I can’t believe that I’ve got a ten-book reading list to get through if I want to fully appreciate the nuances of Tom Stoppard’s upcoming three-play epic “The Coast of Utopia.” But it’s true, according to William Grimes, writing in the NYT:

IN “The Coast of Utopia” Tom Stoppard throws his arms around a subject so big it cannot be contained in a single play. Chekhovian in spirit, and Tolstoyan in scale, it requires three linked plays, more than 70 roles and a fictional time span of more than 30 years to cover the politics, the literature and the tangled personal relationships that animated Russia in the mid-19th century.

The historical allusions fly thick and fast, and the names, in most cases, are less than familiar. Most audience members will vaguely recall that Mikhail Bakunin, the central figure in “Voyage,” which opens Monday at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, was an anarchist. Beyond that, probably, nothing. The novelist Ivan Turgenev requires no introduction, but the Socialist Aleksandr Herzen and the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky do. Belinsky dominates “Shipwreck,” the second part of the trilogy, and Herzen takes center stage in “Salvage,” the third and final installment. If ever a play required a reading list, “The Coast of Utopia” is it. So let’s get started.

Someone is punishing me for pissing and moaning about the cultural desert that is America in 2006. Stoppard may offer a rare treat (or not: we’ll see).
Still. There is no way I’ll get through ten books, or even the three Grimes cites as essential: Russian Thinkers, by Isaiah Berlin; The Romantic Exiles, by the British historian E. H. Carr; and My Past and Thoughts, by Aleksandr Herzen.

For some reason, reading a throwaway sentence in Janet Maslin’s NYT review of Gore Vidal’s new memoir [emphasis mine],

Among the many photographs included in “Point to Point Navigation” is a flattering (but of course) picture of Mr. Vidal, in his dashing mid-30s, hovering over “Claire Luce,” as the caption misspells her first name. (It was Clare.)

I was reminded of a passage in Azar Nafisi’s haunting memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is describing the period right before the final totalitarian clampdown on Iran by Khomeini’s theocratic revolution [emphasis mine]:

…I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped by my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. …
I started picking books up with a greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Boll, and some I had read a long time ago—Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke’s poems and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent’s Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross Macdonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.

I didn’t have enough money to pay for them all. [The bookstore owner said:] Don’t worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore.
Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?

Why does Janet Malcolm’s scolding about a typo remind me of Azar Nafisi’s realization that her world will come crashing down?

Because a typo ["Claire" instead of "Clare"] isn’t always a typo (as in careless mistake). Sometimes it is the result of the cultural illiteracy, as the Bookseller of Tehran told Nafisi: no one knows who they are anymore.

(Those who forget the past, Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat it.)

Nafisi continues:

Who indeed [wants to read these authors now]? People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or James to the Fabian Society, or Austen to the revolutionaries of her time. In the taxi, I took out the few books I had paid for and surveyed their covers, caressing their glossy surfaces, so giving to the touch.

The curators of the Met show Glitter and Doom know that people like Azar Nafisi and, say, George Grosz, who bravely fought the good fight, are definitely not irrelevant—perhaps especially in times when they are made to feel the most irrelevant.

(edited and expanded a bit for clarity)

If ever there was a timely art exhibit, it is this one, “Glitter and Doom,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through mid-February), which the curators introduce thus:

Although often romanticized as the backdrop for erotic cabaret shows and sexual licentiousness, German cities of the 1920s were actually in the throes of rampant unemployment, hyperinflation, and social panic. After the initial patriotic fervor for—followed by the crippling devastation of— World War I, a group of artists known as the Verists questioned their own involvement in the atrocities and focused on the country’s quickly changing social landscape and uncertain political future.

Forgoing new modes of abstraction, the artists found worthy subjects in urban denizens of all walks of life, from the war-wounded to the art dealer. With a stark rejection of idealization, the Verists’ portraits captured the stark existence of a populace through an incisive and often satiric form of realism. Unlike the conservative painting styles popular at the time, the Verists’ psychological portraits do not attempt to reproduce likenesses. Rather, with savage distortions of the face and the figure, the artist turns the sitter into an exaggerated type reflecting the extremes of a turbulent era: wealth and poverty, glamour and violence, decadence and banality.

For example: George Grosz’s Pillars of Society, 1926***

Reviewing the show for New York magazine, Mark Stevens writes [emphasis mine]:

In a famous cartoon by Charles Addams, which shows an audience reacting to a movie, everyone appears horrified—sobbing, distraught—except for one man who’s grinning with glee. That man was me at “Glitter and Doom,” the exhibit of Weimar portraits from the twenties that opened last week at the Met. It cheered me up no end. …

The situation in Germany between the wars was much worse than ours is today, but the dark eye of Weimar still beguiles our culture; it asks us to see through the masks of hypocrisy, platitude, and respectability. Imagine what Dix or Grosz would have made of the simian Bush, the feral Rumsfeld, the gloating bullfrog Cheney. Imagine how these Germans would have treated the Clintons, or Ted Haggard. How uncharmed they would be by the toothpaste smile of Tom Cruise.

Instead of art, we have infotainment: People Glitter

and CNN Doom

In the wonderful documentary Billy Wilder Speaks, Wilder says that people don’t go to the movie theater to be told the truth, which hurts. He was right, of course. We go to shows—documentaries included—expecting to be told a story: to be entertained. That didn’t stop Wilder from nudging us sharply in the ribs with his sometimes savage satires.

Art is about the awful truth, which hurts. It’s about human beings turning a savage eye on themselves.

Which is why I love Sacha Baron Cohen:

I’ve whined before about the cultural (and spiritual) poverty of our times.
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*** Grosz’s target was the bourgeoisie: the businessmen, clergy, academics, World War I veterans who supported fascism in 1920s Germany while also indulging in the hedonistic lifestyle whitewashed for Puritanical American audiences by the glittering Hollywood production of Cabaret. A savage critic of the Nazis, Grosz was out of the country when they came to power in 1933 and stayed in the U.S. after he was told that the Nazis had immediately come looking for him. He didn’t return to Germany until 1954. Such is the power of art—as the Nazis knew so well and used so wickedly to their advantage.

(I wrote about the power of documentaries—another form of art—here.)