The Story of a Life

 About the end of September I found myself too tired to follow an argument in print, able to read only narrative. A fat paperback, The Story of a Life by Konstantin Paustofsky, had been on our shelves for some time, and I picked it up. A fortnight and 700 pages later, I was glad to have read it. I should say that this volume has only the first three of the six books in the autobiography.

The NYRB's edition of The Story of a Life takes Paustofsky through childhood to about the age of 35. It is very much the story of loss after loss, beginning with his father's death, continuing through the loss of his two brothers and a beloved during WW I, his mother's destitution and sister's blindness, and the disasters of the Civil War. The book ends with the departure of the last ships to leave Odessa before its capture by the Red Army. Paustofsky had decided to stay in Russia.

Yet the effect on the whole is not depressing. Talleyrand said that one had not tasted the sweetness of life if one had not lived under the Old Regime: Jacques Barzun glossed this to say that life during a decadence is usually sweet. And there is plenty of sweetness in Paustofsky's accounts. There are country visits to family and friends, there are friendships at school in Kiev, there are flirtations and courtships. And there is excitement: near escapes from death at the hands of the German army, Denikin's forces, and in general the trigger-happy and malicious in no man's land or in Odessa.

If NYRB brings out a translation of the next three books, I will read it. 

 

No Polite Shadow-Fencing

 At Second Story Books today, I looked into a volume of biographical sketches by Isaiah Berlin. The most promising name, I thought, was J.L. Austin, and the beginning of the essay did not disappoint. The two decided to teach a class on the thought of C.I. Lewis, which started such that

 Austin opened by inviting me to expound a thesis. I selected Lewis's doctrine of specific, sensible characteristics -- what Lewis called qualia--and said what I thought. Austin glared at me sternly and said, 'Would you mind saying that again.' I did so. 'It seems to me', said Austin, speaking slowly, 'that what you have just said is complete nonsense.' I then realised that this was to be no polite shadow-fencing, but war to the death -- my death, that is.

Still,

There is no doubt that Austin's performance at our class had a profound and lasting effect upon some, at any rate, of those who attended it. Some of them later became eminent professional philosophers and have testified to the extraordinary force and fertility of Austin's performance. for a performance it undoubtedly was: as much so as Moore's annual classes held at the joint meetings of the Aristotelian Society and Mind Association. Slow, formidable and relentless, Austin dealt firmly with criticism and opposition of the intelligent and stupid alike, and, in the course of this, left the genuine philosophers in our class not crushed or frustrated, but stimulated and indeed excited by the simplicity and lucidity of the nominalist thesis which he defended against Lewis.

Probably I should have purchased the volume this morning, perhaps I will yet. 

 

Recently Read

 In A Concise History of Italy by Christopher Duggan, chapter 1, "The geographical determinants of disunity", there appears the paragraph beginning

One reason why so many subversives believed in the revolutionary potential of the Italian peasants was that they knew very little about them. Most of the leading republicans, anarchists, socialists, and communists came from urban middle-class families, and their knowledge of the countryside was rarely direct. The fact that in Italy a large cultural and to some extent economic divide existed between towns and countryside (many peasant families consumed what they grew and did not sell their produce at market) reinforced this ignorance. In such circumstances, it was easy for a romantic notion of 'the people' as an army of downtrodden soldiers waiting for generals to lead them to the promised land to flourish; and this idea survived many indications that a majority of peasants where in fact deeply conservative, if not reactionary.