Introduction: Contested Legacies

On 15 March 1968 France's most important newspaper, Le Monde, published an editorial by Pierre Viansson-Ponté, its chief political writer, entitled ‘France is bored’ (Viansson-Ponté 1968). The author, a former member of the Resistance and one of the country's most respected political commentators, bemoaned the fact that France was ‘removed from the convulsions reshaping the world’, a place where ‘nothing is happening’. He observed in passing that a few students were demonstrating at Nanterre University for the right of female students to enter the male dormitories, dismissing this as ‘despite everything, a limited conception of human rights’. Anyone familiar with French political culture can understand why he would attach so little importance to what was happening at Nanterre. This was at a new university, poorly resourced (the buildings were not even completed), on the edge of Paris’ suburbs, not even serviced by the Metro system. France's intellectual life was centred on the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale, the cafés of the Latin Quarter, not a new campus on the edge of town. And in France, politics was organized by political parties; its language was political ideologies. Complaints about dormitories were hardly the thing that ‘convulsions reshaping the world’ are made of. Yet a week after Viansson-Ponte's article those same students would occupy Nanterre's administration building, creating what they called the ‘Movement of 22 March’.

Introduction

Where have the revolutions gone? What happens with the passion of the day once movements are no longer publicly visible – what does it transform into? And what are the lessons learned? Our concern in this chapter is to critically examine the idealism of political movements following the moment of 1968, by listening to the voices of adults who have been engaged in a range of activist projects over their lifetime. Our discussion is founded on in-depth life story interviews with adults in the UK, however to contextualize and analyse this material we draw on theories about new social movements developed by European thinkers, as well as on feminist and post-colonialist criticism mainly from the US. We are interested to get beyond simple historical description and celebration and to trace the finer lines and subtle legacies of the spirit of '68 and its follow-on movements of the 1970s and 80s. The focus here is not on spectacular actions and major players, but rather on how adults make sense of participation in extraordinary actions and events within the context of ‘ordinary’ lives.

Introduction

This chapter will focus, from a quantitative and longitudinal perspective, on the cohorts who experienced and were involved in those sixties events often symbolized by reference to the climactic year 1968. It looks in particular at the connection between education and values and unconventional political participation. As education has been a major characteristic of the active sixties generation, educational level and educational expansion will be theorised to analyse social mechanisms behind the sixties movement and its development. We will compare the sixties generation – the birth cohorts 1946–53 at the core – to other earlier and later cohorts regarding their values, and political participation. As there are strong differences between different educational levels, three educational groups will be compared to each other (low educated, intermediate educated and more-highly educated people). As another issue the change in values, orientations and behaviour over time period or age will be analysed for different cohorts and educational levels. To follow the course of development of values and political participation of the sixties generation over time in comparison to other cohorts, longitudinal methods of analysis will be deployed – in particular A-P-C-Analysis (i.e. simultaneous analysis of age, period and cohort effects). The data base used is the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). To analyse these changes appropriately, we consider a time span of 20 years – beginning with 1986 and ending with 2006.

If the slogan ‘make love, not war’ became a constantly evoked symbol of the kind of protest generated in the ‘long sixties’ (Jameson 1984; Marwick 1998, 16–20), the fact is that the attitudes and discourses that originated in this period have not always corresponded to this pacifist image, at times understood retrospectively as parodic, individualistic and carefree. In different times and places, at a gradually more intense pace, the new youth culture introduced profound changes in the fields of customs, taste and morality, and set in motion modes of daring and resistance which often evolved towards open confrontation with bourgeois social codes. The sixties experience, namely in its radical and politicized strand, promoted a new kind of fracturing and transgressive conflictuality, which, rather than rejecting violence, questioned its meaning and sought to redefine its application.

In Portugal, despite socio-cultural and political obstacles, some sectors, primarily originating in student settings, showed their openness to the influence of a certain ‘space 68’ (Frank 2000). This phenomenon intersected with the emergence of a new type of protest against the colonial war, in which philo- Maoist activism had a relevant role. Condemning the bellicose and nationalistic rhetoric of the Estado Novo [New State], these groups nevertheless saw violence as an indispensable means to achieve a desired classless society. This text seeks to analyse the question of violence in the new left radicalism, to contextualize the specificity of the Maoist experience throughout the sixties, and to characterize the practice and discourse of this multifaceted political field during the decline of the Portuguese dictatorship.

Introduction

The above quotation to some extent encapsulates the Situationists' perspective on revolutionary theory. Put simply, the Situationists did not believe in either waiting for a revolution or deferring the living of life until after this possibly hypothetical point. The claim that ‘everybody wants to breathe’ describes the existence of a human spirit which can be truly revolutionary when brought to the surface. ‘Nobody can breathe’ depicts the ‘spectacular’ world in which we live, mired in the illusion of mainstream society and gasping for the ‘air’ of liberation. ‘We can breathe later’ refers to the outlook of many of Vaneigem's contemporaries who saw pleasure, desire and other such concepts – elements of the ‘living of life’ without ‘dead time’ – as somewhat trivial distractions which could wait until after a definitive social and political revolution had swept away the existing order. This approach – the Situationists and today's ‘horizontals’ alike would argue, and I would tend to agree with them – underestimates the value of creating spaces within the reality of one's current lived existence and, as such, chipping away at the nature of this reality to bring about wider changes.

The overall theme of this paper is what I perceive the legacy of the Situationists to be with regard to their impact on certain political movements today.

Did Merezhkovskii under-appreciate the art of Anton Chekhov? Was he, indeed, dismissive of it? The few articles and monographs that treat the personal and literary interrelations of these two contemporaries do convey this impression – whether openly or implicitly. Rosenthal in her major book writes: ‘Merezhkovsky did not consider Chekhov great’. Bedford mentions Chekhov's name only three times in 200 pages.2 Chudakov's substantial l996 article ‘Merezhkovskii and Chekhov’ strongly suggests a certain unfairness in this critic's evaluation of Chekhov the man and artist.

Chudakov's article is probably the best contribution to the subject. It attempts to explain their differences from the fact that they represent two opposed types of fin-de-siècle Russian intellectual (as his subtitle ‘Two Types of Artistic-Philosophical Consciousness’ indicates). According to Chudakov, Chekhov represents an ‘older’ (he was only six years Merezhkovskii's senior) intelligentsia type – atheistic or agnostic, non-religious, not guided by ideology, devoted to progress, humanism, realistic, scientific, tolerant and nondoctrinaire. Merezhkovskii as his almost diametric opposite represents the new Decadent Symbolist type – committed to a Christian religious ideology, a believer, an idealist, doctrinaire and intolerant: ‘Merezhkovskii was organically incapable of tolerance’. Chudakov attacks Merezhkovskii, as many have done before him, for his cold, rational schematism, his way of viewing reality in terms of binary polarities – paganism versus Christianity, flesh versus spirit, Russia versus Europe, etc.

The Literary Critic Mirrored by His Subject

It is one of the well known premises of hermeneutics that interpreting a piece of art not only illuminates the subject of interpretation, but also sheds light on its interpreter. In regard to A. P. Chekhov, this phenomenon is often so strongly pronounced that, given Russian literary criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century, A. D. Stepanov even declares Chekhov's work to be a ‘mirror of literary criticism’. Stepanov's observation also proves appropriate for the present collection of essays. The volume shows Chekhov through the eyes of Russian thinkers and portrays these Russian thinkers through the mirror of their literary criticism. A special place in these reflections of Chekhov is held by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, who in his essays repeatedly discussed Chekhov and his literary work between 1888 and 1914, and whose opinion on Chekhov changed profoundly through this period. The shifting of Merezhkovskii's judgement on Chekhov, – from his early appreciation of Chekhov's literary talent to his later polemics against Chekhov's alleged religious nihilism, do not depend so much on a development of Chekhov's art. From early on, Chekov's literary work shows a relatively constant philosophy of life and poetics. Merezhkovskii's literary criticism of Chekhov should rather be seen as a mirror that reflects Merezhkovskii's own spiritual development. Nevertheless, his criticism remains open to both sides, illuminating the subject of criticism as well as the critic – even where Merezhkovskii obviously misinterprets Chekhov.

Unanswered Letter

‘Of Anton Chekhov [Vasilii Rozanov] once said: ‘Chekhov?–nothing particular in him. He looked at life, and what he saw he wrote down. A very fine writer, people got to like him, and began to like him. But he is a cold one, and there's nothing particular in him. I understand his success but don't enjoy it.’ On another occasion, in 1897, Rozanov dryly remarked: ‘I do not like Merezhkovskii, Chekhov …Nietzsche.’ In 1914 in the article ‘Anton Chekhov’, Rozanov does not simply dismiss Chekhov; instead, he is rather disturbed by the phenomenon of this ‘genius of mediocrity',’ as he calls him. We can even see in the author of The Dark Countenance some traces of sympathy toward Chekhov, as the author of ‘Peasant Women’ (Baby)–the story that Rozanov interpreted in the spirit of his own polemics with Christianity and reflections on Russian women and family: ‘Peasant Women’ should be included in its entirety in ‘The History of the Russian Family’, in ‘The History of Russian Life’ [byt], in ‘The History of the Russian Woman’, postulates Rozanov. Finally, in his literary ‘embryos’ from 1916 known under the working title The Last Leaves (one of the unrealized sequels to Solitaria), Rozanov lists Chekhov together with two other ‘significant’ writers whom he greatly admired, Konstantin Leont'v and Lev Tolstoy, under the rubric of unrealized friendships:

Long before their first encounter, Chekhov seems to predict the outcome of his interaction with Merezhkovskii. In his wonderful story Doma (‘At Home’, 1887), Chekhov depicts the confrontation between a father, a well-respected lawyer named Bykovskii, and his six-year-old son Serezha, who was caught smoking by his governess. After Bykovskii fails in his attempts to educate Serezha on the dangers of tobacco, the lawyer tells the boy a fairytale. The boy is so moved by his father's story that he promises his father to leave the tobacco alone.

Bykovskii recounts the tale while embracing his son and looking warmly into the boy's eyes. This story, along with the highly emotional manner in which Bykovskii tells it to Serezha, reveals the father's own fears and insecurities, his own longing for love and affection. The son responds to this revelation with love and sympathy in his turn, thus confirming a beautiful moment of communication, harmony and love.

The lawyer, however, fails to recognize what it was about the tale that made it succeed. When he muses on what has happened, he does not really understand, and reasons away his confusion with a pragmatic, pseudoscientific explanation, claiming that a factual truth in order to be effective must be dressed in some beautiful artistic form: the magic moment of human interaction is lost, drowned in banal verbiage.

This dialectic between internal communication and external misunderstanding reflects the dynamics of Merezhkovskii's relationship with Chekhov. On some level, Merezhkovskii seems to understand and appreciate Chekhov's art.

Shestov's work on Chekhov – his substantial article ‘Creation from Nothing’ (Tvorchestvo iz nichego, 1905) – has not been forgotten in modern Chekhov studies, but is referred to only rarely, and even then in negative terms. The following famous lines are most commonly quoted: ‘Persistently, dolefully, monotonously, during his almost 25-year literary career, Chekhov was engaged in one single activity: the various ways to kill human hope’. As a rule, researchers point out that what one should discuss here is illusion rather than hope. I contend that there is more to this matter than appears from this single quotation. Shestov himself felt that the quotation did not necessarily carry a negative meaning. Moreover, it did not prevent Shestov from considering Chekhov as practically the only writer among his contemporaries who spoke the truth, not because he was forced by the ‘idea’, but out of his own free will. The title of Shestov's article on Chekhov is directly related to the principal statement from The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (Apofeoz bespochvennosti): ‘all creation is creation out of nothing’.

In the current chapter, I examine Shestov's paradoxical interpretation of Chekhov's creativity, by comparing aspects of Shestov's philosophy to Chekhov's artistic world.

In my view, Shestov's philosophy can be characterized as irrational. In both his early and later works, his opposition of speculation to revelation is central.