Vodka Politics (91 page)

14
. Robert H. Stacy,
Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1974), 55.

15
. Drozd,
Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done? A Reevaluation
, 13.

16
. Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 285; Frank,
Through the Russian Prism
, 188–89.

17
. Georgii V. Plekhanov,
Izbrannye filosofskie proizvedeniia
, 5 vols. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958), 4: 159–60; Marx,
Capital
, 19; William F. Woehrlin,
Chernyshevskii: The Man and the Journalist
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 216.

18
. “Sombre Monsters—or, How to Blow up a Country,” Nicky’s What (Russian history blog), May 10, 2010,
http://nickyswhat.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/sombre-monsters-or-how-to-blow-up-a-country
(accessed March 17, 2011).

19
. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii,
A Vital Question; or, What Is to Be Done?
trans. Nathan Haskell Dole and S. S. Skidelsky (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1886), 2–3, 139. In what follows, I alternate between translations from different centuries to deliver what I feel to be the most accurate and accessible interpretation to a contemporary readership.

20
. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii,
What Is to Be Done?
trans. Michael R. Katz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 52, 64.

21
. Chernyshevskii,
What Is to Be Done?
12, 115–16, 18 (1886 edition).

22
. Chernyshevskii,
What Is to Be Done?
93 (1993 edition).

23
. Chernyshevskii,
What Is to Be Done?
116 (1886 edition).

24
. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya sistema (Sovremennik, 1858),” in
Izbrannye ekonomichesie proizvedeniya
, tom 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1948), 668; the original was written under the pseudonym L. Pankrat’ev, “Otkupnaya sistema,”
Sovremennik
, no. 10 (1858). See also Marc Lee Schulkin, “The Politics of Temperance: Nicholas II’s Campaign against Alcohol Abuse” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), 28. On Pankrat’ev see: T. I. Pecherskaya, “Avtor v strukture syuzhetnogo povestvovaniya (“Povesti v povesti” N. G. Chernyshevskogo),”
Raznochintsy shestidesyatykh godov XIX veka. Fenomen samosoznaniya v aspekte filologicheskoi germenevtiki
, Jan. 28, 2004,
http://rassvet.websib.ru/text.htm?no=15&id=11
(accessed May 11, 2011).

25
. Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya sistema,” 682.

26
. Ibid., 670, 679

27
. Ibid., 671–72.

28
. Ibid., 678. See also
chapter 7
, note 46.

29
. Ibid., 685–87.

30
. Chernyshevskii,
What Is to Be Done? 212
(1886 edition).

31
. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii,
Chto delat’? Iz rasskazov o novykh lyudyakh
(Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1948), 242. Further clues are provided by Chernyshevsky’s reference to the
grud
’—alternatively translated as “chest” or “lungs.” At least a half-dozen times in the novel Chernyshevsky writes that the alcoholics (or reformed alcoholics) have (or once had) some unspecified sickness of the
grud
’. Yet rather than the tuberculosis of the lungs—the common diagnosis of heroines in nineteenth-century European literature—in the first sentences of his
Sovremennik
exposé on the tax-farm system, Chernyshevsky repeatedly invokes sicknesses and ulcers of the
grud
’, suggesting “in actuality, we have in our chest a very serious ulcer” (
v samom dele, u nas na grudi yazva dovol’no vrednogo kachestva
). Chernyshevskii, “Otkupnaya Sistema,” 667.

32
. See
chapter 7
, note 8.

33
. Edvard Radzinsky,
Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar
, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 161–62; Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts into Air
, 216; Michael Burleigh,
Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 280–81.

34
. Radzinsky,
Alexander II
, 162.

35
. Kenneth Lantz,
The Dostoyevsky Encyclopedia
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004), 58; Peter Sekirin, “Literary Journals and “Innocent” Novels: The Period of Transition,” in
The Dostoyevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries’ Memoirs and Rare Periodicals
, ed. Peter Sekirin (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1997), 145; Frank,
Dostoevsky
, 155; Walter G. Moss,
Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
(London: Anthem, 2002), 80.

36
. Lantz,
Dostoyevsky Encyclopedia
, 58.

37
. Indeed, the first few dozen pages of the book present a veritable exposé on drunkenness in which the pawnbroker, the tavern keeper, and their drunken customers are explicitly interconnected. Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Crime and Punishment
, trans. Jessie Coulson, ed. George Gibian, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 6–23.

38
. Donald Fanger,
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism: A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 184–85; Robin Feuer Miller,
Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 55–56.

39
. Donald Fanger explicitly notes the important influence of the liquor debates on Dostoevsky’s masterpiece in
Dostoevsky and Romantic Realism
, 184–85. See also Leonid P. Grossman, “Gorod i lyudi Prestupleniya i nakazaniya,” in
Prestupleniya i nakazaniya
, ed. Fyodor Dostoevsky (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1935), 23.

40
. Dostoevsky’s letter of June 8, 1865, is reprinted as an addendum in
Crime and Punishment
, 476.

41
. Miller,
Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey
, 55.

42
. Cited in Patricia Herlihy,
The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7–8.

43
. Reprinted in Dostoevsky,
Crime and Punishment
, 487–88. See also Miller,
Dostoevsky’s Unfinished Journey
, 57.

44
. See Herlihy,
Alcoholic Empire
, 113–14.

45
. To be fair, Tolstoy’s
Tak chto zhe nam delat’?
(“Then what must we do?”) is not quite identical to Chernyshevsky’s
Chto delat’?
For Tolstoy on Chernyshevsky see Hugh McLean,
In Quest of Tolstoy
(Brighton, Mass.: Academic Studies, 2008), 110; Andrew Baruch Wachtel,
Plays of Expectations: Intertextual Relations in Russian Twentieth-Century Drama
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 25 n.10. On Tolstoy’s realism see György Lukács, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” in
Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others
(London: Merlin, 1972), 126–205. On Tolstoy and the Russian state see Fedor Stepun, “The Religious Tragedy of
Tolstoy,”
Russian Review
19, no. 2 (1960): 157–58. Ironically, Chernyshevsky often defended Tolstoy’s early works against accusations of downplaying pressing social problems. Adam B. Ulam,
The Bolsheviks
(New York: Macmillan, 1965), 58.

46
. Leo Tolstoy,
What Is to Be Done? and “Life
” (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1899), 60 (follow on to page 64).

47
. Arguing how the state and the bourgeois class have conspired to invent “torpedoes, appliances for the use of the spirit-monopoly, and for privies.” Tolstoy complains, “but our spinning-wheel, peasant-woman’s loom, village plough, hatchet, flail, rake, and the yoke and bucket, are still the same that they were in the times of Rurik” back in the ninth century. Leo Tolstoy,
What Then Must We Do?
trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 295–96.

48
. Henri Troyat,
Tolstoy
(New York: Doubleday, 1967), 378. See also Stepun, “Religious Tragedy of Tolstoy,” 162.

49
. Stepun, “Religious Tragedy of Tolstoy,” 164; Anna A. Tavis, “Authority and Its Discontents in Tolstoy and Joyce,” in
Leo Tolstoy
, ed. Harold Bloom (Broomall, Pa.: Chelsea House, 2003), 67.

50
. Tavis, “Authority and Its Discontents in Tolstoy and Joyce,” 66.

51
. Quoted in: Herlihy,
Alcoholic Empire
, 111–12.

52
. Leo Tolstoy, “Letter to A. M. Kuzminskii, November 13–15, 1896,” in
Polnoe sobranie sochenenii
(Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1954), 69:205–6; quoted in Herlihy,
Alcoholic Empire
, 15.

53
. Troyat,
Tolstoy
, 567.

54
. William Nickell,
The Death of Tolstoy: Russia on the Eve, Astapovo Station, 1910
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 75.

55
. Jan Kucharzewski,
The Origins of Modern Russia
(New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1948), 162; Julio Alvarez del Vayo,
The March of Socialism
(London: Cape, 1974), 114.

56
. Ivan S. Turgenev,
Virgin Soil
, trans. T. S. Perry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877), 70–71. For an updated version see the New York Review of Books Classics edition (translated by Constance Garnett), 2000, 84. Some translate it as “brandy”; others, as “drink.”

57
. Turgenev,
Virgin Soil
, 240.

58
. Here again I use the 1877 translation (ibid., 232–33), replacing “brandy” for “vodka,” as is consistent with later translations. Turgenev,
Virgin Soil
, 266 (2000 edition).

59
. Turgenev,
Virgin Soil
, 252.

60
. Ibid., 254–55.

61
. Ibid.

62
. Figes,
A People’s Tragedy
, 130.

63
. Sue Mahan and Pamala L. Griset,
Terrorism in Perspective
, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2009), 40–41.

64
. Philip Pomer,
Lenin’s Brother: The Origins of the October Revolution
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 127–28. Also noteworthy is the extent to which revolutionaries used smuggled vodka to bribe or dope prison guards upon their arrival in Siberian exile. Helen Rappaport,
Conspirator: Lenin in Exile
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), 195, 75–76.

65
. See Pomer,
Lenin’s Brother
; Adam B. Ulam,
Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998), 392–93; Peter Julicher,
Renegades, Rebels and Rogues under the Tsars
(Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland & Co., 2003), 222–23.

66
. Burleigh,
Earthly Powers
, 280; Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner, “Introduction: Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? and the Russian Intelligentsia,” in
What Is to Be Done?
ed. Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 32; quoted in N. Valentinov, “Chernyshevskii i Lenin,”
Novyi zhurnal
, no. 27 (1951): 193–94.

67
. Vladimir I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?” in
Essential Works of Lenin
(New York: Bantam Books, 1966). See also Lars T. Lih,
Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context
(Leiden: E. J Brill, 2006). For Lenin on Chernyshevsky see, for instance, Vladimir I. Lenin, “‘The Peasant Reform’ and the Proletarian-Peasant Revolution,” in
Collected Works, vol. 17: December 1910–April 1912
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 122–24; Valentinov, “Chernyshevskii i Lenin.”

68
. Rakhmetov famously even went so far as to sleep on a bed of nails so as to better endure torture by the state. Drozd,
Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?: A Reevaluation
, 113–40.

69
. Vladimir I. Lenin, “Socialism and Religion,” in
Collected Works, vol. 10: November 1905–June 1906
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1962), 83–84. The original appeared in
Novaya zhizn
’, no. 28, Dec. 3, 1905. On Lenin’s personal drinking habits see Rappaport,
Conspirator
, 195, 75–76; Robert Hatch McNeal,
Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 76. See also James D. Young,
Socialism since 1889: A Biographical History
(London: Pinter, 1988), 102. On Lenin and Krupskaya’s temperate drinking habits when hosting the more intemperate Stalin see Robert Service,
Stalin: A Biography
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 88–89.