Symbolic Landscapes

Paths - Falls - Poo-tee-weet - The Road to Damascus - Redemptions

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April 9, 2025

Paths

We can only hope that Russia will change its course, which now careens wildly into an imperial hinterland — like the two horses and britska (carriage) which represent Russia at the end of Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls — published 183 years ago, in 1842:

Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes — only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!

Russia may continue to travel madly into the wild by attacking Ukraine — just as back in the 19th century, after having expanded from Odessa to the Pacific Ocean, it completed its drive into the Caucasus Mountains, breaking the will of the Circassians, Chechens, and others. At some point, Russia may decide to take back not only all of the Caucasus (including Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia), but also the five independent states of Central Asia. Doing this, Russia will get back the elbow room it had during the days of the Soviet Union:

Or, Russia might decide to take a different path, toward respect for sovereignty and toward reconciliation. Perhaps the Kremlin will leave off in Ukraine, let Belorussia and Georgia run its own affairs, not even dream about annexing the five Stans, and grant greater autonomy to Ossetia, Dagestan, Cherkassia, Chechnya, etc. Perhaps, in a fantastic some day, Russia will follow in the wake of the magic black horses Bulgakov writes about in his 1949 novel, The Master and Margarita:

Night was outdistancing the cavalcade, it sowed itself over them from above, casting white specks of stars here and there in the saddened sky.

Night thickened, flew alongside, caught at the riders’ cloaks and, tearing them from their shoulders, exposed the deceptions. And when Margarita, blown upon by the cool wind, opened her eyes, she saw how the appearance of them all was changing as they flew to their goal.

Bulgakov’s cavalcade takes flight from a punished Moscow during the darkest decade of Soviet repression, the 1930s. This decade included Stalin’s purges and the Holodomor, the death by hunger that killed over two million Ukrainians. Bulgakov’s cavalcade flies over mists of ignorance and through vast stretches of darkness. At the end of the Night Flight, the riders shed their deceptions as they ride toward the dawn. Their clothes fall into the misty swamps below as they fly toward absolution, reconciliation, and redemption. (I examine this Night Ride in 🐎 Magic Black Horses).

The redemption Bulgakov suggests isn’t a minor one, but includes the redemption of Pilate, the Roman governor blamed for Christ’s crucifixion. Applying this to the present crisis, we might say that no matter what atrocities the Russians commit in Ukraine — from glide-bombs to stealing children — and no matter how long it takes for them to realize their error, we can still imagine an end to all of this hatred and violence.

In Bulgakov’s novel, Pilate broods for two thousand years over his treatment of Christ. We can only hope that it won’t take a quarter of a percent that long for Russia to change course. For three years now the West has been saying that all it takes to end this war is for Russia to stop prosecuting it. And, who knows, perhaps Russia will decide to 🔴 stop attacking Ukraine and stop careening into the wild in an imperialistic madness.

Perhaps Russia will 🟡 reflect deeply on what it will lose by destroying its connection with its Ukrainian neighbour. The reflection will have to be a deep one, perhaps in the manner of a Jesuits’s examination of conscience, or in the manner of Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Zosima extends the Christian ideal of the admission of guilt & the universality of forgiveness to everything — to ourselves, to those who betray us, and to the sins we don’t understand. He even suggests that we ask forgiveness of the birds in the trees. The birds who sing their songs and fly like gods through the air. The birds we often shoot, eat, put in cages, and treat like stupid animals.

Perhaps Russia will finally sit down, just as Achilles sat down with Priam during the Trojan War. Perhaps Russia will accept that neither side has anything to gain by killing the other, by burning down homes and destroying families.

Perhaps Russia will even reconsider its time-honoured imperialism, which I see in the figurative terms of Gogol’s britska, which overtakes the whole world, “and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside.” Perhaps Russia will come to see that the Russian Empire, like the Roman and British empires, is best thrown in the dustbin of history. Russia may, to quote from the Eagles’ 2007 song “Long Road Out of Eden,” see “the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way,” that is, it may see the barbarity that comes with conquering other peoples. Perhaps it will then reflect on Britain’s imperial “road to Mandalay” and on America’s “driving dazed and drunk,” and conclude that “the road to empire is a bloody stupid waste.” And perhaps Russia will finally 🟢 take another path.

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Poo-tee-weet

Or perhaps Russia will do nothing of the sort. Perhaps our desire for this change of direction is an illusion, like the soothing fantasy conjured by the exotic trilling in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Perhaps all we’ll hear will be the tweeting of Donald Trump as he does a deal with Russia, and throws Ukraine under the bus. Perhaps some day, when Russia has crushed Ukraine like it crushed Chechnya, we’ll hear the same tweeting that ends Tolstoy’s last novel Hadji Murat (published posthumously in 1912). At the end of the novel, after Hadji Murat and his Chechens have been massacred (historically this occurred in 1852), the notes of the nightingale float indifferently above the slaughter:

all the militia-men, like hunters over a slain animal, gathered over the bodies of Hadji Murat and his men [. …] The nightingales, who had fallen silent during the shooting, again started trilling, first one close by and then others further off.

I imagine the nightingale’s poignant notes transcending time, like Tolstoy’s regret (he himself fought against the Chechens). The notes float over the decades to the two wars against Chechnya, wars which were instrumental in solidifying Putin’s power.

We pray that the present war will end, and that Ukrainians will be free to sit outside a café in Kiev or Kharkiv, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Yet I fear that instead we’ll only hear sirens and what Wilfred Owen called “the monstrous anger of the guns.”

And yet the bird-song haunts our imagination, like it haunted Vonnegut years after World War II. Vonnegut was a POW captured during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to the asylum city of Dresden. When the Allies decided to bomb Dresden (a decision Vonnegut questions throughout the novel), Vonnegut waits with other American POWs beneath a slaughter-house. They wait for the bombs of their own countrymen to stop dropping above them. Vonnegut fictionalizes his experience in Slaughterhouse-Five, which was written in 1969 — that is, while his countrymen were dropping an obscene tonnage of bombs on jungles, villages, and cities in Vietnam. Vonnegut’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, ascends from the Dresden slaughterhouse into the bombed silence of the city above:

Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped.

Birds were talking.

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”

80, 50, 25, 3 years later, we hear the same echoing chirp from the bombed-out buildings of Dresden, Haiphong, Grozny, and Mariupol.

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The Road to Damascus

In continuing to rain missiles down on Ukraine, Putin continues to persecute Ukraine. He refuses to reject in a radical way the premise of his violence. Unlike Saul of Tarsus — Saint Paul, the revered Svyatoy Pavel — no blinding heavenly light is likely to beam down on him to make him realize the error of his ways.

[…] as he journeyed, [Paul] came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven. And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? (Acts 9:1-6)

Saint Paul was on the road to Damascus when he was literally and figuratively illuminated, yet the phrase the road to Damascus is now often used in a metaphoric sense to mean a momentous change of course.

While Paul’s revelation was supernatural and sudden, Russia’s enlightenment may come from any direction, or it may not come at all. It’s less likely to come in a blinding flash, and more likely to be a long, drawn-out process. And yet, when Russian regimes fall, they can fall very quickly, as in 1917 and 1989.

I imagine Russia holding the reins of a britska, spurring it on to the destruction of Mariupol, Maryinka, Soledar, and Bakhmut. Will Russia recognize that it’s become the persecutor and pull up the reins? Will it change direction on the road to Kiev?

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I ask much the same question about the US at the moment. As of today — April 9, 2025 — many people around the world are hoping that Trump will change his course, will see the light on the road to Damascus. In the last couple of months his government has rounded up immigrants, gutted national institutions, and alienated its friends. For several months Trump went on and on about Canada as the 51st state. He still hasn’t ruled out using force to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal. He’s also threatened, and then imposed, enormous tariffs on his closest US allies — Canada, Mexico, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.

More worrying from a global point of view, Trump cozies up to Russia, blames Ukraine for being invaded, puts tariffs on Ukraine but not Russia, and seems more interested in a rare earth mineral deal than a just peace.

This morning Trump put a 104% tariff on China. China has responded with an 84% tariff. China says it will fight a tariff war, a trade war, or any other kind of war — and fight to the end.

The rest of us wonder how far this madness will go. The US is on a course of bullying we haven’t seen since Vietnam or Iraq. To put it metaphorically, many are hoping that Trump will have a change of heart on the road to Damascus.

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Falls

As these videos suggest in a humorous way, Putin isn’t alone in going against a fundamental principles of international law: respect for sovereignty. In this sense, one puppet is very much like the other. Both deserve to be parodied and laughed at, yet both also deserve to be treated to the most damning language we possess.

The same heavy symbolic language I use to refer to Russia’s total violation of Ukrainian sovereignty — a river of blood, the apple of knowledge, the fall from Eden, Apocalypse, magic black horses, the Road to Damascus, Redemption, etc. — can be used for many acts of massive violence. The Eagles suggest as much in their 2007 song “Long Road Out of Eden,” where they see the road the US is on as a highway. The “dazed and drunk” driver is George Bush, and his “propaganda” is most likely his false claims about Weapons of Mass Destruction and Mission Accomplished in Iraq.

While this is an American vision of error, the general idea of driving dazed & drunk on propaganda & entitlement also applies to Putin and his war in Ukraine. It’s worth looking again at Golikov’s troika (which refers to the three horses that pull a carriage), with the steeds flying up in all direction and the drivers struggling like storm-tossed sailors in an ocean of wolves:

The Eagles take the type of chaotic trajectory Goliov suggests and apply it to ❧ an American car on a freeway, weaving drunkenly through garbage and entitlement, and also to ❧ the war the US is prosecuting in Iraq (keeping in mind that the song came out in 2007, four years after the start of that war).

The final lines are extraordinarily powerful in terms of integrated figurative language. Continuing with the metaphor of roads and paths, the Eagles couch the symbol of the apple (primal sin seen in terms of military knowledge) within allusions to religion (Saint Paul) and empire (Roman and British):

The “power of the tools” — i.e. Eden’s apple as military knowledge — has been used throughout the world for millennia, from Caesar’s “Appian Way” 2000 years ago to England’s “road to Mandalay,” which presumably refers to the three wars Britain fought against Burma from 1824 to 1865. Using knowledge to create deadly weapons, expand your power, and massacre another people is to bite deeply into the most dangerous, most original, most symbolic apple of them all.

Germany, the US, and Russia figure prominently in any updated list of massive violence — a list that includes, but isn’t limited to ❧ slavery and empire throughout human history, ❧ the Mongol invasions, ❧ the colonization of the Americas, ❧ Tasmania, ❧ the Circassian genocide, ❧ the Trail of Tears, ❧ the Belgian Congo, ❧ the Holodomor, ❧ the Holocaust, ❧ Apartheid, ❧ Native schools across North America, ❧ The Cultural Revolution, ❧ The American War against Vietnam, ❧ Pol Pot’s Cambodia, ❧ Afghanistan, ❧ Rwanda, ❧ Chechnya, ❧ Congo, ❧ Iraq, ❧ Darfur, and ❧ Ukraine. The American violence in Indochina & Iraq, and the Russian violence in Chechnya & Ukraine aren’t unique in their brutality; they’re simply the latest in a long, sad list.

The further you go down the road of massive violence, the harder it is — and the more necessary it becomes — to stop the persecution, and to turn back, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.

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Redemptions

Repentance and reconciliation aren’t likely scenarios, at least not at present, in the second week of April, 2025. At the moment Putin seems to have Trump’s ear, and Trump seems to be leaving Europe and Ukraine in the lurch. Putin therefore has little reason to rein in the horses of war. In 🍷 Nightingales 1 I argue that a Russian change of course seems more like a fantasy on our part, more like the escape Keats’s writes about in “Ode to a Nightingale,” where the poet wants to escape the depressing world and “cease upon the midnight with no pain.” In 🐦‍⬛ Nightingales 2 (not yet online) I look at the worst case scenario, where the war just drags on, and where we continue the surreal nightmare in which human anger and violence are juxtaposed with the beauty of the bird’s song — the nightingale heard by Tolstoy after the slaughter of “the Chechen rebels,” and the “poo-tee-weet” heard by Vonnegut after the bombing in Dresden and Vietnam.

Yet it’s worth noting that the greatest Russian literature contains powerful notions of redemption, from the universal forgiveness of Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov, to the reformation of Chichikov and Raskolnikov in Dead Souls and Crime and Punishment, to the cosmic redemption in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.

In 🌊 Russian Horses and 🐎 Magic Black Horses, I’ll argue that Bulgakov’s Night Flight on horses suggests a path forward for Russia. Symbolically, they suggest an acknowledgment of mistakes, and the possibility of redemption. I argue that this redemption is because of, rather than in spite of aspects of a dark Apocalypse: Bulgakov’s Devil and his retinue leave the violence and punishment of Moscow in their wake, and fly through the Night on black horses toward the dawn. Into this symbolic landscape of catastrophe and damnation Bulgakov weaves in redemption and forgiveness. The Night Flight sounds the depths of darkness and annihilation, yet leads to redemption and light, most deeply indicated by the reconciliation of Pilate (along with his faithful dog) and Christ.

If Pilate can be redeemed, so can Putin. If Germany can repent and atone for WW II & the Holocaust, Russia can atone for its brutal assault on Ukraine. I was going to write unforgivable assault, which may get closer to how Ukrainians feel about the horrid damage being done. Yet the word doesn’t work here, since it preempts the idealism Dostoevsky and Bulgakov suggest: nothing is beyond forgiveness & redemption.

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