Gogol, Swift, Tolstoy, Solzhenitzyn, and Papillon

If you don't know anything about Matt Taibbi and look for his bio in Wikipedia, you'll get perplexed: a very acid political journalist and author who left at some point America to live in Uzbekistan; he was expelled from there after six months as their president likes much more to criticize than to be criticized; so Mr. Taibbi moved to Mongolia where he started to play professional basketball; he got so sick that he needed to return to America for treatment; he worked then several years in Moscow, and finally washed up on American shores again. Somehow kind'o reversed Borat.

If you read his interview in Mother Jones you'll get more the hack of it: Russia is unspoiled and different from America in such a great way, it’s so different. Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia everywhere you go is completely insane. In Russia, if you wake up in the morning to go do something you’re supposed to do for your job and end up 100 miles away stone drunk with a bunch of strangers it’s totally OK. In America we’re so efficient. When the Americans came into Russia en masse in the mid 90’s they all had this crusading missionary attitude – like we have to change this place and turn it more into America. We have to take all these dingy old buildings and replace them with our gleaming corporate storefronts. We have to replace all these interesting idiosyncratic people and replace them with middle class managers who all want to buy IKEA furniture and go on vacations in Ibiza. They had a real missionary zeal about it.

After that you can start to read his blog and to understand the guy.

Only now I would like to tell you something different about Matt Taibbi: his list of five most important books, that I found in today's Newsweek; Gogol is there, along with Swift, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn... and Papillon. Here you go:

1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (Matt Taibbi has read it probably fifty times: a great novel about how human society is basically an unbroken string of tragic misunderstandings)
2. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (also read about fifty times: a lot of the books that Matt Taibbi likes are sort of about the same thing)
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (his way of making you realize that the seemingly dull details of ordinary day-to-day existence can be dramatic and terrible)
4. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (of all the books ever written, this one is probably the least like Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has to count for something)
5. Papillon by Henri Charrière (the greatest true-adventure tale ever, a great story of perseverance and the will to live; and so Matt Taibbi is always amazed by how beautiful the writing is)

Do you remember the first lines of Dead Souls?

In the britchka was seated such a gentleman--a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young.

I remember these lines as I read them first time, in Romanian; they sounded somehow different:

Un om despre care nu se putea spune ca era urat, dar nici chipes nu puteai sa zici ca ar fi fost. Nu era gras, dar nici slabanog. Batran nu era, dar, hotarat lucru, nici tanar nu puteai sa zici ca este.

(A Life in Books)

(Gogol)