Emily Gould is coming to Moscow in October

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Mooqla Dolls

These silicone-encased plastic dolls are nothing like their famed Mattel counterpart, physically or… emotionally. The six beauties in this collection have moving joints, reminiscent of old-time porcelain dolls, and bear rather tragic expressions. Don’t expect a Hollywood smile from any of these girls, and play at your own risk: a Mooqla doll does not make a good flight attendant, mermaid or tea-party host, and she doesn’t drive of a pink convertible. We’re thinking more along the lines of tearful sessions with a shrink, half-hearted cry-for-help suicide attempts, and repeated viewings of Carrie. Designed and produced in Moscow by Polina Voloshina, the dolls are sold at the Galleries Lafayette in Paris, and cost about $350.
www.mooqla.ru

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a heroic human being, an epic researcher, a fair stylist, a proud grouch and, last but absolutely not least, a kind of Western pop icon.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a heroic human being, an epic researcher, a fair stylist, a proud grouch and, last but absolutely not least, a kind of Western pop icon. He would rain righteous indignation on the last epithet, but it happens to be true. The Gulag Archipelago did less for its homeland, where it was reiteration of the obvious for some and treasonous slander for others, than for the West: here, the book accomplished the all-important task of disabusing the American intelligentsia from its illusions about the Soviet Union. Gulag ended the Western liberal romance with communism even more decisively than the sight of Soviet tanks rolling into Prague.

Solzhenitsyn not only dismantled the terrible mechanisms of repression and laid every oily cog and washer bare – he did it twice. Less famous than Gulag, his 1968 novel The Cancer Ward blew the lid off another Soviet secret: its miserable, prison-like hospices. (The official Kremlin tack was, absurdly enough, to hush up the very existence of cancer within Soviet borders; perhaps the disease’s modus operandi of metastasizing, corrupting micro-evil reminded the system of itself).

In his later years, Solzhenitsyn was celebrated in the West much more vigorously than in his homeland, because he happened to perfectly fit the Western idea of the Great Russian Writer. (The Yuri Testikov character in a memorable Seinfeld episode, a pompous novelist who tosses Elaine’s electronic organizer out of a limo window, was rather clearly based on Solzhenitsyn.) It was fun having a real live Tolstoy in our midst. That beard! Every gnomic utterance about the evils of rock’n’roll, say, or American waffling in Vietnam, was rendered profound by filtering through that beard.

Thing is, a Tolstoy makes a terrible houseguest. Once in the U.S., Solzhenitsyn retreated behind a formidable fence and emerged only for the occasional get-off-my-lawn jeremiad about the decadence and weakness of the Western culture. Unlike, say, Nabokov, whose gratitude to America was deep and genuine even after he departed for Montreux, Solzhenitsyn never shrank from iterating that his tenure on these shores was a strictly temporary arrangement.

In 1991, he trained his sight back on his homeland, publishing a massive op-ed called Kak Nam Obustroit’ Rossiyu, roughly translatable as How We Ought To Arrange Things In Russia. The tension was right there in the headline. Obustroit’ was a very peculiar, somewhat archaic word choice: Solzhenitsyn, it seemed, saw Russia’s future in its past. His 1994 return there had a touch of messianic spectacle – he alighted at the country’s easternmost tip and then took a train to Moscow – and, before the Russian elections of 1996, there was brief talk of him running for president that came to naught. Thereafter, the Russians have been as perplexed about what to do with the surly prophet in their midst as the Americans were in the ‘80s. He was given his own TV show; he tried on the role of a hectoring public intellectual, with soporific results. His last major work was a two-tome treatise on Jews and Russia. It would have been controversial had anyone read it.

Solzhenitsyn was less a novelist than a letopisets, a chronicler; applying Tolstoy’s standards to him is unfair and misleading. Taken as a whole, his body of work comprises not a writerly oeuvre but the most unequivocally moral judgment of our era’s vilest attempt to subjugate the individual. Its very existence also renders that attempt a glorious failure. – Michael Idov