AtDtDA(28): The Unthinkable Possibility

Sat Mar 8 17:48:16 CST 2008

Genghis Khan, who inspired the name Genghis Cohen in Lot 49 (Pynchon has said).....has Irkustsk resonances.....
  Any significance anyone think?

  [edit] History  Irkutsk grew out of the winter quarters established (1652) by Yakov Pokhabov for gold-trading and for the collection of the fur tax from the Buryats. The town gained official city rights from the government in 1686. The first road connection between Moscow and Irkutsk, the Siberian Road (Сибирский Тракт, Sibirsky Trakt), was built in 1760. The city benefitted economically from this new road. Many new products, often imported from China, were widely available in Irkutsk for the first time, including gold, diamonds, furs, wood, silk, and tea.
  During the past centuries Siberia, with its severe climate, has had a reputation as the place for exile. In Genghis Khan's army, punishment was either death or exile to Siberia.[4] In the early 19th century, many Russian artists, officers, and nobles were sent into exile to Siberia for their part in the Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nicholas I. Irkutsk became the major center of intellectual and social life for these exiles, and much of the city's cultural heritage comes from them; many of their wooden houses, adorned with ornate, hand-carved decorations, survive today in stark contrast with the standard Soviet apartment blocks that surround them.

Irkutsk railway station in the early 1900s.

  By the end of the 19th century there was one exiled man per two locals. Different people from the members of the Decemberists' uprising to Bolsheviks have been staying in Irkutsk for a long time. These people have greatly influenced the culture and the development of the city and it has finally became a prosperous cultural and educational center for Eastern Siberia.
  Irkutsk has long been reputed to be a remarkably fine cityits streets being straight, broad, well paved and well lighted; but in 1879, on July 4 and 6, the palace of the (then) Governor General, the principal administrative and municipal offices and many of the other public buildings were destroyed by fire; and the government archives, the library, and the museum of the Siberian section of the Russian Geographical Society were utterly ruined. Three quarters of the city were destroyed, including approximately four thousand houses. However, the city quickly rebounded, with electricity arriving in 1896, the first theater being built in 1897, and a major train station in 1898. The first train arrived in Irkutsk on August 16 of that year. By 1900, the city had earned the nickname "The Paris of Siberia."

Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
    What is that bit about masonry and "spiritual ease" .........until
  they see the rich brick-and-masonry homes in irkutsk?

Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
  "... the unthinkable possibility had been dawning that God had
abandoned Russia. What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was
now as loaded with uncertainty as any peasant's struggle with the day,
and all, regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly."
(pp. 779-80)

Razvedka

Russian: intelligence (in the military-political sense).

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_768-791#Page_779

"the naval defeat at Tsushima ...."

The Battle of Tsushima ... was the last and most decisive sea battle
of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904â1905. It was fought on May 27â28,
1905 (May 14â15 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) in the
Tsushima Strait....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tsushima

"... the unthinkable possibility ... that God had abandoned Russia"

Irony? I.e., ...

The Soviet Union was an officially atheist state. According to various
Soviet and Western sources, however, over one-third of the country's
people professed religious belief....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Soviet_Union

How did it happen that the country known as 'Holy Russia', with such a
long history of Orthodox Christianity, was in a very short period of
time turned by the Bolsheviks into 'the first atheist state in the
world'? How was it possible that the very same people who were taught
religion in secondary schools in the 1910s with their own hands
destroyed churches and burned holy icons in the 1920s? What is the
explanation of the fact that the Orthodox Church, which was so
powerful in the Russian Empire, was almost reduced to zero by its
former members?

http://en.hilarion.orthodoxia.org/6_8

Cf., however, e.g., ...

"'By the time of Columbus, God's project of Disengagement was
obvious to all,-- with the terrible understanding that we were to be
left more and more to our own solutions.'" (M&D, Ch. 50, p. 487)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0205&msg=66784

"Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the
Saviour." Isaiah 45:15

http://www.bartleby.com/108/23/45.html#S69

The term Deus Absconditus means "hidden God" in Latin (Isaiah, 45:15
in the Vulgate Bible), and refers to the view (shared by the
Protestant Luther and the Catholic Pascal) that God had become
inaccessible, hiding himself from the view of sinful humans, and
therefore demanding a challenging existential act of faith.
Predestinarian theology held further that most people were incapable
of perceiving the hidden God, whose gift of grace permitted the
minority of the "elect" to know him....

http://icg.harvard.edu/~laa72/glossary/deus_absconditus/

"What had been certain and mandated by Heaven was now as loaded with
uncertainty as any peasant's struggle with the day, and all,
regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly." (pp. 779-80)

Main Entry: with
Pronunciation: \Ëwith, Ëwith, wÉth, wÉth\
Function: preposition
Etymology: Middle English, against, from, with, from Old English; akin
to Old English wither against, Old High German widar against, back,
Sanskrit vi apart
Date: before 12th century

1 a: in opposition to : against ...

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/with

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