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Trevor Wilson, "Alexandre Kojève and the Specters of Russian Philosophy" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
00:47:01
An interview with Trevor Wilson
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- [00:00]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
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Elisa Kuzmina
Hello, dear listeners. I'm Elisa Kuzmina, one of the New Books Network hosts. Today I'm talking with Dr. Trevor Wilson, the author of the book Alexander Kashev and the Specters of Russian Philosophy. Welcome to the podcast, Trevor.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Thank you very much for having me.
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Elisa Kuzmina
As I was reading your book, perhaps because of the nature of it, and what I mean is, you really do a great job placing the figure and the life of Alexander Kozhev into the intellectual and cultural environment of Europe. I thought about the class I'm teaching this semester, which is studies in 20th century Europe, and I was thinking, oh, I could send our conversation to my students. I wanted to ask you to introduce Alexander Kozhev and perhaps to do that in two ways. One, for a broader general audience who may not be familiar with him, and another for someone who is in the field and knows of Alexander Khrushchev, but perhaps does not know him in the context that you've come to know him.
- [02:09]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Absolutely. So first, let me start by thanking you for reading my book, and furthermore, thanking you for introducing it potentially to your students through this interview or in any other sort of medium. I think it's a really, really great way to think about Alexander Kozhev through this context of 20th century European culture and kind of interactions between you know, different intellectual traditions throughout Europe, particularly in. In the interwar period, when there's a lot of sort of migration for obviously political reasons, you know, as well as the revolution, the Russian Revolution. And so in my book, I'm. I'm very much so interested in kind of embedding Khrushev as a figure and a philosopher into a migration of people and intellectual and cultural traditions across national tradition. So in my context, it's a Russian philosopher moving to a German and then French context. But for anybody who has any sort of interest with other national traditions of the interwar period, you would similarly find a kind of migration, be it, you know, Czech to, you know, to French or, you know, you know, Bulgarian to German. I mean, there's. There's massive amounts of sort of cultural migrations. That was the sort of impetus for me to write this book, and why there's this sort of specter of Russian philosophy in the title. But let me just get to your questions very quickly. You asked for two versions of Kozhev, a sort of more general one, as well as one perhaps for those who already know Kozhev, but how I position him. So for the first one, I'll just start very quickly by saying Kozhev is a philosopher. So who. Who emigrated from Russia just after the revolutions of 1917. He was not forcibly expelled, but he chose to migrate. And subsequently, after a series of interesting years spent in Germany, he moves to France. And in the 1930s, he gives a series of seminars on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which becomes a sort of defining moment in the history of continental philosophy, but specifically French philosophy. So in that time period, it's incredible the number of French intellectuals who sat in those seminars and that after World War II, many of the people who sat in those seminars directly took influence from them when they started doing their own sort of philosophical or literary or other sort of artistic work. And I guess just to put a pin in it about if you do not know who Kojev is, why he might be interesting about him philosophically. So two ideas often get associated with Kozhev. One is the end of history. So he was interested in how history moves according to possibly some sort of culmination in which it concludes. And that's an interesting thing to think about in the context of the interwar period, thinking about the end of history. And the second, which perhaps maybe we'll have time to talk a little bit more, is this idea of a subject and its other. And so how someone who has a sense of Identity constructs their sense of identity through an external, other, other figure. And that becomes very, very influential for later, you know, feminists, for example, Simone de Beauvoir, who takes influence from him, Frantz Fanon, who take. Who sort of thinks about sort of black identity through this idea of a subject and its other. But there's a long history of that that makes Koja very interesting. If I could speak very quickly about the second part of how do we know Kozha? Maybe from a. More from the context of the field of philosophy and Tokhvistra, if you're already familiar with him. What was particularly interesting to me with Kozhev as a figure was, as I mentioned, his seminars are about Hegel. I was interested in sort of teasing out varieties of Hegelianism in the early 20th century. So how different ways of interpreting what Hegel was thinking, how it could be applied to politics, but also various fields of inquiry. Kozhev inaugurates a very specific one. And my book traces that through to a Russian intellectual history, a broader history in which Hegel plays an enormously important role, both within Russian philosophy in general, but also within Marxism, because Hegel influences Marx. And so there's this really rich history of reading Hegel. And so I think a lot of my contribution, specifically to the field of philosophy and intellectual history, is trying to insert Kozhev into. Into, like, negotiations around Hegel, but also negotiations around Russian philosophy in that time period, if that makes sense.
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Elisa Kuzmina
Right, of course. And as you reiterate throughout the book, if we are to see Kozhev not as a mere interpreter of Hegel, but as a philosopher of his own and the interpreter of different ideas, we are to look at all those different specters, Right? Like subjectivity and desire, universal state in interwar politics. And in that view, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the specters. How did you come up with the concept? Was it something intuitively obvious that just came to you? How did you come to incorporate them into the book?
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Thank you. That's an excellent question. I don't think anybody has ever asked me that question because it took me a long time to sort of make sense, actually from the very. The very level of the title of the book itself, to make sense of how I understood this question of influence, Russian philosophy influencing Kozhev. To me, one of the biggest problems. And this leads into your question of specters. But to me, one of the biggest problems with formulating this book is that I didn't want to make it. I didn't Want to make a claim that Russian philosophy is this sort of siloed, specific thing, that if you're Russian, you think this way, in the same way that if you're French, you think this way. If you're Latvian, you think this way. If you're German, you think this way. I mean, I didn't want to sensualize and say that, you know, this is how certain people think versus other people. And I think it's very easy when you. When. Particularly when you work within a specific national philosophical tradition to make assumptions that there is something inherent to being American or Russian or French or whatever that makes you think and operate in a specific way. And I didn't. And so I wanted to avoid that entirely while still doing service to the fact that he did come from a Russian intellectual environment, both in Russia proper, but also when he emigrated and he worked through these emigre circles. So the question of Spectre to me was interesting because I was reading, you know, I read Anxiety of Influence, kind of classic literary text of sort of how different ways in which you could imagine influences to operate on an individual. I was trying to make sense of how would you structure that sense of influence if it's not inherently direct? There's. Because in many ways, Kozhev does not. You know, he quickly abandons. Abandons writing in Russian. He doesn't really talk about Russian philosophy by name. And so he doesn't necessarily seem immediately like somebody who would be within the Russian tradition. That being said, if you look at his earlier works, you can see how he's haunted by certain ideas and topics that were permeating in the context of emigre Russian culture. And so Spectre I kind of settled on, because while it is not something that immediately is constantly directing and shaping everything that Kozhev does, it's this kind of thing that. That perpetually returns and has some sort of. Yeah. Spectral quality to. That still is a form of influence.
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Elisa Kuzmina
I am impressed by the approach that you took. That sounds fascinating. Do you know when he changed his name and why he did that? Was that also part of this distancing from his roots?
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
So if I remember correctly, I think it's 1927 is when he. So he emigrates from Soviet Russia in 1920. First he moves to Germany, and then he moves to France. I think he moves to France in 1926, and then he starts writing as Kozhev instead of Kozievnikov in 20. And I think, to your point, yes, I do think there is something about the change of the name that almost Symbolically is a kind of farewell to a certain identity as a writer and then creating a new one in a new context.
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Elisa Kuzmina
Right, but you mentioned that he had an accent that people remembered his lectures by sometimes.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yes. I mean, I think it could easily again go into that idea of essentializing this is how Slavic people think and operate. What's fascinating is when you read recollections of people who studied with Kozhev or worked with Kozhev, they always allude to a kind of Slavic. Yeah, Slavic accent and a certain, you know, self presentation that bleeds into why in the closer to the Second World War, he gets thought to be this sort of sympathizer with Stalin. The kind of like stereotypical Russian. He. It bleed like all the stereotypes sort of come together both in a charming way, but also in a way that I wanted to avoid in my own analysis of him as a philosopher.
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Elisa Kuzmina
Philosopher, absolutely. It's something that perhaps you cannot ignore, but mentioning it through the recollections would be a great way to do that. Again, coming back to the 20th century Europe class, the students read different perspectives of people of the time. For example, they read Stefan Zweig's the World of Yesterday. They also read about the perception and reception of the Rite of spring in 1913. Again, I thought about Alexander Kozhev's experiences as a Russian emigre in Germany and France. Could you talk to me a bit about this positionality in relation to his understanding of Europe in that time?
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah. Thank you. Again, another excellent question and one that I thought a lot about when I was writing this book. But I think when you finish a book, you always have ideas of what you would put in more after you published it. And this is something that I think I would have maybe included a little bit more explicitly, but it's still in there. But it's something I've thought a lot about explicitly after it's been published. What's interesting to me, if I go back again to this. This important philosophical point in Kozhev's work, just to say it very briefly, is the idea that a subject develops a sense of certainty in their identity through an external other. Person acquires a sense of subject through an other, and that's. And that becomes codified in Content of philosophy in the 20th century through Kozev reading Hegel. To go back to what you were just saying about Europe, what's very fascinating to me about him in the interwar period is that it's this period of sort of modernist exploration of new forms, new identities, new ways of being And I think Rites of Spring is a. Is an excellent example of that from a musical perspective, of the sort of shock of this new form. And it's no. You know, it's no surprise that Rites of Spring is playing off of a sort of, like, atavistic pagan culture that gets presented to the Parisian. Parisian audience on stage. And it's a sort of this. Like a new form develops through this relationship between others and this question of alterity. And I think that Kozhev is really fascinating to me in that period, because you could fall. You could make a similar argument in the visual arts and music, in literature, this kind of exploration of form through a sense of strangeness and otherness. And that comes from the, I think, like, vast political upheaval in Europe and migrations of people to cosmopolitan centers like artists, composers, coming to Paris. Artists, composers, et cetera, coming to Berlin, Prague, London, so on and so forth. And Kojev essentially, to me, is a figure that does that philosophically. So I think that Kozhev. It's no surprise that Koshev is interested in this sense of self and other as a philosopher who is reading a. As a Russian philosopher who is reading a German text in France. And so I think it's sort of another similar way in which these kind of forms of identity are being played within that period. And I think that that has. That's a really significant way to think of what is the culture of Europe in the interwar period. And so I think that would also be a way. If you don't necessarily have an interest in Kozhev philosophically, or you don't have interest in philosophy, it's a way to sort of tie him, I think, to a broader set of ideas and people and places.
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Elisa Kuzmina
Since we've begun talking about the new forms, I was thinking about the COVID of your book, which is beautiful. And when I saw it, the first thing I thought about was Kandinsky. And then I found out in your book that they are related. Can you tell me a bit more about the process behind the COVID of the book and also about his relationship with his uncle?
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Absolutely. So the COVID of the book is Drei Elementa, Three Elements by Kandinsky. Kandinsky is, as you just said, is Kozhev's uncle. They had a long series of correspondence that's been published, I think in it was written. They corresponded in French, but it's since been published, I think in English as well. But it's a really fascinating set of correspondences because Kozhev was trying to write philosophically about Kandinsky's paintings. And so what exactly is it that Kandinsky is trying to achieve on the canvas? And Kandinsky was encouraging his nephew Kozhev, to sort of write a philosophy of Kandinsky's paintings. And so when it came to essentially time to choose a book cover, I immediately knew I wanted to do something Kandinsky, because I thought that that sort of connection was just such an interesting connection of how, just as I was kind of saying, this kind of interwar period in which cultural migration is producing new forms, Kandinsky, you know, moving like Kozhev moving from first from Russia to Germany and in Germany to France, and, you know, becoming this sort of a global painter of, you know, of influence, following a sort of similar trajectory. And so the painting that is on the book's cover, it was given to Kozhev's family, and it remained in his family, I think, until Nina Ivanov, who was Kozhev's partner until she died, and then it went to a museum in France. But just visually, to me, it's very interesting, especially because Kozhev was, in his philosophical writings on Kandinsky, was trying to basically make the argument that Kandinsky does not do abstract painting, but his paintings are actually concrete paintings. And so there was this interesting debate about how you should never call it abstract painting, but actually concrete painting. But I don't know if we have time for that, so I won't go into it.
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Elisa Kuzmina
When I first saw the COVID and I didn't know about this connection, I thought that, oh, maybe it is representative of time and of a thinking process. So it made me think of a philosophizing as a process. So perhaps that corresponds a bit to the concrete painting.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, no, absolutely. So thinking is a form of. Yeah, absolutely. So philosophizing is a form of creating concrete concepts. And what's interesting about the argument about non figurative painting being concrete, so non figurative means that it doesn't depict a specific figure. Right. It's not a picture of a tree, it's not a picture of a woman, it's not a picture of a cat or anything. Instead, it's just these sort of these forms as you're describing. And Kozhev makes the argument in his essay that that is actually concrete painting because it's abstract painting when you have something that you're representing because you're making an abstraction of the thing that you're representing. So let's say you're painting a picture of a tree. It is abstract painting, the figurative painting is actually abstract painting, because you're abstracting from the actual existing tree. By contrast, concrete painting means that you are essentially creating a singular thing that is not representing anything else. It's a concrete object, essentially, that doesn't represent anything else. And so, therefore is not abstract. And so there's an interesting. Just sort of conversation between the two of them, Kandinsky and Kozhev, about the idea of concrete being a good term for it. And I think it has very much so a connection to your point to philosophizing that he's doing in the period as well.
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Elisa Kuzmina
So we talked about his relationship to his uncle a little bit. Can you tell me a bit about his relationship with his wife? How did he meet her and what was their relationship like? Because she ended up kind of speaking sort of for him after his death. Right. When they needed to clear up some stuff about him being a spy and stuff like that.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I have to admittedly say I don't know too much about her life, except accept the fact, to your point, that in his passing, she became the person who provided the sort of substantive evidence that led to the conclusion that Kojev had, in fact, been giving documents, had been passing documents from the French government to the Soviet government. I do know that. So Khrushchev was. Well, he was married one time. I do not think that his. His subsequent partner, Nina. I don't think they ever married because she's always referred to as his partner. But his first wife, he met through the emigre Russian community. And Nina Ivanova, obviously also was from the Russian emigre community. And his first wife, it's interesting because she has a connection to Karsavin, another philosopher. So, like this kind of insular community, insular emigre community that all of these figures were sort of operating in the 1920s and onward, she sort of emerges from. But to your point. So eventually, Cecile Chutak is her name, the first wife. They divorced in 1927, I think, and then he married. Well, he eventually becomes the partner of Nina Ivanov, who he stays with until his death in 1968. And she is the one who maintained, you know, as is always the case in these sort of like, you know, the classic heterosexual patriarchal relationship, she's the one who sort of managed his papers and managed his estate. And I don't say that at all to downplay that role, because actually, it was an incredibly important role. So much so that when she passed in 2006 or 2007, all of his papers were donated to The French National Library, like under her, you know, her supervision. And those are papers that I worked with to write this first book. And they're under. The papers are currently under the supervision of Kozhev's niece, Nina Kuznetsov, who I work with quite frequently. She lives in Paris, is a really, really generous and lovely woman who has since become responsible for managing who can publish and have access to what materials. And I've had to work frequently with her to have rights to translate things. So I've translated several of his things from the archive, and in order to do so, I've had to get her permission. So there is this long, interesting kind of history of all of those documents, and it definite does. It's all thanks to Nina Ivanov, his partner.
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Elisa Kuzmina
Yeah, that's. That's a great addition. Thank you for that. And you said 1927. I wonder if that was partially the reason why he changed his name. He was like, okay, divorce, that's new life, new me.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, I mean, it might be the case. I mean, I also think that that was also the year around the time that they first moved from Germany to Paris. It seems like that was a time in which it was peak precarity for him. So, like, there was. There were a lot of fact. He didn't have employment. He didn't. He didn't really, like, hadn't quite finished his degree in Germany to, like, to qualify to teach at the Des Institutes in France. So he had, like. There were lots of things that were kind of up in the air, and he got divorced.
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Elisa Kuzmina
So, you know, your archival work for this project is fascinating, and from what I understand, you also translated his writing. I wanted to ask you about that process and how it impacted your understanding of Koziev, of his thinking, and how did it impact your project?
- [22:46]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah. Thank you. And to this I should add that I am currently translating his main work that was published in French in 1945, which was a book based on the seminars that he gave in the 1930s on Hegel. So eventually it was published in French by Gallimar, the main. The sort of major French publisher, and it's only ever been translated into abridged form in English. So about. About one third of it has been translated into English. And so I have it under contract with Routledge to do a full version of that book. What's interesting about that book is that the book was actually not written by Kozhev himself, but was based off of notes from the students in his seminar. So it's a kind of complicated book that is related to those papers that I had just been describing, but also somewhat different. So to go back to your question or in your sort of invitation to talk about translation, in Kozhev's archive at the Bibetec national, the National Library in Paris, there is a just enormous amount of unpublished works. And of those works, many of them are written in Russian. And what I immediately discovered upon starting to do my research on Kozhev was that his Russian handwriting was completely illegible. Like, it was so difficult to read. I had to sort of work with specialists to get a sense of, you know, even, like, trying to make my way through certain texts. You know, I say this as someone who speaks Russian, but just the way that sort of hand. I mean, those who write in Russian can certainly understand that some Russian handwriting is quite terrible. And so I had to, you know, I worked with someone to have those sort of transcribed. And I have a French colleague who is a French Slavist. He does Russian Slavic philosophy as well, but at a French university, Rambert Nicolas, who succeeded in transcribing the largest remaining text by Kozhev that has not been published, which is about Sophia. And I think we'll talk about that a little bit later. But the text that I have been translating from Kozhev, so I translated some texts of his from Russian emigre newspapers, particularly Yevrazia, which is a French. Well, so it's a Russian language, French emigre newspaper. And so I translated some of his essays that he wrote in that journal when he first moved to France. And then I've translated a decent amount of stuff. I also speak French, so I translated a bunch of things that he had also written in French. But it is interesting, I think, to your original question, to work with somebody who's written on philosophy in German, in French and in Russian, because you get a sense of how certain concepts change from one articulation to another. So, like, sort of, what verb does one use in Russian, and how does it relate to what verb one uses in German and French and so on. That's been an interesting whole process because there is particularly, for example, in German, there's a very, very specific philosophical vocabulary that you can see him trying to articulate it from one language to another. And there's actually some controversy in how Kozhev translated certain philosophical terms from German to French because they thought that he did it perhaps incorrectly or removed some nuance. Nobody has a strong opinion about what words he used in Russian because they don't quite know him yet as a Russian philosopher, that's part of my goal is to introduce that part of him. But from German to French, there are people who have strong feelings about how he translates one thing or another.
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Elisa Kuzmina
I wonder if now is a good time to look into chapter three in your book where you discuss Sofia manuscript and Kozhev's relation to the Soviet state. And here again, I wonder if we could do that kind of similarly to the beginning, if you could talk about Sophia in general terms, and then what did it mean to Kozhev? And then if we could talk about his relationship to Stalin and its Stalin state.
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Dr. Trevor Wilson
Absolutely. And to do so, I might even take us one step back, just as a sort of like, explanatory step, by saying that in the early 1920s, a whole generation of Russian philosophers was expulsed from the Soviet Union in an episode that became known as the philosopher's steamships, because they were exiled on these steamships that went from what was then called Petrograd, St. Petersburg, Leningrad, into Germany, where they then moved throughout Europe. The reason why that's an important position to start at is that what essentially happens in Russian philosophy in the 20th century is a kind of bifurcation, two lines of Russian philosophy that are in operation. And this is true if anybody studies emigre culture more broadly in Russian literature. We often speak of a sort of emigre camp canon of Russian literature and a Soviet canon of Russian literature, and the two sort of develop side by side. There are some famous emigre authors, for example, Vladimir Nabokov. There's some famous, you know, Soviet authors like Bulgakov, for example. There's these two lines. The same thing essentially happens with Russian philosophy, where a bunch of Russian philosophers who were mostly but not exclusively religious philosophers, working in the tradition of Russian Orthodoxy, be it explicitly or in taking ideas and topics from Orthodoxy into philosophy. On one hand, there were those philosophers working in emigration, and on the other hand, there are Soviet philosophers in the Soviet Union, of course, who are developing a sort of materialist philosophy, largely based through Marx, of course, Lenin and Stalin as sort of amateur philosophers. The reason why that's an important first step is that Kozhev was not a religious philosopher, but was in emigration and throughout his life showed sympathies towards the Soviet Union in such a way that many people often thought that he may or may not be a spy. And it sort of proves, more or less, it's been kind of established that he did certain things that would be considered maybe being a spy. However, this question of Sophia is really fascinating because Sophia is one of the main topics that these Russian emigre philosophers were discussing in Diaspora. So Sophia is a very, very old concept. It has many, many different roots, as roots in sort of Platonism, Jewish Kabbalah, various sort of, like, esoteric traditions across Europe. But then it emerges in Russian religious thought as a way of conceptualizing how the divine manifests into the non divine, into, like, human experience. And so Russian religious philosophers, particularly Sergius Bulgakov, who was a famous Russian religious philosopher that was exiled in the 20s, spent the 1920s, 1930s, and even further on, sort of articulating what becomes known as sophiology, so trying to incorporate this idea of divine incarnation through love. So she was. Sophia is a woman, and it's sort of eroticized how, like, humanity kind of, like, merges with her. It's kind of sexualized. So they spend this whole time trying to sort of articulate this view of Sophia. Kozhev never had any interest in that. But what's really fascinating about the Sophia manuscript, sort of coming back to it, is that in the 1940s, Kozhev wrote a manuscript that was basically a treatment of Sophia from an atheist perspective. And so he's trying to bring in these sophiology, these sort of debates about Sophia and the emigrant community, and apply them to Stalin and to Stalinism. And so it's this incredibly fascinating document that's still being transcribed and published in any language right now. It kind of combines those two philosophical traditions. So the emigre tradition and the Soviet tradition. It, in a weird way articulates both of them because it's talking about Sophia, but it's talking about Sophia in the context of Stalinism. And so I think that's something that's incredibly unique and remarkable about Khrushev, is that this Diaspora figure who is kind of writing about a religious topic, but doing it in a way that explains why Stalinism is a necessary political project. And so I think that. I mean, I'm happy to keep going and talk about his relationship to Stalinism as a spy, if you'd like, but I also. Maybe we'll just stop there.
- [31:21]
Elisa Kuzmina
I would be curious to stop at the. At another point that you mention in his. In your book that he sometimes really toyed with that idea of him being into Stalin and kind of not ever addressing it directly. And you mentioned that his Western colleagues did not really take that seriously. I was wondering, why do you think that was?
- [31:50]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, I mean, it's something that's actually quite a big source of debate amongst people who study Khrushchev about Sort of how seriously do you take this connection between Khrushchev and Stalin and sort of Stalinist sympathies?
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Elisa Kuzmina
And he described himself as like. Right. Marx.
- [32:07]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yes, yeah, Marxist. Du troid. Yeah, right, right, A right wing Marxist. Well, so I guess to answer the first question, why did his Western colleagues maybe not take it seriously? I would say that after World War II, Kozhev takes up a position in the French Ministry of Finance and sort of becomes a major diplomat on a pan European level. And so he very much so enters the upper echelon of European political life. And so part of me thinks that maybe the reluctance to take take Kozhev's sort of Stalinist sympathy seriously is because it would almost be at odds with the kind of public Persona that he develops with himself as a kind of someone who works not that far away from Charles de Gaulle, who's trying to negotiate what eventually would become the European Economic Community, trying to establish what would be a pan European political entity after World War II. So I think maybe that kind of work that he was doing would lend itself to maybe not take seriously the idea that he has these sort of like these Stalinist principles that he was, you know, kind of saying during his seminars. But I would just say that I think when you look at this Sophia manuscript, I think it's very clear that he absolutely does take, he takes seriously Stalinism. And so therefore you should take seriously what he's. That he has this relationship to Stalinism. And part of what I do in my book is I sort of suggest that many Russian emigres in the interwar period had incredibly convoluted and complicated relationships to Stalinism and to communism and to the, you know, Russian identity. And so all of them were trying to articulate a sense of, you know, a Russian state when it's. There's so many things are in flux. And so I kind of. I tried to associate him with that, with that flux a bit, because in his later life, he doesn't seem to be as heavily invested in the Soviet project. So it's kind of maybe in the interwar period when people are still trying to figure out what does it mean to be Russian. Kozhev was perhaps toying with a sense of philosophy that took seriously the new Soviet government as part of a Russian identity, if that makes sense.
- [34:26]
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- [34:56]
Elisa Kuzmina
Since we started talking about this intersection of philosophy and politics, I was wondering if we could talk about the last chapter of your book, Loose Ends of History, and how his ideas got picked up and reworked after his death. Was that a challenging chapter to write? How did you approach that speculative approach?
- [35:19]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, I mean, it was challenging. I would say it's probably the most challenging one to write because as you just said, it is quite, quite speculative. But I think it was also, for me, one of the most rewarding ones, just because if anybody's familiar with Kozhev, there is an immediate sort of baggage around him with this idea of the end of history. So the idea that once history concludes, however that works. I mean, I could get into the details, but it's, you know, maybe not time for it. However history ends, there will be some sort of final form. And that becomes an incredibly potent topic of conversation in the Cold War period as there's a. There's a debate going on between two very different competing political forms. You know, the Soviet Union and the United States. In the late, late Soviet period, someone named Francis Fukuyama, who's a famous political scientist, takes up Kozhev's ideas at the end of history. And he does it in a very interesting lineage because he studies with somebody who studies with Kojev. There's a kind of, like, linking chain going back to Kozhev. So Fukuyama takes up Kozhev's writings on the end of history and argues after the Soviet Union eventually collapses, that the final definitive form at the end of history will be liberal democracy. So now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, there's going to be, you know, everybody will be transitioning. The ultimate progression of history for everybody will be what was liberal democracy in the sort of American model. Fukuyama has gotten a lot of criticism for that, rightfully so. I mean, if we look at where we are in 2025, I think it would be ridiculous to say, A, that history has ended, or B, that there's some sort of definitive political form for anybody. But what was interesting to me in that last chapter was to see how, through a series of exchanges with German and American political theorists, Kozhev's ideas about this become integrated into this landscape, speculating on what would be the end forms of political life. And I think that a Lot of people who want to save Kozhev, you know, make him not guilty of being involved in that kind of wrong speculation can say that, oh, these people who took Kozhev's ideas perhaps interpreted them incorrectly. And I kind of say this in my book. I don't think that, that it's. I don't think that they interpreted them correctly, but I don't think they interpreted them incorrectly either. I think that Kozhev was relatively ambiguous enough that it became like his theory of history became useful to be used in a number of different, different political ideologies to talk about what would the end of history look like. And then that chapter also ends with basically how a bunch of Russian theorists and philosophers today return to Kozhev and try to get rid of this sort of end of history, because they are sort of living in this, this kind of post socialist condition where history has ended, but history also still goes on. So it's just a really interesting moment in which Kozhev kind of has this legibility. People can use and understand and react to Kozhev in very current political situations.
- [38:34]
Elisa Kuzmina
Right, right. And as you're saying that, I've been thinking that I really want to go back to your book and reread certain sections because it was such a pleasure to read it. And I think it is written very clearly and with care, which I thought was wonderful. And if I could think about care, I was thinking about reading the acknowledgement section of your book and I noticed that you mentioned, like, you thanked coffee shop stuff, for instance, which I thought made a lot of sense and not something that I see often. Did you have a writing routine? Like, could you perhaps, before we wrap up, leave me and our listeners with this image of your writing routine and like, what did you order? Where did you go?
- [39:25]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Sure. So first, I think to say my writing routine, I have to say that when I wrote this book, I had a dog, and my dog since passed, but I had a dog that, like, very much so dictated my routine so much that I would get up very early because he would get up early. So I. So I would get up early and I would always go to a coffee shop, to your point, and I would write and I would write for, you know, a couple hours or read or, you know, whatever. But it was a way of structuring my time. And one thing that was very important to me as I was finishing this book, I mean, as I was finishing the last versions of it and as it was being published, is that we were living through the pandemic And I was very cognizant of the fact that although I was able to, as an academic, a grad student and then faculty, although I was able to have a incredible flexible, remote work arrangement, many of the people who structure our very possibility of being in academia, coffee staff, you know, very service people, people who, you know, can keep the lights on, literally, people who. Who, you know, change trash cans. I mean, all the people who do the actual literal, physical labor of the university, both in the universities and as well as in the neighborhoods and the coffee shops, those sorts of people did not have that luxury. And so I. To go back to my routine, there was a local coffee shop when I was living in Pittsburgh, Espresso Amano, that I would always go to to write, but I would also go to. If anyone's been to Pittsburgh, I would also go to the Cathedral of Learning. The ground floor of the Cathedral of Learning has a coffee shop. And I was just amazed at these three women who work at that coffee shop who would every single day during the pandemic, be there, who did not have a choice. I mean, it wasn't as though they had a choice. I'm sure. I'm sure they were being forced by the administration, by the powers that be, to be there. But just thinking about how much of the things that we do in academia and the ways that we think and how we write is built upon an infrastructure like that that lets us do it. And I don't take for granted that I was able to, during a really terrible time in a pandemic, to stay at home and write and think about Russian philosophy while these people had to stay afloat. They had to go work in these coffee shops. And so I thought it was really important to think about those people when I was writing my acknowledgments, because I quite literally could not have written the book without those people being there.
- [41:42]
Elisa Kuzmina
Absolutely. What was your order?
- [41:45]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Yeah, so I tend to just get a small oat milk latte. Yeah, I don't really like any flavors. Sometimes espresso. But I think. I mean, just single espresso. But I think now, as I get older, I definitely need something to cut the espresso. So I think a small oat milk latte is sufficient for me.
- [42:04]
Elisa Kuzmina
Shout out to the ladies in the coffee shop.
- [42:08]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Absolutely. Thank you so much, the three of you. I mean, I could not have written anything without those three women.
- [42:13]
Elisa Kuzmina
That's awesome. And shout out to you, Trevor. Thank you so much for coming to New Books Network. It was great to have you.
- [42:20]
Dr. Trevor Wilson
Thank you. Very much for inviting me. I had a good time, and thank.
- [42:23]
Elisa Kuzmina
You to our listeners for tuning into our conversation with Trevor Wilson about his book Alexander Kozhev and the Specters of Russian Philosophy. To explore more books and discussions, visit the New Books Network website and have a great rest of your day.