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July 13, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
48:09
THE END OF AN ERA? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep620
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walzer, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth. Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com. Coming up, there's a big summit in August with the BRICS group over the future of the US dollar as a global reserve currency. I'll tell you the momentous implications of that. I'll consider a concrete case that reveals the ideological subversion of biology. I'll do a close analysis of a Chekhov short story. It's called A Darling to extract its psychological insights.
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There's a big summit coming up next month.
This is in the third week of August.
And it is a summit that could have big implications for the US economy, for the world economy, For your finances and mine, the summit is in Durban, South Africa.
And it's a summit of the so-called BRICS Group, now sometimes called the BRICS Plus Group.
And I'll explain why the plus sign was added.
It's almost like LGBTQ, LGBTQ+. In this case, we have BRICS Plus, but I'll tell you why.
Why is this important?
And it's something that has gotten, well, some attention and maybe a little bit more in the economic or financial press, but not enough in the mainstream press and not enough in the conservative media.
We're looking at the possibility, I think the probability, of the rollout of a major new currency.
So, sometimes people talk about multilateralism, multipolarism, and what they're referring to generically is the fact that the United States losing its sole position as the world's superpower and other powers coming up.
I'm not talking about that. I'm actually talking about almost a revival of Cold Warism.
In the sense that the Cold War was between just two countries.
Each of the countries might develop a wider orbit of allies, and in the case of the Soviet satellites, but it was a bipolar world.
I'm talking about a bipolar currency world.
So, not a world of 10 currencies.
I mean, obviously, many countries will have their own currency, but we're talking here about a reserve currency.
And a reserve currency is the currency that countries hold on to To store their value.
Think particularly of countries that don't have debts but are in a creditor position.
Money is owed to them.
They have a ton of money that's their money, but how are they going to hold it?
Typically, they're going to hold it in the form of a reserve currency that allows them to use that currency to buy anywhere in the world because it's an accepted, a widely accepted currency.
And what we're talking about is the dollar has been the world's reserve currency now for decades.
Really, 70 years or so.
And we're talking about a rival currency that certainly at the beginning doesn't displace the dollar, doesn't get rid of the dollar, but it eliminates the dollar's monopoly as a global reserve.
And all of this can happen pretty quickly, and it might be kicked off in this event I'm describing in August.
So just talk a word about BRICS. BRICS, of course, stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
Now, there are a bunch of other countries that want to join BRICS. In fact, there are eight that have applied for membership officially, 17 others that have said that they might want to join.
And so we're talking about countries all over the globe.
Zimbabwe, Uruguay, Turkey, Tunisia, Senegal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bangladesh, Afghanistan.
So these may seem like, well, we're talking about some second-rate countries, but no.
Let's look at the power of BRICS in an objective way.
First of all, Saudi Arabia and Russia.
So we've got two of the largest, two of the three largest energy producers in the world, the U.S. being the third.
If Russia, China, Brazil, and India are all members, you've got four of the seven largest countries measured by landmass, just physically the largest.
And China, India, Brazil, and Russia are four of the nine highest population countries.
So they represent collectively 40% of the world's population.
I'm telling you all this to give you a sense that BRICS is not some kind of We're talking about a coalition of countries that forms a significant part of the world's physical landmass and its population and its financial power and its also political and military power.
China, India, Brazil, Russia, and Saudi Arabia have a combined GDP of $29 trillion.
That's about 30% of global GDP. And Russia and China, of course, have two of the three largest nuclear arsenals in the world, the United States, of course, being the other.
So, now, why has this remarkable coalition even come together?
I would argue that it's come together because the US has, at least in the perception of many of these countries, abused its dollar reserve power.
And here's what I mean.
When you have a global reserve currency, the rest of the world trusts you that they can store dollars and, at their discretion, use those dollars to buy stuff.
Now, what if you decide, no, because it's my currency, it's my dollar, I own it, I'm going to tell you, no, I got sanctions against you, so you can't use my dollars anymore.
Well, suddenly the guy goes, well, I've been storing my national wealth and dollars, and you're now telling me I can't use them?
So this will produce a panic, a desperation, a resistance on the part of the sanctioned party.
And, of course, the United States has had sanctions against Iran, by itself not so significant, but now sanctions against Russia in the wake of the Ukraine war.
So the Russia sanctions have really sent...
The point is not just that Russia can't do business with dollars.
And what does that make Russia do?
Well, it makes Russia send oil to countries like India, to other countries that do do business with Russia, and then guess what?
Those countries turn around and sell that oil to Europe.
So, Europe has sanctions.
They can't buy Russian oil directly, so they buy it indirectly.
They buy the same Russian oil that has been transported in tankers to India and other countries and then sold to the Europeans.
And the Europeans go, well, we're not buying from Russia.
We're just buying from India.
But the important point I want to stress, and I'll pick this up in the next segment, is that not only does the country that is sanctioned feel a sense of uneasiness, a sense of vulnerability, is going to look for alternatives to the dollar, but lots of other countries say to themselves, hey, listen, we could be next.
If the United States decides that, guess what, we won't fly a transgender flag, we won't have gay marriage, we won't get rid of our laws against homosexuality, suddenly the U.S. is going to go, you can't use our dollars.
And so these countries go, this is unacceptable.
You don't get to dictate the mores of the world because we all have your currency.
And so interestingly, a lot of these countries think it is safer to do business with China and Russia than to rely on a currency that has been a sort of a steadfast source of reserve for many decades now, which is the U.S. dollar.
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I'm talking about the upcoming summit in Durban, South Africa, August 22nd to 24th.
It's for the BRICS countries and other countries that have applied for membership in BRICS or are interested in joining.
So this is why we have the term BRICS Plus.
BRICS refers to the four countries and the plus the other countries that may join in the future.
Now, people have talked about the dollar losing its exclusive position as a global reserve currency for some time.
I remember talking about this going back to the 1990s.
But by and large, that's kind of all it was.
It was just talk.
It didn't seem to be something that could become a reality.
And there were too many things that were in the way.
The United States' domination of the world economy, the United States' So geopolitical and even military domination, U.S. military spending equals like the next eight top spending countries combined.
The United States, of course, had allies all around the world, not just the power of NATO, but the fact that Russia became almost a kind of subordinate force to the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, the dollar reigned supreme, and all of that has changed.
Suddenly, there is talk, but now not just talk, possibly talk leading to action, and countries are starting to experiment with doing business not in dollars.
So, Dubai and China, for example, have made a deal.
Dubai is now going to sell things to China, and in payment, the Chinese will give them yen.
See, in the past, if this exact same transaction would have occurred, the Chinese would have bought stuff from Dubai, and the Chinese would have used their dollar reserve currency, the dollars that they're holding.
Now, they don't actually hold dollars, but they hold the equivalent of dollars.
They hold bonds and securities that reflect a dollar value.
So, the transaction is conducted in the dollar.
And the point is not just that the U.S. gets to sort of charge a kind of transaction fee.
The point is that they're using your currency.
And this also means, by the way, that in the United States, you can spend a lot of money and not feel the immediate inflationary effect.
Why? Because instead of pumping dollars into America, where they begin to compete for the same goods and services, driving prices up, that's the definition of inflation, instead of doing that, you take these dollars that you've printed and And basically, the Chinese take them.
Or the Saudis take them.
So other countries hold on to these dollars, preventing them from having, as I say, this inflationary effect in the United States.
So it's really good. You are in an advantageous position if you have a global reserve currency.
But now that's changing.
Dubai and China are like, no, we're going to do business in the Chinese currency.
Saudi Arabia and China have been talking about doing the same, exchanging oil for yen, for the Chinese yuan.
But they haven't done it yet.
They haven't kind of made it work, but they are working on it.
China and Brazil recently reached a bilateral currency deal.
Each country agreed to accept the currency of the other in trade.
So this is obviously good for the Brazilians, it's good for the Chinese, and not good for the United States, because suddenly the United States is now out of the picture.
And the idea of this BRICS Plus meeting is to talk about creating a new currency.
Now, there's some debate about whether this new currency would be a currency based upon a basket of commodities, or will it be based upon gold?
Either gives a more reliable basis for that currency than we have now because the dollar is based on neither.
In other words, the government, when it prints dollars, doesn't have to hold gold.
The government doesn't have to say anymore, hey listen, this currency is quote as good as gold.
Why? Because there's gold backing the actual currency.
We've gotten away from the gold standard and we haven't replaced it with any other standard of using another mix of commodities.
Now, there are some arguments back and forth about whether commodities is better or gold is better.
I think, in general, gold is better.
And I think that the BRICS currency in the end is more likely to be based on gold than anything else.
Now, when we talk about a currency, I'm not talking about going around using a currency note that has the name bricks on it.
We're talking really about a digital currency.
And we're talking about a currency that is being created as a reserve currency.
a reserve currency and not a payment currency.
And this is a key difference that many people don't understand and so I'll kind of close out today on this topic. And it's a little complex but it's a very important topic.
It's the difference between a payment currency and a reserve currency. Now a payment currency applies worldwide now.
You can go to Europe and pay in euros.
You can go to India and pay in Indian rupees.
There are currency values to exchange currency all over the world from one currency to another.
So obviously, all currencies work in the sense that you can just go to a broker and say, look, I want to exchange rupees for the British pound or rupees for the Chinese yen, and you can do it.
That's not what we're actually talking about.
What we've been talking about is countries that have a surplus, that want to hold that value in some currency other than their own.
They want to hold it in some currency other than their own because when they go to buy stuff from other countries, the other country will not take their currency en masse and wants a safe currency, almost like saying, you know, you owe me money.
I'm not going to take a personal check.
I want a certified check.
So the certified cheque is like the global reserve currency.
It's backed by the bank.
And the United States dollar has been that global currency.
So what we're talking about is that a change, not in payment currencies, which continue, but a change in the global reserve currency.
And that's where the threat of the BRICS group has now become quite serious.
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Every now and then on the podcast, I like to dive into an important article on a relevant topic because it tends to go into more depth than we normally find in the surface coverage of daily news.
The article I'm talking about is in a skeptical inquirer, and it's called The Ideological Subversion of Biology, and it's written by two prominent biologists, Jerry Coyne and Luana Moroja.
The theme of the article, biology and the sciences in general are under fierce attack by progressive leftists who are trying to destroy the traditional way of doing science in this country with very serious implications.
They say we're not trying to argue that sort of biology or science is dead, just that ideology is poisoning science.
And they're saying further that much of what they're talking about is occurring within academic science and is not really visible or known to the general public.
Now, people have talked for some time about the culture wars, which we think about as wars over the humanities and culture and arts and religion.
But they say this is also now happening in the hard sciences.
And it's happening in all the hard sciences, in physics and astronomy, in computer science.
But they're biologists.
So they say, we're going to be talking about biology.
and specifically they are evolutionary biologists, which is to say they're biologists that study evolution and the pathways of evolution. And they say that in biology already, progressive ideology has produced disastrous outcomes. What are they talking about?
They're talking about campaigns to strip Scientific jargon of words that are offensive.
Don't use these words because, like mankind, you can't talk about mankind.
And while that may seem just semantic, there are other scientific words that have precise meaning and yet they are being removed because they have some sexist or some kind of ageist or some other sort of ideologically offensive connotation.
They talk about the funding, the tilting of funding away from research and towards sort of social reform.
So, making, for example, biology more inclusive and things like that.
So their point is that science should be and science has made the progress it has and delivered the technology that it has because it's an enterprise aimed at finding truth.
I think it was Richard Dawkins who once said that the reason that the white man figured out a way to get to the moon is because he got a lot of his equations and sums right.
If you get those wrong, that's when your space shuttle crashes.
That's when you end up in the ocean instead of on the moon.
So this is not just a matter of academic theory.
It's a matter of producing the kind of advances in knowledge that have taken us away from the Stone Age and then sequentially through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age and now, of course, the Industrial and the Computer Age.
So, the authors in this article look at some specific examples of nostrums that are put forward by progressive science, if you will, that they say are flatly false.
They're sort of Alluringly misleading.
They seem to have a grain of truth, but they're actually not true.
But nevertheless, they are pressed forward.
And it's, again, it's one thing if you go to some guy who doesn't know science and say things like, there's no real difference between men and women.
Here I've got, you know, you might say that men are taller than women.
I've got a very tall woman and a very short man.
And, you know, of course, someone who's a real dummy is going to go, wow!
Wow! What an excellent point!
There really are no differences between men and women.
Now, that's not going to convince someone who knows something about the subject.
But what these guys are saying, the authors Jerry Coyne and Maroja, is that these kinds of progressive lies are being promoted in academia.
They're being supported by academic journals.
It's almost like science scientists are losing their mind.
So that's why this topic is so important.
Here's the first... Sort of misleading statement that they identify, quote, And these guys go, no.
In nature, not just in human beings, but in animals and even in plants, sex is binary.
There is basically male and there is female, identified by different size of gametes.
I'm now quoting the authors.
No other types of gametes exist in animals or vascular plants, and we see no intermediate gametes.
There is no third sex.
There's only male and there's female.
Now, they admit that, look, you do have hermaphrodites, which have kind of male and female functions.
But note again, it's male and female functions.
It's not some other function that has a different nature.
It's not a third sex.
And then they say, similarly, you have...
Intersex people, a very rare condition.
In fact, they say that these intersex people are, quote, one in 5,600 people.
So that's point... Zero, one, eight percent.
Less than one-tenth of one percent.
Or one-tenth of one percent.
Very tiny. And so, sex is not a spectrum.
Sex is in fact a binary, they say, not just in humans, but in animals and plants.
And then they go on to say that this is not accidental.
This is something that occurs because natural selection, the very process, the evolutionary process of driving species towards survival and reproduction is based on this.
So it's not a kind of accidental thing like having big ears or small ears.
No, there's a reason why you have males and females, and it's not a case that your maleness or female was, quote, assigned to you at birth.
It's a biological reality.
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I'm talking about the important article, The Ideological Subversion of Biology by two prominent figures in the field of evolutionary biology, Jerry Coyne and Luana Moroja.
I've said a word about the progressive lie that they focus on, the lie about about the fact that sex is not binary, but a spectrum.
And they go into that in a little more detail, which I'm not going to follow.
But I want to pivot to a second big lie that they highlight, and that is, quote, race and ethnicity are social constructs without scientific or biological meaning.
Now, this is a very widespread nostrum that is taught across academia.
I even heard this when I was a student In the mid-80s, I read a lot of literature on this.
The idea basically being that there's no such thing as race.
Now, there is an element of truth to this in the sense that race is a complicated business.
So, for example, we talk about people being, for example, white or black or Hispanic or Asian.
Well, first of all, Race cannot be reduced just to skin color.
Because if you go to India, for example, from North India to South India, you have people who are completely black to people who are basically Debbie's color.
I mean, they're white.
And so Indians alone span a huge spectrum.
African Americans in this country aren't black in the sense that they're not jet black.
They're a whole spectrum of colors.
Hispanics is not even really a racial group, but a kind of a linguistic group.
These are Spanish-speaking people with different degrees of European, in some cases indigenous or Native American.
Inheritance. And so race is a little bit of a complicated business.
Indians, for example, would be racially Caucasian in features, because in the original racial distinction, you have Orientals, you have Blacks or Negroid, and you have Caucasian.
And those are the three racial groups.
So, you even have blacks who are Caucasian in features but dark-skinned in color.
So, no one is claiming that there's a kind of bright line that can be drawn racially.
But that being said, and this is the point of the article, there is such a thing as populations that have grouped together, that have intermarried with each other, that have faced different survival conditions over many, many thousands of years and have developed different By the way, not just cultural and social, but even biological characteristics.
A really good example of this is, well, first of all, if someone says that race is purely a social construct, ask them this.
Let's say you were to find out, you see a group of people who are just human carcasses that are lying on the ground. And there are people from all over the world, let's say they were killed in a famine or they were killed in a sort of tsunami. And you ask people, let's separate these people according to race. You know, the black, the white, the oriental.
Almost everybody could do it.
And that means that it's not a social construct.
Why? Because you know, based upon physical characteristics alone, you know nothing about these people.
You don't know where they're from. You haven't been prejudiced or told anything about it.
You will be able to separate them out pretty accurately with maybe a mistake or two, but...
Only that. So that means that race does have a physical basis.
But the authors, of course, are going much further.
They're saying that, for example, when it comes to disease, you'll notice that certain racial groups are more prone to certain illnesses than others.
Not to say that nobody else can get it, but they don't get it to the same degree.
And we're talking about hereditary biological diseases that are not because you ate too much, too many burgers or too much linguine, but this is stuff that is passed down from through the generations.
Now, the reason that this is important to study, again, is not because you're trying to provide some legitimate basis for discrimination or anything like that, but it helps you to understand, well, first of all, in the field of evolutionary biology, it helps you to understand how population groups came about in the first place.
In other words, why is it the case, if all humans are descended from a single ancestor, how do we have humans that look different at all?
And then, how is it the case that when you look at the 100-yard dash at the Olympics, it seems that not only every winner, but every contestant is black?
How is it the case that in places like the NBA, you don't have an equal distribution of racial groups?
How is it the case that when it comes to all kinds of social indices, you seem to have groups that cluster?
Some groups are clustered over here.
Other groups are clustered over there.
Why is that? Well, you This would seem to be a reasonable object of study.
And the point that these writers are making is simply that there's an effort to shut down the truth.
There's, in fact, an effort to shut down inquiry.
And so, if you deviate from the progressive line, they go after you.
They go after your job.
They go after your funding.
And so, the danger here is not just in the humanities.
There's a left-wing attack on science itself.
In fact, it's funny because the left is often saying, follow the science.
We're following the science. No.
They aren't following the science.
What they're following is an ideological vector.
And they only want science that supports the ideology.
They don't base their ideology on science.
They base their science on ideology.
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I'm seeing a really interesting development on social media, specifically on Twitter, and that is people posting insights and visuals from the past.
And they do this in sort of threads.
So you'll have guys who post beautiful architectural buildings in Leipzig or cathedrals.
And in some cases, analyses of these are interesting lines by Machiavelli or by Charles Dickens.
And I came across a series of quotations from Napoleon's speeches.
This was posted by a guy named Josh Dolani, and it's in a thread.
He talks about the fact that the writer, the French writer Balzac, made notes of Napoleon's statements.
And put these together in a sort of collection.
That's how we know the things that Napoleon said because Balzac was there and he also saw those speeches reported in the local press.
So I want to look at a few of Napoleon's statements because they seem to me to be bristling with insights.
The first one is,"...I found the crown of France lying in the gutter and picked it up with my sword." What Napoleon is saying is I wasn't one of those French kings.
I did become the emperor, but I became the emperor through conquest.
It's almost as if the French kings could not hold on to their country.
They dropped the crown in a gutter, in a sense, debasing it.
And I didn't get the crown directly through being next in line or being the son of a king.
But I got there probably the way the first king got there, which is by the sword.
Here's Napoleon again.
Political freedom is an accepted myth thought up by those governing to put the governed to sleep.
Now, this is a very provocative line because it implies that political freedom doesn't really exist.
But what Napoleon is getting at here, I think, is that power in any society is concentrated at the top.
There are always a few people who make the key decisions.
And this is by the way, true, not just for a country, it's true for a company, it's true in pretty much any institution.
And what Napoleon is getting at is a different political system, different ideologies are different ways of, in a sense disguising the fact that there's always going to be a few people ruling.
We think, oh, there's monarchy, there's oligarchy, there's democracy, radically different forms of government.
And Napoleon is saying, not so different, because in all these cases, a few people are running the show.
Here's Napoleon on equality.
I think the implication of this that is quite profound is that equal rights...
is not a way to assure equal outcomes.
On the contrary, equal rights is a way to provide moral legitimacy for inequality of outcomes.
Why? Because nature has distributed strengths and talents, whether physical strength or intellectual brilliance or emotional insights, very unequally.
And so, in a condition of equal rights, which is similar to an Olympic race where the clock goes on, the gun goes off, everybody starts on the same line, but guess what?
The person who's the faster runner thus hits the finishing tape and collects the gold medal.
So, nature...
It says Napoleon is not giving people equal faculties.
A lot of our problems in society today, the phenomenon of people who lack self-esteem or even the trans phenomenon, a rebellion against the simple fact of nature.
Now we turn to Napoleon on the French Revolution.
The nobility would have survived if it had known how to master the writing desk.
What an odd statement. Napoleon is saying that you might expect him to say, well, the nobility would have survived if they had better armies and they knew how to crush the rebellion.
But no, says Napoleon.
The problem with the nobility Is they didn't have propaganda.
They didn't know how to make the case for themselves.
They didn't know how to convince the French people at the time when the French people were like, what is the nobility doing for us?
They couldn't say, hey, guess what?
We're doing A, B, C, and D, and any other system is going to be inferior to our own.
They couldn't make that case.
And, says Napoleon, that's what brought us the French Revolution, which, by the way, ended with Napoleon himself coming to power.
And then the final quotation I want to discuss from Napoleon.
Well, two of them.
He has a comment on courage.
Courage cannot be counterfeited.
It's a virtue that escapes hypocrisy.
Here's what he's getting at.
Any other virtue, you can pretend.
You can pretend, I'm a kind, compassionate person.
All these people who posture as compassion.
You can even pretend to be intelligent.
Learn some big words, spout some phrases.
You can pretend to be a lot of things.
But, says Napoleon, courage, which is revealed in a given circumstance, either you are or you aren't.
There's no such thing as pretending.
Either you run toward the traffic, you run toward the enemy, or you don't.
And finally, Napoleon on policing.
The art of the police consists in punishing rarely and severely.
His point is that if you administer a light punishment, you've got to do it a lot.
You administer a heavy punishment, but do it rarely.
It has precisely the deterrent effect it's supposed to.
So here you see in Napoleon a guy who knew something about managing armies, but also managing countries.
Some insights to think about that are applicable, it seems to me, to our own time.
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This is sort of Anton Chekhov week on the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
It's a reflection of the fact that I've been reading Chekhov's short stories back and forth on our trip to London.
I want to talk to you today about a very good one. It's called The Darling.
It's a story about a woman named Olenka.
And it's her peculiar personality that Chekhov finds interesting.
So she is, she lives in a part of a small town in Russia.
and there's a single theater in the town which is run by a guy named Kukin.
So the woman's name is Alenka, and the manager of the theater is Kukin.
And Kukin is always complaining.
He goes, oh man, it's, quote, again, he said despairingly, it's going to rain again, rain every day as if to spite me.
I may as well hang myself.
It's a ruin. Now, why is the rain a problem?
Because people then stay home.
They don't want to go to the theater.
And this guy, Kukin, has all kinds of views about his audience.
In fact, he sort of doesn't like them.
He despises them. He tells the young woman, Olenka, he goes, to begin with, the public is ignorant, boorish.
He goes, I give them the best operetta, first-rate music hall artists.
But do you suppose that's what they want?
They don't understand anything of that sort.
They want a clown. What they ask for is vulgarity.
And he complains like this every day.
And of course, he's apparently living in a very rainy part of Russia.
So Olenka keeps listening to this poor man.
And her heart is sort of touched by his misery, by his misfortune.
And she sort of begins to have feelings for him.
And here's what Chekhov says about her.
She was always fond of someone and could not exist without loving.
In her earlier days, she loved her papa, who is now in a darkened room breathing with difficulty.
so obviously very sick.
Before that, when she was at school, she loved her French master.
She was a gentle, soft-hearted, compassionate girl with mild, tender eyes.
And then says Chekhov, when men sort of encountered her, they kind of looked her over and thought, not just her looks, but her personality, not bad.
And says Chekhov, while lady visitors could not refrain from seizing her hand in the middle of a conversation, exclaiming in a gush of delight, And that's the title of the story, The Darling.
So Kukin, this fellow, proposes to Olenka, and they get married.
And the interesting thing is, once they get married, she throws herself into his business.
She begins to look after things in the theater.
She takes tickets. She does the accounting.
And it says that she would go around telling everybody that theater is the most important part of life.
It's basically only through drama and art that you can derive true enjoyment and become a cultivated and humane person.
And then she would say things like, but you know, the public doesn't get any of this.
She says, what they want is a clown.
Yesterday we did Faust.
Almost all the boxes were empty.
But, you know, if my husband and I produce some vulgar thing, I assure you the theater would have been packed.
But you know what? Tomorrow we're doing Orpheus in Hell.
Please come. What Chekhov is getting at here is that the woman adopts the opinions and values of her husband.
She's sort of almost a person in the shadow.
She doesn't have her own mind, but part of her way of showing her affection is she kind of takes on board your entire personality.
But then by a weird turn of events, the husband dies and the woman goes into mourning.
She's completely lost.
Olenka is. Until she meets another guy.
In fact, this guy, she's mourning in church every day, and this guy walks her home from church.
He's a timber merchant.
And he tells her, you know, you shouldn't be so sad.
Terrible things happen in life, but it is ordained by God's will.
And in any event, she begins to now identify with this guy.
Soon enough, they get married.
And then the same woman, Olenka, is going around telling her friends, Timber gets more expensive every year.
The price rises 20%.
Now my husband has to go for wood to the Mogilev district and the cost of freight.
Oh, the cost of freight.
So the interesting thing is that she begins to talk as if she's been in the timber business all her life.
She masters the kind of vocabulary of Tinder.
She talks about posts and beams and poles and battens and planks and so on.
And then, says Chekhov, her husband's ideas were hers.
If he thought the room was too hot or that business was slack, she thought the same.
The husband didn't care for entertainments.
On holidays, he stayed home.
She did likewise. And the funny thing about it is that she would meet up with a friend, and the friend would say to her, you know, you're always at home and at the office.
You never vary from those two places.
Sometime you should maybe think about going to the theater.
And here's Alenka. She goes, my husband and I have no time to go to theaters.
We have no time for that kind of nonsense.
What's the use of theaters?
So, quite amusing and very, this is Shekhovian irony, when she was married to the theater guy, the theater was the most important thing in life.
Can't live without the theater.
That's what makes life worth living.
Now that she's married to the timber merchant, he's kind of a, let's say, a bourgeois guy.
He doesn't care about arts.
He wants to stay We stay home all the time, she stays home, and now to her the theater has a completely different meaning than it did before.
I'm talking about Anton Chekhov's story, The Darling, and we're focused on a woman named Olenka, who was first married to this theater guy, then he died, and now she's married to another guy who's a timber merchant.
But would you believe it?
This guy catches pneumonia, a severe cold that becomes pneumonia, he takes ill, and after a four-month illness, he dies.
So once again, Olenka becomes, Chekhov tells us, a widow.
And she is in mourning...
And her life has become disheveled.
Her home becomes disheveled.
And then she meets a third guy.
And this guy is a veterinary surgeon.
And he's full of opinions about animals and the way they get sicknesses and so on.
And as Olenka gets to know him, she begins to absorb his opinions.
Now, the difference between this guy, the veterinary surgeon, and the earlier two guys is that this guy is already married.
Now, it's not clear from the story if he fesses up about this or not, but nevertheless, she falls for this guy.
And she goes around spouting his opinions.
So, this is Olenka. There's no proper veterinary inspection in our town.
That's the cause of all sorts of epidemics.
This is why people get infection from the milk supplier.
They catch diseases from horses and cows.
And she goes on to say the health of domestic animals ought to be as well cared for as the health of human beings.
Again, you're not listening to Olenka talk.
This is the veterinary surgeon, and she's just...
Echoing, reflecting, reproducing the opinions of the man that she is infatuated with.
And this is what Chekhov says.
She was of the same opinion as he was about everything.
And so, the man sometimes has visitors.
Now, it could be that he has a family in one place and has a practice somewhere else, because it's hard for me to see how Olenka could be present if he's having visitors at his home, but he apparently does.
Yes, he's apparently a kind of a regimental veterinary surgeon, which means he travels with a military contingent, and this is why he's out of town.
So Olenka's pouring tea for the friends, and it says, Chekhov says, she starts talking about the cattle plague, of the foot-and-mouth disease of municipal slaughterhouses.
And after a little while, the veterinary surgeon gets a little embarrassed, and he says to her, Please, when we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please don't put your word in.
It's really annoying. What he's getting at is that everybody knows she's not a vet.
She's not a doctor. She has no direct knowledge of any of this.
She is kind of, almost by a sort of ventriloquism, just saying what he thinks.
But nevertheless, she has this sort of relationship with him until he disappears.
He goes back to his family.
The regimen is transferred away.
And once again, her life unravels and she's living in this sort of disheveled condition.
And then remarkably, the veterinary surgeon moves back to her town, but this time with his family.
So he now has his wife and they have a young son.
His name is Sasha, 10 years old.
And what's really remarkable, and this is kind of the climax, if you will, Chekhov stories don't normally have a climax.
It's not a crescendo building to a certain action.
He just has really interesting people in psychologically interesting situations, and he allows you to sort of dive into their thoughts and their lives and kind of Almost you feel like you are in a different place and time and understanding from the inside a different type of person, very different than you or me.
And what happens here is that this woman's affections, which are clearly not entirely romantic, because we see this in the climax of the story, now her affection moves almost imperceptibly and automatically away from the veterinary surgeon, whom she's sort of almost already written off because he moved away, Now she gloms on to the son, the little boy named Sasha, 10 years old, and says Chekhov, of her former attachments, not one had been so deep.
Never had her soul surrendered to any feelings so spontaneously, so disinterestedly, and so joyously as now that her maternal instincts were aroused.
Chekhov is making a subtle point here, and that is that when we have an affection toward our children, or in this case, toward somebody else's child, it can be disinterested because it's not the same as a romantic relationship where your own happiness, your own feelings are central.
What am I getting out of this?
But in this case, it's almost more the kind of This interested love that you have.
And that's what she has for this boy.
So she starts taking him to school.
She walks him to school. She sort of befriends the family as if there had been no kind of past relationship.
Her relations with the man now are non-existent and completely platonic.
And she's completely focused on this young boy, Sasha.
She says things like, the lessons at your school are very difficult.
Oh, it's too much. Yesterday they gave you a fable to learn by heart, a Latin translation.
So essentially... What Chekhov is saying is that this story is nothing more than a psychological portrait of a certain type of woman who lives derivatively, but you don't feel a contempt or anything toward her because she gives herself completely to the situation.
She's open-hearted, big-hearted, apparently very appealing, and she sort of Closes out this sequence of relationships by focusing our affections, again, not in any inappropriate way at all, with a young boy of ten named Sasha.
And that's how the story, almost in mid-sentence, leaves off.
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