1. In 1869, Flaubert publishes A Sentimental Education, the mother of all modern novels. As workers erect barricades for the revolution of 1848, the character Frédéric Moreau waits anxiously for the married Madame Arnoux in a seedy hotel room. She doesn’t come, he never makes love to her, he misses the revolution. 2. In 1922, the Hungarian critic György Lukács is enraged by German excitement for a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. Calling Ghare-Baire (Home and the World) “Tagore’s Gandhi novel,” Lukács describes the novelist as a bourgeois reformist seeking to check the Indian revolutionary struggle against imperialism. It should be said that Tagore’s critique of Indian radicals came from his unease with nationalism rather than any love for the British Empire. But Lukács’s summary of the novel (“how the wife of a ‘good and honest’ man is seduced by a romantic adventurer”) suggests that, once again, adultery has distracted the characters from the work of revolution. 3. Neither Flaubert nor Tagore is significant in my early encounters with the relationship between adultery and revolution in the novel. Instead, I am impressed by the Bolshevik novel And Quiet Flows the Don. Written in the ’20s by Mikhail Sholokhov, this is an approved text of the revolution. Yet within its vast expanses of wheat and history, charging cavalrymen and ossified feudalism, there is an adulterous affair between Grigori and the wife of a fellow Cossack, offering a remarkable instance in which the forces of libido and historical materialism appear to coincide.

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The latest Bookforum has a set of stimulating reflections on fiction and politics, especially this brilliant piece on revolution or adultery by my friend Siddhartha Deb.