1869, Ep. 125 with Gabriella Safran, author of Recording Russia

7:08PM Nov 21, 2022

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Gabriella Safran

Keywords:

people

birds

russian

russia

recording

insult

writers

dostoevsky

listening

nightingale

19th century

prison

book

canaries

gabriella

question

happening

voices

mid 19th century

places

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Gabriella Safran, author of the new book Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century. Gabriella Safran, the Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies, teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University. Her books include The Worlds of S. An-sky, Wandering Soul and The Whole World in a Book. We spoke to Gabriella about how Russian writers in the mid-19th century worked hard to accurately record the voices and sentiments of the emerging middle classes, the fascinating story of Dostoyevsky's ritual insult battles, and the ancient connection between birds and the human language. Hello, Gabriella, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Happy to be talking with you. Congratulations on your new book Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century. Now I like in the introduction of the book, you say, listening is not easy. Tell us how it came about to write a book about listening.

Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this one was about a late 19th century Russian and Yiddish playwright and ethnographer S. An-sky. And in doing the research for that, I noticed so many points in memoirs about him where people said he was such a good listener, he was so good at listening to the people, to the Jews, he collected folklore from Russian miners. And I thought, wow, these people, they were obsessed by listening. What does that mean? And then I really finished that book with this open question, what does it mean to pay attention to someone else's ethnographic listening? And, and in pursuing that question, I ended up pursuing it sort of all the way back to the middle of the 19th century. So you know, a couple of generations before An-sky, and I pursued it back into the Russian canon, famous mid 19th century Russian writers, you know, Turgenev and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and folklorists like Vladimir Dahl, who is this unbelievably interesting writer of the most important mid-19th century Russian dictionary. And I also found that part of the story was travelers to Russia, these famous Western European travelers like the Marquis de Custine, and I realized that they were all obsessed by listening. Each of them asking, how good am I? And how good is that other writer at listening to and recording the people, whatever they mean by the people - and that varies from one writer to another. And I realized they're interested in this question, and that they were kind of competing with each other, to be the best one at listening to and recording the voice of the people. But often, they were competing with themselves. They were competing with a worse version of themselves. And they were saying, How do I have to reform myself to become really good at listening to and recording the voices of people who are unlike myself? I imagine that as someone who makes podcasts, you're interested in this, you know, this is what's happening right now. You're listening to and recording me and looking very friendly and, you know, kind of performing. You're listening, you're smiling. And I think that's what these writers were doing. They were, like, great creators of podcasts in the mid 19th century. So I was interested in these questions. And then I also was really motivated by the ways that questions about mediating other people's voices, doing that well or badly, seemed to me to be kind of modern questions. I realized it's not just these mid 19th century Russian writers and travelers to the Russian Empire who see listening to and recording other people's voices as something you can do well or badly. I realized that my students care about this. My 21st century Stanford undergrads, who are, you know, 18, 19, 20 years old, they, they are concerned with questions of ethical mediation and representation. They're worried about what happens if you unethically, incorrectly maybe, appropriate someone else's voice or art. These are urgent questions for people now, not only my students, but I think all of us. And that made me really fascinated by how those questions were being asked in the mid 19th century. And I think these are questions about Russia in specific, sort of who speaks for Russia, is there a Russian people? Is there a unified Russian people? Or are they diverse? You know, Putin has an opinion, he's very confident that the Ukrainians are not real. They're just part of the Russian people who are deluded into thinking that they're different. That question is very urgent now, in that there is a large, destructive, deadly war that's, you know, destabilizing the global economy. And that's happening basically over that question, or at least from Putin's perspective, in his rhetoric, it's happening over that question. And I think that question of how unified is that great Eurasian landmass that's been ruled by from Moscow and St. Petersburg? And how does language make it unified? Or maybe make us hesitate about whether it's unified? That's also a question that was urgent to the people I study, and it's urgent to us now. We can't escape it.

That's great. I like how you brought this to the modern day. Yeah, it feels as if I don't want to bring this, necessarily. But, you know, if he was emulating these Russian writers and European observers of Russia from the mid-19th century, and was obsessed with listening, maybe there wouldn't be a war.You know, listening to others is difficult, and understanding where they're coming from, I think, can only spread peace rather than war. But all that being said, you know, it sounds like the writers and travelers to Russia that you profile on the book, they're trying really hard to listen. And they're listening to different classes, the emerging middle class, the laboring class. And yet, there's also this interesting thing that you mentioned in the book, that there was a conviction that they had that, actually, you need to be a part of the group to really understand and really hear them correctly. How did they bring those two things together?

Yeah, maybe you can never bring those things together. Right. And maybe that's a way that these mid 19th century characters are not so different from us, you know, I think we too, cannot be ever 100% confident that we have adequately heard someone else and that we can adequately convey their voice and speak for someone else. I'm not sure we can do that. I'm not sure we can be confident we can do that. Even when it's people that we identify with strongly, you know, people of our class or ethnicity, people in our own family, can you really speak for them? We wonder that I think and we doubt ourselves, and rightly so. But we are also compelled to try to listen to other people and to convey their words, and to record them, you know, that's what you're doing now. That's what people do, not just people who write books and make podcasts but you know, all of us in our daily lives. And so we struggle with this. I think it's especially the case with politicians, political activists, and verbal artists of any kind, you know, writers, songwriters, filmmakers, they're always asking, have I really heard these other people? Am I conveying their voices adequately? Or somehow inadequately? Do I get them? Am I identifying with them enough to convey their voices adequately? And I think, you know, we try, we fail, we try again. And I think that's what these 19th century writers do, as well. I'm, you know, I'm basically sympathetic to these writers. Sometimes I worry that people might think I'm making fun of them. Because I say that they their listening is performative, and they're in contests with each other. But I don't want it to come across as though I'm making fun of them. I mean, some of them are kind of funny, but I really want to say, look, they're like us. And you know, and at the same time, I do feel like I see moments when there's a tremendous danger in purporting to be able to adequately represent another group of people like Putin saying, you know, the Russians and the Ukrainians are just the same and I speak for the Ukrainians. You know, that is kind of what he's saying. He's saying I can speak for the Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians are saying, No, you can't. Right. So that's an indication of a kind of failure of that impulse to speak for someone else.

Certainly, certainly, you mentioned that there's a you alluded to it, that there is a gap between writers or observers and the people. But you say that a lot of the previous examinations of the writers that you profile have focused more about, you know, emotions and politics, but you say that there's actually more of a connection to technology and performance. Tell us a little bit about this.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I think technology and the sort of changes in technology are a really important part of how we think about our own abilities to listen, to listen and to record. And I think each new kind of technology for reproducing the human voice gives us this fantasy that we're going to finally establish fully adequate connections, that that whatever the sense, we have of a kind of gap between us and other humans, that's going to fall away, if we just use, you know, Zoom recording correctly, or something, you know, new cameras, I don't know, we'll use our phones the right way. That's, that's a fantasy that we know. And that was also a fantasy in the mid 19th century. People especially fantasized about the telegraph that it would, you know, allow for this establishing of fully adequate, almost mystical connections between people. Each new kind of technology, I think, prompts the people who encounter it, the media generation of people who are formed in part by their encounter with a specific new technology (we might be the Zoom generation, I'm sorry to say), each new technology prompts people to learn how to use it, and then to want to show off how good they are at using it. And to imagine, like, if I'm the best using this, I'm going to be able to really record and create connection. But then what happens is that we grow skeptical about the ability of these new technologies to do the thing we fantasize, you know, we realize Zoom is not the answer, although it's not bad, but it's still not the answer to all kinds of gaps among humans. So it's these ideas that come from media studies, and that I especially find in studies of 19th century media, I read a lot of historians of 19th century sound and listening and telegraphy. And I found them really inspirational. So these ideas, I think, offer us a way to get past some kind of tired myths about Russia. So people who study Russia tend to say that Russians are exceptional, that Russian intellectuals are different from intellectuals elsewhere, that the Russian people are different, that Russia is a space that's completely unlike the rest of the world, especially, importantly, unlike western Europe or North America, that Russia is a place where there's this tragic gap between the intelligentsia and the people who are in Russian the “narod.” So there's this gap between the intelligentsia and the narod. And the intelligentsia is full of guilt, they're wracked with guilt, they feel this gap to be a tremendous tragedy, in order to reunite with the people, in order to find some common cause with the people, the narod, they have to turn away from everything that they, the intelligentsia, had learned, had thought was important to themselves, they have to reform themselves. So there is this discourse, this myth that like Russia is so special and different in this gap between the intelligentsia and the people. And what I say is I don't believe that Russia is so different from the rest of the world. I think that 19th century Russian intellectuals, yes, they thought there was a gap between themselves and the people they were listening to, but the same thing was true in the United States and France and Colombia and Japan and you know, other places that historians of the 19th century write about excitingly, you know, Russia is not so different. And also, I want to argue, the 19th century is not so different. And we have more in common with the 19th century than we tend to think. And Russia is more like the rest of the world than we tend to think. And I like thinking about media and sound, because this puts us into a kind of transnational frame of mind, where we're less likely to fall into believing these myths of national exceptionalism.

I like that a lot. It makes total sense - to just, you know, take Russia as this, oh, it's gotta be completely different than all these others, it doesn't make any sense. I mean, obviously, there are cultural differences, and there are different histories that every nation has. But overall, the commonalities are much greater than the differences.

I think that's true. And I find it really disturbing and fascinating that Putin in his rhetoric is so strongly insisting on a fundamental gap between Russia and the West, he has been issuing all kinds of statements and his people also issue these statements. Some are more formal, some are less formal, in which he harps on this theme of Russia as a place of tradition, and collectivism, and virtue, and the West as a place of bad newfangled dissolution and bad individualism and bad globalism, and they are fundamentally different. And I just feel like that's not true. You know, there's collectivism here, there's individualism there, there's tradition in both places, there's globalism, in both places. This binary, dividing Russia and the West, is something that you can see is important to the mid 19th century characters I study. But it's constructed, and we should be skeptical about it. And now again, it's resurfacing in our politics, and we should, again, be skeptical about it. I do think that you hear some American, some Western thinkers feeling this impulse to reproduce Putin's sense of a fundamental distinction between Russia and the West. And we hear people here also saying Russia is totally different from us, were totally different from them. We should not do that. That just plays into his hands. And it's false.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it plays in this if we want to take a global perspective, this is what every leader does, when they're gearing up for war, and they're in a war, you have to for your own psychological health. You know, you're here you are killing people, well, let's not make them people, let's make them the other, theyr'e really bad. It's, you don't have to feel guilty about them dying. And every country does that to their opponent - turns them into an animal or you see the imagery all around the world, like the enemy is not us. Right? It makes it easier to go to war with them,

and it makes it hard to end the war.

yeah, and that, too. Yeah. Yeah, we're not in a good time in history. But it is, again, you see the historical trends of this happening before, but spinning into a more positive note. Tell us some of your favorite stories or anecdotes from the book.

Oh, well, so I really enjoyed the research for chapter seven. Chapter Seven is on Dostoevsky and his time in prison. You know, Dostoevsky was a part of a radical reading group as a young man, and then he and other people in that reading group were rounded up and punished and he was sent to Siberia, where he was in prison for four years. And then he served as an Army private for the rest of a decade. So it was a long time. And he ended up writing this wonderful, absolutely fascinating novel about someone very much like him in a prison very much like the prison where he was. It's called Notes from the Dead House. I recommend it. It's really, really fascinating. And it's a fast read, it's marvelous. So while he was in the prison, he kept notes of everything he heard, of a lot of things he heard. He had epilepsy, so he would frequently be sent to the sick ward in the prison and there the doctor let him keep a notebook. He wasn't supposed to keep a notebook, but the doctor kept the notebook for him. And in that notebook he would write down all of the phrases and songs and jokes and everything that he heard from the other prisoners who were people unlike himself, not writers, they were not all literate (although they were more literate in general than people of their class were in the general Russian population, interestingly), but they were ethnically diverse. So he was fascinated by them. And he spent his time in prison as an ethnographer. And then he drew very heavily on that prison notebook when he went to write Notes from the Dead House. And that's something that people who studied Dostoevsky know very well. So it's been discussed a lot. But what I'm really fascinated by is the way that Dostoevsky was especially interested by how the different prisoners would get involved in insult contests with each other. These were what anthropologists or linguistic anthropologists call ritual insults. So they're not insults that are really meant to be taken seriously. You don't respond to them by you know, getting in a fistfight with the person who's insulting you. Rather, this is a verbal contest, in which you're insulted, and you are supposed to respond with an even more elaborate insult. And then your opponent should respond with an even more verbally creative, elaborate, improbable insult. These are the elements of this kind of insult battle. Around the world, you can see ritual insults happening in a lot of different places. They've been studied a lot in Africa, I also work with Yiddish. So there's definitely ritual insult contests as a part of Eastern European Jewish culture, Yiddish culture, you see them represented in the works of Sholem Aleichem. They are more associated with women in Yiddish than in other parts of the world. It's also fascinating that rap battles are seen by some people as being associated with insult contests. So I feel that people haven't talked enough about Dostoevsky’s interest in these ritual insults in prison, and the ways that he reproduces them. He listens to them, he records them and then he reproduces them in his autobiographical novel notes from the dead house. And at a certain point, after thinking about this a lot, I realized that Dostoevsky not only is fascinated by the prisoners’ ritual insults, but he himself eventually gets involved in an insult battle with another writer. So this other writer, Nikolai Leskov, Dostoevsky's contemporary, Leskov and Dostoevsky are both the children of priests, their fathers were from the priestly estate, their fathers had gotten the education that the sons of priests would get, but then their fathers decided not to be priests and went and did other things. This was very common in the 19th century and Russia, they were too many priests’ sons for the available priests’ jobs. And priests’ sons had some education, they were literate, so they could go to med school or, you know, do other things. So that's what happened to Dostoevsky’s dad and Leskov's dad. So they're from this priestly background. And then eventually, Dostoevsky and Leskov get in a fight in print about which of them is better at representing the voices of priests, which of them is better at representing priests. So Dostoevsky publishes something about priests, Leskov writes this review under a false name under a pseudonym, making fun of how Dostoevsky represents priests and then Dostoevsky publishes something making fun of Leskov for how he makes fun of him under an assumed name for misrepresenting the voices of priests, and Dostoevsky says he's so bad at representating priests, no real priests speak the way he says priests speak. So I think that this is so interesting in so many ways. Partly, it's interesting, because it's this fascinating dynamic of how people identify but not fully with the group that their parents are in. You know, I think that's probably true of all of us. You know, we sometimes think we can represent what our own parents or grandparents might say. And then at other times we realize there is a gap and we can't and we might be kind of caught out, it might be revealed that we're inadequate in doing this. But it's just fascinating that it's specifically priests, but what's also so interesting is that I think Dostoevsky and Leskov were involved in a ritual insult battle, just as Dostoevsky saw his fellow prisoners doing in in the prison in Siberia.

That's hilarious. If you can say on the podcast, what was what were some of your favorite insults?

So there's a lot of insults that Dostoevsky records in the prison that have to do with birds. And I think that's really interesting. In the specific ritual insult contest that he describes in detail, pretty early in Notes from the Dead House, it ends with one of the prisoners saying, what kind of bird are you? And the other one saying, I'm the kagan bird, which is this mythical bird. And then everyone laughs. And that's a really good answer. And the one who says he's the kagan bird wins, which is strange, but also Dostoevsky constantly records bird terms, both in his notebook and in letters he writes later about his prison experience. And in the novel Notes from a Dead House, you see that the prisoners are always insulting Dostoevsky and the people like him, right. Dostoevsky is an upper class person. He is unlike most of the other prisoners. There's a few people who are like him in the prison. And the lower class, mostly peasant prisoners, called Dostoevsky and the other upper class prisoners “iron beak,” they say you iron beak, you peck and peck at us. But now we have the upper hand because you're stuck in prison with us. And we're going to torment you. Right? So I'm fascinated, like, what is iron beak? I thought about this a lot. And I came to the conclusion that it might be a reference to Mumming, which is a Christmas time tradition. In Eastern Europe. I mean, also in Western Europe, like, if you're from Philly, you know, about mumming. So it's this tradition of people dressing up in these different kind of ritualized costumes, and displaying themselves, maybe going door to door and asking for treats, or maybe having a parade if you're in Philadelphia. And, and so one of the costumes that was known in in Russia was being a bird. Young men would dress as a bird and they would have a stick with a kind of hook on it. And they would use that hook to attack people. So that the people would give them, you know, candy or nuts or whatever. So I suspect that the prisoners’ insult has to do with this kind of ritualized mumming version of a bird. But I was really fascinated by birds. Throughout the book, I felt that wherever people talked about recording vernacular language, the image of birds would surface. And I found this not only in the writing of a lot of Russian writers, I also found it in Dickens, you know, other mid 19th century writers from places other than Russia. I think there's something about how birds can fly away, we can't catch them. So they're a little bit like oral language, when you think about it as something that you're attempting to record, but that you might not succeed in recording. But there's other reasons as to why birds provide a really compelling metaphor for spoken language. We see it in Homer, of course, right? Homer has winged words, the idea of people speaking in winged words, so it's an ancient metaphor, that birds and words are somehow connected. But there's also some ways that I think birds are experienced in 19th century Russia as in kind of a distinctive way that causes that metaphor to be especially appealing.

Interesting. That's really interesting. I mean, I think that...wasn't there, augury? That was seeing birds as an omen. So I mean, we see that in the movies, if there's something bad that is going to happen, you hear the owl hooting, or you hear like the crow cawwing. So there's augury going way back when as well as the birds and Twitter is an example of that. They use a bird as an example. A little bird told me - just going back to augury that the birds were an omen of something that is going to happen in the future.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's the actual history of birds and communication, right?

That's true.

Owls in Harry Potter also carry a message. And of course birds are actually recording devices like we tend to think of parrots are, you can teach your parrot to say something, so then the parrot records your words, and it will record your words in your accent. But in the mid 19th century, there was a pretty lively trade in in the Russian Empire in what were called Russian canaries, which were a mix of canaries from the Macronesian islands and these local Russian forest birds, siskins, that were hardier, so they could endure the cold climate, from the 1820s-1830s. These hybrid Russian canaries were being bred in villages in the Russian interior, and then they would be sold to urban consumers who would keep them in cages and have something like a gramophone is before you have a gramophone. They would they would give you sound entertainment. The way that you can see how these Russian canaries became recording devices is that the peasants who would be rearing them in these villages in the interior, they would cage their canaries for sale next to local birds like especially nightingales, famous for their beautiful song. So the Russian canaries would learn to reproduce the song of the nightingale.

Wow, that's brilliant.

Yeah. And you have these amazing accounts of people very carefully training either the Russian canaries or songbirds that they had captured to sing like other birds that were understood to be virtuosi, virtuosic singers, like there's this account in Turgenev, he has this amazing text where he is purportedly, I'm sure he really is recording the voice of someone he knows who's a peasant and songbird hunter who says, you want to know how to capture really good nightingale's I know how to capture the best nightingales, and then he tells you in great detail where you find the nightingale, the best singers, and how you capture them. It's very elaborate and complicated. And then he says, You, you take your nightingale that you've captured, you hide it in your hat. And then you go into a tavern, where there's an especially good nightingale, who's an especially good singer in a cage, and you stand under the cage. And then the nightingale in your hat hears the really good singer, and it learns to reproduce that song. And then you get more money for your nightingale. Because you've recorded more desirable music into your nightingale, which becomes like a recording device.

That's incredible.

Doesn't that make you want to do a podcast just about that?

Yeah, totally, totally. I think bring you back on go go deeper into this.

Actually, where you should go if you're interested in this. There's this young woman who teaches somewhere in England, Olga Petri, who writes about these nightingales, this kind of songbird, the Russian canaries and she's amazing. And I feel like someone should make a podcast about her stuff, because it's so cool.

I'll check that out. That's amazing. Yeah, reminds me of what I saw, it was a one of the BBC wildlife specials that wasn't a nightingale but it was a bird that had imitated the language that this bird had heard, people that were nearby, like children playing and the parents yelling at the children and things like that. And the bird could imitate that. It was incredible.

Birds are incredible. And yeah, and I think that is something. You know, I don't think that Russia is distinctively, you know, silent or autocratic or collectivist. But I do feel like, maybe it's distinctive, to think about these places that have huge forested expanses, and a whole lot of birds. And maybe that's the sort of real distinctiveness, the distinctiveness of the soundscape.

Nice, I like that, I like that. That's beautiful, beautiful. Well, you said this in so many words earlier, but this is one of the quotes from the very beginning of the book, and it's from the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language by Vladimir Dahl. "A word is like a sparrow. It flies away and you can't catch it.” Very true. But in this particular case, you have caught a lot of words. And you've captured a lot of really great insights. And so it's a pleasure talking with you, it's been a lot of fun. And I've learned a lot and I encourage our listeners to see what you have captured in this new book, Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century. Thank you so much for coming on our podcast, Gabriella.

Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.

That was Gabriella Safran, author of the new book Recording Russia: Trying to Listen in the 19th Century. If you'd like to purchase Gabriella's new book, use the promo code 09POD to save 30% on our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. If you live in the UK, use the discount code csannounce and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast.