Wednesday, March 15, 2017

THE SPY MOST LIKELY TO RAISE QUESTIONS OF CULPABILITY


The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy - Basic Books (2016)


There are two things I will never tire of watching: movies from the James Bond franchise, and episodes of Law & Order (I am perhaps the only person alive who prefers the original series over SVU). Like millions of viewers before me, I am drawn to the dark, illusory world of covert ops and international espionage like Gollum to his ‘precious.’ There is just something so thrilling and romantic about the notion of having a secret identity, slipping in and out of different personas, and infiltrating the inner nexus of a foreign governmental body. 007 is a master of reinvention, and if I were really honest with myself, I would have to admit that I envy his freedom from domestic obligations. My enduring love of Law & Order comes from a different corner of my psyche. I love the games of strategy, the risks and maneuvers, and above all the rhetoric of a courtroom drama. Some of the most ‘boring’ episodes of Law & Order are also my favorites. I don’t care much for high-speed chases or hostage situations. I love when criminals are apprehended early and the lawyers spend the rest of the episode delicately testing moral and legal boundaries, calling upon all the subtle permutations of the law. Because the law is undeniably malleable, and each new case widens the gap for new lines of inquiry and new questions which demand that we reflect upon what it means to be an individual within a society. The ruling in a single case can set the precedent for dozens of others and can impact the social milieu in which we exist. This does not always end well, but it is nevertheless fascinating to witness legal experts page through the same catalogue of rules and examples in order to argue opposing conclusions. The fact that someone can win an argument even when the court of public opinion is against them is one of the key differences between criminal justice in a democracy, and criminal justice in a totalitarian regime in which subjective opinions matter more than facts and logic. 

I could rant forever but TL;DR I am a sucker for well-dressed undercover agents and clever lawyers

The Man With the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy satisfied both of my narrative appetites. It is also well-supported enough to exist somewhat above the level of an actual Ian Fleming adventure. It is nonfiction that reads like fiction. The first half of the book, which documents the conversion of Bogdan Stashinsky from a Ukrainian revolutionary to a KGB assassin, is just as suspenseful and ludicrous as any Cold War mass-market paperback. The assassination by Stashinsky of a top Ukrainian leader, for example, involves multiple identities, a weapon concealed in a tin of sausages, and a gun that fires vaporized poison. In fact, most of the orders sent to Stashinsky from the Kremlin would be hilarious if they weren’t so deadly. Plokhy cleverly recycles all the effective literary devices from fiction in his biography. Thus, two characters might be introduced with full back stories in the early chapters, only to be merged into a single double-agent later on. Whereas many biographers would choose to clear up any identity confusion in the beginning, Plokhy lets his characters grow and expand significantly before ripping off their masks. Character information is distributed strategically rather than all at once, infusing what might otherwise have been a straightforward biography with a sense of mystery. More than once, the reader is left in the same state of disbelief and betrayal that one feels when Vesper Lynd stabs Bond, James Bond, in the back. In fact, Plokhy himself encourages the reader to participate in a bit of vicarious sleuthing with his journalistic manner of narration. Concluding his preface with what can only be termed ‘linguistic bait,’ Plokhy writes:

Most of what we know today about Bogdan Stashinsky, his crime, and his punishment comes from the testimony that he gave at his trial in Karlsruhe, Germany, in October 1962. We can now supplement that data with information from recently declassified files of the Central Intelligence Agency; KGB and Polish security archives; and memoirs and interviews of former KGB officers. The study of graveyard records in a Berlin suburb made it possible to corroborate parts of the story originally told by Stashinsky, and my interview with a former head of the South African police allowed me to trace the former Soviet assassin to that country. He is probably still living there, always looking over his shoulder, aware that the old habits of the KGB die hard, if at all.

This whodunit tone is all the more impressive considering Plokhy’s standing as a reputable historian. His published books (more than ten of them) have been translated into numerous languages, won countless awards reserved for Eastern European scholarship, and earned him a position as the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Plokhy is, furthermore, prolific in his country of birth and has done much to support Ukrainian writers of fiction and nonfiction alike. 

The second half of The Man With the Poison Gun is concerned with Stashinsky’s defection, trial, and subsequent disappearance. Having murdered two high-profile Ukrainian nationalists, Stashinsky fell in love with an East German woman and became gradually disenchanted with the ideals of a Soviet Empire. The two main sections of Plokhy’s book (conversion and trial) are neatly joined by Stashinsky’s stressful flight from Moscow to West Berlin. His defection and cooperation with the CIA became a turning point in the Cold War and a powerful blow to the reputation of the Russian elite. The trial section of The Man With the Poison Gun is written in a different tone—and progresses at a different pace—than the first chapters. In this section, Plokhy is chronological to the extreme, as if he were the court stenographer present at Stashinsky’s trial. There is very little ornamentation. Plokhy’s tone is dry and factual, reflecting the new legal setting of his narrative. The second half of his book takes place almost entirely in a courtroom that Plokhy brings to life in exacting detail. I do not know which half of the narrative I prefer, but I am thoroughly impressed by Plokhy’s ability to sew them together into a seamless whole. This transition is at least partly facilitated by a series of questions raised at the end of the first half of the book, which later become the key points in the 1962 court case. Plokhy first aligns his readers with the wary CIA agents who handle Stashinsky’s defection, and then with the witnesses in the courtroom attempting to locate the truth amidst all the illusions. Writes Plokhy:

Bogdan Stashinsky was flown to Frankfurt on August 13, 1961, while Inge [his wife] was interrogated separately by the West German authorities…The first of the many problems that the CIA interrogators faced in dealing with Stashinsky’s testimony, both in Berlin and then at the CIA interrogation center in Frankfurt, was that they could not establish his identity. The many documents he produced had three different names on them: Bogdan Stashinsky, Joseph Lehmann, and Aleksandr Krylov. The CIA Officers did not know which of them, if any, was authentic. The CIA also had no way to verify Stashinsky’s career with the KGB, or his surprisingly candid claims that he had killed Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet. Besides, no one thought that Rebet had been assassinated, and what Stashinsky was telling the interrogators about Bandera ran counter to all the evidence they had collected so far and all the theories developed on the basis of it. The documents assembled in the CIA’s Bandera file suggested that he had been poisoned by someone close to him, not by a lone killer wandering the streets of Munich with a strange tube in his pocket. 

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that courtroom (and Plokhy almost makes it so). Not only was the identity of the accused uncertain, so was his admission of guilt. After weeks of examining the evidence, both the defense and the prosecution were confident in their determination that Bogdan Stashinsky had in fact carried out the assassinations. But who should be held responsible? Should the burden of guilt be placed upon the shoulders of the man with the gun, or did it belong within the inner sanctum of the Kremlin? Was it even possible to prosecute a nebulous political organism that routinely flouted the rules of international diplomacy to eliminate traitors and enemies abroad? After weeks of debate, Bogdan Stashinsky was given eight years penal service for two murders. He was convicted as an ‘accessory’ to a crime committed by Soviet Russia—a mere tool in the hands of a powerful ideological monster. The repercussions were inevitable. Writes Plokhy:

Since the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, the West German courts had universally rejected the argument that Nazi perpetrators had simply followed orders. Now the Federal Criminal court and then the High Court, which approved its ruling, were dramatically reversing that policy. Both courts rejected the “acting under duress of orders” defense in the  Stashinsky case, but the ruling opened new avenues for the defense of Nazi criminals, as they could now claim that they had only been accessories to murder, while the main perpetrators, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and other top officials of the Third Reich, were long gone.

Cases like Bogdan Stashinsky’s are, of course, never simple. Stashinsky’s repeated assertions that he was forced to join the KGB to protect his family (his sister was a Ukrainian revolutionary), that he carried out his assignments under duress, and that he was brainwashed by the zealots of communism are not exactly excuses for murder, but they do warrant a degree of empathy. At the very least, the reader must pause to consider what he or she might do in a similar situation. And if we decide that the legal cost of an acquittal—in new opportunities for incarcerated felons—is too great, then aren’t we in danger of buying into the same ‘greater good’ mentality used to justify the original crimes? In other words, is there a difference between a Nazi who thinks ‘if I spare one Jew, the rest will demand mercy, so I should kill them all,’ and the judge who thinks ‘if I pardon one assassin, the rest will claim victimhood, so I should convict them all’? Perhaps the more important question is how do we find the words to explain the difference (and I think there is one) in a manner that is legally unassailable? How do we translate what we know to be true in our souls into real sentences that clarify rather than confuse? In The Man With the Poison Gun Serhii Plokhy touches upon these questions while all the while reminding readers that biographies can be thrilling, suspenseful, and fun.  


Wednesday, March 8, 2017

THE AMERICAN MOST LIKELY TO CRAFT HIS OWN NATIONALITY


How the World Moves by Peter Nabokov - Penguin Books (2016)


I would like to think that I benefitted from a fairly progressive upbringing. My teachers always encouraged me to ask questions, pursue alternative viewpoints, and listen to the marginalized voices drowned out by the bullhorn of Western narcissism. My parents pushed me to unearth the foundations beneath every accepted narrative, every assumption, every story that concluded with a straightforward confrontation between good and evil. But there are certainly gaps in my knowledge. After reading How the World Moves by Peter Nabokov, I realize how little I know about the country I am proud to call my home. I am not dense enough to believe that North America rose out of the sea like some biblical Atlantis, custom-made to accommodate the battered victims of European religious strife. The modern world did not pop into being as the first white man’s boot touched down upon Plymouth Rock. But I am ashamed to admit that I know very little about the pre-puritan history of the ‘New World.’ The fact that I still think of Native Americans (Indians? American Indians?) as a homogenous mass—a bastardized conglomerate of many distinct tribal units—is rather alarming. I am embarrassed to say that as a relatively enlightened twenty-four year old woman with a receptive heart and an inquisitive mind, the names that I remember most easily are those of Pocahontas and Sacagawea—both of whom have been reduced in the established narrative to harmless feminine ideals of ‘noble’ savagery that mainly exist to compliment and assist masculine Western progress. It is high time to fill in the gaps.

How the World Moves is about a single Pueblo family and their attempts to juggle Native expectations and Western opportunities. Raised in the isolated New Mexican mesa community of Acoma, Edward Proctor Hunt embodied what it means to be a cultural hybrid. Born in 1861, Hunt coexisted, from the start, as a member of one of the oldest nations on earth, as well as one of the newest. His ancestors could trace their roots back to Pueblo villages pre-dating the birth of Christ. Their communal identity was strengthened by a set of complex creation myths, a pantheon of minor deities, and a deeply-entrenched respect for nature. They had survived wars against neighboring tribes, the aggressive and racist policies of the Catholic Spaniards, and the exploitive and inhumane ones of the later Americans. They watched as their lands were settled by white men and their children were carted off to Christian boarding schools. The fact that Acoma culture remained relatively intact for so long is partly explained by its geographical isolation atop a rocky outcrop. It is also due to an ingrained wariness and a refusal to speak about their beliefs and rituals with outsiders. But by the time Edward Proctor Hunt came into the world, things had already begun to change. Writes Nabokov: 

Edward’s life span [covered] the period of the greatest displacement of indigenous peoples in world history. During this time many millions of tribespeople and peasant villagers were thrown on the road, uprooted by war, famine, greed, genocide, or extreme prejudice. The story behind the Hunt family’s hegira is akin to that of refugees in general who must face anguishing decisions about staying put or reaching out for more survivable and successful futures. Many strike hard bargains between tradition and progress and wind up fending for themselves through all manner of diasporas, both external and internal. Their stories are a defining aspect of our human experience, as thousands of premodern communities produced postmodern families like the Hunts.

How does one choose between individual survival and cultural preservation? Which among us has been asked whether we would prefer to abandon our community or die a slow death in obscure and unseen poverty? If a boy watches his homeland shrink, year by year, overtaken by men who wield superior weapons and technology, can his embrace of modernity really be considered a betrayal? These are difficult questions and there will never be easy answers. Was Edward Hunt a sellout? And when exactly did his betrayal occur? Most would argue that his willingness to perform in traveling shows as a kind of whooping, scalp-snatching ‘every-Indian’ character was the point of no return. But perhaps the Acoma elders would suggest that Edward Hunt severed ties the moment he agreed to share tribal secrets and myths with the esteemed anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institute. Because if knowledge is power, the Acoma Indians’ refusal to share their worldview was itself an act of resistance. As if to say, you can take our land, you can call us primitive, but you will never infiltrate the intimate spaces of our minds. Edward Hunt let the white man in. After centuries of oppression, manipulation, and criminal neglect, it was impossible for the Acoma elders to understand how one of their own could trust the duplicitous motives of an outsider. Writes Nabokov:

The target of this adulation hardly knew what hit them. First came the question of how to decipher the ravenous curiosity that energized these eager white faces. It was such an about-face from even a generation before, when disdain, even disgust, for Indian religion, social practices, and pace of life was palpable. What range of desires lay behind this new scrutiny, and why were they being questioned about beliefs and practices these whites once found so abhorrent? 

The problem facing Edward Hunt is the same problem that many ethnic ‘minorities’ come to face. White people often take individualism for granted. I am not expected to live my life in opposition to harmful racial stereotypes, so I enjoy greater freedom to make mistakes and act selfishly. I try to make my friends and parents proud, but that’s as far as it goes. I do not have to answer to a larger community fighting for recognition and respect. There is no room for selfish behavior, for individual desire, when one is expected to redeem the status of an entire race. That is why it is so difficult to make a conclusive statement as to the contradictory character of Edward Hunt and his adaptive clan. Writes Nabokov:

They delivered the thrills of seeing costumed and war-painted Indians in the flesh (especially those attired like fearsome Plains Indian warriors) with the sense that audiences were also being educated in their tribal backgrounds. Here were Indians who seemed incontrovertibly Indian but whom outsiders felt good being around. The fortuitous combination of their handsome looks and unique life experiences made them perfect mediators for all the contradictory ideas and symbolism that swirled around the paradoxical images of the Indian—as savage and noble, solid friend and frightening foe, enemy other and congenial ally, rapist and spiritualist, border-town drunk and wilderness mentor.

As problematic as the Hunt family’s simplified and flattened performances may have been, they were at least celebratory in tone. Despite the fact that Indians were (and are) considered to be more or less interchangeable, their accumulated dances, songs, and crafts were deemed worthy of preservation. There were also spiritual lessons to be learned from the Indians, along with a more symbiotic relationship with nature. Were the Hunts, whose insider knowledge did afford them at least a bit of authenticity, truly any worse than the affluent white Bohemians who turned native culture into a doomed and dying fetish? In other words, if the above quotation makes you feel uncomfortable, how about the following?

The crocodile tears shed across America over the widespread lamentation that the country’s Indians were a “vanishing species” were in flood as the nation approached its new century [the twentieth]…Painters, sculptors, and photographers exploited the nation’s distress over the plight of the Indian by portraying broken warriors fading into sunsets, riding alongside train tracks or telegraph wires, or slumped over drooping horses…What no political or social forecasters were willing to admit was how this pathetic vision caused inner sighs of relief. If everyone remained patient, natural attrition and what some called “the normal replacement of one race by another” would solve the “Indian Problem” all by itself.

How The World Moves is full of passages like the one above. Peter Nabokov raises difficult questions, prods festering wounds, and bolsters his elegant prose with an impressive library of research. His role, of course, carries its own contradictions. How are we meant to feel about white anthropologists who claim to speak for their subjects? Isn’t Nabokov’s repeated assertion that Edward Hunt was ostracized for sharing tribal secrets with Western academics a bit hypocritical? Nabokov is, after all, himself a professor of American Indian Studies at UCLA, and his research relies on interviewing and observing Natives who might be punished for their collaboration. I’m not sure I know how I feel about these issues. On the one hand, I have an acknowledged appetite for information—I am fascinated by other cultures (past and present) and would like to learn as much as I can. On the other hand, I recognize that some knowledge is too sacred to be shared. Secrets, especially spiritual ones, belong to individuals and communities—they are not owed to some kind of nebulous Western knowledge bank. If not knowing something allows another culture to protect its dignity, then I think I am happy to remain in the dark. 

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

THE ART COLLECTOR MOST LIKELY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A PAINTING


The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming - Scribner (2016)


The Vanishing Velázquez by Laura Cumming is, structurally speaking, one of the most innovative biographies I’ve ever read. In fact, I think ‘dual biography’ is probably a more appropriate term for this phenomenal text, as Cumming divides her attentions equally between two men who lived centuries—and worlds—apart. The first man will be easily recognizable to anyone who has ever studied the great masters of European painting. He is the esteemed Diego Velázquez, whose piercing portraits of Spanish nobles captured the melancholy twilight of a dynasty in decline. The second man will be recognizable to no one. He is John Snare, a nineteenth-century bookseller whose fascination with a single painting precipitated the spectacular ruin of his own reputation, business, and marriage. Having dedicated his life to the impassioned defense of a painting he knew in his heart to be a genuine Velázquez, after combing through the archives and chasing down every fragile lead, John Snare found himself spending his ‘golden’ years in relative anonymity, alone and impoverished in New York City, discredited by most experts in the field of fine arts and wanted by the Scottish authorities. His life is the nonfiction rendition of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. In the tragic figure of John Snare, Laura Cumming erects a monument to irrational obsession, material greed, and, ultimately, the supernatural power contained within a beautiful piece of art. One can visualize Snare as an elderly man, alone in his tiny dilapidated apartment on Broadway, holed up with his treasured painting and little else. After spending the first half of his life carefully establishing himself in the close-knit community of Reading, Snare died a slavish, Gollum-like creature, having lost his soul in the alluring painted gaze of the doomed Charles I of England. The inevitable fall began, as Cumming suggests, the moment Snare followed a whim to an obscure little auction and chanced to glance behind the filthy surface of a forgotten canvas. Fate looms large in the history of art, in the vaulted halls of our greatest museums, and in every chapter of The Vanishing Velázquez. Writes Cumming: 

For two centuries and more it has been confidently predicted that the small sum of Velázquez’s art would never increase, that no more paintings by him would now be found, that any lost paintings were permanently lost. But this has never been true. His pictures really have turned up again, tumbled in the tide of history, one by one, discovered in the most unlikely places…For Velázquez’s portraits, so miraculously empathetic and precise, so unmistakable and inimitable, as it seems, keep on being mistaken and overlooked. Perhaps something in his exceptionally enigmatic way of painting has veiled these works; something in their mystery and modesty—from the self-effacing brushwork to the absence of a signature—has obscured them. They depend upon the kindness of strangers to an unusual degree; they need people to find and to save them.

The fact that a middling merchant of no great worth happened to be one of these ‘saviors’ is further evidence of fate’s naughty disposition. When I think about all the times I have walked by framed portraits in thrift shops without a second glance, it makes John Snare’s perseverance all the more impressive. It can be difficult, after all, to trust the authenticity of a work of art that hasn’t been given the curator’s seal of approval. Uneducated as he might have been in the history and composition of fine art, John Snare’s eye was discerning enough to rummage through a collection of soiled and neglected doodles and pick out a masterpiece. Or so he would claim as he spent the remainder of his life defending ‘his picture.’ The portrait having since mysteriously disappeared once again, neither Cumming nor her readers can make any headway in determining whether or not Snare actually possessed a genuine Velázquez. But that is beside the point. The point is Snare’s singular devotion, which reads rather like a Tolstoy love story. Writes Cumming: 

We say that works of art can change our lives, an optimistic piety that generally refers to the moral or spiritual uplift of painting, and the way it may improve its audience. But art has other powers to alter our existence. The moment he bought the portrait of Prince Charles, Snare’s life changed direction. It was a lost work, disregarded, on its way to the oblivion from which he saved it in 1845. It was an object that he would be forced to defend from danger and theft, that took him from small-town provincial life to the most fashionable streets of London and New York, and from obscurity to newspaper fame; a painting he would take with him wherever he went, that came to mean more to him than anything in the world, more than his family, his home, and himself, that would lead to exile, a lonely death in a cold-water tenement and an unmarked grave in New York: the painting that would ruin his life.  

Cumming is a master of nonfiction ‘storytelling.’ Part of the reason her book is so easy to read—and so lauded by critics—is because it contains all the decadence and decay of a Victorian novel. John Snare finds himself drawn into the glittering world of transient wealth just like Dorian Gray and Jay Gatsby. Like Theodore Decker and his painted finch, by the time John Snare realizes the price of his obsession, he is already estranged from the ordinary life he might once have led. Falling in love with a work of art is ultimately a lonely experience because it happens so rarely and is not easily understood by those who have never swooned over brushstrokes. Cumming bridges the gulf by writing about Velázquez’s style in almost erotic terms. By doing so, she encourages readers to identify with Snare’s feelings, even if the object of desire remains intangible. Writes Cumming:

Everything he did was original, and in every genre. His landscapes are unprecedented; his still lifes almost sacramental; his fables are real and human. He invented a new kind of pictorial space and a new kind of picture in which consciousness flows in both directions. His portraits are not just the living, breathing likeness, but the seeing, feeling being in the very moment of life and thought, Nobody has ever surpassed his way of making pictures that seem to represent the experience—the immediacy—of seeing in themselves. He is the taciturn revolutionary among them all.

This description of a style of painting is almost hot-and-heavy. Through her heightened vocabulary and the rapid, tumbling urgency of her sentences, Cumming comes across just as enamored as Snare must have been. This is not entirely surprising—Cumming is a notable art critic and wrote an equally breathless book on self-portraits in 2009. The means by which a single annotated fragment in a dusty record caught her attention and dragged her off on the same hopeless mission as John Snare himself is a testament to the allure of Velázquez. In fact, Cumming found herself following in the literal footsteps of Snare in her pursuit of the lost painting, coming up against the same obstacles and frustrations, unearthing the same hilariously-named participants like characters out of Beatrix Potter, traveling great distances to interview senile eyewitnesses, and ending up with the same unanswered questions and the realization that she will likely never know the truth about the vanished masterpiece. Part of the anxiety felt by Cumming, Snare, and modern readers alike, has to do with the desire to see something that survives only in description. The limitations of words in the communication of art is an underlying theme trickling quietly beneath Cumming’s narrative, and it is what makes her writing both entertaining and frustratingly inconclusive. 

Velázquez is known in the art world for his ability to draw observers into the scenes he depicts. Thus, the relationship between inanimate painting and animate human being is more reciprocal than in most situations. In fact, Cumming might argue that Velázquez’s best canvases engage in a certain amount of seduction.The artist,

…invents a new kind of art: the painting as living theater, a performance that extends out into our world and gives a part to each and every one of us, embracing every single viewer. For anyone who stands before Las Meninas now, held fast by the eyes of these lost children and servants, is positioned exactly where the people of the past once stood. This is part of the picture’s content. It elects you to the company of all who have ever seen it, from the little princess and her maids, who must have rushed around to see themselves the moment Velázquez finished, to the king and queen who appear in miniature in that glimmering mirror at the back…The picture turns the world upside down, so that citizens may take the place of kings, and kings may be tiny compared to children.

Can John Snare be blamed for his downfall? Laura Cumming seems to think that falling in love is inevitable for anyone who stands before a genuine Velázquez. The Spanish master was just that good. It is impressive that Cumming’s biography remains so balanced even while one of her protagonists soars towards the heavens of artistic immortality, and the other plummets into obscurity. Their narrative trajectories may spin off in opposite directions, but the reader feels for and appreciates both untouchable Velázquez and forgettable John Snare. This is, perhaps, Cumming’s greatest accomplishment in The Vanishing Velázquez.