Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War

February 5, 2023 5:24 PM

How to reckon with the ideology of “Anna Karenina,” “Eugene Onegin,” and other beloved books. [slNewYorker]
posted by Ahmad Khani (28 comments total)

"Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed much to Dostoevskyism,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in an essay last April, after the massacre in Bucha. She called the invasion “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long-suppressed hatred and envy,” adding, “ ‘Why should you live better than us?’ Russian soldiers have been saying to Ukrainians.”

Which is exactly Xi's message to the people of Hong Kong, and after he brings it home to them, to the Taiwanese.

The centre, as it turns out, can hold all too well.
posted by jamjam at 9:42 PM on February 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've linked this in a few of the previous threads:

"What Kind of Russia Do I Love?" (Oxana Pachliowska, Day [«День»] , April 2009, Kyiv)

...Mayakovsky’s poem was entitled “Fine”! Too few Russian authors wrote poems and novels entitled “Bad!” Small wonder that Mayakovsky’s message — “Today you have/ To crash the world’s skull /With brass knuckles — ends with a call for killing whole peoples “in toilets.” Dictum fatum.

And so the kind of Russia I love is an alternative to this barbarous destruction of culture. Ukraine would have no problems with this kind of Russia (or if there were problems, they would be kept on a minimum scope). Ukraine would be able to get prepared for European integration unimpeded and Russia would renovate its state after two fiascos in the same century and would become an ally of the Western community of nations in meeting challenges of the modern world. Regrettably, there is no conditional mood in history.

There is another aspect. At times “politically correct” Ukrainian intellectuals say with a sigh of relief that they do not like Russian politics but that they like “Pushkin’s Russia.” Or take the “politically correct” Ukrainian (and not only Ukrainian) historians who tend to say that Stalin was a monster in human form, of course, but that the Russian people must not be blamed for his crimes.

In reality, everything is much more complicated....

posted by snuffleupagus at 10:25 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

[The link]

(there's more in there about literature and the intelligencia)
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:39 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't want to be overly simplistic about a complex piece, nor to say anything that could be interpreted as even remotely tolerant of Putin, but find me any of the winners of history who haven't had some form of these wretched beliefs percolating through their culture. It reminds me a bit of the hunt for the supposedly uniquely German cultural pathology post-WWII.
posted by praemunire at 10:44 PM on February 5, 2023 [19 favorites]

I appreciated the approach and content of this essay and will look into the author's novels. The author is struggling with the conflict between the idealistic and self serving "universal literature" concept that pretends novels aren't essentially political, and the simplistic view that authors and works are largely symbols for use in political arguments. The author's background/intentions, the actual text of the work, and their subsequent use as political symbols are all related but distinct things and this essay dives into some of the relevant details.

Given that Putin is explicitly using Pushkin and Dostoyevsky's writings as a political tool, the Ukraine-based movement to tear down physical monuments and avoid reading the works in the current day seems totally appropriate to me. It's not like the books are going to be burned and forgotten, they have such a high level of cultural prominence in the intelligencia (illustrated by this essay) that they will still be read and analyzed for hundreds of years. The only one of these books I've read myself is Crime and Punishment (which had a profound affect on me as a teenager), but this piece made me really want to read Hadji Murat by Tolstoy.
posted by JZig at 10:54 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

What a delightfully subtle and concise take on the treatise that essentialism is kind of fucked up.

I wonder how many years we'll have to wait before she can put together another 8000 words -- laced throughout with personal anecdote -- on what Jack London might think about the existence of the Labradoodle.
posted by 7segment at 10:58 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

And yet somehow people have no issue with telling me and other Irish folk that we really should read The Faerie Queen...
posted by lesbiassparrow at 11:31 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Last year I read Garth Ennis and Steve Epting’s Sara, a serious and well researched graphic novel depicting female Russian snipers fighting back against the Nazi occupiers of their homeland in 1942. It rightly gives a very sympathetic account of Sara and her colleagues, saluting not just their determination and courage but also the sheer ingenuity of their improvised tactics against far superior numbers.

Reading this tale at a time when, in the real world, Russia itself was the hated invader and the Ukrainians replacing the book’s patriotic heroes proved a jarring experience. I can’t think of another occasion when the fictional world I’d immersed myself in and the daily news reports presented such a stark and discomforting clash.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:51 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Are you referring to the fact that Spenser's avowed solution to 'the Irish Problem' was extermination, lesbiassparrow?

I took a course in Elizabethan poetry from a Spenser specialist, so he (of course, why else would he choose to teach it?) wanted to spend most of the semester on The Faerie Queen.

I was utterly shocked at how bad it is, how completely tedious, monotonous and mechanical, like sitting though a weeks long ringing of the changes in a church with 200 bells. And dripping with the most saccharine, insincere, and completely uninspired flattery of Elizabeth I. How did that ever become part of any canon?
posted by jamjam at 12:10 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

What's funny is, you know who really understood the imperialist implications of Russian literature? That's right, the Bolsheviks. Dostoyevsky and Pushkin were actively suppressed in the first two decades of the Soviet Union because they were regarded, quite correctly, as reactionaries and apologists for empire. The people who implemented those policies understood very well that those books were political because they grew up knowing the political context in which they emerged, in which the right-wing content of Dostoevsky's work hadn't been watered down into the sort of universal message about alienation and modernity they're associated with today. At the time the Communist Party was actively trying to force Russian-speaking town dwellers in eastern Ukraine to speak Ukrainian as part of a campaign against "Great Russian chauvinism." It was only with Stalin's rehabilitation of classic Russian literature in the mid-1930s that those authors began to be taught again.
posted by derrinyet at 1:14 AM on February 6, 2023 [24 favorites]

Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 348
posted by ShaunMurfeey at 2:08 AM on February 6, 2023

I read The Brothers Karamazov recently, and i found it at once a very deft and astute take on family dynamics that was still very much relevant today, and also a profound window into the conservatism and orthodoxy of the writer's time. I hadn't really considered the purely political narrative, but i can see how it could be used to elevate the idea of Russian imperialism. I've got Crime and Punishment lined up so it will be interesting to see how that compares.
posted by trif at 2:51 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Does this mean I can cross Dostoevsky off my list of authors I really have to get around to sometime?
posted by Phanx at 2:52 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Dostoevsky's work isn't exactly imperialist for the most part except the Writer's Diary (mentioned in the article), but what it shares with the right-wing writers of his time is a belief that the spiritual culture of the Russian peasant has the unique ability to redeem human civilization and that Western culture, including the parts of it most dedicated to human liberation, is irredeemably corrupt. This narrative of civilizational conflict was an indirect justification for imperialist conquest (because you have to build up your civilization's sphere of influence in anticipation of an apocalyptic clash between them), and the Writer's Diary makes the link explicit.
posted by derrinyet at 3:02 AM on February 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

Phanx, I wouldn't say that at all; there is a lot of interpersonal narrative that is really well written, and his descriptions of personal, group and family motivations and dynamics is superb, and it is impressive how relevant it still is today. I was surprised at how readable it was.

It is by no means propagandic, but there is a conservative and orthodox lean to the writing that an authoritarian Russian regime might view as such
posted by trif at 3:06 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

> Does this mean I can cross Dostoevsky off my list of authors I really have to get around to sometime?

On a return to my 11th grade reading list last year, I loved Crime & Punishment on a purely thriller level despite knowing Dostoyevsky was a reactionary. However, anyone looking for reasons to reject his books will get a kick out of this Nabokov lecture where he picks apart Dostoyevsky's entire style of writing as potboiler trash.
posted by johngoren at 6:35 AM on February 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

I will always adore Dostoevsky for Notes from the Underground which is, in part, a direct takedown of one of the worst socialist novels ever written, What is to be Done? I'd always known him for a conservative, so the implicit acceptance of empire makes sense. Conservatism is defending the rights and privileges that the powerful have that others do not, something that all empires do with respect to their home country. And conservative literature is a wonderful jumping off place to defend an imperialist view of the world.
posted by Hactar at 7:29 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I enjoyed this article. I have a recurring thought which this reminds me of... there always is a debate between the people who are into stuff like Death of the Author and think we should bracket off the author's views when considering a book, and those who really want to know what the author's actual opinions were, in order to interpret the book. It seems to me that, regardless of what side you're on in this debate, often enough a worldview is very obvious from the book itself. Dostoevsky was very obviously conservative if you look into his actual opinions, and a person who read his novels would be able to pick up on that, even if all other information about Dostoevsky besides the contents of his novels had burned in a fire and everyone forgot it. It just seems to me that there's sometimes a false dichotomy between the two stances on how to interpret books, sometimes.

I am going off on a bit of a rambling tangent here, so don't read too much into this comment, haha. In any case, I got around to reading Either/Or, a recently published book by the author of the article, last summer, and I commend it to the attention of anyone who is interested in mid-late Turkish-American Harvard students.
posted by Whale Oil at 7:37 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I will always adore Dostoevsky for Notes from the Underground which is, in part, a direct takedown of one of the worst socialist novels ever written, What is to be Done?

Well, there's the rub, isn't it? Because while I completely agree with you that Dostoevsky is by far the better writer, WITBD is, in relation to its time, one of the most progressive works of literature ever written. Its avowed purpose is to portray a female central character who isn't defined by her relationships to men, for whom those relationships enhance rather than constrain her freedom, and for whom liberation comes in the form of creating a women's labor cooperative rather than finding the right husband. And the relationships it portrays show men respecting and deferring to that freedom and collaborating in pursuing it, in the service of a broader goal of transforming society not just for upper-class women but for everyone. What's more, unlike many contemporary works that engage with radical and identity politics, we have a tremendous amount of evidence that people read this book and took its lessons to heart as a blueprint for personal and social transformation.

So I dunno. I respect Chernyshevskii a lot, honestly, and it's odd to me that while Dostoevsky is being debated alternative models of political writing have not been reclaimed. The art/artist connection should run both ways. I mean Chernyshevskii literally died in Siberian exile for his political views.
posted by derrinyet at 9:00 AM on February 6, 2023 [11 favorites]

(And yes I know Dostoevsky went to Siberia too, but in his case rather than strengthening his radical views the experience turned him into a reactionary antisemite)
posted by derrinyet at 9:19 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

This grabbed me (formatting added by me):

As Said points out, novels became a dominant literary form in eighteenth-century Britain and France, precisely when Britain was becoming the biggest empire in world history and France was a rival.

Novels and empires grew symbiotically, defining and sustaining each other...

...In an influential reading of “Mansfield Park,” Said zooms in on a few references to a second, Antiguan property—implicitly, a sugar plantation—belonging to Mansfield’s proprietor. The point isn’t just that life in the English countryside is underwritten by slave labor, but that the novel’s plot itself mirrors the colonial enterprise.

Fanny Price, an outsider at Mansfield, undergoes a series of harrowing social trials, and marries the baronet’s son. A rational subject comes to a scary new place—one already inhabited by other, unreasonable people—and becomes its rightful occupant. What does a story like that tell you about how the world works?

This kind of plot isn't uncommon in the books I've read.
posted by amtho at 10:14 AM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure that it makes sense to fault Tolstoy or even Dostoevsky for Putin's use of their works to advance his neo-imperialist ambitions. I think Batuman, as a novelist, perhaps imagines that novelists and novels have more power and influence over everyday events than they actually do. And maybe there's more than a bit of wishful thinking there.

Relative to all the effort being expended to (unsuccessfully) conquer and subjugate Ukraine, having some well-pedigreed intellectuals come up with interpretations of classic novels that justify today's violence isn't even a rounding error. If Dostoevsky wasn't available for that purpose, something else would be found.

Imperialist regimes create mythologies and justifications for their actions with whatever cultural artifacts happen to be available. Participants in the imperialist system do it, in many cases, without being asked, or frequently even consciously realizing what they're doing. When you write for the approval of an imperialist audience, your work will almost always end up being imperialist propaganda of one sort or another.

Novels, like all art, need to be understood in context; trying to find an abstract meaning in Crime and Punishment, without any regard for the environment in which it was produced, or the audience for which it was originally intended, strikes me as a fool's errand. I would go further, and argue that there is no such thing as "abstract meaning" to begin with. If you read Dostoevsky without knowing anything about 19th century Russia, or Dostoevsky's life, the meaning you'll extract from it isn't abstract, just naive, and rooted in your own ignorance and un-examined assumptions.

But I don't think there's a strong argument for not reading or not teaching Dostoevsky; doing so seems like a bit of an own-goal: particularly if the Putinists are using Dostoevsky as their propaganda, refusing to read it limits our understanding of our adversary. It certainly changes how we should probably approach it, though. I'm not sure I'd chuck it in as a two-week section of a highschool literature course.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:06 PM on February 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would have liked to have heard a discussion of Chekhov in this piece, as he better than Gogol offers a foil to the big names dealt with. Nabokov said of Chekhov:

“Chekhov’s genius almost involuntarily disclosed more of the blackest realities of hungry, puzzled, servile, angry peasant Russia than a multitude of other writers, such as Gorki for instance, who flaunted their social ideas in a procession of painted dummies. I shall go further, and say that that the person who prefers Dostoevski or Gorki to Chekhov will never be able to grasp the essentials of Russian literature and Russian life.”

This piece from LitHub expands on Chekhov, as compared to other Russian writers.
posted by kneecapped at 5:24 PM on February 6, 2023

I'm a fan a Elif Batuman, she's a great writer and essayist.

Fyodor Dostoevsky was a fascinating writer for his weird psychological psychodramas, but I'd never really gotten the impression that he was a proponent of a Stalinist/Putinist authoritarian Russian State.

I've also liked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was a great writer but unfortunately had terribly stupid opinions about Ukraine, which didn't quite appear in his works.
posted by ovvl at 6:03 PM on February 6, 2023

Zooming in,

In one hall, I came upon a wooden door with a plate that read “Museum of Repressed Writers.” I tried the door handle. It was locked.

...is a little moment of perfection.
posted by clawsoon at 7:03 PM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this thread-- I just couldn't get interested in the Russian classics when I was young. Now I'm more interested in people, but there still might be better people to read.

I appreciate the bit about Dostoyevsky being about everything between people not working. I just (by coincidence) read a fairly long analysis about The Idiot-- the writer noticed that Prince Mishkin created a disaster with his compulsion to help, and *still* treated being like Mishkin as something that people were failing at.

If the idea of universal classic is flawed, might there still be classics suitable for different people, times, and places?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:52 AM on February 7, 2023

This link about the ongoing Battle of Bakhmut, posted in the latest Ukraine war thread, touches on attitudes towards Russian literature, language, and Dostoevsky in particular:

Dinner ends and the soldiers leave to wind down. Me [reporter] and Nata [photographer] are left. She’s been discussing the cultural aspect of the war with [UKR Special Forces soldiers] Yevgeny and Kazbek because it’s a war not just against Ukrainian territory but against its very essence as a nation. Putin says there is no such thing as Ukraine, which means everything from its language to its history and literature must be denied.

“For years we were told Ukrainian was just for peasants and Russian was for the sophisticated,” she says. “I see Russians and they can barely speak it. I can live without ​​Dostoevsky. Look at Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikoff kills an old woman for money and then spends the entire book trying to work out why he did it. I’ll tell you why he did it: because he’s trash.”

My interpretation is that, when she says she can "live without ​​Dostoevsky", that's not a suggestion that the work should be censored or repressed, as much as it should simply be passed over, in Ukrainian schools and public discourse, in favor of Ukrainian writers writing in the Ukrainian language. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable stance. The Ukrainians, after all, probably feel like they understand the Russian imperial mindset better than they'd like: they don't need to ponder Putin's favorite Russian literature to understand it; they have it in their literal backyards, in some cases.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:09 AM on February 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the Iraq War really put me off Melville.
posted by AillilUpATree at 10:38 AM on February 15, 2023