Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If you want to keep commenting on HN in the future, please review the site guidelines and make sure you're using this site as intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We all know there's a war going on. That doesn't mean the rules here don't apply. It means we have to work harder to stick to them. If you don't want to do that, or feel too strongly to be able to, please don't post until you do and can.
EDIT: It's clear that this is a sentiment that is coming from the emotional pressures of war. I don't blame some Ukrainians for feeling the way that they do, though I find the argument dubious and disagree with it.
I’m reminded of an equally strange move, in an equally strange vein: “Freedom Fries.”
> Freedom Fries
How about "Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!"
I can certainly see why they're upset but it's a problem with Russia's leader at the time, and not the culture right? If it's a long-standing cultural issue then I'd imagine some introspection would also be required, which seems like it may undermine the whole notion.
It may be a coincidence (getting rights for the people is hard), or due to some structural issue. I don't believe anybody knows the reason, but yeah, it may be external because when modern democracy first appeared it was concentrated geographically, what usually happens when the causes are larger than a single country.
They have (from memory) 13 countries on their borders, and almost no "natural" borders, e.g. rivers or mountain ranges. They have a history that's blood-curdling. Expecting a new czar to make it like Denmark is a bit much.
The West tried in the 90s, and Boris Yeltsin is not remembered fondly over there. The emergence of gangster capitalism was the result.
None of this, of course, makes the banishment of Russian cultural products (especially old ones) any more reasonable. We’ve got to get better at separation of concerns.
What? We must not have the same history books. In none of the French-German wars was the German side (or Prussia before that, or the HRE even before) an innocent victim.
And, to be clear, everyone sleepwalked into WWI, sure (though it wasn’t France’s fault any more than Germany’s), but there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for WWII. I cannot believe someone would even write that.
> Historically thinking Ukraine is just continuation of constant wars in Europe.
I grant you that. Though Russia’s justifications are about as credible as Hitler’s were.
they have all of them on one side (Western border), and majority of these countries are small and weak. Comparing to Germany, which is surrounded by potential enemies (I am talking about pre WW2 time), Russia had significant advantage.
Indeed, Russia has had its share of problems with Poland before that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Muscovite_War_(...
When my country has begun the greatest atrocity of our generation, there are now more urgent things to do than write articles about the loss of its culture. For example, volunteering to help Ukrainians, donating money to their cause, and doing other things that will help reverse this disaster, even if only a little bit.
1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome.
2. This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. All three have led to the total destruction and failure of the invaded state. Ukraine has lost territory and there has been substantial suffering, but it has not been nearly on the same scale and the social disruption has not, at least yet, been anywhere near as significant.
I bring this up because moral consistency is important. Just as we should endorse the right of the Ukrainians to defend themselves from criminal aggression, we must also endorse the same rights for other peoples. And we should be making the same calls, or not, for the aggressor states in these crimes to have their cultural influences purged from law-abiding societies.
That depends on what numbers you're going to believe about civilian fatalities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen etc.
It is often claimed that the Iraq War killed anywhere from 0.5 million to over 1.0 million Iraqis.
However these big numbers don't make much sense considering that large scale aerial bombings and artillery strikes stopped after a month into the war and large-scale ground operations stopped after the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. The Iraqis then suffered a horrific decade of weekly and monthly sectarian terror attacks. However adding all the civilian fatalities from the US invasion and the decade of sectarian violence still doesn't add up to ~100,000 and not anywhere near the "millions" range.
Don't get me wrong. The people who started the Iraq War are war criminals. However it doesn't make sense to compare the most widely exaggerated estimates from the 10+ year Iraq War with the current UN confirmed counting of civilian fatalities in the 5 month war in Ukraine. If we go by confirmed civilian fatalities Russia is currently killing Ukrainian civilians at a faster pace than anytime during the Iraq War.
That said, the Ukrainian state has survived and is continuing to provide civilian services. Ukraine still produces plenty of electricity (it is even exporting it), and still is able to provide food, healthcare, water, and other essentials. There are tight supplies for some things, like gasoline and some medicines, which is awful.
Contrast that to the devastation after the American invasion of Iraq, the starvation in Yemen, or the chaos in Afghanistan. Iraq still has spotty electricity and deals with violent incursions, and the war has spilled into Syria. Yemeni deaths have been horrific, but equally bad has been the widespread hunger and extreme poverty the war has thrust millions into. I just don't see that kind of suffering in Ukraine. At least not yet. If the war continues at this level of intensity and Ukraine collapses entirely, which I find unlikely (indeed, the level of intensity and casualties is already down significantly from its peak in March) I'll reassess.
JFC.
Funny goal posts seem to get used a lot in this conflict.
Your opinion is very one-sided and misses many details:
- Iraq is currently relatively peaceful democracy after decades of tirany and wars (Iran-Iraq war caused 1M deaths)
- Afghanistan under US rule demonstrated significant economic, demographic and human rights growth
- Yemen civil war started with Iran backed shiite houthis took power by force in country with majority of suni population, and Saudis reacted on this
And people are doing all those things. People also volunteered to fight and die with them, countries are sending them weapons.
It's not taking away from any of those things.
Readers interested in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Chekhov are presumably intellectuals. Presumably, they will be familiar with the countless examples from history when, driven by patriotic fervor, countries cleansed themselves from the culture of an adversarial state, including language, literature, music, linguistic borrowings, scientific contributions, common history, etc. etc. Presumably, these potential readers should be sophisticated enough to separate the crude politics of the day from the valuable contributions to the history of art or science.
Is he _really_ interested in the audience whose interest in the 19-th century Russian literature is predicated on the Russian politics of the 21st century? Why does he want to reach this audience? And, more generally, in the environment that is arrogantly dismissive to "old white men" in general, why worry about the readership of Dostoyevsky at all?
Dostoyevsky's works are amazing without any background knowledge. No 'intellectualism' is required, just a love of stories. With a few tweaks they could be set in a modern era and turned into Netflex series.
War and Peace is considered a challenge because of the rambling philosophical chapters between the main action, but strip those out and you have Gone with the Wind. Easily enjoyed without any extra frontal lobe matter.
One of my mantras as a reader is that I no longer am in school and no one is going to make me write a paper or discuss overriding themes. I can read the way I like and enjoy what I like and if I missed all the mustard seed references than it doesn't matter to me.
I could go into a side discussion on how literature is taught but I'm sympathetic to English curriculum developers who have to give students some books to read and have some criteria by which they can make sure students have read and understood it.
I'm a science fiction fan and I like to approach books as though they were set in Jupiter in the far future. One of my beliefs is that great literature transcends the time and place of where it was written. I haven't been disappointed yet.
It's always worth researching translations to make sure you find the best, most readable one before embarking on a non-English classic.
Surely, it's a matter of taste :-) I've read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Demons, and The Idiot without particular enjoyment. I would take Tolstoy any day.
And Anna Karenina was in production too...
The cleanest way out is to separate them. The work of art stands on its own, and you can't critique The Epic of Gilgamesh by complaining that they still had slaves back then and there was no health care system.
I haven't read Pushkin, not being into poetry OR speaking Russian, but if Pushkin said some evil things in "To the Slanderers of Russia", you just have to concentrate on the poetry he wrote that does speak to you. Apparently that's difficult but passing moral judgment is easy?
I.e., if a Hitler (you saw that coming) says something demonstrably true, while a Pope (yep) says something demonstrably false — who do we agree with? Working out an answer to this question in a clear form has repercussions for the cancel culture, institutions created by slave owners, etc, etc, etc. It isn't new either. People struggled with the oeuvre of writers who supported Nazism way back when: do we read them or do we forget them? Knut Hamsun comes to mind. Rolf Nevanlinna would be a similar example in mathematics.
Ukraine is a pawn at the world stage, but if the West is serious about battling russia (for its own sake really), cultural front has to be among top priorities.
Solzhenitsin is one of the best literary chroniclers of repressions in the Soviet Russia (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Gulag Archipelago, In the First Circle), with the degree of earnestness and realism that approaches Tolstoy's. How does his compassion to Ukranians, or lack thereof, change that? Why do people want writers of fiction to be impeccable moral leaders?
> Solzhenitsyn's Greater Russian, Orthodox-driven nationalism, Elder notes, "once made him appear sorely out of touch, but today has become increasingly fashionable." Although he is best known for his exposure of the Soviet Gulag system and his staunch anti-communism, Solzhenitsyn welcomed Putin's rise to power in 1999 and praised him for restoring Russia's national pride. In 2007, Putin visited the ailing Solzhenitsyn at home to award him a state prize for his humanitarian work. In "Rebuilding Russia," published in the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn criticized the Soviet government's haphazard border policies that he said carved up traditional "Rus." He advocated a "Russian Union" encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the ethnic Russian parts of Kazakhstan.
From here: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/ho...
I can only vouch for the realism of his description of a hospital in his Cancer Ward (published in 1966), and for a scene of phonetic spectral speech analysis in In the First Circle (1968). Both unusually lifelike and showing first-hand experience.
Cant disagree more. To understand modern day Russia one needs to have read Solzchenitsyn's books. The country today is a product of decades of strong negative selection favouring the immoral and strongly discouraging moral acts. Those who live in Moscow and make up the modern Russia are the descendants of those who successfully navigated the communist opressions. The westerners should read the books to understand what that meant. There would be far less surprises at the deeply immoral acts of russian govt had the likes of Merkel bothered to read and reflect. Boycotting such books would do Russia a favor.
Me too :-) I don't accept anyone's authority to tell me what I should or shouldn't read (watch, listen to, etc.); and I wonder at anyone who would.
However, I couldn't help noticing that the vocabulary of your comment ("negative selection", "descendants") was rather biological. As I am sure you know, it isn't just the Moscovites who have navigated their way through the communist times, but the populations of the former Soviet republics as well. I also think I won't be too far off the mark if I say that superficial social adaptations or morality aren't hereditary, and people are very malleable creatures.
Surely you can understand why it matters to Ukrainians?
It sucks, but you have to manage expectations, i.e. that barring some unexpected event the smaller political entity will always have a lot more to lose in a battle against an imperial-like entity. Again, we, Romanians, had to learn that the hard way ever since the 1400s, when the Ottomans came around this part of the world.
If Russians look out at the world and see a consensus that their leader has impoverished their nation for his personal benefit, they'll be more likely to question his motives.
Ukraine's best shot at winning the war is for Putin to lose the support of Russian soldiers. That should be one of the top priorities, and it will be better accomplished by driving a wedge between Putin and the Russian people than by driving them together. (Though delivering more HIMARS is an even higher priority.)
You will surely agree with me that Russia is not the world's pioneer in wars of aggression. What about (oh no, whataboutism! We can safely dismiss the argument without thinking now) all the other countries that did, and do the same? Should we also dismiss their cultural output?
I'm not trying to diminish the seriousness of Russia's aggression, or how much Ukrainians are suffering. That is not the point. I want to know why you think we should dismiss Dostoevsky but not Shakespeare (to be clear, Shakespeare is just an example. I am not talking specifically about the UK). Basically every great artist and intellectual was part of a war-waging genocidal empire, and many of them pro-regime in varying degrees (Dostoevsky being a good example of the "varying"). Appreciating these people doesn't mean supporting the empires.
The 11 million muslims killed (and many more displaced) by the collective west (NATO) since 1990 don't count, because they're brown.
But when a non-western majority white country wages war, as George Carlin famously said "That's Our F*ck!ng Job":
We are talking about Russian literature because it is part of our culture, unlike Afghani literature.
Attempts at weaponizing compassion are disgusting.
"On France’s BFM TV, journalist Phillipe Corbé stated this about Ukraine: “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civili...
I also watch more movies in English in settings I am familiar with or better know the context of (Western history versus eastern).
I also wear clothes I am culturally comfortable with. Am I racist for not giving all clothes equal wearing?
Because I had a diversity of ethnic foods around, I am comfortable and enjoy eating them. My family from the midwest who had no exposure mostly don't relate to them. I am not less racist, nor are they more, it's just a proximity and culture thing.
I am very fond of Greek and Roman history, yet have no Greek or Roman ancestry, because I am much more familiar with greek and roman history and culture than say Persian. It's not race, it's proximity and culture. Not that I wouldn't love more Parthian Empire stories.
What does eating Thai food have to do with anything? I sense you tried to make an analogy, but it's so obtuse I honestly can't imagine what you were thinking.
Are you honestly saying that empathy is dependent on culture or nationality? That is some pre-enlightenment thinking right there. I thought we civilized westerners had evolved towards universal empathy, all humankind is equal and all that.
You conspicuously left out one thing. It's a biggie. Proximity and culture and RACE.
I recommend you read the article I linked. If you're okay with the statements such as "they are not like the [savage middle easterners], they are blue-eyed like us", then it is an honor to be antagonized by you. I would be disgusted to have someone who thinks that agree with me.
It is so tiring when people nitpick one specific word to "refute" you so that the rest of what you said is automatically invalidated.
I’m not on the “boycott dead Russians” train but the difference is timeliness. Russia is today engaged in a colonial war of aggression. England was last involved in such a thing in the last century.
I stand...correct?
“We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513055-we-all-come-out-from...
There being no Ukrainian state at the time, he was appropriated by the Russian literature as a quintessential Russian writer, but his sympathetic sentiment towards the Cossack tradition is well-known (and obvious in his texts), and one can make a good argument that in his early stuff he is more subversive about the entire Russian empire thing than a naive reader may think. (Ok, his late stuff is also subtle, but in a different way.) One has to realize that in an empire, with official censorship etc, one cannot be openly anti-czarist.
Here is a nice paper highlighting some of the subtleties in Taras Bulba: https://cius-archives.ca/items/show/1514
I haven't read that many of his works, but the two that almost any Russian adult would know about are "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls". Both of which are almost 100% about satirizing government corruption and awful local politicking in the most grotesque ways possible. The intent and overall theme of those stories was as obvious as it can get, though both pack plenty of great less obvious nuance as well.
Not disagreeing with you overall though, Gogol had so many massively impactful works, it is hard to neatly pack his work as "here are his 2-3 monumental pieces everyone knows", he has way too many of those. "Taras Bulba", as you've mentioned, is extremely different from the two i listed above, but there are just as many people who know Gogol exclusively for that. And that can be said about half of his works imo. Then "Viy"? That one was a whole different genre completely (supernatural horror with some subtle themes under), and there is a whole swath of people who would know him just for that as well.
Ukraine as a country is a relatively modern construct. Born out of centuries of oppression at the hands of Muscovites. That doesn't mean that Ukrainians didn't exist just because they were called something else in the past.
Anyhow, tons of Gogol's writings reference Ukrainian culture. He was born in a cossack town. Which also happened to be part of the Russian Empire, before the idea of Ukrainian independence became widespread.
Might as well say Italians didn't exist before modern Italy, or deny the Germans' history and existence just because Germany is a relatively modern state.
Also, your claim of oppression needs to be cited or else it's hot air.
Again, I didn't say Ukrainians didn't exist: they were called Russians the same way Bavarians are called German now.
finally, once again, I didn't say Gogol didn't reference Ukrainian culture: he did, but he never called it a "Ukrainian" culture. In his writings, he always said: "My Russia". It is the same as saying a Texan says he is American. Does that mean we are denying Texas their Texan culture and dialect?
And for reference, Germany has always been called that--Germania.
Sure, there may be plenty to boycott. Boycott anyone who supports the genocidal regime. The dead ones didn't get a say, though.
"Submit, Cherkes! Both West and East,
May soon share your fate,
When the time comes, you'll say arrogantly:
Yes, I'm a slave but a slave of the Tsar of the World!"
1. Pushkin supported the Russian unitary empire and subjugation of Ukraine.
2. Pushkin was instrumental in the development of the modern Russian language and is thus seen as symbolising the forced linguistic homogenisation imposed on Ukrainians.
The first argument has some explaining power as to why Ukrainians wouldn't want to have a Pushkin memorial.
The second argument is presented with a helping of founding myth: Russians are a homogeneous blob of NPCs, Ukrainians are autonomous and diverse individuals. This is a weak argument.
For a thread that rails about conflating history with modern reality, it strangely sidesteps contemporary linguistic politics. The modern Russian state has federal divisions specifically for non-Russian ethnic groups called republics which are distinct from oblasts i.e. provinces. And these republics established official languages of their own as expressly allowed by the Russian constitution. Ukraine on the other hand clamped down on the use of Russian and Hungarian. Ukrainian is a co-official language in Russian occupied Crimea but Russian has no official status anywhere in Ukraine.
And considering how unnecessarily long-winded the thread is, I wouldn't say it was particularly constructive.
China has freedom of speech and democracy guaranteed by their constitution, would you defend China's open press and elections next as quickly as you are defending Russia's hollow laws? (not anti-Russians here, my grandfather was Russian, but definitely anti-Russia today).
What federation? I have no idea what you're talking about. I made a specific claim about the status of minority languages in Russia and Ukraine. Do you have any evidence to show that it is inaccurate?
> Russia can have all the written rules they want
What exactly are you implying in this specific instance? That minority languages aren't actually used? The state broadcaster runs services in a dozen or so minority languages.
2. They are free to have official languages, as long as they include Russian. They are not free to exclude Russian.
Ukraine did not clamp down on Russian prior to Russia annexing 10% of Ukraine in 2014.
This is the most proper thing to implement in all national republics that form a larger federation. This policy makes sure that younger generations are not deprived of economic and cultural opportunities due to language barriers.
> Ukraine did not clamp down on Russian prior to Russia annexing 10% of Ukraine in 2014.
If the Ukrainian government feels like to clamp down on Russian due to their own uncivilized messing with the right to representation of East Ukrainians (mostly russian-speaking) via the violent coup against a democratically elected president that didn’t break a law, then it tells a lot about their self-awareness and general ability to reflect on the matter. Have they ever studied how civil wars get started?
This part is most definitely true: "The Russian system of political power has remained unchanged and unchanging down the centuries—a pyramid of slaves worshipping the supreme khan. That’s how it was during the Golden Horde, that’s how it was in Stalin’s time, that’s how it is today under Vladimir Putin."
This is why 90s and russian democracy failed so utterly, why it will fail completely in the future. There is no nice way out. People love the tsar that wins, it does not matter if he murders, tortures, rapes. He is tsar and above it all, boyars might be held responsible.. but tsar has one measure, winning. Narod will love him as long as he is strong.
"Slaves give birth to a dictatorship and a dictatorship gives birth to slaves. There is only one way out of this vicious circle, and that is through culture."
This is a delusion, there is only one way out and that is the fall of the empire. As Golden Horde died so must its successor state. Culture has not saved Russia in the last 2 centuries, it won't save it now.
It is possible to be critical towards the philosophy of some litterature without banning it.
https://collegenews.org/italian-university-suspends-course-o...
The Russian people's spectrum is incredibly wide though, and have also produced some of the deepest writers, musicians and filmmakers humanity has seen.
Admitting both of these truths at the same time is something people have a hard time doing, and that's the real issue here.
(This is not a justification for violence of course.)
Russia has been a nation of serfs for millennia now.
Many cultures have had genocides and countless atrocities without producing anything of similar value.
It beats me how Brodsky, the same person who penned "Bosnia Tune", could have succumbed to that thinking.
https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BA_%D0%BD%D0...
That's why cherry picking quotes to show how "imperialist" classic Russian writers were because we currently dislike Putin's Russia is so silly.
They just wanted a cudgel for power — they’re perfectly happy to engage in that behavior themselves, when it suits them.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34237648-creating-russop...
"Mettan's journalistic credibility has been questioned on several occasions. In 2017, Reporters Without Borders criticised Mettan for his pro-Russian militancy and for serving as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda. Florian Irminger, Secretary General of the Swiss Green Party, also called Mettan an apologist for Putin's government. Following Mettan's support for the Ukraine bioweapons conspiracy theory in a Die Weltwoche essay in 2022, Swiss magazine Republik referred to the article as a 'breathtaking compendium' of Russian propaganda."
From what I've seen, hand-wringing over "russophobia" is just another armament in Russia's information war.
Your link was about anti-Russian sentiment being tied to western propaganda when in reality, they're creating that sentiment through their own actions.
Against specific Russian people, that would be counter-productive and unfair. A lot of them individually disapprove of their government and act in smaller or larger ways against it. I know personally a couple of them, and Inadmire them because they are doing their best in a terrible situation. Collectively, they still put Putin in power and let him come to that point.
It’s exactly the same thing in the US: a lot of Americans are great, but there is no escaping the fact that enough of them think that Trump was a good idea (and I have no doubt we will see worse in the near future).
Brodsky derided the Ukrainian quest for independence 30 years ago just like Pushkin did the same for the Polish one 150 years before that.
This is perfectly rational for a writer concerned about his audience size: why should Poles or Ukrainians read inferior poetry in Polish or Ukrainian when a vastly superior poetry is available in Russian?!
Bigotry?
Does the West condemn all authoritarian governments?
If it can’t guide a nation towards humanistic values, what is a culture’s point?
If you say that russian culture is valuable, you must set the context why.
It doesn’t communicate anything particularly original. It’s not especially beautiful (arguably). It didn’t stop and some might argue even enabled the carriers of that culture to either tolerate a genocidal regime or actively support it. What’s the point of it then?
What’s the point of the moral dilemma in “Crime and punishment” for example, if their choice is always “let’s kill another old lady because we can”?
And you have clearly not read and understood Dostoyevsky if that is what you got out of Crime and Punishment. Maybe you shouldn’t be that fast to condemn a whole culture if your understanding of it is on the level your last paragraph reveals.
The usual way of framing it and especially russian classical literature in russian schools, like in my case, was that it is the moral guiding light of the nation. As such it has clearly failed.
Also, I'm confused by the notion that I have the obligation to you to interpret a work of art just like you to have an opinion on it.
It's not anti-Pushkin as much as pro-Shevchenko...
Edit - also interesting that the author is Russian-Swiss, presumably living in Switzerland.