Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam’s Utopian Anti-Utopianism

This chapter concerns two anti-Soviet texts: Osip Mandel'shtam's so-called Stalin epigram and his widow's Nadezhda's memoirs. Here, Mandel'shtam accepts the “lures of liberalism” despite the antiliberalism of the Soviet Union. He develops the most radical project of all: composing a poem that links his independence to his death. His performance of an epigram mocking Stalin in 1933 anticipates Isaiah Berlin's claim that the “logical culmination of the process of destroying everything through which I can possibly be wounded is suicide.” Mandel'shtam's performance led to his arrest in 1934 and his death in a Gulag transit camp in 1938. “Total liberation in this sense,” Berlin laments, “is conferred only by death.”

Utopias of Two

This concluding chapter concerns the challenges and value of reading difficult texts by examining the work of Thoreau's near-contemporary Emily Dickinson. It looks at how Dickinson's “The Soul unto Itself” represents her utopia of one. This chapter considers whether the poem was an attempt to represent or even cultivate her own independence, as the poem certainly represents a utopia of one. Dickinson presents a soul at war with itself and then describes an ideal state of independence—total sovereignty, total security. This utopia of one is different from the utopias explored in this book. Most significant, its efficacy does not depend on its difficulty or exclusivity or inimitability. Indeed, Dickinson's description of independence can serve as a model for readers attempting to perfect their own lives.

Wallace Stevens’s Point of View

This chapter describes Wallace Stevens's pursuit of value from his point of view—especially during the act of writing. It begins with an account of his attitude toward his metaphysical need and then examines how three poems fail to satisfy it: “Sunday Morning” (1915, 1923), “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934), and “Credences of Summer” (1947). Each poem, the chapter argues, approaches the problem of value as a problem of community formation. Each poem is an experiment—an attempt to coordinate a collective solution to the fact/value dichotomy that avoids both nihilism and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the “supernatural.” Ultimately, the chapter details how a fourth poem, “The Auroras of Autumn” (1948), solves the problem of value (for Stevens) by abandoning the idea of community altogether. The poem's success hinges on its inaccessibility—how it prevents readers from sharing Stevens's point of view.

Anna Akhmatova’s Complicity

This examines Anna Akhmatova's two great late poems Requiem (1935–62) and the famously difficult Poem without a Hero (1940–65). In Requiem, Akhmatova embraces her role as a “world-historical personage.” In a sequence of ten lyrics and various supplementary texts, she challenges Soviet historiography and, as a result, the Soviet Union itself. Requiem, as this chapter shows, is continuous with both the Stalin epigram and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's memoirs. Meanwhile, Poem without a Hero considers if complicity is always a condition of dissent and if there is a way to oppose totalitarianism without replicating its worldview. The poem attempts to realize a different kind of dissent—one that does not promote Soviet utopianism or the Mandel'shtams' utopian anti-utopianism.

Learning from Walden

This chapter concerns the pedagogy of Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854). When Thoreau moved to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, his goal was to maximize his independence. America, from his perspective, had failed. To maximize his independence, Thoreau radically reduced the size of his world. He minimized his social and financial obligations, and chose to live in an artificially circumscribed environment. He also developed a practice of writing and rewriting that refined his perception of his environment. Writing became an instrument of attentiveness and suppression—a way to improve his vision and restrict its range. At Walden and in Walden there was little or no conflict between receptivity and sovereignty. Thoreau could be open to his surroundings and in control—vulnerable and secure. This was the beginning of Thoreau's utopia of one: a world small enough to be received in its entirety.

Reading Ezra Pound and J. H. Prynne in Chinese

This chapter examines Ezra Pound's and J. H. Prynne's use of Chinese poetry to understand the problem of motivation—and the incentive structures that govern modern life. It considers how difficult poetry illuminates the difficulty of motivating social change. Here, Prynne's work, “Jie ban mi Shi Hu,” exemplifies a problem for readers of his work, and for literary and social theory: How and why should we read texts that make extravagant, even impossible demands? The question asks us to justify the value of particular texts and the values of the world that receive them. To put this point a different way, when we ask for reasons to accept a poem's invitation to do work, we should also ask what kind of world would have to exist to make the invitation seem reasonable, and whether we would want to live in that world. Similar questions are relevant to debates about utopianism.

Utopias of One

This introductory chapter briefly sets out the book's claims on utopian writing. The first claim is that the texts examined in this book create perfect worlds. The overarching claim is related: the texts being examine create perfect worlds by refusing or failing to present models of perfect worlds. Here, the chapter argues that efficacy and divisiveness go hand in hand. For the writers discussed in the following chapters, the dissolution of community is the first step toward establishing an alternative to community. A writer responds to the failure of utopia—America in the aftermath of Reconstruction, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the world under neoliberalism—by devising their own utopian project. The project is precarious. It risks solipsism at one extreme and mere critique at the other. Ultimately, its effects are asymmetrical and highly improbable: a perfect world that cannot be replicated or shared.

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Hermeticism

This chapter concerns W. E. B. Du Bois's utopianism during the last fifteen years of his life, after his final break with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The chapter tracks his increasing commitment to Soviet communism and examines the difficulty and efficacy of his Autobiography (1962, 1968). It asks how Du Bois's utopianism led, finally, to a utopia of one. In the book, Du Bois does more than document the development of his thinking about race and politics, and prefigure the “philosophy of Black Power”—he attempts to radically transform his life. Autobiography is fundamentally different from Du Bois's earlier autobiographies. Indeed, the book addresses the future—an American public (black and white) finally ready to hear the truth about liberalism and communism.