Conjectures of Order: A Review Essay*

July/August 2006 Historically Speaking 27 den that would be undertaken by the people chosen by God Himself to preserve Western civilization. As Sokurov's patronizing letter makes perfectly clear, the movie's historical mystifications, while aesthetically stunning and technologically innovative , were never intended to further the cause of promoting education about Russia. In that sense, the mutually contradictory opinions of Custine and Sokurov are actually two sides of the same coin. Indeed, for all of its technological razzle-dazzle, Russian Ark contributes as much to the ignorance about Russia as the "Potemkin villages" that Custine encountered at the court of Nicholas I. By representing Russia as a land that, in the words of the 19th-century poet Fedor Tiutchev, "cannot be grasped intellectually or measured by a common standard . . . but must simply be believed in," RussianArk only further propagates the cycle of mythmaking and fear that has characterized relations between Russia and the West. At the end of this cinematic spectacle, we are still left with the same old dichotomies between East and West, modern and backward, civilized and barbarous. Far from offering salvation to the world, RussianArk turns out to carry the same load of Russian nationalism that helped to unleash the flood of the 20th century. ErnestA. Zitser is a research associate at the Davis Centerfor Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is the author ofThe Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great (Cornell University Press, 2004). Pamela Kachurin is a research associate at the Davis Centerfor Russian and Eurasian Studies and co-founder of the Society of Historians of East European and Russian Art (SHERA). She is the author of numerouspublications on Russia and Soviet art. 1 For the text of Sokurov's open letter to the American public, see "Sailing Russian Ark to the New World" . 2 Jane Knox-\7oina (Bowdoin College) explained Sokurov's indebtedness to Tarkovskii at a roundtable discussion of Russian Ark sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, May 2, 2003. 3 George E Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1S39 (Princeton University Press, 1971). Conjectures of Order: A Review Essay* Bertram Wyatt-Brown Michael O'Brien's Conjectures of Order stands in bold contrast to a longstanding denigration of Southernness, intellectual and otherwise. After the Civil War, members of the northern intelligentsia found their southern brethren hopelessly backward, parochial, and dullwitted . In The Education of HenryAdams the autobiographer observed that antebellum Southerners had been "stupendously ignorant of the world." Adams characterized the lords of cotton as "mentally onesided , ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known." In fact, the Southerner, Adams stated unreservedly , "had no mind; he had temperament."1 Likewise, Henry James blasted the South's pursuit of a false "Confederate dream" that "meant the eternal bowdlerization of books and journals" and placed "all literature and all art on an expurgatory index."2 Referring to the South of his day, H. L. Mencken in 1917 opened an influential essay by quoting the poet J. Gordon Cougler: "Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer—/She never was much given to literature." Mencken added, "It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity .... Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of worn-out farms, shoddy cities, and paralyzed cerebrums."' Michael O'Brien, Conjectures of Order: IntellectualUfe andtheAmerican South, 1810-1860, 2 vols. (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). As late as the 1930s, Southerners themselves deplored the seeming absence of cultural giants , despite the appearance of William Faulkner and many others . The North Carolina journalist W J. Cash traced the problem to the ways of the Old South. A "savage ideal" of white superiority and brutish brawn over intellect helped to defend slavery.4 The late C. Vann Woodward, who became the leading historian of the South, recalled that he was not alone in "parroting metropolitan wisdom" that the "critical moguls" dispensed from "the Hudson." To the young Woodward , even Faulkner appeared to draw "his subjects out of abandoned wells."5 The poet Allen Tate censured antebellum Southerners who "knew no history for the sake of knowing it...