Utopias of One by Joshua Kotin (review)

The thesis of this provocative meditation on the tenacity and ferocity of unrealized social ideals is as follows. A nation is founded on a utopian premise. As it must, the grand experiment falls short. Writers appear who condemn this failure, but creatively: they counter it with a utopia of their own, potent enough to win converts and rewrite history. Kotin tells us that he wrote this book out of frustration with those who would read utopian literature—ever foolish, ever failing—"exclusively as an instrument of social critique." He will aim deeper and darker, at persons rather than at faceless paradigms for the perfect state.

To this end Kotin selects disillusioned memoirists and poets from nations born of revolutionary ideals, the United States and Soviet Russia, augmented by the British Isles. Anglophones occupy the outer rim: the first two chapters on Henry David Thoreau and W. E. B. Du Bois, the final three on Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, J. H. Prynne, and Emily Dickinson. In their isolation, their withdrawal from mainstream culture and their counterstructurings of reality, all these writers triumph. Here Kotin's strategy is close reading and reception history. Their despair is real. But to this reviewer, the outer Anglophone rim is but a minnow to the leviathan of the central Soviet part, which focuses on the great poet Osip Mandelshtam, his wife and ferociously protective widow Nadezhda Yakovlevna who would memorialize his martyrdom, and their friend the poet Anna Akhmatova, a self-fashioner of genius. The failed utopia in which these Russians lived not only isolated, but murdered, its critics—and tyrant and subject alike held poetry in reverent awe. Strategies shift in scope and scale. In Russia, why write a book, as Thoreau did his Walden and Du Bois his Autobiography, when one had the power to write a death warrant? That was the moral lever, and Mandelshtam wielded it. In 1933 he composed his anti-Stalin epigram and performed it to friends and fellow poets, thereby forcing them into complicity (not to denounce the poet was a crime). Arrested, rearrested, and sacrificed in the Gulag, Mandelshtam the martyr lived on in his widow's immensely influential memoirs, where his fawning Stalin ode of 1937 is reconfigured. Kotin is careful to insist that the Mandelshtams' opposition to the corrupted Stalinist state was not a liberal protest. Both were utopias, replicating the same rigid dichotomies and unfreedoms. Two purities competed for the historical record, as a "purge on paper" was transformed into a "purified community." Akhmatova inherited this astonishing halo of moral authority, which, Kotin astutely shows, conquered even her bedazzled interlocutor, that theorist of pluralistic secular liberalism Isaiah Berlin. Akhmatova's unfinished life's work, Poem without a Hero, tries to sustain and at the same time privatize this utopian authority. Only the poet has access to its truths.

Thus, Utopias of One gradually reveals itself as a work of revisionist reader-response criticism. Thoreau ostracizes the reader (Walden is my thing, he intimates; do your own thing). Du Bois, civil rights activist turned unrepentant Stalinist, provokes the reader. Osip and Nadezhda Mandelshtam implicate, test, and endanger their readers, whereas the charismatic Akhmatova would mesmerize them. Stevens, Prynne, and Pound immerse (and perhaps drown) the reader in interpretive tasks so cognitively difficult (like Prynne's untranslated poem in Chinese) that a sense of community is effectively scorned. Kotin ends on a paradox. Utopias of one, when crafted by great poets or memoirists, are also illusions, but unlike their socially embedded variants they cannot fail. They infect, inspire, go viral, win out in the memory wars. For the mortal writer, membership in such a singular utopia might well be the world's most valuable citizenship.