A lot of the characters that were written into existence in this book are full of extremes, almost Kundera like. For example, there is Mimica, Natasa and Miroslava. Mimica is the youngest generation of the family, and she is highly involved in protesting the government in the form of the “resistence,” trying to contrast herself and her life against the wishes of her father. Then there is the mother, who is described time and time again as subservient, silent, and overall a good housewife. She tries to do the best for her family in an unobtrusive manner, so that she does not offend anyone or cause any stress. Then, there is the Grandmother Miroslava, who sees herself in her granddaughter, except not instead of the resistance against the communist regime, she is protesting for it. As she says, on page 171, “We were shouting ‘Down with the Cvetkovic-Macek government!’ and ‘Long live the proletariate!’ That’s just the same as now when you shout ‘Down with Milosevic!’ and ‘Long live democracy!’” As you can see, the black and white type extremes are even written into the characters.

Another example of total extremes is the idea of freedom within repression. Throughout this whole book, there are multiple examples of protest against the system, or repressionary tactics taken by surporters of the system, but one of the most prevalent motifs that I found within this repression was freedom. There are not many references to physical freedom, so much as mental freedom, and the ability to speak ones mind. Stevan actually mentions this sort of black and white freedom, where one is only allowed to move freely, but not think freely. “He would greet them in the street in a servile way, anyway, constantly with that feeling that he was only conditionally free and that he had to display his correctness at every moment.” (185). To this idea of freedom, another thing that just occured to me was the use of serving versus dominating. In almost every chacaracter, there is some sort of example of this concept. Within the Zarkovic family within itself, Jovan serves the government with a sort of blind passion, while his wife serves him because she sees it as her duty to create a calm household. Aleksander serves his father, if begrudgingly, but emotionally dominates the relationship with his girlfriend, Marina. His sister, Mimica, is dominated by her boyfriend, but also tends to rebel against the notion of being servile to a government.

I would like to get into gender binaries, but I think we can discuss this one over in class.

The last thing I would like to bring up in class, although I’ll discuss it here as well, is the use of repeating words and phrases throughout the novel. There are many examples of this throughout the book, and I was just wondering whether it occurred to anyone else like it did to me?

Žarković seems to sympathize with the self sacrifice encouraged in Njegoš’s poems for the sake of the nation. But it seems that he interprets him in a dangerous way in order to justify his political position.

(Abbot Stefan was a character in Njegos’s epic The Mountain Wreath.)
And I take everything onto my soul.” What did the old abbott want to say by that? That he consciously takes punishment on himself for the sake of the salvation of his people! Yes, that’s what he meant. Žarković couldn’t resist the need to make allusions so the students would recall the current historical moment and the current leaders of the people. A sin upon my soul, he would say to them, imitating Abbott Stefan. (45)

“The Bishop chose freedom, at the cost of injustice for him and for his people…” That sentence of hers seemed to him quite correct in some visionary sense. Wasn’t it just as true today? He thought of the president of the country: wasn’t he doing the same thing? Wasn’t it true according to Njegoš, according to Nikolaj Velimirović, and according to Isidora herself that it was the greatest sacrifice to commit the greatest sin—to kill, and to accept the punishment, to suffer for the good of the nation? What has to be done is not difficult, Jovan Žarković concluded with a sigh, walking out of his office. (151)

(He comes back to Isidora during his conversation with Omorac, in Omorac’s opinion she “tended more to the bourgeois-conservative spirit than to the proletarian-revolutionary.(163)”" For her the trident is a symbol of the heroic, the liberatory…”)

But Žarković is at that time writing an essay on Rastko. Žarković seems to think that he is better at writing on poets that repels him, and what repels Žarković from Omorac is his Latinism, and he thinks that what he doesn’t like about Rastko is his avant-gardism. But in the end what Žarković opposes in Rastko was his cosmopolitanism, which is a repetition of Omorac’s Latinism in a way.

Now, in these new circumstances, he suddenly experienced Rastko as a stranger. He no longer felt resistance to his avant-gardism but toward his political positions, Rastko’s Europeanism, his cosmopolitanism. “Yes, yes, I can’t permit that to myself, nor do I wish to.” He was especially hurt by one sentence of Rastko’s, so quotable: “My land has grown wider.” He, Jovan Zarkovic, was fated to admit dejectedly, “My land has grown narrower, and who knows how much more it will narrow…” (348)

Otherwise I was overwhelmed by the diversity of characters and it was hard to keep track of who did what and have what kind of political views. Also the young resistant group seemed to have not much political views on their own, just spraying paints. They actually reminded me of how Kundera described kitsch. “The identity of kitsch comes not from a political strategy but from images, metaphors, and vocabulary. (TULB, 261)” But the older people weren’t really likable either, possibly because the novel switches the center of consciousnesses and everybody slanders everybody else but there seemed to be some truth in the slanders, and I was left with no one with no flaws, or no lovable flaws.

I always wanted to make some kind of book that was primarily written through found art, or writing. When I was a child, I thought at some point in time I would write a book about a girl going through a popularly discussed and obsessed over mental disorder. Her account would be primarily found in letters to her family, receipts, school reports, interviews with her psychiatrist etc. I never got to actually writing it although I attempted many times to start it. To be honest, I think I was daunted by the task and I could never write something of such proportions. It was trying to eat a horse with a toothpick. I kind of regret never having started it, but I feel that even after extensive research and determination, my efforts and creating such a book would come off as trite.

Back to this book, I would like to just reiterate my points. I found the use of themes throughout the book entirely satisfying, because although the actual “plot” was incredibly difficult to follow (if there was one: I am still confused to be totally honest), there was still a sense of familiarity in every aspect of the book that really comforted me. It was like bringing a blanket from home wherever you go, so no matter how weird the surroundings are, there is always a comforting constant. The use of photograpgs was entirely apparent, I felt, maybe even a bit overly implied, but the use of memory was a little bit more subtle.

Overall, I am in absolute ecstasy that we have read 4 such amazing books in a row. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to read such good literature on a regular basis.

But what do you guys think? Is the constant switch in narrative non-condisive to persuasive literature? Or does the constant differences just create a more compelling narrative?

<3, Rachel

My favorite section of this novel was part five, “Was ist Kunst?” Art was a major thread throughout this novel, but this was the section that most directly addressed the concept of art. My two favorite answers to the question “what is art” were “Art is an endeavour to defend the wholeness of the world, the secret connection between all things”  (161) and “I don’t know. An act which is certainly connected with mastering gravity, but which is not flying” (169). I thought the first answer was especially intriguing. The idea of art being used as a connection isn’t exactly novel, but I like the idea that art is what keeps the world from breaking up into pieces. I’m not completely sure I understand the idea that art is “an act which is certainly connected with mastering gravity, but which is not flying,” but at the very least I thought that this was a nicely poetic idea. I think that not only are both of these really beautiful answers, but I really liked the idea of having a section dedicated to exploring the impossible question of what art is.

In addition it was nice reading a novel not only written by a woman, but also told from the perspective of a woman. While other novels that we have read have certainly featured women, this was the first that only had a female protagonist, and I thought that this was a nice change of pace that offered a fresh perspective on some of the issues that the other writers have been exploring.

On a slightly unrelated note, I’m eating a fortune cookie whose fortune says, “to remember is to understand” which I think ties in quite nicely with Ugrešić explorations of memory.

The Berlin ones are especially interesting in terms of the form because of the repetition. 45 and 124 is exactly the same except for a little bit of addition in the 124. 10 and 107 are almost the same but the wordings are different. Some questions like “Do you have some time?” and “Was ist Kunst?” are asked to different people. The language is again also interesting because first the author asks Richard in German (160), but it may be that she actually didn’t know the word and asked Richard to practice her German, and then she started asking her friends in German but they all answer in English. Then at last she asks Richard “What is art?” to Richard in English, it seems (169).

The form of The Kinder-egg chapter (55-91) reminded me of a section from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being‘s “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words,” because of the all capitalized section title, and because this is another example of how people associates more meaning to certain words than the dictionary meanings.

One last thing about the form is that they are supposed to be in the form of a museum exhibition. And the book is exhibiting unconditional surrender(s). However I am confused now with the title because we learn that there actually was such museum in Berlin and it was a Russian museum, and the one who surrendered was Fascist Germany. I was thinking in this book the ones who surrendered were the exiles and the one who they surrendered to is either to their own country or the general force of history. If I were the author, even if I got the idea of the title from the museum I wouldn’t mention that in my novel, because then the analogue of me would be Germany, which I don’t think an exile is. Fascist Germany indeed may be exiled from the right path of history after the war, but still it doesn’t really seem to fit.

The machine says, “civilizations are not to be tampered with, for each must go its own way, progressing naturally from one level of development to the next and having only itself to thank for all the good and evil that accrues thereby” (271). Nonetheless Klapaucious needs something to fulfill his desire to help others and he was given Altruizine, which ensures that everyone feels what the person around them is feeling. Thus, being happy is for the greater good. This experiment is a catastrophe. Once Altruizine is released on a population the people go insane from the emotions of others. Ultimately, it becomes clear that happiness cannot be forced or imposed on individuals. It is impossible to find universal happiness and even altruism can lead to disaster. While all of these stories are intriguing ad humorous I believe there are some deep meaning in many of them. There is commentary on human nature, vice, and vanity.

Throughout the book there was a sense of justified antiauthoritarianism, most obviously in Lem’s depiction of King’s and other authority figures. In general, robots in positions of authority were ignorant and gullible, never wholly capable of committing good or acting out of anything other than their own self-interest. This is exemplified during the story called “The Fifth Sally or the Mischief of King Balerion,” when the King trades bodies with other people from the kingdom and completely abuses the privileges that that affords him, only to wind up repenting with a taxing job which, Lem editorializes, “was Justice done.” Although this thematic dissidence is so obvious and consistent, making it almost not worth analyzing, it is remarkable within the framework of Soviet-occupied Poland, where Lem would surely have been considered revolutionary if he had expressed his discontent with totalitarianism and brute force in a more covert manner.

One thing that definitely struck me was what an unusual and interesting hero Trurl proves to be – I think he is certainly presupposed as a hero in many of these stories, and his unheroic acts are frequently a result of ignorance or accidence. In “The Seventh Sally” Trurl comes across a planet with a single lonely and despairing individual on it, Excelsius the Tartarian, rule of Pancreon and Cyspenderora (**sidenote: how do these crazy names translate in Polish? are they just as odd?). Excelsius requests the restoration of his former position. “Trurl had no intention of complying with this request of Excelsius, as doing so would bring about untold evil and suffering, yet at the same time he wished somehow to comfort and console the humiliated king” (162). Trurl’s motives are good, but his actions propel us into one of the most profound conflicts in this novel: the question of what makes a being living. This was by far my favorite part of the book because it raised really significant questions that can be applied at all levels of our own terrestrial reality, but through a whimsical fictional framework. Trurl ends up creating a miniature world, a model of Excelsius’s world with all of its qualities in place, only scaled down. Klapaucius, upon being told of this by Trurl, is infuriated and aghast. He argues that Trurl “took an untold number of creatures capable of suffering and abandoned them forever to the rule of a wicked tyrant” (168). Trurl feels that the scale of the civilization, and the fact of it having been programmed entirely by him, disqualifies it from being treated with the same degree of humanity and existential consideration as a civilization on, say, Earth. Klapaucius embodies the equitable perspective of a radical animal rights activist – he argues that the citizens of the civilization are able to suffer, they live out full lives regardless of their scale, they are self-organizing, and above all, they are their own reality, no matter how or why they originated. “A sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering that you may touch it… a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!” Klapaucius argues.

I thought this whole passage had two major earthly implications. One, that on a fundamental level, all of Earth and all of humanity, is merely electrons in space, but that this in no way renders us irrelevant or less significant or less alive. Two, the ending – that as the creation, we have the power to take our creator captive. That the agency that our very existence imbues us with is enough for empower us to be the rulers of our own humanity.

One thing that I did pick up on is the warning about the extent to which we use machines and technology in our lives. I think that one point that Lem is trying to get across is that technology can’t be a replacement for real emotions and real human communication. I think that this was especially evident in the story “Altruizine OR A True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Universal Happiness, and What Came of It.” This story concerns a hermit, who, realizing that just meditating on existence wasn’t enough of a life, decided that he needed to do good for the world. In order to do this good Bonhomius does not use any of the means that we might expect from someone who wants to bring about good, however. Instead, with the help of the constructor Klaupacious he gives a drug to a group of humans that would allow them to feel each other’s emotions and senses. Of course, all hell breaks loose. I found this story especially interesting because it most directly concerned the use of technology and artificial creations on humans. Happiness was not attempted out of any genuine means of emotion, but instead through a drug.

The other story that I thought was especially interesting was “The Seventh Sally OR How Trul’s Own Perfection Led to No Good.” This was the story in which Trurl creates a miniature kingdom in order to bring happiness to a cruel king, without, Trurl believes, harming any real beings in the process. I thought this story was interesting because after Trurl creates this kingdom he and Klaupacious begin a debate on what it means to be alive and how if something can have feelings and real emotions, then, even though they may be an artificial creation, they still are important just because they are able to feel things. I thought this was an interesting meditation on life.

Another enjoyable part for me was the deduction to the Highest Possible Level of Development (243-4), because this is almost the Zorn’s lemma, which I wouldn’t have realized had I not taken some math classes. Quoting from Wikipedia, Zorn’s lemma is the following:
Suppose a partially ordered set P has the property that every chain (i.e. totally ordered subset) has an upper bound in P. Then the set P contains at least one maximal element.

Partially ordered sets are sets that you can order the elements sometimes but not always. For example, when you try to order some numbers by their divisors, for example, you can say that 12 is above 4 and 6 because 12 is a multiple of 4 and 6, but 4 and 6 are not comparable because they don’t divide each other, but they both are above 2. In this case the totally ordered subset is 2-4-12 and 2-6-12. And the maximal element is 12.

It’s quite strange that this is actually a deep statement, which supposes (or is equivalent to) the “Axiom of Choice,” and used to prove some of the big theorems of mathematics. Axiom of choice says that if we are given choices, we are able to choose, and this is not trivial in the case when we have infinite choices.

But what I wanted to do is to point out that the author may be alluding to the axiom of choice, which sounds like “free will,” as the back of the book says that he plays with. And what follows in the book is the denial of the will to bring happiness to others by some technology. I thought this part and the seventh sally were the most philosophical of all the stories in the book.

I also felt that the book is very atheist, which I think was a good thing under communism. In the seventh sally, he shows his ideas that we are in the end just a collection of atoms, and that even a non-God Trurl can be the Creator, and in the last part he talks about how human beings reason misfortune not as a random process, misplace of an atom, but as a meaningful thing under the divine plan (264-265). Then he switches topics and seems to be saying that correcting that kind of mistakes would be endless to begin with, and in my interpretation he seems to be saying that it would lead to the perfect society, where there is no individual difference. Something that reminds me of the issues explored in the Unbearable Lightness of Being. But on the other hand, if we think of ourselves as collection of atoms and a product of interactions of atoms, we wouldn’t really have any free will. To me the author, rather than promoting a certain view on these topics, (which may have been dangerous if there was strict censorship), seems to just state these kind of problems in an entertaining way, and leave the reader to ponder about it for a while.

When I began reading the book, I first stumbled upon the foreword by Askold Melnyczuk, which already got me very excited for a simple reason: Melnyczuk nigh on apologized to his readers for the fact that the book was so short (Peltse stretching a mere 50 pages). But for me, as someone who hates nothing more than a dragging plot, accentuated by awfully long description of surroundings, people, their physique, their thoughts, their family’s thoughts, their family’s tennis partners thoughts, their family’s tennis partner’s cleaning lady’s thoughts and their family’s tennis partner’s cleaning lady’s thoughts and woes, this was a welcome sign and got me primed for delightful reading.

When I actually started reading, it felt like I was in some kind of rollercoaster. Everything starts of on the pastoral and innocent scene of young children submitting to their own young urges and playing innocent games. But then the pace brutally picks up, when we follow Peltse living through his future life in the one second, before what he anticipates can only be his “sudden death” in a sense: Just as we know from witness accounts of people who were face to face with the grim reaper, time compresses in those crucial seconds and people get to relive their lives in a sort of YouTube-Movie reduction style, only that our protagonist Peltse does not sift through his previous life (there would not be a lot of interest that happened in those few years apart from some full diapers and endless screams for food.) but gets to go through various scenarios of what might happen to him in the future. All this happens in broad view of the reader, who is swept away through the rapid succession of the different events that may or may not happened.

I personally felt like I was being flown through the rapid successions of a modern thriller movie. (It actually reminded me a bit of the movie “Source Code” where the protagonist gets to relive the minutes before death of a victim of a train bombing several times in an attempt by the government, running this interesting experiment to find the culprit)

And then we get to the hilarious scene where a poor Peltse comes across as a nothing but pitiable figure, when he is halted by his old-time bully and local drunkard Paltshiuk, who uses him as a person to talk at, while indulging in the grand sport of drinking vodka, while poor Peltse is thus barred from completing his prescribe workout. In this scene that in my head made Peltse look like a 7 year old shy schoolboy bullied by a peer of twice his age, we also see the turning point of a bullied and (seemingly) quiet boy which will (as we later see) help him become the great leader and comrade Peltse, a real big shot.

But the trifle of the tragicomic figure that is Peltse is pervasive and comes to show again in a scene where our now older and equally higher up the ladder Protagonist tries to get some, as the narrator puts it “hors d’oevre” and firewater of some young party members, but this very important endeavor (much to Peltse’s dismay) does not lead anywhere, since he isn’t able to find any incriminating evidence which he could use to extort a delicious dinner from the two youngsters.

The final iteration of Peltse’s inherent comicality is brought upon us when we read about a dinner party, at which a very interesting painting or picture, titled along the lines of “Comrade Peltse leaving a certain establishment” is mentioned in front of Peltse’s sheep, who are in the house of the Western wolf, who adamantly deny the existence of such a sacrilegous icon and retaliate by presenting the host with the “Collected writings by Comrade Peltse”.

After the final appearance of an exhausted and slightly cynical Peltse, who, lying in the sumptuous sleeper of a third-class cabin gets his toes bashed in by a passenger who slams his suitcase into aforementioned toes, declares with a sight that he had had to take an awful lot in his time I was quite amused:

What Volodymyr Dibrova did here is one of the most comical of transformations of a semi-real character: He took the motive of a Soviet leader (let x be Nikita Chrushtshow for instance), people that were stylized by their propagandic apparatus to be some kind of superhuman, super powerful politician, who spends his day inspecting combinats, shaking hands, generally smiling and letting everyone know that communism is the way to go. But Dibrova shows us that these rather fearsome people might have had something of laughable past as well: He makes great leader Peltse look like someone, who just never quite got it right, and as an epilogue in his life has to flee his country armed with a fake beard and injured toes.

This very light-hearted take on the once all powerful and intimidating figures of the Soviet Union bemused me a lot, a motive as old as history.

The second part of the book, the story “Pentameron” which is introduced with a cast list, just like that of a play, points in an exactly opposite direction with its bow of sarcasm: Here not only the leaders in the social hierarchy are the main objects of ridicule, but the common people of Room 507 in Institute NIIAA (“not me!”, great onomatopoeticon) with their delusional dreams, visions and everyday struggles and woes are poked fun at:

Just as in Peltse we are taking away quickly from the linear progression of the day at works and delve into the rambling thoughts and visions of our 5 main characters.

The Pentameron lets them each tell their own slightly offbeat story about their very personal problems, by having them daydream while they tend to the translation of literature as fascinating as that about swimming pools heated with solar energy, as well as the structural integrity of concrete buildings.

We hear about the woes of a mother, who nearly falls to hysteria over concern that her husband doesn’t take proper care of their ill son.

We follow the inner life of Vitya, the lowest in the social order of the crew in room 507, who so desperately wants to become an artist, and spends his day essentially dreaming about how such a life could pan out, culminating in a brilliant scene, where he travels to an imaginary haven of artists, deviates, and dissidents (including, most hilariously, scores of Hare Krishna followers) who are all deported later on, leaving him alone in this artistic refuge.

We hear from Svitlana Zhuravlynchenko, whose main concern in her life is that she is not able to reach an orgasm.

We hear from Ophelia Feliksivna, the most senior member in room 507, who is in a constant struggle with herself over the question whether to flee the country, that she so often complains about (we as the reader are witnesses to a considerable amount of outbursts in that direction.)

And we hear from Zoyka, the young girl, who lives in the inhumane circumstances of a student dorm that, like most habitats in the Soviet Union, provide neither refuge nor private life at all.

The story ark behaves like the sun: There are huge eruptions on the sun every day, but in the end nothing changes, and it continues with its fusion reactions for another couple of million of years. And in the play it is analogous: The emotions and thoughts of our protagonists boil over considerably and often. But in the end everything stays more or less the same.

Despite the daydreamer’s mental eruptions growing bigger and more dramatic, in the end, all remains the same: They leave the office in the evening, as though nothing had changed. The only exception being Vitya, of whom we don’t know if he remained in the premises, or, as the only one courageous enough, to leave this godforsaken realm and try to start a new life on the grounds of what he loves and is most passionate about.

But for all others the misery persists. And this I like so much about this book: It shows so well what made the Soviet Union a horrible place to live and be in. That is, that there is no kind of perspective whatsoever for any kind of self-fulfillment and self-development outside the bounds of anything that is useful for the ideology.

Living in the mills of an insiduous, meticulous and equally corrupt bureaucracy, with a low standard of living, and to add insult to injury, with people that are everything but sophisticated, that is the real horror of the Soviet Union.

And the Rhapsody that is Peltse and Pentameron, a Piece made from two unconnected stories, gives us a both humurous and compelling insight into the proceedings of a bygone time.