Learning from history

I have started a new book, the first book I have read of recent contemporary fiction in….uh….not sure how long. Five years maybe? It is Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated from the Russian). It is an eccentric book but appealing, for reasons I don’t totally understand yet….perhaps I am curious about the logic by which it is structured? It’s also full of rich, humourous language and references which I always enjoy in a book.

Anyway, I took a break from reading and found this interview with Vodolazkin and his translator, which I want to bookmark here. There is lots in it to think about.  Here is some of the text as to give a flavour:

Eugene Vodolazkin: Memory … What do we have except memory? Nothing. Memory is the consciousness of a person, whereas history is the consciousness of the people. And that is why the book of books, the Bible, is a historical text. It ismemory. As it happens, I am a historian — formerly a philologist, but my whole life I’ve studied the Middle Ages, and my academic writing is more about history and the philosophy of history than about linguistic problems. But history as such is not as important as we sometimes think. There’s Cicero’s famous aphorism: “History is the teacher of life.” But we shouldn’t take these words too seriously. History doesn’t actually repeat. I mean, it does in some sense, but if you want to build a modern democracy, you quickly understand that ancient Greek democracy has nothing to do with what you want, except in name. Because every historical event is a great complex of different circumstances, intentions, and so on and so forth. And to bring all of these together for a second time is impossible. And that’s why knowledge of history will not save us, cannot teach us what to do in the future. You can’t draw political conclusions from history, except in some extremely limited sense.

Interviewer: So it’s not the case that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it?

EV: Well, it’s not that history doesn’t teach us anything at all. But you have to identify the specific sphere of its influence. And for me, that would be the personal sphere. If we want to draw historical lessons, we must understand that they are moral rather than political. For society as a whole, it doesn’t make sense to study examples, because each person has his or her own agenda, in the same way that every battle has its own general. There are so many directions, so many vectors, that it is impossible to regulate this process. Which brings me back to our previous topic: if you want to help your society, develop yourself. Don’t develop the Volk, the people in general. Don’t deal in thousands and millions; deal with your own self. This point is crucial for The Aviator. One of the book’s main ideas is that personal history is much more important than general history, than world history — that world history is actually only a small piece of individual history. Whereas all these utopian ideas, like communism, all these ideas that put pressure on individuality — they are not organic, not vital. They have no right to exist. And The Aviator is precisely a text about an attempt at emancipation of personal history from world history. (full interview)