In our December 18 issue the historian Yuri Slezkine reviews Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea—“the first comprehensive history” of its kind, he says, and, “for the foreseeable future, the best.” Slezkine is perhaps most known for his book The Jewish Century, from 2004, which was the subject of academic symposia in the US, France, Germany, Russia, and Israel, and for The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, from 2017—a labor of twenty years and immersion in seventeen archives. As Benjamin Nathans characterized it in his review in our pages, it “offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism.”

I wrote to Slezkine in Latvia, where he lives “in the best Chekhovian dacha imitation I can afford,” to ask him about his family history, his favorite prose stylists, the “insoluble pancake” (to quote one of them) of civilizational anxieties, and his new book.

Prudence Crowther: Your paternal grandfather was a writer too. Of what?

Yuri Slezkine: He kept up with the times, moving in spurts from elegies about declining noble estates in Russia (such as the one he grew up on), to mannered eroticism, to Bulgakovian satire (they were friends for a while; some critics portray him as the Salieri to Bulgakov’s Mozart), to psychological novellas, to historical epics (the final one was called Abdication, referring to the last tsar and, presumably, his own renunciation of his family’s imperial service). Most of his relatives emigrated after the revolution; during the civil war he and my grandmother (my father’s parents) fled to the North Caucasus, where his uncle General Ivan Erdelyi was commander of the White forces, but he came down with typhoid fever and remained under the Reds in Vladikavkaz, where my father was born.

Your mother’s mother was imprisoned as a Communist around the time of the revolution, when she was about thirteen, and after that went to Argentina. And then?

Most boys and girls from her shtetl were Communists. I like to think that she was arrested on orders from one of my paternal great-grandfathers, who was a Corps of Gendarmes general in the Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno Governorates, having been demoted from horse artillery because of an affair with a Polish ballerina. I have a lock of the ballerina’s hair in my Moscow apartment, next to a notice announcing her death from consumption.

My maternal grandmother went to Argentina because someone from her family had already emigrated there. Her eldest brother stayed in the shtetl (where he was killed along with his family a quarter-century later), the rest went to Buenos Aires, where my grandmother met my grandfather (a textile worker, Yiddish writer, and trade union organizer) but did not meet my father’s cousin Yuri Slezkine, a cavalry officer, monarchist, and regular contributor to the Argentine White Russian newspaper Our Country. About ten years later they took a ship to Leningrad and then several trains to Birobidzhan, the Jewish national region on the Chinese border. Having founded a settlement called Sotsgorodok (“Socialist Town”) and buried their first child, they moved to Moscow, where my mother was born and my grandfather arrested, released, and later killed in the war.

What kind of historian was your father, and was he a big influence as such?

He started out as a Latin Americanist and wrote, among other books, a history of Cuba and a popular account of the discovery of Brazil before switching his focus to the US and writing a multivolume history of the original colonies. He was a war veteran, lifelong adolescent, unapologetic romantic, and a great influence on me in every way except, perhaps, as a historian.

Did your mother work?

My mother taught violin at a music school. Sometimes her students would come over to practice; the less accomplished ones produced blood-curdling noises that would have traumatized a less sanguine child (we lived in one room in a communal apartment, in harmony with our neighbors).

You trained as a Portuguese interpreter in Moscow. What led you to Portuguese in particular, and then to Mozambique?

My specialty at the university was medieval Russian literature. I have no idea what I would have done with my degree if, in my senior year, the philology department had not announced the creation of Portuguese language classes for anyone who wished to attend. It was 1977, Portugal’s African colonies had declared their independence, most Portuguese citizens had left, thousands of Soviet engineers and technicians had been sent to Africa to replace them, and the demand for translators was so high that anyone who could put three Portuguese words together was allowed to choose a country to go to. I chose the port of Beira, in Mozambique, inspired by a book I had read as a child about Vasco da Gama, who stopped not far from there on his way to India. My job was to interpret for Soviet port electricians, crane operators, and ship pilots. The Mozambican Civil War, which broke out that same year, added considerably to the experience.

I was amazed to learn that you’ve long been devoted to the great Irish humorist Flann O’Brien. How’d that happen?

A Scottish friend in Beira told me about him. I first read The Third Policeman in Moscow around 1981 and have kept a copy next to me ever since. When life begins to make too much sense, I open it at random and read a passage—for what is life, really? “There is a queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars…or bread manufactured with powerful steam machinery.”

In his review of The House of Government, Nathans writes that “in the ongoing debate about secularization…Slezkine has staked out a maximalist position: politics is incapable of divorcing itself from the sacred, and history consists of endlessly recurring salvation projects.” Does mankind require such projects?

Mankind does not. Most humans for most of human history did not mind going around in circles, and many still don’t. But there are those, most prominently the heirs of the three Abrahamic traditions, who assume that history has an expiration date. When nation rises against nation, brother betrays brother to death, children rebel against their parents, and the stars start falling out of the sky, some people expect the End in their lifetimes, and a few (the self-proclaimed chosen ones) try their best to speed things up.

You translated that book into Russian. Why that one, and did anything surprise you about the experience?

It belongs to a particular Russian genre of history writing and should have been written in Russian in the first place. Having finished the English version, I had to produce the Russian original. The hardest—and most enjoyable—part was finding my own voice in my native language fifty years too late.

Your prose style has been called “preternatural.” Whether or not it actually exists out of nature, it’s marked by a love of irony. Of your generation, “conceived during the Khrushchev Thaw and raised amid ‘the Brezhnev stagnation,’” you say that “nothing was the way it seemed, no one meant what they said; irony—both liberating and desiccating—defined every glance and gesture.” What redeemed you, if I may presume, from being desiccated by irony? 

Nothing. Soaking in alcohol kept us from withering.

Do you have favorite stylists? 

There are lots of great stylists (O’Brien is one), but for me it all begins with Gogol in Russian and Dickens in English. Remember Sloppy from Our Mutual Friend?

Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle, had Sloppy, and he didn’t know how to dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances.

If the UN maintained an irony index, what nations do you think would be up there?

I think Gogol and Dickens are as representative as they are inimitable. I’d rank the Russians and the English at the top. In England irony is closer to the surface, but don’t get fooled by appearances: in Russia it is everywhere, just beneath the cant and the melodrama. In The Idiot there is a character, Antip Burdovsky: “Not the slightest trace of irony or self-awareness was reflected in his face; what animated him instead was a total, moronic intoxication with his own entitlement and, at the same time, a peculiar and unrelenting need to be and feel permanently aggrieved.” The type became common among radical activists in the 1870s, came to power in academia and the arts during the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s, and was then extinguished during the Great Terror, only to resurface in American universities a century later.

In Varouxakis’s story of the idea of the West, antipathy toward Russia appears as a constant that underlies conceptions of “Westernness.” What accounts for it? 

“The West” is Western (Latin) Christianity without Christianity. The reason Russia feels so alien to most Westerners is that it has never been Latin (and was never disciplined by either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation). The reason it feels so threatening is that its alienness is less immediately apparent than that of the other “East” (Near, Middle, or Far), while looming much larger because of its size, proximity, and imperial expansion. And of course the less coherent and self-confident “the West” is, the more it needs an outside threat. 

As the least obviously non-Western alien, Russia, you say, “requir[es] repeated acts of estrangement and boundary marking.” Does an insufficiently other Other also provoke the West because it calls into question a civilization’s historical notion of its superiority?

Russia never produced a sense of civilizational inferiority in the West (Byzantium did, but that was before Latin Christendom became “the West” as portrayed by Varouxakis). The prevailing attitude has been the Orientalist combination of contempt, fear, and admiration, made more baffling by the association of Western superiority with whiteness, an equation Russia’s version of barbarism fit poorly. The selfless love of Moscow some Western intellectuals developed in the twentieth century had to do with the promise of the millennium, not Russia as a civilization (and in the US, many of them were Jewish émigrés from the Russian Empire).

Post-Petrine Russian elites have tended to take Russia’s inferiority for granted. “Westernizers” (currently known as “democrats” or “liberals”) would like for Russia to be more like the West (when they don’t give up and emigrate, spiritually or in the flesh). Slavophiles and their successors are similar to many non-Western nationalists in making a virtue of traits the West singles out for scorn (collectivism, spontaneity, “the soul,” etc.).

Did no civilizational specters (Islam, for example) haunt the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century? Did they engage in any behavior comparable to the West’s for the sake of defining “the Russian soul,” or anything like that?

Of course they did, all the more so because of Russia’s civilizational insecurity and imperial heterogeneity. But whereas “the West” referred to a collection of competing states (which might or might not include Germany), “Russia” stood—and still does—for one empire with one ruler and one army.

Did you grow up with any conception of “Western civilization”? I’m thinking of Brodsky, who said, “I may even insist that we were the real Westerners…with our instinct for individualism fostered at every instance by our collectivist society, with our hatred toward any form of affiliation.”

There was no “Western civilization,” but “the West,” as Shangri-La, was everywhere. That’s what Brodsky’s essay is about. But he is playing an elaborate game. First, only a non-Westerner can be more Western than the Westerners. Second, the paragraph you quote from begins with the claim that “on the scales of truth, intensity of imagination counterbalances and at times outweighs real­ity,” and the essay as a whole ends with the image of the narrator standing on the deck of a US aircraft carrier waving to an invisible photographer, “for a man is what he loves.” And finally, reality may counterbalance and at times outweigh imagination. A man may not be what he loves, and love may not last. Russians may, in some real sense, turn out to be more Western than the West Brodsky and I imagined in our cargo cult days. Individualism? Brodsky knew that college admissions were for “joiners.” Privacy? I remember discovering, on my first trip to Amsterdam, that prostitutes and middle-class families put themselves on display because they had nothing to hide. And I remember riding my bike in the evenings in the Berkeley Hills, many years later, marveling at the lit-up domestic scenes framed by curtainless windows. In Russia, you build a fence and draw your curtains, just in case. Because you do have something to hide.

You’re writing a comparative history of canons and national bards. Can you say something about it?

The introduction of writing and the rise of agrarian empires led to the creation of deliberately preserved scriptural and literary canons seen as essential for community life. The introduction of the printing press and the rise of nation-states in Europe led to the replacement of the Christian-cum-classical canon with vernacular pantheons headed by national bards (Shakespeare led the way). The introduction of the Internet and the rise of almost-globalism led to the decline of Western European national canons and the near disappearance of the common, pan-Western one. Today a fragmented, self-doubting empire with a dubious past and a boundless mission is facing a circle of geopolitical competitors—China, India, Iran, Islam, and, in its own partial and insecure way, Russia—that circumscribe their constituencies, celebrate their past, claim to be culturally coherent, and are happy to call themselves civilizations united by sacred texts.

How often do you get to Russia?

At least once a year. I strongly disagree (to put it mildly) with those colleagues who endorse the sanctioning of scholarly exchanges, bans on research in the country they claim to study, and the assigning of collective responsibility in ways they would never imagine applying to themselves. I go to Russia because it is my home country, filled with old friends, ghosts, haunts, and heirlooms, but also because my colleagues and students there do not deserve to be ostracized.