L’inferno- Dante  (1321) 
Finished the inferno, this month Cantos 33-34. 

Canto 33 
Ninth circle- Antenora: Traitors to country 

So the guy we left gnawing on someone’s brain at the end of the last canto, is introduced here as Count Ugolina della Gherardesca. His victim is the Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Both betrayed each other in a political play, but Ugolino ultimately lost, was imprisoned with his four sons, and then starved together, for which Ugolino now eternally eats Ruggieri’s head. 

Virgil and Dante move on and pass into Ptolomea, the region that holds those who betrayed guests and friends.  In Caina, the imprisoned looked down, in Antenora, straight ahead, here, they look up, and their tears freeze in the eye sockets so a glassy visor settles over the eyes. Dante speaks to Frate Alberigo, who invited his in-laws to dinner and had them murdered. The interesting thing about this region is that souls are taken at the point they commit the betrayal, even before they die. A demon then inhabits their body until their death. 

Canto 34 
Ninth circle- Judecca: betrayers of benefactors. 
As they approached the center, Dante noticed a wind, and Virgil told him in the last canto that he’d soon see the reason for it. Virgil tells him now to arm himself with strength. In this region, the condemned are completely buried in the ice: some lying, some erect, others bent over. In the center is Satan, buried halfway in the ice, with his chest and arms free. He has three faces: one red, another light yellowish, and a third black, and six sets of wings, which continually flap and make the wind that freezes hell over. Satan is huge, much larger in comparison to the giants than the giants are to Dante. If the giants were estimated at 70 feet tall, Satan must be nearly a thousand feet tall. 

In the center mouth, Satan chews on Judas. In the right and left mouths, he chews on Brutus and Cassius. 

At this point, Virgil tells Dante they’ve seen everything, hold on, and then they climb down Satan’s hide until they flip over and continue climbing up. This confuses Dante until Virgil explains that Satan was at the center of the earth, and now they are ascending up on the opposite side. They make their way through the cave and out on the earth’s surface again to see the stars. 

This is the end of the canto, and the poem about hell.   

Ten Days That Shook the World- John Reed  (1919) 

The book chronicles the 1917 Russian Revolution, and how the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. 

The author, John Reed, was an American Socialist, and sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, so he doesn’t pretend to write a completely unbiased account, but his sympathies gained him access to the Bolsheviks, which wouldn’t have been granted otherwise.  

The Tsarist regime had been overthrown already in March 1917, and in the meantime, there were political battles fought over who exactly would take control. The most ideologically communist of the parties was the Bolshevik party. The Menshiviks were socialists, but they believed that communism could only truly come about at the end of capitalism (per Marx himself), and that therefore, attempts to bring it about by revolution would end in failure and setback. There were smaller groups of Monarchists, Liberals, and other versions of Social Democrats- those that believed in reforms to capitalism, rather than complete overthrow. The Bolsheviks had gained the following of the working class and peasants, particularly with promises of free land and better wages, but had alienated those in society that actually controlled the means of production. 

The Bolsheviks did manage, by the end of October, to organize an armed revolution to take over the oust the old leadership of the government. But they found that those in actual control of the various institutions were uncooperative, which plunged the entire country into a grinding halt. 

The book did give insight into a question I’ve had for a while: why do revolutions tend to “eat their own”? When revolutions happen it is often those that helped bring it about who end up being killed by those who have taken over power. Why is that? 

It starts with the basic recognition that any functional society is comprised of many interdependent parts, that can only function when there is a high degree of order in that system. Order comes first, and when order is largely established, freedoms come after.  

Overthrowing a political system requires people who agitate that system and create instability, so that the greater mass of people will be open to a new system. Systems that work, don’t require change, so if revolutionaries want change, they must cause disfunction in the system, so that people will want the change being suggested by the revolutionaries. 

Once that shift in power has been obtained, order must be restored. But the very tools used to break down the system (Agitators) so that power could be transferred to the revolutionaries, are now the opposite of what is needed. Agitation and destabilization are not only useless once power has been transferred, they are counterproductive. The new power needs stability and order. But those actors that are capable in destabilizing and agitating don’t become the opposite once the power is transferred. The very capabilities that made them useful in destabilizing a system, make them liabilities and criminals in the new order. Hence, they are, before long, eliminated after their usefulness has served its purpose.  

Here’s an example from the book, where Lenin:  
“explained the revolution, urged the people to take power into their own hands, by force to break down the resistance of the propertied classes, by force to take over the institutions of government. Revolutionary order. Revolutionary discipline! Strict accounting and control! No strikes! No loafing.” 

“No strikes”. This was one of the tactics used by the revolution to force their will on the old order. But once power had been shifted- it was no longer allowed. Likewise the freedom of the press. The revolutionaries used the press to foment agitation and instability. But once they had the power, they shut down opposition press, so any questioning of their orders was not allowed. 

It also explains why the new order tends to be even more repressive than the old order it replaced. 1) Revolutions, almost by definition, occur when there is a minority taking power. If they had an actual majority, they could take power naturally through democratic mechanisms. But, as happened in Russia, they, didn’t have the support of much of the class of people that runs things, and so they had to implement very repressive measures to force compliance with their objectives. 2) breaking down institutions unleashes a nasty set of social dynamics that are hard to get back in control once they’ve been unleased. Repression will almost certainly be needed to contain those unleashed social dynamics once again.

Stalin: Paradoxes of Power- Stephen Kotkin (2015) 

This biography attempts to capture a whole range of internal and external events that led to Ioseb Jugashvili, Stalin, becoming the dictator par excellence he turned into. It’s a fascinating look at the internal politics of Russia leading up to the 1917 revolution. It covers Stalin’s early life, as well as the politics of the day. It covers the political mood of Europe at the time, and how these events all played some part, along with Stalin’s personal strengths and weaknesses, to produce the man that led the Soviet Union. In listening to author Stephen Kotkin, he said he wanted to avoid reliance on voices who only provided “insight” after the fact. Those voices tend, so he says, to read too much back into isolated instances, which at the time were ignored, but later revitalized with significance. Relying on the more recently declassified Soviet archives, Kotkin aimed to see what people were thinking and saying at the time, to get a more accurate picture of how the man got where he did.  

Perhaps surprisingly to some, a dictatorship didn’t arise in the Soviet Union because Stalin hijacked communism and turned it into something it wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, Lenin, the leader of the revolution, demanded that nearly all decisions went through him. His vision of Marxism necessitated some changes in the orthodoxy, but he, and Stalin after him, faithfully tried to implement Marxism in the Russian state, and they hoped, the world. The problems Stalin, and Russia, experienced in the 10 years after the revolution were driven by the straightjacket of their Marxist ideological solutions. In fact, they were somewhat mitigated by the allowance of small scale markets allowing the peasants to produce food. But they were communists, and markets were anathema to communists, so they were always in conflict with actual production in the country. As has been leveled: Stalin was enforcing his particular view of communism on everyone else. But communism doesn’t really allow for democracy, otherwise people might vote out the system. Communism’s innate totalitarianism structurally necessitated a concentration of power and decision making in very few hands, and even those had to agree. If they didn’t, well, then the power had to be concentrated in one person. Lenin wanted it to be him, Trotsky thought he knew better, so did Stalin. From Lenin on, anyone who contradicted their views, were claimed as ‘counter revolutionary’, enemies of the revolution, and therefore enemies of the people.  

This is the first of three volumes Kotkin is writing on Stalin. 

The Way of All Flesh- Samuel Butler  (1903) 

The novel was written between 1873 and 1884, but Butler didn’t wanted it published until after his death. In it, he satirizes Victorian English hypocrisy, particularly around Christianity, which wouldn’t have earned him any friends. The story is multi-generational, but centers around Ernest Pontifex. Ernest is rather gullible, as a result of his upbringing, and meets with continual misfortunes, but manages to learn his lessons along the way.  

I, Claudius- Robert Graves  (1934) 

This is a historical fiction, written from the first person view of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who ruled between Caligula and Nero. It’s written very much in the style of the Roman historians of the time: Suetonius, Livy, Tacitus; so much that you’d be fooled into believing the work was actually from that time. The characters and events are actual characters and events, but there is additional material added in to fill out what we know. 

Life of Charlotte Bronte- Elizabeth Gaskell  (1857) 

Since my last read through what has become one of my favorite books, Jane Eyre, I have wanted to find out more about the author Charlotte Bronte, since I had read that many of the novels particulars were directly from lived personal experiences Charlotte had.  

In Book 1, Ch. 4, Elizabeth Gaskell writes about the Bronte sisters’ experience at the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters’ School, which was the model for the Lowood Institution in Jane Eyre. While the headmaster had his faults, he was actually conscientious about providing good food. But…. apparently, the cook wasn’t, and the food provided for the students was abysmal. This was eventually dealt with after a typhoid outbreak where the food was found responsible for many of the health issues. The cook was fired, and another took her place. The Sunday routine of forcing the girls to walk a few miles up and back in winter weather with inadequate clothing to protect against the cold was also based on their real experiences.  

Book 1, Ch. 8, mentions an infamous story of a young governess finding a situation with a wealthy family in Leeds, where she ended up marrying a gentlemen there. But the story went south when it was discovered that the gentlemen was already married, but his wife was insane. The story of the unfortunate girl, pregnant by that time with the man’s child, caused widespread pity for the young woman. This was, of course, one of the main plot devices in Jane Eyre. 

There is an amusing anecdote that Charlotte had related in the first chapters where Gaskell gives a flavor of the Yorkshire people that the Brontës grew up among. “A man that she knew, who was a small manufacturer, had engaged in many local speculations, which had always turned out well, and thereby rendered him a person of some wealth. He was rather past middle age when he bethought him of insuring his life; and he had only just taken out his policy when he fell ill of an acute disease which was certain to end fatally in a very few days. The doctor, half hesitatingly, revealed to him his hopeless state. ‘By jingo’, cried he, rousing up at once into the old energy, ‘I shall do the insurance company! I always was a lucky fellow!’ ”