Hollow Man Roboputin, dead at the core, and his grotesque consort Drumpfitsa at their gopnik wedding, in an AI image Hana Filip posted on her Facebook page on 2/15, when she was (as she put it) working on her anger at the performance of Roboputin and Drumpfitsa’s baby (James Donald Bowman) at the Munich Security Conference on 2/14/25:
To come: the gopnik subculture (stereotypically conservative, aggressive, homophobic, nationalist and racist) in Russia and its European surround; the source of this image; hollow men (from T. S. Eliot); and Gopnik as a family name
The gopnik subculture. From Wikipedia:
A gopnik is a member of a delinquent subculture in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and in other former Soviet republics — a young man (or a woman, a gopnitsa) of urban working-class background.
The collective noun is gopota (Russian: гопота). The subculture of gopota has its roots in working-class communities in the late Russian Empire and gradually emerged underground during the later half of the 20th century in many cities in the Soviet Union. Even before their heyday in the 1990s following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the associated rise in poverty, there was a “gopnik” movement in the Soviet Union. Young men from working class areas rebelled against neformaly (non-conformists) and harassed the lovers of Western music, which had become popular in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
… A stereotype image of a gopnik is that he is conservative, aggressive, homophobic, nationalist and racist. Gopniks often hold strong anti-Western views.
The source of the image. I found the image funny and asked HF about its source. Our exchange on Facebook:
— HF > AZ: I’m glad that it has some entertainment value for you. Thank you for adding the wiki entry about gopnik, which is quite well done. As for the source of this image, it keeps circulating in the mainly East Slavic and Baltic internet space, created perhaps in Ukraine, or Lithuania, who knows, or čort znaet (‘devil knows’ in Russian [AZ: in English, God (only) knows]).
— AZ > HF: Ah, urban folklore of the moment. As for entertainment, it’s the pleasure of savage mockery, not of playfulness.
— HF > AZ: There is some incredibly savage stuff, clever and funny along these lines in the Slavic/Baltic urban internet folklore space — this one is very tame, of good taste, and funny.
Hollow Men. “Not with a bang but a whimper”. From Wikipedia:
The Hollow Men (1925) is a poem by the modernist writer T. S. Eliot. Like much of his work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary, concerned with post–World War I Europe under the Treaty of Versailles, hopelessness, religious conversion, redemption and, some critics argue, his failing marriage with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot.
… Eliot wrote that he produced the title “The Hollow Men” by combining the titles of the romance The Hollow Land by William Morris with the poem “The Broken Men” by Rudyard Kipling; but it is possible that this is one of Eliot’s many constructed allusions. The title could also be theorised to originate from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or from the character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who is referred to as a “hollow sham” and “hollow at the core”. The latter is more likely since Kurtz is mentioned in one of the two epigraphs.
The two epigraphs to the poem, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” and “A penny for the Old Guy”, are allusions to Conrad’s character and to Guy Fawkes. In the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, Fawkes attempted to blow up the English Parliament and his straw-man effigy (a ‘Guy’) is burned each year in the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Night (5 November). Certain quotes from the poem such as “headpiece filled with straw” and “in our dry cellar” seem to be references to the Gunpowder Plot.
The Hollow Men follows the otherworldly journey of the spiritually dead. These “hollow men” have the realisation, humility, and acknowledgement of their guilt and their status as broken, lost souls.
But Roboputin lacks self-knowledge. He is hollow two levels down.
The Gopnik family. On Facebook on 2/16:
— Susan Fischer > AZ: rather ironically, Adam Gopnik is a politically liberal writer for the New Yorker.
— AZ > SF: Well, Gopnik is just a name. Meanwhile, you surely know that the writer Adam G is the brother of Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison G, and both are the children of McGill linguist Myrna G. In (psycho)linguistics, Gopnik is an illustrious name.
— Hana Filip > SF: Adam Gopnik is aware of the fact that his name is ‘funny’. But the surname Gopnik is older than the gopnik Soviet/Russian culture. [AG has written about] his surname, in a BBC News piece “A Point of View: The curse of a ridiculous name” by AG on 7/6/12.
AG is an old acquaintance on this blog. Highlights of his appearances here:
— on 11/18/11 in “The Food Issue, with pesto”, with Adam Gopnik’s suggestion that the centerpiece dish for the holiday should be turkey with pesto and Calvin Trillin’s opinion that it should be spaghetti carbonara
— on 2/22/12 in “Martyrdom”, on a recent New Yorker review by Adam Gopnik of a book about the Inquisition
— on 11/4/14 in “Family, language, and food in the New Yorker”, about Adam Gopnik’s Our Local Correspondents piece “Bakeoff: What is happening to our pastry?” and about the Gopnik family
— on 7/9/22 in “Ravioli stuffed with Italian sausage”, with a use of the character
Charlie Ravioli …, an invention of the 3-year-old Olivia Gopnik, as described by her father Adam in a 2002 New Yorker piece that then appeared in his book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York (2007)
— on 7/26/22 in “O tasty Tweety! O Tweety, my prey!”, with a section on
an Adam Gopnik piece in The New Yorker‘s 4/23/18 issue, “The sense beneath Edward Lear’s nonsense: For the artist, parody was a vehicle for the renewal of feeling” (a long essay-review of Jenny Uglow’s Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense) — a sympathetic and perceptive treatment of Lear’s art … and his nonsense
February 17, 2025 at 10:05 am |
For readers outside the US: John Donald Bowman is the birth name of the current vice-president of the US
February 18, 2025 at 2:04 pm |
The pleasures of synchronicity: about to arrive in my mailbox, the latest (Winter 2025) issue of Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), on “The Social Science of Caregiving”, edited by — yes! — *Alison Gopnik*, Margaret Levi & Zachary Ugolnik.