Posted by Ed
I'm just back from a weekend trip to Berkeley, and I'm too tired/lazy/busy to write anything substantive of my own. Instead, here are some recent articles that have struck my interest:
Just as pizza, once a Neapolitan speciality, spread throughout Italy as a result of its popularity in America, so Tantra's reputation in India was significantly affected by its notoriety in Europe. Today, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the sort of hard-core Tantra that White describes never existed and that Tantra has always been solely a technique of meditation. When scholars of this ilk encounter the blatantly sexual statements of the hard-core texts (and the Tantras do contain statements like: "The body of every living creature is made of semen and blood. The deities who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood"), they interpret them metaphorically, somewhat in the manner in which rationalizing Greeks interpreted their own myths as allegories.
The problem with the book comes not from the abundance of anecdotes and details, but from Montefiore's unwillingness to throw any of them out. That reluctance precludes building any kind of meaningful structure. An enigma of totalitarianism -- one of the things that inspired Orwell, Arendt and others to think hard about it -- was its effort to destroy the difference between the public and the private realms. It made them both equally subject to the absolute demands of ideology. In effect, Montefiore does the same thing, but by reducing everything to the dimensions of trivia.Before reading "Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar," for example, I did not know that one member of the British delegation to Moscow on the eve of World War II was the author of a book called "Handbook on Solar Heating." And now I do know. But why? That, like Soviet history itself, remains an enigma.
Very glad you liked my piece on the Big Book of Stalin Anecdotes. After finishing the review, it occured to me that the book would actually be okay as supplemental reading. If you were reading a solid historical book about the Moscow Trials (or whatever) and wanted to know some backstage scuttlebutt, then consulting the pertinent chapters of Montefiore would be a good way to take a break.
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