Indianism

Posted By Eagle Owl on May 1, 2012

Ivan Bunin entered the Russian literary arena with a plethora of writings about Russian peasantry. One of the stories published in 1911 is “А Nocturnal Conversation” (Ночной разговор). The son of a wealthy landowner, a boy in his early teens who attends a gymnasium, is infatuated with the rugged ways of local peasants who work for his parents. One summer he decided not to engage in bookish learning to achieve self-improvement, but instead to “study the common folk” (изучить народ). Described as an “irresistible passion for peasant oafs” (страстное увлечение мужиками), the boy’s interest in peasant ways lead him to work the land side by side with them and to imitate their cavalier roughness with respect to local girls. After having rubbed shoulders with them for the whole summer, the boy adopted their “sudden, awkward but firm reasoning, ready-made cookie-cutter wisdom, rudeness and good-naturedness, fitness for work and laziness” – all those qualities that set them aside from “bookish oafs.” He was ready to celebrate the success of his summer-long expedition into the Russian soul when a night conversation with several peasants revealed to him the shocking truth of their past cruelties to people and farm animals. One peasant shot and stabbed to death a Georgian prisoner-of-war, another one killed a man in a bar fight and watched how other peasants scalped and eviscerated the body, while the third one took part in a grim act of skinning of a live bull. Unrepented and terrifying in their “Mongolian calmness,” the peasants dispelled overnight the idealistic picture of a primitive rural culture that the boy had been building in his mind.

It’s remarkable that, as part of his initial description of the gymnasium boy’s life, Bunin mentions that he “played redmen” in the winter. “Playing Indian” seems to have been a quite popular entertainment among Russian boys at the turn of the 19th century. Dmitri Ulyanov reported that his younger brother, Vladimir (later Lenin, born in 1870) used to play Indian. Anton Chekhov focuses on this dramatic outdoor pastime in his story “Boys” (Мальчики) (1887), Alexander Serafimovich documents a boy’s attempt to escape to America from the “joyless and painful gymnasium days” after having read Mayne Reid and Cooper in “Escape to America” (1898). I documented these literary instances of the “playing Indian” theme in “Playing and Nothing” (2006). What Bunin adds to these mentions is an unusual context. If in Chekhov and Serafimovich, playing Indian is a revolt against dumbifying formal schooling, in Bunin playing Indian is lumped together with the boy’s inauthentic, childish, bookish, passive winter life that he tries to overcome by getting close with local peasants during the summer. Playing Indians, dreaming about the African adventures of David Livingstone, reading about unknown geographies and high passions of self-sacrifice was part of childhood, working next to peasants and idealizing them was a step into adulthood. When physical exhaustion undermined his will, the boy’s winter life would beckon him back. Finally, it triumphed over his summer life when he became disenchanted with the peasants. The boy was trying to enter psychological maturity – to follow on his physiological maturation enabled by his sexual encounter with “a widow” arranged by one of the peasants – by breaking free from book-induced developmental paralysis, but he couldn’t yet handle gruesome realities. Once faced with the peasants’ savagery, his desire for authenticity reveals its origin in the world against which it revolted. One of the peasants refuses to accept him as one of his kind by calling him “Moscow wimp.”

Fascination with peasants was an important part of the late-19th century populist political movement in Russia. Known as “going to the country folk” (хождение в народ), the movement affected a segment of the young, urban Russian intelligentsia. In the period between early 1860s, when serfdom was abolished, and the 1910s before Russia plunged into World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, enthusiastic young people from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and other major cities began escaping to villages and small rural towns. They found work as doctors and teachers, tried to keep their ear close to the needs of the Russian peasantry, learned peasant ways and spread the word of an imminent socialist revolution among the rural poor. Many of these narodniki felt partiality toward peasants since childhood, and as they matured, this interest in what they thought of as the “pure Russian soul” and the “autonomous Russian way” developed into a full-blown ideological movement, an important flanker to the industrial socialism advocated by mainstream Bolsheviks. Interestingly enough, this Russian kind of peasant populism is reminiscent of the fascination with American Indians in the U.S., which, as Philip Deloria (Playing Indian, 1998) showed, was an intrinsic part of the young American nation’s search for national identity. Just like Indian imagery in the U.S. and Western Europe fell into two contrasting templates – noble savagery and ignoble savagery (see Berkhofer R. F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York, 1978) – so did the images of peasants in Russia. The boy in Bunin’s “Nocturnal Conversation” tasted both of them.

Category: Literature, Populism | No Comments »
Tags: idealization, Ivan Bunin, peasants, Playing Indian, Populism

Posted By Eagle Owl on May 1, 2012

My old friend, Kola Tanka, sent me a few images of Daliah Lavi posing as a mixed-blood Indian woman named Paloma-Nakama “Dove of Foamy Waters,” from Old Shatterhand (aka Apaches’ Last Battle, 1964). The originals were signed by Lavi herself.

I wonder if there’s ever a connection between an actor’s stage and offstage identities. We often hear that an actor in a movie “played himself or herself.” Many people are convinced that Jack Nicholson is just the same in real life as in his roles – irreverent, irresistible, self-centered son of a bitch. You can’t act out a role unless you are this very person. But how can Daliah Lavi be possibly an Indian maiden?

First of all, Daliah Lavi is an Israeli actress (one may notice some faint similarity between her and Natalie Portman) who became a celebrated performer of schlagers in Germany. Back in the 1960s she rubbed shoulders with Hollywood greats such as Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas and Dean Martin and had a part in Casino Royale (1967), one of James Bond movies. Stunningly beautiful, exotic, multi-lingual and classy, Lavi nevertheless remained in the world of B movies and finally made a career shift to pop singing. Her offstage life story is more captivating than her career in film. She was born in Israel (then part of the British Mandate of Palestine) in 1942 as Daliah Lewinbukh. Her parents were German and Polish Jews who were part of Fifth Aliyah, the last pre-war wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine. Escaping from persecution in Nazi Germany – in retrospect a most prudent decision, -  they settled in Shavei Tzion (Hebrew, “Returnees to Zion”), a moderately collectivistic (moshav shitufi) commune equipped with a defense tower and surrounded by a stockade. In the wake of the 1936-1939 Arab revolt against the British rule and the Jewish immigration, such fortified constructions were essential to Jews’ survival in the Promised Land. Just like the forts were for the early European settlers in North America. Starring in a movie with the scenes like the one on the left should’ve conjured up in a 22-year-old Daliah Lavi memories of growing up in a tower-and-stockade commune like the one on the right.

Those European movies about American Indians and the conquest of the West were predictably phony. Based on fictitious novels by a German writer, Karl May, who created a cornucopia of adventure novels set in the American West without ever having set foot in the New World, these movies were filmed in Yugoslavia, featured a motley crew of B actors (Pierre Brice as the Apache chief Winnetou, the ex-Tarzan Lex Barker as the gun-blazing German engineer traveling in America, etc.) and sported a full roster of corny racial cliches, brief nudity and ethnographic blunders. But they were nevertheless insanely popular with the European audience and were instrumental in launching another wave of fascination with and emulation of American Indians by young Europeans. One of my earliest cinematographic memories come from the first movie in the Karl May series entitled Der Schatz im Silbersee (Treasures of the Silver Lake) filmed in 1962. My cousin, 10 years older than me, was growing up in the midst of the Karl May fever in the Soviet Union and he recalls engaging in playing Indian, drawing Indians, building forts with his peers. When I was growing up, he drew an Indian chief for me and dusted off an itched image of an Indian in a war-bonnet that he had created as a little boy. Later, when the Berlin Wall came down, having shared memories of watching the same German Karl May movies as children made Russians and East Europeans feel like “blood brothers” again.

It’s likely that those Indian movies, albeit bizarrely flawed, conjured up Old World cultural and political realities better than some of the direct depictions thereof. In film Daliah Lavi was a mixed-blood Apache, daughter of a British pioneer Wilkins and an Apache woman, living in Fort Blue Water and staying away from the malicious Comanches. In reality, she was a daughter of Jewish pioneers in Palestine, then a British protectorate, who lived in a fortified commune and tried to survive an onslaught of local Arabs. Later in her life, she entertained German audiences, the repented children of those Germans that drove her family out of Europe, by singing saloon-like schlagers about “summer nights” and nostalgic romances about Jerusalem. Although not a perfect frame-by-frame match, imaginary Indian sagas were made up of the same essential building blocks as the gritty realities of the 20th century European history. Be it the late medieval myth of American Indians as the “ten lost tribes of Israel,” or Jonathan Boyarin’s post-modern juxtaposition of Jews as Europe’s Indians and Native Americans as America’s Jews, the deep structural parallels between American and European otherness have always maintained the integrity of the nexus between the real and the imaginary, often engaging people such as Daliah Lavi as its stewards.

Category: American Indians, Cinema, Jews, Karl May | No Comments »
Tags: American Indians, Cinema, Daliah Lavi, Israel, Jews, Karl May, Lex Barker, Old Shatterhand, Pierre Brice

Posted By Eagle Owl on March 29, 2012

In this warm Australian commercial for the cold-and-cough brand Vicks, kids are shown playing Indian in the house. They try to engage their mother to do the same. The mother is suffering from a cold, but Vicks Sinex quickly comes to the rescue to allow her to start painting her face Indian style. Indian play is here one of the “unmissable moments” that parents share with kids. It’s noteworthy that Australian kids play Indian, just like American and European kids, and not Australian aborigines.

If the link is broken, click Indianism-VicksAd

Category: Advertising | No Comments »
Tags: Advertising, Australia, Playing Indian, Vicks

Posted By Eagle Owl on March 5, 2012

To attract a young demographic, the mortgage company, “Mother’s Capital” (Материнский Капитал) resorts to the image of a Russian family “playing Indian” in this online ad.

Category: Advertising | No Comments »
Tags: Advertising, Russia

Posted By Eagle Owl on February 23, 2012

Boris (Rodin) Maslov points me to a peculiar episode of “Citizen Poet,” a satirical TV series on F5.ru. Each episode uses a famous Russian poet from the past as inspiration. A prominent Russian poet and journalist, Dmitry Bykov, writes a 5-minute-long verse in the style of the poet being featured and this verse is recited by actor Mikhail Efremov. All verses are of satirical nature representing a biting critique of the dominant Putin-Medvedev political and ideological system. Let’s take a look at the issue called “Giant Seliger” (Селигерище) inspired by the patriarch of Soviet children literature, Kornei Chukovsky (1882-1962) and invoking Chukovsky’s famous characters “Giant Cockroach” (Тараканище) and “Crocodile.”

Now, the question is why is Chukovsky featured in the background dressed in a Blackfoot Indian war bonnet and why is Efremov mimicking him wearing a flimsy, tacky and childish one? Chukovsky was well-versed in English literature but this is as far west as his interest and expertise went. Just like any man of highest national standing, Chukovsky was showered with gifts. One day he received an Indian war-bonnet as a gift from his admirer, Vladimir Sosinsky. Sosinsky (1900-1987) was a Russian emigre translator who took part in French resistance and then worked for the Soviet Union section of the United Nations Organization in New York. Sosinsky did not do anything an American Indian tribe would not do for someone it admired. Joseph Stalin once received a Indian war-bonnet from the Mohawk Indians.

In the first half of the 20th century, American Indians were popular characters in children’s literature in the U.S. and Europe. Although Chukovsky, as a writer or translator, never got around to bring more Indian stories to Soviet kids, he saw an opportunity and encouraged other writers, e.g., Leonid Dobychin, to write “something about Indians.” He also probably felt at home in an Indian war-bonnet as it made him look like such luminaries of Western literature for children as Grey Owl, Ernest Thompson Seton and James Willard Schultz.

American Indians have been treated unevenly in children’s literature and film. Sometimes they provided credible role models offering education in a highly engaging and entertaining format. But all too often they served as vehicles for dominant Western cultural stereotypes. Due to their perceived economic and political backwardness, American Indians were deemed “children of the human race.” The demeaning intent of this formula transferred onto Western children and youth perceived as a group steeped in self-absorbed recreational activities and needing a patronizing hand of mature adults. Consistent with this stereotype, the phony and grotesque “Indian” war-bonnet on Efremov symbolizes the patronizing power of the Putin-Medvedev state toward Russian people and, more specifically, the infantile bravado of the state-sponsored youth movement “Our Own Folk” (Наши).

The carnivalesque phenomenon of “playing Indian” surfaces every time there’s a need to subvert dominant political power. American colonists dressed as Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party were engaged in protest against British dominance (Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven, 1998). They used Indian symbolism both as an acknowledgement of their non-British identity – their rustic, savage, creole roots often provoked mockery on the part of haughty Brits – and as a ritual of imparting this previously marginalized identity with real political power. When the two boys in Anton Chekhov’s “Boys” (Мальчики) attempted to flee their home town to live among Indians, they protested against the “way things are” in the world built by adults. The Efremov-Bykov poetic subversion of the Putin-Medvedev system performed the same function: by emulating and mentally escaping into the world of Block, Tvardovsky, Tarkovsky, Chukovsky and other Russian and Soviet poets (effectively the “Mohawks” of the “Citizen Poet” cycle), they tapped into an old ethos of peaceful resistance to political repression. Аs Boris Maslov notes, poetic expression saw resurgence as a significant part of political dramaturgy in the recent public protests against parliamentary elections fraud in Russia. When it came to Chukovsky, the Indian garb activated an additional symbolic order – that of carnivalesque emulation of such quintessential victims of political and military terror as American Indians.

Category: Literature, Politics | No Comments »
Tags: Bykov, Chukovsky, Citizen Poet, Efremov, Literature, Playing Indian, Poetry, Political Subversion

Posted By Eagle Owl on February 22, 2012

In 1898, Ivan Bunin authored the famed Russian translation of Henry Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’. There can be little doubt that Bunin was familiar with American frontier writings, including James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking cycle, and they likely ignited his interest in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” However superb, translations by celebrity writers of the works of other celebrity writers never constitute the core of their own oeuvre. And at that time American literature – no less than the American nation – was still in its infancy and couldn’t create much of an impact on Russian literature. Still, immersion into the exotic – and Bunin amply demonstrated his uncanny ability to penetrate both faraway cultures and the foreign traditions of depicting faraway cultures – often results in an artistic backlash or transference. Sometimes an exotic backlash affects whole literary traditions, as was the case with the importation of the quintessentially American genre of “captivity narratives” back into English literature. Sometimes it affects a single author.

As I was reading Bunin’s “Деревня” (Village), I came across in “Сосны” (Pine Trees) dated at 1901 a vignette describing a peasant hunter referred to as Trailblazer (“Следопыт”): Это был высокий и худой, но хорошо сложенный мужик, легкий на ходу и стройный, с  небольшой откинутой назад головой и с бирюзово-серыми, живыми глазами…. Это был Следопыт, настоящий лесной крестьянин-охотник, в котором все производило цельное впечатление: и фигура, и шапка, и заплатанные на коленях портки, и запах курной избы и одностволка.” (Бунин И. А.. Деревня. Повести и рассказы. М., 1981, 36). There seems to be little doubt that this Russian peasant hunter is a calque of Leatherstocking. Just a few years after completing the translation of the “Song of the Hiawatha,” Bunin’s fascination with the “exotic inside,” namely the Russian countryside, showed a slight trace of similarity with the classic exotic of the American frontier. What facilitated this hidden connection was likely Bunin’s perception of Russia as a blend of Russian and Finno-Ugric cultures (“Есть два типа в народе: в одном преобладает Русь, в другом Чудь, Меря”), and it’s precisely the Finnish epic “Kalevala” that furnished a blueprint for Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.”

Category: Literature | No Comments »
Tags: Exotic backlash, Henry Longfellow, Ivan Bunin, James Fenimore Cooper, Song of Hiawatha