Tuesday
Last week when Joe Biden was meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocrat claimed to be quoting Leo Tolstoy when he responded to a reporter’s question about whether there was a “growing trust and happiness” between him and America’s president. “There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that,” Putin said
Commentators were unable to find any instances of Tolstoy saying or writing this, nor does it sound like something that Tolstoy would say. In fact, his characters often find genuine moments of happiness. The closest MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell could come was a passage from War and Peace, but Prince Andrei has something very different in mind that Putin.
Having lost his wife as well and seeing his proposals for military reform dashed, Andrei is feeling particularly discouraged. He begins to experience new hope after meeting Natasha, however:
“Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!” thought he.
To be sure, this happiness will not be long-lasting. After accepting his marriage proposal, Natasha will renege and then Andrei will almost die when fighting Napoleon and almost die. Although he will in fact die, before he does he will experience a vision of absolute love. (Now there’s a vision of happiness that eludes Putin.) Andrei also forgives Natasha, and he does not so much surrender to death as accept it as a new adventure.
His best friend Pierre, to whom he attributes the observation, is the novel’s existentialist, constantly pondering the meaning of life. Yet happiness awaits him as well as, after he and Natasha mourn Andrei, they fall in love (this after Pierre escapes execution). We see them enjoying a contented family life as the book comes to its conclusion.
While it’s not Tolstoy, what Putin said serves his purposes. If Russians believe that life is inevitably unhappy, then they won’t blame Putin’s kleptocracy for tanking the Russian economy. They will just continue to suck it up, as they have been doing for hundreds of years.
In Putin’s defense, the reporter’s question was strange. What does happiness have to do with the Biden-Putin relationship? Indeed, Russians and Americans may have very different visions of what constitutes happiness. For Americans, the word appears in the most important sentence of their founding document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These are the words of a people who think they can start fresh in a new world. It’s the vision of a young and optimistic people, a belief that one can erase the past. This vision has been embraced by each successive wave of immigrants and is integral to the American Dream, that which makes America America.
Russia, on the other hand, has experienced hardship after hardship. For them, there’s no easy way out. We see plenty of suffering in War and Peace when Napoleon invades, and the 20th century alone dumped on the Soviet Union more than almost any other nation. That Russians have been hardened in a way that optimistic Americans have not may contribute to Russia’s literary greatness. In any event, I can see why Putin would be taken aback by the question.
Incidentally, his response reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He too represents a response to facile American optimism. After he and gang have just murdered a Georgia family, one of his men complains that he’s not having much fun. In the line that ends the story, the Misfit replies, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life.”
The Misfit and Putin are both clear-eyed realists with blood on their hands. The issue of soul gets raised with both as well. When meeting with Putin as vice-president in 2011, Biden reported the following:
“I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told the New Yorker at the time. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.'”
Biden’s remark was a follow-up to George W. Bush’s fatuous statement, made ten years before, about his meeting with Putin: “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.”
Both Putin and the Misfit have buried their souls so deep that they cannot respond to the humanity of others. It is because the Misfit momentarily sees the soul at work in the otherwise shallow grandmother that he freaks out and shoots her. By reaching out to him with tenderness and love, even though he has just had her family killed, she shakes his cynical world view to its foundations. When Bush thought he could reach out similarly, however, Putin ran circles around him. Biden knows a lost cause when he sees one.
In any event, Putin represents everything that Tolstoy was against. The writer spoke from the beating heart of his country whereas the autocrat just twists words for his cynical ends.