{"id":120133,"date":"2018-01-12T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-12T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=120133"},"modified":"2018-01-12T13:01:49","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T18:01:49","slug":"cornel-westta-nehisi-coates-twitter-feud-explained-russian-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/12\/cornel-westta-nehisi-coates-twitter-feud-explained-russian-writers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cornel West\u2013Ta-Nehisi Coates Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Cornel West and Ta-Nehisi Coates.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

There\u2019s a phrase I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book\u00a0The Gulag Archipelago<\/em>, \u201cWherever the law is, crime can be found.\u201d \u2014Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/p>\n

Chekhov for me is the great writer of compassion. \u2014Cornel West<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It was the fall of 2008 and I had just started a Ph.D. program in Russian literature at Princeton University. In retrospect, I don\u2019t know what kind of twenty-two-year-old I was that I would leap so enthusiastically into long days and nights spent reading about serfs, brain fever, and Cossack rebellions, but there I was. I was anxious about keeping up with all the reading, so I eagerly signed up for a course on Anton Chekhov, who once famously said, \u201cBrevity is the sister of talent.\u201d About a month into the class, my already frazzled nerves snapped in two when I learned that our next session would be guest taught by Cornel West. As someone who grew up in a black family, this was bigger news than if Chekhov himself would be joining us. I was, however, a bit surprised; I knew Cornel West as many things: an intellectual and lyrical genius, a spitter of \u201cblack prophetic fire<\/a>,\u201d an extra in my least favorite Matrix<\/em>\u00a0film, and even a fashion icon<\/a>, but back then I did not associate him (or really anyone who\u2019d ever been on TV) with nineteenth-century Russian literature.<\/p>\n

But, as I would learn that day, West has long loved Russian writers, Chekhov in particular, whom he places at the center of his vision for radical social change. In interviews and public talks, West describes himself a \u201cChekhovian Christian\u201d (and he seems refreshingly unconcerned that most people don\u2019t have a clue what he means by that). There were only two other students in the class, and we were scheduled to be there for about three hours, so there would be no hiding in the corner; I\u2019d have to talk to Cornel West, most likely more than once. When he arrived, he smiled warmly (revealing his signature gap tooth) and introduced himself to each of us individually. He wore his usual three-piece black suit, and he took care to thank our professor, \u201cSister Ellen,\u201d as he called her, for inviting him.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

West began by talking about Chekhov as a blues man, weaving connections between Chekhov and the African American musical tradition (he was working on a piece comparing Chekhov to another of his heroes, the jazz musician John Coltrane). As West put it, Chekhov wrote about characters whose lives were ensnared by disappointment, dashed hopes, and unfulfilled potential\u2014the stuff of the \u201cgut bucket blues.\u201d Chekhov was obsessively concerned with how to cope with pain without retreating into despair or, worse, metabolizing resentment as hate. West tied this to Chekhov\u2019s own tragic fate: at just twenty-four\u00a0years old, Chekhov, a doctor, contracted tuberculosis. West spoke solemnly about how Chekhov continued to practice medicine. In offering comfort to those in pain, Chekhov found a compassionate love that allowed\u00a0him to push past his own anguish. It was in that love, in that refusal to turn away from the horror of mortality, that West located the seeds for social transformation.<\/p>\n

In an interview with professor David L. Smith (published in The Cornel West Reader<\/em>), West spoke about this Chekhovian Christian love in Marxist terms, explaining, \u201cWhat Coltrane and Chekhov represent is how the indispensable nonmarket values of love, care, concern, service to others, intimacy and gentleness are to all of us who move from womb to tomb.\u201d And love continues to figure in West\u2019s anti-capitalist political vision; as recently as the 2016 election, when stumping for Bernie Sanders, he referred to the Vermont senator\u2019s campaign as a \u201clove train.\u201d I remember watching him say that on TV and thinking to myself\u2014ah yes, Chekhov.<\/p>\n

That said, I hadn\u2019t given much thought to West or his affinity for Chekhov since that first meeting. Strangely, it\u2019s been Ta-Nehisi Coates (whose new book We Were Eight Years in Power<\/em>, received a \u2026 let\u2019s say unfavorable review<\/a> from West) who I have been thinking more about in the context of Russian literature. Since Coates began devoting more of his writing to the subject of mass incarceration, I noticed he was increasingly invoking the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author best known for his indictment of the Soviet forced-labor camp system in novels such as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich<\/em> (1962),\u00a0In the First Circle<\/em> (1968), and, his magnum opus, The Gulag Archipelago<\/em> (1973), a genre-defying three-volume text that contains testimonies from hundreds of Gulag survivors and a detailed account of Solzhenitsyn\u2019s own arrest and imprisonment. Coates\u2019s October 2015 cover story for The Atlantic<\/em>, \u201cThe Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,\u201d begins with an epigraph from Solzhenitsyn, pulled from The Gulag Archipelago<\/em>, that reads: \u201cWherever the law is, crime can be found.\u201d Solzhenitsyn was referring to the proliferation of new categories of crime that were invented under Stalin, particularly those that fall under category 58, the section charged dealing with counterrevolutionary activities. Solzhenitsyn writes: \u201cthere is no deed, design, action, or inaction, that could not be punished by the hand of article 58.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is perhaps unsurprising that Coates would find an intellectual interlocutor in Solzhenitsyn. Coates and Solzhenitsyn focus on policies and practices that allow powerful institutions to naturalize violence, disenfranchisement, and plunder. While West, the Chekhovian Christian, imagines a kind of spontaneous love that could cure our apathy toward human suffering, Coates imagines the work of compassion as a slow, arduous pulling apart of a carefully constructed state apparatus. In his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me<\/em> (just a few lines after reiterating his indebtedness to Solzhenitsyn), Coates dissects the building blocks of political apathy, writing, \u201cThe mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one\u2019s eyes and forgetting the work of one\u2019s hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

West\u2019s preferred Russian author, Chekhov briefly turned his attention to the structural matter of state-organized violence. In 1890, he traveled for three months across Siberia in order to reach the island of Sakhalin, a Russia penal colony just north of Japan. Writing to a friend about the purpose of his journey, Chekhov wrote, \u201cIt is clear that we have sent\u00a0millions of people to rot in prison, we have let them rot casually, barbarously, without giving it a thought.\u201d Solzhenitsyn later wrote about Chekhov\u2019s visit to Sakhalin in The Gulag Archipelago<\/em>, though just to argue that the czarist system of forced labor was mild compared to that of Stalin\u2019s. But Chekhov\u2019s most famous works, which he would publish after his return, were his four major plays, all of which set the question of human cruelty away from the gargantuan world of the Russian labor-camp system, and back in the country estate, the cherry orchard, the sitting room, back into everyday forms of callousness and the redeeming power of irrational love.<\/p>\n

In December, West published a widely circulated critique of Coates in the\u00a0Guardian<\/em>, calling him\u00a0\u201cthe neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.\u201d Central to West\u2019s continued criticism<\/a> of Coates is his reluctance to engage with topics outside of American race relations. Coates has defended his focused attention on racism in U.S. history, saying, \u201cThose people who have specialties on foreign policy probably can\u2019t write with the depth that I can about race<\/a>.\u201d Watching (along with many) in confusion as Coates and West, two of the most dynamic thinkers of our time, seemingly spoke past one another, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder if their differing choices in Russian authors, Solzhenitsyn and Chekhov\u2014two writers tackling the question of how to make a better world at vastly different registers\u2014might shed some light. Solzhenitsyn, like Coates, wants to master the granular world of procedure\u2014the mechanics, policies, and practices of institutional violence. West wants from Coates the kind of radical empathy he recognizes in Chekhov\u2014a boundless concern, documented in print, for every form of injustice; he reads Coates\u2019s hesitation to take on subjects he feels are outside of his purview as apathy\u2014the ultimate sin for a Chekhovian Christian. Chekhov, though, was agnostic, and, like Coates, was accused of pessimism. He was a dyed-in-the-wool gradualist liberal who hoped a revolution wouldn\u2019t unfold in Russia\u2014in sum: a seemingly unlikely candidate for West\u2019s veneration. Likewise, Solzhenitsyn might have actually agreed with West\u2019s complaint that Coates is too parochial (Solzhenitsyn famously alleged<\/a> that Angela Davis did not do enough to fight state violence outside of the United States, accusing her of silence regarding Soviet repression of Czech dissidents). But finding our heroes (and foes) on the page is always a process of selective reading. In any case, I\u2019m just glad to have a new Russian literary dichotomy on the table. The \u201cTolstoy or Dostoevsky?\u201d question was getting a bit tiresome.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jennifer Wilson is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of\u00a0Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a phrase I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He says in his book\u00a0The Gulag Archipelago, \u201cWherever the law is, crime can be found.\u201d \u2014Ta-Nehisi Coates Chekhov for me is the great writer of compassion. \u2014Cornel West It was the fall of 2008 and I had just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1284,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[25146,4738,8868,9429,32471,32474,32473,32475,32477,32470,32472,32476],"class_list":["post-120133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-a-day-in-the-life-of-ivan-denisovich","tag-anton-chekhov","tag-cornel-west","tag-princeton","tag-sakhalin","tag-solzhenitsyn","tag-ta-nahisi-coates","tag-the-cornel-west-reader","tag-the-first-circle","tag-the-gulag-archipelago","tag-trevor-noah","tag-we-were-eight-years-in-power"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Cornel West\u2013Ta-Nehisi Coates Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Cornel West loves Chekhov and Ta-Nehisi Coates loves Solzhenitsyn, and this explains everything.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/01\/12\/cornel-westta-nehisi-coates-twitter-feud-explained-russian-writers\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Cornel West\u2013Ta-Nehisi Coates Twitter Feud Explained Through Russian Writers by Jennifer Wilson\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"January 12, 2018 \u2013 There\u2019s a phrase I\u2019ve been thinking about a lot recently by the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 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