In his 2023 book The Art Thief, author Michael Finkel crucially observed (my book review here) that “art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure of all.” So true, and it raises an exciting question about the present and future of art: as an increasingly globalized division of labor comprised of man, machines, and machines that think make life’s necessities and luxuries more and more of a sure thing, isn’t the brilliance of art set to explode in a myriad of amazing ways?
Time will tell. For now, it’s interesting to contemplate the past. In particular, what was happening economically in 19th century Russia that so much amazing literature and music was created? Think Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, and Tolstoy among many others. If art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all, it’s apparent that in the 19th century Russia must have had prosperity-oriented policies (or better yet a lack of policy) that enabled immense artistic progress.
All the spectacular 19th century Russian culture came to mind while reading Amor Towles’s newest book, Table for Two. This time Towles has written a series of short stories along with a novella. The first of the short stories is titled “The Line,” and it’s about a peasant named Pushkin and his wife Irina. In the last days of the Tsar, they live in a small village “one hundred miles from Moscow.”
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