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| Anna Akhmatova by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin |
Times Op-Ed columnist
David Brooks wrote a recent piece about the night Isaiah Berlin the famed
philosopher and Anna Akhmatova, the equally famous Russian poetess
spent the night together (“Love Story,” NYT, 5/1/14) Brooks hastens to make
clear that spending the night together was a purely Platonic affair, which is
probably a good way to describe a meeting which includes a philosopher. But the
piece exudes a nostalgia for a time in history when there were still people
who were passionate about ideas. Can we say that ancient Greece, the Middle Ages
(scholasticism), the great age of Islam, the Enlightenment and the great age of ideas preceding and directly following the Russian Revolution (and documented in
Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia) exemplify periods in which the leaders of society trafficked in ideas. Brooks remarks, “Berlin and Akhmatova were from a culture that
assumed that, if you want to live a decent life, you have to possess a certain
intellectual scope. You have to grapple with the big ideas
and the big books that teach you how to experience life in all its richness and
make subtle moral and emotional judgments.” This is all admirable,
but today one can be a lover of Chekhov and Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Turgenev
and their more modern counterparts who are more likely to be found in the ranks of
filmmakers like Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Mizogushi than among poets,
novelists or philosophers and still realize the difference between the human
being and the works he or she produces. Bergman was our modern Shakespeare, but
reading about him you realize that his knowledge to the soul didn’t extend to
himself. Like Picasso and many other great artists he left a path of human wreckage in his wake. Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of all time, exerted his doit
du seigneur with the peasants on his estate and then converting to a
Christian view ended up running away from his wife, Sonya, and dying alone of
pneumonia in the Astapovo train station. Dostoevsky, whose The Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov,
may rank as the greatest passages in literature was a compulsive gambler and
anti-Semite. When you read about the lives of great thinkers and artists, one is forced to note that the human factor is the one thing that is often missing.
Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova were standard bearers for culture. But would you
have wanted to spend the night with either of them, particularly if you hadn‘t
done your homework? Would you want to hang out with those clowns?
, or is the enigmatic meaning, which gives pause, only subterfuge? Analog personalities don’t work as fast, but aren’t they a bit like Isaiah Berlin’s 
, slowly but surely unfolding the truth? Many of us have given up film photography for the digital camera. But what has been lost is the sense of process, the steps leading to a conclusion. Too many images are created to occupy any of the old leather-bound albums, with their magical little adhesive corners that kept grandmother’s photos in place. Bridging the gap between the analog and digital worlds is perhaps best encapsulated in the concept of the dialogic, as proposed by the Russian philosopher, Bahktin in his work, 
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