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Life is complicated.
Not sure about that, honestly. As reading of longform text has declined with the rise of the smartphone and other distractions, and the literary-fiction publishing market is converging internationally, a significant amount of people who still read fiction represent demographics that like to view art through a contemporary political lens, often specifically North American-centric notions of race, gender, and power even if the reader hails from somewhere else.
But he was a russian empire/orthodoxy apologist through and through, except for a brief period early on (which earned him the gulag).
huh? Isn't anticolonialism usually not a big fan of western philosophy? I mean it seems to me quite a reasonable conclusion of some anticolonialist theories that Western Philosophy supports murder if not actually forcing it.
All of which Dostoyevsky tried to defend.
Don't get me wrong - early western democracies weren't perfect or even close. But it was still an enormous improvement over what came before.
Still, it is important to mention how imperialistic Russians were - you know Pushkin, for example, right? If a public figure espoused publicly such views on any nationality as he on Poles, they'd be cancelled right away.
There is a reason why Ukrainians demolished specifically his monuments and why Russians are building them. It has zero to do with quality of prose and a lot to do with ... his extremism.
Russia managed to somehow do imperialism/colonialism and get away with it without reevaluating their past. Probably because they colonized white people.
Better to say that they colonized non-African or non-American indigenous people who could not be conveniently attached to vehement Trans-Atlantic chattel slavery or Catholic-conquistador narratives, because the Khanty, Buryats, Yakut, etc. have an appearance that is hardly what most people using race-based terminology would associate with “white people”.
But short answer is - Russians absolutely have separation between colonizers and colonized. To this day.
In modern Russia the usual word to describe immigrants and non-ethnic Russians is "chorni" which basically means "blacks" and is used as a slur. There's discrimination, there's police raids on people hiring them in European part of Russia. They are overwhelmingly sent to die in Ukraine instead of "proper" Russians from the European part of the country.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/russias-ethnic-minorities-...
> The BBC found that six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in Ukraine are located in Siberia and the far east. And that men from Buryatia, a Russian republic whose residents are descended from Mongols, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
Even Ukrainians before the current war weren't treated as "proper" Russians - they were "smallrussians" - the country bumpkin stupid childish version of a "proper" Russian that have to be ruled by the Mother Rossiya or they will have a failed state forever. Basically the Russian version of "the burden of the white man".
Also let's not forget Stalin took food from the most fertile part of USSR - Ukraine - and distributed it to the rest of USSR/exported it, leaving millions of Ukrainians to die of starvation in Hlodomor. And then sent "proper" ethnic Russian colonists to replace the dead Ukrainians.
Russia did the same with Crimean Tartars, just using mass murder and expulsion instead of famine.
There were also other ethnic cleansing done by NKVD. They took adress/phone books, looked at the surnames, and arrested/murdered people based on the surname endings.
Russia absolutely was and still is a colonial empire.
Russification has been going on for 1000+ years. Often organically, and often by forced policies. People abandon their languages and cultures and adopt Russian language, culture, and ultimately identity, until one day their descendants are ethnic Russians. Some maintain the ethnic identities of their ancestors, but many – often most – don't.
Plenty of other empires have attempted to assimilate the colonized population to some degree. It's not even an unusual aspect of colonization; historically it's been a ubiquitious aspect, in fact.
"We give them coal, and in return they take sugar from us."
So to compare Dostoevsky to Kipling is high praise!
While I don't personally lean that way myself, I'm also not close-minded enough to dismiss the possibility outright.
You keep being "open-minded" about that, I prefer modernism and liberalism, thank you.