“Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982” by Cho Nam-Joo (translated by Jamie Chang)

Cho is a television scriptwriter turned novelist. She has written a new novel that has captured the zeitgeist of the age. The eponymous heroine, Jiyoung, was born into a country that has achieved first world economic success, but where all the gains have yet to be evenly distributed. Her life story is emblematic of the struggles that Korean women still face in society today. The inequalities of gender start at birth and multiply from there. “Jiyoung’s earliest childhood memory is of sneaking her brother’s baby formula. She must have been six or seven then. It was just formula, but it was so tasty she would sit by her mother when she was making it for her brother, lick her finger, and pick up little bits that spilled on the floor…. It was given that fresh rice hot out of the cooker was served in order of father, brother, and grandmother, and that perfect pieces of tofu, dumplings, and patties were the brother’s while the girls ate the ones that fell apart.” Things were even worse for girls of her mother’s generation, when Korea was still poor. “The unbelievably meager wages from working day and night, popping caffeine pills, and turning jaundiced went toward sending male siblings to school. This was a time when people believed it was up to the sons to bring honor and prosperity to the family, and that the family’s wealth and happiness hinged upon male success.” Cho uses footnotes throughout the book to embed real statistics within the story. “In 1982, the year Jiyoung was born, 106.8 boys were born to 100 girls, and the male birth ratio gradually increased, ending up with 116.5 boys born to 100 girls in 1990. (“Statistical Indicators and Ratios in Demography,” Statistics Korea.)” 

Jiyoung, just because of her gender, is made to feel a second class citizen in her society throughout the course of her life—within her family, at school, on the subway, and at work. The boss at her first job, Kim Eunsil, warns Jiyoung, “I’ve noticed this about new employees over the years. The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while the guys never do. Doesn’t matter if they’re new or the youngest—they never do anything they’re not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves?” Once married, pressure from both sides of the family for a male heir is often suffocating. “Jiyoung’s mother said, “It’s okay, the next one will be a boy.” Daehyun’s mother said, “I don’t mind.” Jiyoung very much minded what they’d said. It wasn’t just the older generation.” As a stay-at-home mom Jiyoung is made to feel by society that she is a sponge off of her husband and called a “mom-roach” by nosy strangers in the park. She complains to her husband, “It’s nobody’s business what I do with the money my husband made. Am I stealing from you? I suffered pain having our child. My routine, my career, my dreams, my entire life, my self—I gave it all up to raise our child. And I’ve become vermin. What do I do now?”

“On the Eve” by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Michael Pursglove)

In this nineteenth century Russian novel, a young lady, Yelena, is pursued by no more than three suitors. “From the age of sixteen she became completely independent; she began to live her own life, but it was a solitary life. Her soul both blazed up and died down in solitude; she thrashed about like a bird in a cage, but there was no cage: no one was constraining her, no one was holding her back, but she struggled and exhausted herself.” Yelena ends up falling for a mysterious Bulgarian noble, Insarov, expelled from his homeland in his youth by the Ottomans on pain of death. He is living in exile in Moscow, a poor university student, helping to raise arms for the independence movement. “I’m sure you will come to love us: you love all oppressed people. If you knew how bountiful our land is! Meanwhile it is being trampled, torn apart…. We’ve been robbed of everything: our churches, our rights, our lands. The filthy Turks drive us like cattle and slaughter us.” Yelena cannot help but fall in love. She writes in her diary, “The time will come when he’ll leave us forever, will go home, will go there, beyond the sea. So? Good luck to him! But all the same I’ll be glad that I got to know him while he was here. Why is he not a Russian? No, he couldn’t be a Russian.” His rival suitors bow out to Insarov in typical Russian fashion, “We’re not blind, we see what’s going on around us, but we’re gentlemen, my dear sir, and we take revenge in a gentlemanly manner.”

“On Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra” by Leo Strauss

In this set of lectures at the University of Chicago, Strauss seeks to explain the crux of Nietzsche’s philosophy. “Nietzsche, as quite a few modern thinkers before him, revolts against God in the name of love of men. We can say they turn from the love of God to love of men.” Strauss goes further. ““God is dead,” that is the thesis. That is different from saying “God is not” or “God does not exist.” “God is dead” means God once lived. Nietzsche’s atheism is a historical atheism.” Nietzsche is concerned about what will become of man stripped to his modernity. “The death of God makes possible this greatest degradation of man, the last man, and this is the greatest threat now…. Christian morality without a Christian God, one herd without a shepherd, that is to say, anarchistic self-complacency combined with the abolition of suffering. Heaven on earth, that is to say, social or political hedonism, utilitarianism…. [Conversely,] the superman is a superhuman man. The superman is then the alternative to the last man.” In Zarathustra, Nietzsche ponders the tenuous essence that has always befallen man, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.” Strauss explains further Nietzsche’s conceptions of the nature of man, of the self, and of the individual. “The place of God is taken not by the ego but by the self. The self, not the ego, is the core of man. The self wishes to create beyond itself, not the ego, because the ego is not creative; that is to say, the ego as ego is in itself on its way to the superman, in which human creativity reaches its climax…. Nietzsche’s appeal was to the individual, and his concern was with the creativity of the individual, and this is absolutely incompatible with political action.”

Nietzsche is not an egalitarian. He states, “For, to me justice speaks thus: Men are not equal. Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise?” Strauss explains, “For Nietzsche, inequality is the condition for any high achievement…. Life is will to power—i.e., will to superiority.” The will to power was engaged in an unwinnable fight against the arrow of time. Nietzsche claims, “It was’—that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.” Strauss expands, “Man is an animal which cannot forget…. Man lives therefore as much in the past as in the present…. We are also always what we no longer are. Our existence is an imperfectum which can never be perfected. Man cannot forget; hence he sees everywhere becoming, as distinguished from being…. The will desires to be sovereign, to be simply creative, but it depends on the given, that is to say, on the past…. Will to power is not only the essence of man, will to power is the fundamental characteristic of everything living. The will to power doctrine is meant to account for the upward movement in evolution, in human history, without the assumption of a preexisting end…. Nietzsche calls philosophy the most spiritual form of the will to power…. The will to power, as we find it in the organic world and in man most of the time, is an attempt to overpower and incorporate other things. But on the highest stage, the will to power turned against itself.” In “Ecce Homo” Nietzsche reveals, “My task is to prepare a moment of the highest self-consciousness of mankind, a great noon where mankind looks into the future, where mankind leaves the dominion of chance and where it poses the question of the ‘why’ and ‘for what’ for the first time as mankind.”

Nietzsche suggests that all philosophy before him was subjective. Through the lens of historicism, he is able to see the cultural relativism in all prior truths. His is an attempt to step out of history. Or, if not to step out, which would be impossible, at least to acknowledge, the limits imposed on man by being embedded in history. “All knowledge, as [Nietzsche] puts it, is perspectivity. There is not the perspective: all knowledge is relative to a specific perspective, but there are narrower and broader perspectives. Nietzsche’s own doctrine of will to power is meant to correspond to the best or broadest perspective which has emerged hitherto…. The absoluteness of the perspective is established by the fact that life has now for the first time become conscious of itself, that it knows now what it truly is.”

Man is a creature of his own culture. “In Nietzsche’s opinion, a society is not possible without a culture of its own. A culture requires ultimately some commitment, which we may loosely call a religion. This is Nietzsche’s chief concern: a regeneration of man…. I return to the beginning: the death of God and the possibility of the superman; secondly, the death of God and the new understanding of both man and the whole to which man belongs. This new understanding is expressed in the thesis that nature or life is will to power in opposition to eros in the Platonic sense, as striving toward given ends, unchanging ends, transcendent ends. The will to power generates the ends—the will to power in contradistinction to the modern alternative, the will to mere life, because the will to life does not account for the upward thrust, for the overcoming of the lower, for the creativity in evolution. Now the superman is the highest form of the will to power, and therefore the two notions belong together.” Fundamentally attached to Nietzsche’s will to power is his concept of the eternal return. “Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power is the highest form of the most spiritual will to power because it is the first philosophy which is free from the spirit of revenge as he defined it. It does not rebel against becoming and perishing but accepts it and affirms it. It affirms it infinitely. This infinite affirmation of becoming and perishing is the belief in eternal return: no end of becoming, no end of perishing.” Nietzsche has found the only objective purpose for man. “Men have purposes, they set themselves purposes, but the highest purpose they can set for themselves is to be without purpose: simply to be, though to be while knowing. The highest act of creativity, we can therefore say, is the recognition.” Nothing is permanent except for the will to power. “The doctrine of the will to power… is primarily an attempt to understand history. The doctrine of the will to power is an attempt to state, particularly, the ground of historical knowledge, the ground of history. This ground is found in human creativity, and we can provisionally say will to power is primarily human creativity. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is then the self-consciousness of human creativity and, with good reason, final.”

“The Big Green Tent” by Ludmila Ulitskaya (translated by Polly Gannon)

This contemporary novel looks back on Communist Russia, particularly the years following Stalin’s death. The chapters generously weave back and forth in time, loosely following the friendship of three boys growing up in Moscow. “A three-way friendship, like all triangles, is a complex matter. Obstacles and temptations arise—jealousy, envy, sometimes even treachery, albeit trivial or pardonable. Can treachery be justified by unendurable, boundless love? The three of them would be granted an epoch quintessentially suited to posing this question, and a whole lifetime—shorter for one, longer for the others—in which to find out.” Ilya, Mikha, and Sanya first bonded over books, enamored by their grade school literature teacher, a one-armed veteran of the war. “A small but mighty army of young people had learned the art of reading Pushkin and Tolstoy. Victor Yulievich was certain that his students were thus inculcated against the ills and evils of existence, both petty and grand. In this he was, perhaps, mistaken.” Ilya wound up marrying Olga, whose parents were dyed in the wool party cadres. “It was here, near Vologda, that she finally came to terms with her keen disappointment in her parents’ ideals, in the whole edifice of power and authority of the country she was born in, in the country itself, with its cruel and inhuman regulations and customs.” Her mother, Antonia, even as she grew accustomed to black market luxuries, never recanted her belief in the communist system. “In Russia, all our might, all the intellect and know-how of our scientists, is for exploring the cosmos and making atomic power stations. They just invent can openers. Well, I have to admit, they do know how to make those.” Those radicals who could not consent to support the system lived far on its fringes. “Each of them was an outstanding personality with eccentric interests, rare knowledge, or expertise in every imaginable and unimaginable field, and all of it superfluous to ordinary life…. All of them, except the woman with the diamonds, worked as security guards, elevator operators, truckers, fictitious research assistants, were spongers living off their wives or mothers, creative layabouts who never lifted a finger, parasites, pariahs, and outcasts, all of them equally dangerous and fascinating. It was never completely clear whether they refused to work for the state, or the state refused to have anything to do with them.” Through the course of the novel, all three men must, again and again, choose for themselves how much they are willing to compromise on their own ideals to live within Russia. “But there was less and less time for friends. There were no more school breaks, walking excursions through Moscow with a favorite teacher on Wednesdays—the sublimely obligatory school-day camaraderie had ended. They came together from time to time out of the inertia of habit, but they dove into their little coves of friendship less and less often. Suddenly they discovered that life had forced them apart.”