter. You know, it seemed like you and I are kindred souls and I hope you know we stay in contact and blah blah blah was very excited as having made this connection with somebody who he wouldn't normally think of as being a compatriot in the faith. Yeah, and so he writes in his journal I think this is from.
Speaker 2:No, this is from another letter to Pasternak after he read Dr Zhivago, and Merton says the great business of our time is this for one man to find himself in another one who is on the other side of the world. The novel was full of sentences that might have been written in characters Merton felt he knew. In fact, he confided Dr Zhivago's faithful companion, laura, was a woman he had already met and went on to share the scandalous secret of a monk who is in love with a girl, and a Jew at that, and what he was talking about, what Merton's talking about there, is that he had a dream where he met a girl and her name was Proverb, and she became an image of biblical wisdom and also Merton's sort of muse for some poems about the Lady Sophia of the Bible, wisdom commentaries. And so he's sharing that with Pastor Knnak as finding that same character in Laura.
Speaker 1:It's such a special connection between them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not to accept the Nobel Prize because the Soviets claimed that it was a propaganda stunt by the West to celebrate a minor poet against their Soviet great writers, who were just yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:An amateur poet. That doesn't stand up to our propaganda. Yeah, I mean that does stand up to our propaganda.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that does stand up to our propaganda. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Two things I want to say. Pasternak, I do want to ask you the question of telling this backstory of him describing himself as an atheist who lost his faith in atheism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to hear that story. But before we do that, I do want to share. I did find Osip Mandelstam. Oh, you did find osip mandelstam. Oh, you did find the intro. I found the poem that got him killed. Okay, well, why don't we read that? That this is on a, on a blog by a kathy young who says says she's a russian journalist and she did her own work on translating it into english with a friend.
Speaker 2:Uh, because it's very clunky coming from russian english, because it rhymes in russian yeah and doesn't rhyme in english right, you probably pronounce the names correctly too yeah, and I won't be doing that um, also, also, it sounds like there's a lot of russian I mean a lot of english versions, and none of them were good, she said right
Speaker 1:so here's. This is osip mandelstam's defiant poem against stalin that led to his exile and death. Uh, apparently it's called stalin epigram. So it says with no land felt beneath us, we live day to day. Our speech barely carries 10 paces away each half snatched conversation Remembering the Highlander. Up in the Kremlin, his fingers are greasy as overfed worms and final as cast iron weights are his words. Cockroach whiskers are laughing and winking and his boot tops are gleaming and twinkling. There's a rabble around him of chiefs with thin necks. That's awesome. He plays. He plays with half humans. He's got at his Beck some mewling, some whimpering and some hissing. He goes poke, he goes boom, and they listen like horseshoes. He drops one by his, one by one, his decrees to the groin, to the head, to the groin, to the head, to the eye, to the knees. Every killing's a sweet celebration and stands tall.
Speaker 2:The broad-chested.
Speaker 1:Osation Osation O-S-S-E-T-I-A-N. Yeah, I guess. So I don't know that yeah.
Speaker 2: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:Yeah, no this is not. Yeah. So when people, when people say fascist and authoritarian, I mean there's a huge spectrum. Yeah, yeah, I mean we don't really know about that.
Speaker 2: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 stolen yeah, you mean you're, you're arrested and imprisoned all the time for nothing.
Speaker 1:I mean that's, that's authoritarianism yeah and fascism. Yeah, um, you know, a lot of people 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:Also, there's a reading from these figures are interesting because with Russian history in the 20th century is the story of that entire sweep right From ecstatic revolution to reign of terror, to thaw, to new reign of terror, you know, and to have these people's lives and their poetry and their work, like Pasternak, pass through all of these historical moments with integrity and honesty and statements of conscience.
Speaker 1:That's a great observation.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like the moral calm and centeredness lasted through various iterations of their government, up and down, the ups and downs and takeovers an important figure and his voice fits into a tradition that we don't know as much about in the West, because his voice, that voice in those final journal entries that were published in the New Yorker this year or last year, august, sound a lot like Solzhenitsyn, sound a lot like Pasternak and it sounds a lot like Yuri Zhivago in Pasternak's work of a person of integrity who refused to remake his vision of the world in terms of the political ups and downs of particular movements and parties and terrorist organizations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, here I have our next three steps here. I want to show you something I found where I see an echo between Pasternak and Wendell Berry.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:And I found it off of reading back to the part of a poem you quoted in your book on Pasternak and then remembering this Wendell Berry poem and I just pulled them up side by side and I see this little clue and I wonder if Wendell Berry was influenced by this poem of Pasternak.
Speaker 2:Okay, read the part from Pasternak and Berry and we'll see. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then after that I want to get the backstory on how, on how he lost his faith in atheism. And then I want to move on to Alexi.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1: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 to tow the party line. So this is him talking about the anonymity required to deal in the situations he had to live through. He says creation calls for self-surrender, not loud noise and cheap success. Life must be lived without false face. Live so that in the final count we draw unto ourselves love from space. So plunge yourself into obscurity and conceal there your tracks, but be alive. Alive, your full share, alive until the end. I love that.
Speaker 2:That is a divine obscurity, isn't it Something we don't know in our publicity seeking?
Speaker 1:Yeah, influencer social media world. It's the opposite. It's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:Right. You go underground, into your soul and into your connection with all humanity. You think slow to think fast. You don't think fast to think slow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as the funny thing about influencers right now, like what, what dominates the young people my, my age and younger is social media influencers and they they have a thousand youtube videos and blogs and everything about how to build their brand and how to make themselves influencers, just like the guys teaching uh, you know how to write in front of solzhenitsyn, he's so annoyed but, but here's pasternak, with no social media, no internet, no email, interacting with Merton from across the globe in an obscure, quiet conversation through letters.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he said I'm going to read it again, because just if you think of social media and media in general now think of and and news cycles, you know all that noise. Just think about this poem again creation calls for self-surrender, not loud noise and cheap success. Life must be lived without false face, lived so that, in the final count, we draw unto ourselves love from space. So plunge yourself into obscurity and conceal there your tracks, but be alive. Alive, your full share, alive until the end. It totally resonates with me because I felt like I was in obscurity for a while because of social media making me feel like, oh, I'm not doing enough, no one even knows who I am, like the fame, fame of um, our culture. It's like if you're not famous and you're just kind of some dude, you know yeah right, celebrity or nothing yeah, and here's wendell, here's wendell berry, kind of echoing a similar sentiment.
Speaker 1:Let's hear that it's at the end of his uh manifesto of the mad farmer liberation front. That's great, which is probably his most at the end of his uh manifesto of the mad farmer liberation front. That's great, which is probably his most famous poem. One of his most famous poems and we'll get into window berry down the road.
Speaker 1:But yeah I love this, this little echo here. He said it's in the middle to the end of the of this paragraph. Go with your love to the fields, lie down in the shade, rest your head in her lap, swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts, and this is the main part. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary. Summon the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. But the idea of making the false tracks sounded like sounded like Pasternak saying conceal your tracks. Yes, pretty cool. Yeah, that is kind of like. Intentionally subvert all the noise and powers that be in a quietness. Yes, they both are saying that. It's kind of awesome.
Speaker 2:And and and Merton is an interesting co-conspirator because he became a monastic and and ultimately a hermit because his order wasn't isolated enough for his tastes. And so then he comes across Pasternak and finds a kindred soul and writes him a letter on snail mail and they have like maybe three letters and then things get crazy for pasternak and he, he writes back and says, uh, I can't write you anymore for a while. Um, don't write me. Uh, I'll write you, but you know, wait for my next letter because I'm dealing with a lot of stuff. Wow, and that was the last he heard from him. Oh, man, and so those you can get Merton's side of that correspondence in a collection of his letters to writers called A Courage for Truth. But unfortunately that doesn't include the other writers' responses back to him, so you have to kind of chase those down, if they even exist in English.
Speaker 1:Now one more thing I want to tell you about Pasternak before we ask the question how did he lose his faith in atheism? There's a modern day current podcaster called Lexx friedman. He's actually russian, he's from a couple towns I cannot pronounce, and he's he's american. He moved here when he was 11 after the collapse of the soviet union uh-huh to chicago area. He's extremely smart, like he's a super computer scientist, but you can just tell he's a brain of brains. He's going to be a big influence from MIT and stuff. He's 41 and he's on the Joe Rogan podcast and I'm hearing him quote Pasternak. He's reading a poem that some fighter, a Russian fighter named Bavazir Satiev. This Russian fighter, a Russian fighter named Bavazir Satiev. This Russian fighter I believe he's Russian he quotes this poem before every fight. Oh really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, by going to the library during the Battle of Leningrad right Getting the spiritual sustenance he needs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's pretty awesome the way he read the poem in English. He's like it's hard to read it in English. Yeah, it didn't sound. I couldn't quite grasp the poem based on the English.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I would love to see it in writing so I could grasp it better. But yeah, so tell me about how pastor knacks and then maybe chime in or back and forth with solstice. But how did pastor knack lose him his uh, faith in atheism?
Speaker 2:now as to uh pastor knacks uh losing his faith in atheism. He was born into a Jewish family but, as you point out, they were not particularly religious.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they considered themselves agnostic. But he had a nanny who was a Russian Orthodox nanny, oh yeah, and she would take him to church with her and she would sort of proselytize him with her sort of peasant form of Russian Orthodoxy which stuck with Pasternak as a primitive but moving expression of faith. And so as he slowly began to be more skeptical of dialectical material, you know, like the conventional dialectical materialism which would be sort of the conventional materialism in the West, you know that people embrace skepticism with a faith that once they become skeptical of skepticism then that opens them up to maybe some other ways of looking at the world. They become less dogmatic and a little bit more reflective. And that same experience happened to Pasternak and you can see that it's not so much an evolution in the poetry as in the character of Zhivago.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like he told his conversion story in Zhivago?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think he did.
Speaker 1:That'd be awesome to read. I still haven't read it yet. I just learned about it from you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he's trained as a doctor, he's trained as a skeptic, a scientist, and yet he finds this Soviet political faith sort of taking over his own skepticism. And then he falls in love with Laura and he begins to see through the ideology of his friends who became military leaders in the revolution and so hard-nosed Bolsheviks, and so that kind of turned him like in Dr Zhivago, that would be Strelnikov, who is now a military guy who toes the party line, in fact is an agent of revolution. And there's a passage oh yeah, it is in Paul Elie's book from Dr Zhivago, I think where he is describing I think it's here, maybe it's in Merton's essay where he's describing Strelnikov and what happens to his friend they were college friends who's become a leader of the military. Let's see here Okay, here it is what Zhivago opposes to communism. This is Merton's essay.
Speaker 2:What Zhivago opposes to communism is therefore not a defense of Western democracy, not a political platform for some kind of liberalism, and still less is it a track in favor of formal religion. Zhivago confronts communism with life itself and leaves us in the presence of the inevitable conclusions itself and leaves us in the presence of the inevitable conclusions. Communism has proposed to control life with a rigid system and the tyranny of artificial forms. Those who have believed in this delusion and yielded themselves up to it as a superior force have paid the penalty of ceasing to be complete human beings, by ceasing to live in the full sense of the word, by ceasing to be men or women. Even the idealistic and devoted Strelnikov becomes the victim of his own idealisms, becomes the victim of his own idealisms.
Speaker 2:And Laura says of him and then this is a quote from Dr Zhivago it was as if something abstract had crept into his face and made it colorless, as if a living human being had become the embodiment of a principle, the image of an idea. I realized that this had happened to him because he had handed himself over to a superior force that is deadening and pitiless and will not spare him in the end. It seemed to me that he was a marked man and that this was the seal of his doom. The beast in man is not tamed by threats, but must be brought into harmony with life and made to serve creativeness and love by the influence of inner and spiritual music. And then this is another quote from Dr Zhivago but what you were just reading was Merton, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was Merton Talking about Zhivago.
Speaker 2:Except for that quote about Strelnikov, that was from Dr Zhivago. Yeah, and then this is from Dr Zhivago. What for centuries raised man above the beast? And the centuries you could assume as a reference to Christendom? Raised man above the beast is not the crudgel, but an inward music, the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example. It's always been assumed that the most important things in the gospel are the ethical maxims and commandments, but for me the most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea that underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal and that the whole of life is symbolic because it's meaningful. That's from Dr Zhivago. And then here's Martin, kind of following that through.
Speaker 2:Everyone has been struck, not to mention embarrassed, by the overpowering symbolic richness of Dr Zhivago. In fact, pasternak, whether he knows it or not, is punched fully into the mainstream of the lost tradition of natural contemplation which flowed among the Greek fathers after it had been set in motion by origin. Of course, the tradition has not been altogether lost and Pastor Knack has come upon it in the Orthodox Church. The fact is clear. In any case, he reads the scriptures with the avidity and spiritual imagination of a contemplative, and he looks on the world with the avidity and spiritual imagination of a contemplative, and he looks on the world with the illuminated eyes of a Coppadesian fathers, but without their dogmatic and ascetic preoccupations. So it's sort of like the. It's sort of that the Pasternak comes to faith again through being a writer in natural and natural contempl, and and and subsequent speeches that he gave, however, and his letters to to Merton, however secret those were, having not even made themselves public until, you know, maybe two years before he died. Yeah, which is pretty interesting there.
Speaker 1:Well, the, the pasternak story. I mean well, first of all, before I transition um what I see in pasternak and javaga, I mean uh and merton, just from the, just from the brief amount of writings I've come across so far with you, and what we're reading is super deep souls.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:This stuff does not come out of somebody who just hasn't spent time with God, spent time in contemplation, spent time observing the world with an honest heart. Yeah, spent time observing the world with a honest heart. Yeah, there's a nobility that's so deep to like a faithful person. It's so noble and so beautiful, like. Those are the kind of men I want to be. That's why I was so drawn to this whole, this whole book. Every person in it just has such a depth and and vastness. The way they have something to say to the culture. Yeah, they have something to say the culture that the culture needs. It's not like they're trying to push a religion on the culture. What I mean is they have the goods.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, it's sort of like, uh, gravitas what they like they call gravitas uh, you know, uh, an awaited authority in their witness comes from having paid a price. I mean, they, they, these are people that paid price for for being, for being able to say the things they do. They don't. They don't just, you know, look it up in a wikipedia article and then claim it as their own and then change their point of view 15 minutes later as the as the situation changes. These are entire lifetimes, entire generations of writers, um, and, and the Yevishanko's anthology is a testimony to these unknowns that shaped him that he, as a writer, discovered as echoes of his own kind of poetry, that he wants to write. He wants to write, and I think we see this in Solzhenitsyn's voice and in Navalny's prison journals, where he holds himself to the same standards.
Speaker 2:He's holding these other people and he keeps asking him am I any different than these guys? You know, I just was following along. I just thought I understood myself. I was naive to think that I could 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 myself and it's you know, he's saying the same thing. You know, because he's writing it in retrospect and he's looking back on his arrest and he's saying what was I thinking, you know? Thinking that I could just go turn myself in and they would treat me fairly. Did I really think that I was living in a country that was not so corrupt to the core that it no longer knew what it stood for? And that was part of his political awakening? I think in both their cases was tied to their spiritual awakening and I think in both cases the spiritual awakening came first. That's so cool. And it was forced.
Speaker 1:It was forced upon them by being honest with themselves about you know well the the way I heard it I don't know where I heard it, if it was in your book or somewhere else, as I was researching it um, the kind of the mechanism that led solzhenitsyn to Christ was to see the people that would get the regular prisoners. I think you might have told me this Regular prisoners would get elevated to like a guard helper or a guard, and then they would turn into animals against their own people, their fellow inmates. And then he just saw this lack of like. There was just nothing to these people. And then he saw these like orthodox christians in the gulag and they seemed to be steady and have a moral fortitude and an honesty about him that he was impressed with yes, and and and they and the thing that kind of.
Speaker 2:I think really um got now that you're bringing this back to me now.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think you told me that but I'm not sure it's in the sections in the Gulag about his first prison experiences and he normally thought of these. A lot of these guys that became exemplars for him became exemplars for him were of a very rigid religious sects that were like Baptists and Mennonites and folk that he didn't really think of as being that sophisticated philosophically or in terms of literature or philosophy and yet founded him, exemplary people of character who wouldn't let their lives be turned around by the present experience and that got him reconsidering what religion was all about and who these people were and what his own experience of faith was with his nanny and all of that stuff seemed through his own personal. His conversion was not a reformation in the in the Soviet sense of, of finding his political feet Right. It was kind of like the opposite, you know, finding, finding why he didn't have any political feet to fall on because he was pursuing a different kind of identity, identity um one, and that he was. He was going to write this story someday when he got out uh, if only.
Speaker 2:And so he had to memorize it while marching on the tundra, not not trying to please his captors or trying to find his way out, out by some sort of capitulation of character, yeah, and that's what makes the moral dimension of the gulag so powerful, and also Navalny's prison diaries, because it's the same voice, you know. Yeah, I wanted to come back because this is my country and I didn't want to give in, because giving up would be to give in and to give in would be given to their corruption. Yeah, and to lose my soul now.
Speaker 1:So like, like, like Solzhenitsyn, and like the Russian poets and dissidents and Pasternak. 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 may never heard the whole story. I just found out the rest of the story. I did hear about him. I did hear about a character with a russian name getting uh nerve, nerve, attacked by what was, you know, assumed to be putin's powers uh years ago, and that's him. So let me tell you a little bio on him and then one of his prison readings and um the. The end of the story is that one year ago, this month, he was killed in basically a modern day russian gulag, a prison camp, um in siberia. So he had a different outcome, a worse outcome than solzhenitsyn under stalin um. He is now um dead and it is because of the current russian regime. So this is uh the bio. This is from the new yorker. They did an article on him recently and um in october, and it's his own writings, but they did write a um. The new yorker didn't give a an author's name for this little intro, so let me just give you that, because it kind of tells his story really well.
Speaker 1:On august 20th 2020, during a a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner, alexei Navalny, thought he was dying. He was disoriented and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk and Navalny was hospitalized hospitalized Two days later. Thanks to the persistence of his wife, yulia Novani, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment. Novani emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia. Despite the obvious danger, doctors concluded that novani had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called novichik novichok. While recovering in the german countryside, he began writing his memoir patriot, which is a book that's out now you can read his memoir and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of vladimir putin and the works of the FSB the Russian security services but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable phone telephone call which was filmed for a documentary about his life uh, navalny was duped, or no? Navalny duped an FSB agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and doused his clothing with the poison.
Speaker 1:On January 17, 2021, alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport, despite international protests on his behalf. Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges, embezzlement, fraud, extremism, etc. Prison cells and solitary confinement by the end of 2023. He landed in this quote-unquote special regime colony, known as polar wolf, north of the arctic circle.
Speaker 1:In captivity he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile. I have my country and my convictions. I don't want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary. So this was published in the fall, but the but he died one year ago in February, and one, one section from his diaries I wanted to read. It's been, it was told to me that his faith kind of came out in these diaries. It wasn't so, it wasn't so obvious, it wasn't so forward with it in his protesting of putin and campaigning against him and calling out his corruption right writers.
Speaker 2:It's that way, like uh uh, yuri, zhivago and pasternak as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So in in hindsight, then you see where all the power came from from his spiritual fortitude. So here's, here's a part of his writing from march 26th I'm guessing this might have been from 2022 or 23, having died in 2024. Um, it says march 26th and he says I have the second technique. He's talking about techniques of like surviving in this prison. The second technique is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it.
Speaker 1:It is religion. It is doable only for believers, but does not demand zealous, fervent prayer by the prison barracks window three times a day, a very common phenomenon in prisons. I've always thought and said openly that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Whoa, faith makes life simpler. The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one.
Speaker 1:You lie in your bunk, looking up at the one above you and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be 800 years old or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone, but are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins. Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you could honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don't worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.
Speaker 1:My job is to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won't let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison. Here, they will take my punches for me. Wow, that's something else. It is something else. It's really, really. I don't even know what the word is.
Speaker 2:Well, on that note, Travis, we come to the end of our reflection here today, I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And next time we're going to go back in time a little bit and see where this kind of prophetic tradition has its roots. We're going to check into a visionary 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. Bye, bye, bye, bye, appreciate it. Have a great day. Okay, you too. Bye-bye, bye-bye. There's something here for all of you, whether you're a skeptic or a believer or somewhere in between. With some deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what this means to have a life of deep meaning in a world that feels increasingly fragmented and dealing with nihilism. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and share this with anyone who might find these conversations meaningful. This has been a Subversive Orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Nchasti.
Speaker 3:Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff without a parachute, like I'm high on cannabis. Podcast with Travis Mullen and Professor Nchosti Outro Music.