Searching for icons in Russia

THE KATERINA ICON by Robert Mitchell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amateur versus professional crooks.

A couple of Australian tourists in Russia rescue an old man from drowning, and in gratitude he tells them of an ancestor of his who, during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution, attacked a train and stole some icons that had been stolen by the Bolsheviks from the Russian royal family. One of the Australians is of Russian ancestry, and the old man tells him that if he can find the hidden icons, he can keep them, and gives him one of his own family icons, which is said to hold the key to the secret location of the icons.

The tourists, an accountant and a dentist, return to Australia and when they believe they may have found a clue to the location of the icons, decide, after many arguments, to return to Russia and look for them. Their arguments continue throughout the book. First one is keen on the project, and the other is lukewarm, and then the one who was lukewarm becomes keen and the other is sceptical.

Their enterprise is of dubious legality and morality, and thus they need to keep it secret, but they take it in turns to boast about it and to warn against doing so. First one says too much, and the other warns him not to, and then they exchange roles. As a result of this, several others, including professional criminals, become aware of the treasure hunt, and the two amateurs find themselves in serious trouble and great danger again and again, usually because one has done something foolish that the other has warned him against.

The battle between the amateurs and the professionals goes right through the book, and I thought the theme was a little overplayed. The protagonists never seemed to learn from their mistakes, and went on making the same mistakes over and over again, and getting into similar trouble over and over again. One would take precautions that the other would get angry about, or one would neglect precautions that the other would get angry about.

View all my reviews on GoodReads 

So much for the review of this particular book, but I have more comments on the theme, since I myself have written a book on a similar theme, or at least with a similar trope -- ikons that went missing in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution (I prefer the spelling ikon with a k for the holy images. Icons with a c belong on computer screens). You can see reviews of my book The Year of the Dragon here on GoodReads.There are other and more comprehensive reviews on the Smashwords page, where you can also get a copy of the book. 

Apart from the icon/ikon trope, there are other superficial similarities. In The Katerina Icon the protagonists are two middle-aged men, a dentist and an accountant; in The Year of the Dragon the protagonists are two young men, a lawyer and an auctioneer. In both a woman dies because of the icons/ikons, though the circumstances are different.

But the differences are perhaps more more significant, and it is these that struck me most strongly. In The Katerina Icon, the protagonists are driven purely by greed. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Their only interest in the icons is the price they will fetch, nothing else counts. In the story, they are the "good" guys, the characters the reader is supposed to root for, but their values are identical with those of the "bad" guys, who are likewise motivated purely by greed. And one cannot help thinking that these are the values that triumphed at the end of the Cold War. 

The young protagonists in The Year of the Dragon start off in much the same way. The young lawyer has to wind up the estate of a murdered woman, and takes his auctioneer friend along to inspect the property and help him assess its monetary value. But as the story proceeds they gradually discover that there is more at stake, and that the value of the ikons, in particular, cannot be calculated only on the price they will fetch on the market. They come to see that there is more, and that the "more" is actually more important.

So with The Katerina Ikon I wavered between 3 and 4 stars, and put the 4 stars there to compensate for my prejudice in having written a comparable novel, which I thought went deeper than the rather superficial greed displayed by the characters in The Katerina Icon, in which there were really no good guys or bad guys, only winners and losers, and it wouldn't have mattered in the end which lot won or lost. The Neoliberal Revolution at the end of the Cold War ended up much the same as the Bolshevik Revolution as portrayed in George Orwell's Animal Farm -- the other animals looked from man to pig, and from pig to man, and could no longer tell the difference.

What's your lifestyle?

The word "lifestyle" has been around for more than a century, but was only popularised a little over 50 years ago, and now seems to have been hijacked by the advertising industry. An article in BusinessTech informs us that Lifestyle Estates are Booming in South Africa:

Giovanni Gaggia, CEO of Real Estate Services, said that lifestyle estates offer a unique blend of luxury living and community engagement.

The estates typically offer several amenities, including golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, which cater to various interests and promote an active lifestyle.

They also offer a secure environment and well-maintained infrastructure to add to their appeal.

But the shanty-town lifestyle estates of informal settlements not only don't offer such "typical" features as golf courses, fitness centres and nature reserves, they also do not typically have indoor plumbing, sewerage, proper roads or electricity.

The advertising hype suggests that only an affluent lifestyle of conspicuous consumption qualifies as a lifestyle at all.

The earliest reference to "lifestyle" in the Oxford English Dictionary was 1915, and it is defined as

A style or way of living (associated with an individual person, a society, etc.); esp. the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life.

It only became popular in the late 1960s, however, when it was used mainly to contrast the lifestyles of the "hip" and the "straight". The hippie counterculture espoused different values from those of "straight" society, and expressed these values through different lifestyles.

One of the values that hippies eschewed was the lifestyle of conspicuous consumption that was practised or aspired to by straight society.

The advertising industry, which was dedicated to promoting conspicuous consumption, fought back, and one of the ways it did so was by adopting hip jargon to promote products and services and sell them to the changing youth culture. "Lifestyle banking" was one of the earlier ones, illustrated with yachts and luxury cars.

Part of the countercultural lifestyle is, however, still reflected by my Collins Millennium Dictionary (does that make it a dictionary for "Millennials"?) which gives

lifestyle business a small business in which the owners are more anxious to pursue interests that reflect their lifestyle than to make more than a comfortable living.

Advertising hype has not taken over completely. We still talk about the lifestyle of hunter-gatherers as compared with the lifestyle of peasant farmers, neither of which would be found in the so-called "lifestyle estates".

When the term first became popular it was variously spelt as "life style", "life-style" or "lifestyle", depending on the house style (house-style, housestyle)  of the publication concerned, but now the "lifestyle" spelling predominates.

The point to remember here is that a lifestyle of poverty is  just as much a lifestyle as a lifestyle of affluence, no matter how much the advertising agencies would like us to believe otherwise. 

Another point to remember is found in the OED definition: the characteristic manner in which a person lives (or chooses to live) his or her life

A lifestyle may be voluntary or involuntary.

The lifestyle of a prisoner is involuntary.

The lifestyle of a person living in an affluent "lifestyle estate" is voluntary. If you can afford to live in one, you can also afford not to live in one. And if you can afford not to live in one, you can also choose to avoid an affluent lifestyle, and choose rather to live an abstemious one.

For most people, lifestyle is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary. Inmates of institutions like boarding schools, hostels, communes, monasteries, old-age homes, etc may have varying degrees of choice whether to enter such institutions, but, once within them, they need to adopt features of the prescribed lifestyle or leave. 

To some extent, this might be true of "lifestyle estates" as well. The lifestyle is prescribed and circumscribed, sometimes even more than the lifestyle of informal settlements. If you live in a "lifestyle estate" and start erecting shacks in your backyard to sub-let to others, you would soon discover the limits of freedom in a "lifestyle estate".

There are many ways in which lifestyle is determined by circumstances, such as wealth or poverty, ones upbringing, one's education or the lack of it. But some, like monks, choose voluntary poverty, and this was also the case with some in the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s.

Lifestyle is also linked to values. An authentic lifestyle reflects your values; an inauthentic lifestyle probably conflicts with your values, or perhaps reflects the values you actually hold rather than the values you profess. 

Before the hippies came the beats, who didn't speak of lifestyle, though they knew what it was. Their term for what the hippies called "straight" society was "square", and as Lawrence Lipton put it in his book The Holy Barbarians (Lipton 1959:150):

The New Poverty is the disaffiliate’s answer to the New Prosperity. It is important to make a living. It is even more important to make a life. Poverty. The very word is taboo in a society where success is equated with virtue and poverty is a sin. Yet it has an honourable ancestry. St. Francis of Assisi revered poverty as his bride, with holy fervor and pious rapture. The poverty of the disaffiliate is not to be confused with the poverty of indigence, intemperance, improvidence or failure. It is simply that the goods and services he has to offer are not valued at a high price in our society. As one beat generation writer said to the square who offered him an advertising job: ‘I’ll scrub your floors and carry out your slops to make a living, but I will not lie for you, pimp for you, stool for you or rat for you.’ It is not the poverty of the ill-tempered and embittered, those who wooed the bitch goddess Success with panting breath and came away rebuffed. It is an independent, voluntary poverty.

But for more on that see here: It's Cool to be Hip, but not Hip to be Cool.

Interestingly enough, though advertisers frequently misuse "lifestyle", the original meaning still lives and it has not been completely skunked. If you look here, you can see that when "lifestyle" is used as a modifier, the most common usage is "lifestyle changes", followed by "lifestyle choices" and "lifestyle factors".