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Show Notes
This week, Matt and Cameron kick off a three-week series in an attempt to figure out just what, exactly, is to be done. This week, they’re reading What Is To Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, perhaps one of the influential books (in the Russian context) that you’ve never read. Sit down, strap in, and prepare yourself for political theory disguised as a horribly written novel!
Major themes: Rakhmetov Being an Absolute Unit, Sewing Collectives, Subtext is for Cowards
The music used in this episode was “soviet march,” by Toasted Tomatoes. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube.
This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism.
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This week, Cameron dives into Vasily Grossman's first book of World War II: The People Immortal. Learn about how his writing evolved before writing his own "immortal" books, Stalingrad and LIfe and Fate
