My Life and Thoughts

Arghh, dear readers—I can’t keep up with you guys! I did finally reply to the comments. But I keep receiving such amazing additions to the beard bibliography! All Russian readers with an interest in beard semiotics are urged to consult Gregory Freidin’s 1993 article about his own beard, in the context of Gogol’s Overcoat, and the larger question of cultures and subcultures in Russia during the late ’80s and early ’90s (“Dve shineli, ili anekdot s borodoi,” Znamia 2 (1993)). The footnotes alone include many promising additions to the field of beardobibliography… I mention here only A. D. Leach’s “Magical Hair (Curl Bequest Prize Essay, 1957),” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 80.2 (1958).

“My beard is a part of nature—and yet, it is also a sign,” writes Freidin, who grew a beard at the end of the ’60s, with the intention of embracing a Bohemian subculture. But there remained the problem of all the famous non-subcultural beards, like those of Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Engels, Marx, the Academician Timiryazev, and nearly all the “classic” Russian writers. (“On the symbolic map crossed by the demarcation line between Russian and Soviet literature, the surname Tolstoy was an invariant sign, while the beard was a sign of differentiation”: Alexei Tolstoy has a zero-value beard, but Lev Tolstoy has a “beard approaching infinity.”)

As it turns out, the fluctuation of beards between subculture and culture is nothing other than the “rhythm of history.” It begins with Peter the Great, who famously banned all beards, exposing the boyars’ chins. The Russian word for chin, podborodok, is literally “under-beard.” Thus, “from a marker of ‘sub-culture’ and ignorance, the sub-beard transformed into its opposite—a sign of state culture and reforms.”

Just when you thought the bare-chin cultural hegemony would never be challenged, along came Pushkin with his wild sideburns. The subsequent flowering of beards peaked in the age of Great Reforms, “the greatest of which was the liberation from serfdom of bearded ploughmen.” Then the pendulum swung back again, ushering in a beardless Bolshevik regime and a new model of historical progress: “from Marx’s beard to Stalin’s mustache, and further to Khrushchev’s smooth pumpkin-like head,” which appeared on the horizon as the apotheosis of Peter’s dream of total facial hairlessness.

Beards were again subculture… until post-Stalinist Russia, where “deviations overwhelmed the dominant” to the extent that the bearded actually outnumbered the culturally dominant beardless, leading to phenomena such as skinheads, who were in fact “bearded people in reverse [borodachi naoborot].”

Well OK, I won’t summarize the whole article, but the general idea is that, along with Gogol’s “Overcoat” and Osip Mandelstam’s Red Army–style overcoat, the beard, an ostensible marker of subculture, stands for the writer’s unspoken desire to wear the costume of cultural dominance. On the subject of the dialectic between literary subcultures and the cultural mainstream, I share with you a recent communication from n+1’s Keith Gessen, currently in Moscow:

Dear Elif, I am checking your blog and finding that you are interested in Russian beards. As it happens I have come down recently with the flu and myself have grown a Russian beard! If I could only get my stupid webcam to work I could take a photo and send it to you for possible inclusion on your blog. (On spec, of course.) Unfortunately my webcam wants some completely different version of Windows from the one I have… So you’re just going to have to take my word for it. Great. Russian. Beard. In potentia.

Keith’s beard: you heard (but did not see) it here.

Apropos of mens’ overcoats, jackets, outerwear, etc., I recently received an interesting article from the psychoanalyst Harold Bourne, called “The Saga of Freud’s Dinner Jacket” (British Journal of Psychotherapy 24.1 (2008): 91–97). It was sent to me in response to my recent LRB piece, which mentions the ill-fated collaboration between Jean-Paul Sartre and John Huston on a Freud biopic—particularly, their inability to understand each other’s taste in men’s suiting:

‘[John Huston] is empty,’ Sartre concluded, ‘except in his moments of infantile vanity, when he dons a red tuxedo, or goes horseback riding (not very well).’ (Huston, of the infantile red tuxedo, was equally bemused by Sartre’s wardrobe, its stark invariance: ‘I never knew if he owned one grey suit or several identical grey suits.’)

“The Saga of Freud’s Dinner Jacket” begins in New Zealand, where Bourne was consulted by Dr. Z, a Russian literary scholar, on the subject of “[Alexander] Blok’s mother’s influence on his poetry.” As it turned out, Dr. Z really wanted to be psychoanalyzed, because of his bedwetting problem. (The bedwetting is kind of a side plot in the saga… it turns out to be caused by a tumor, and is successfully treated.) As it turns out, Dr. Z emigrated to New Zealand via Vienna, where his mother was friends with Anna Freud—to the extent that Z actually wore Sigmund Freud’s dinner jacket to his own wedding.

Only it’s like this huge puzzle of human identity, a “modern-day Rubik’s cube,” because later, in London, Bourne ends up at a lecture reception with Anna Freud:

I turned up for the cocktails and found myself… with Miss Freud standing at my side. It was awkward because, strictly speaking, I was not invited… However, nobody else was making much conversation with her, and so I introduced myself as a psychiatrist from New Zealand. To my astonishment, she said: “Oh! You must be Dr Bourne. I’ve heard about you.”

I could only imagine incredibly that, 12 years later, she was still remembering a minor newspaper article of mine in New Zealand for the Freud centenary…But her tone had been sharp rather than complimentary so cautiously I asked her what she could have heard… “ You’ve been spreading stories in New Zealand about my father…. Stories about his lending his dinner jacket. He never had a dinner jacket!… [And] even if my father ever had a dinner jacket, [Z] couldn’t have worn it for his wedding in 1939 because he was only about 5 or 6 years old then, after we moved to London.”

“No,” I replied… “Z is in his late fifties now, 30 years later, and he would therefore have been not 6 but 26 in 1939.” But…if I prevailed then, I was soon to suffer a vendetta at Anna Freud’s hand that evening…

So it turns out to be historically documented that Dr. Z really did get married in Freud’s dinner jacket… but Anna Freud is still mad. Her “vendetta” manifests itself when Bourne asks her a question at the end of her lecture (about whether there are any essential, culture-transcending differences between masculinity and femininity), and Anna Freud makes him answer it himself.

On the subject of essential male-female differences, I leave you with a link to an article about some dolphins in Australia who use marine sponges as tools to help them “ferret prey from the sea floor”—a technique evidently passed down by female dolphins to their daughters and granddaughters. This item of news was forwarded to me by Nate Barksdale, with the enigmatic but somehow touching note that “it does seem resonant with the sort of important questions you tackle in My Life and Thoughts.”  Apparently the female dolphins use the sponges by wearing them on their noses… a bit like beards, only more useful.

photo by Ewa Krzyszczyk

Tags: academic life, animals, beards, clothes, d-list, doctors, Keith Gessen, n+1, New Zealand, politics, publications, Pushkin, Russia, Russian literature, Tolstoy

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