The histories, the saints - what shall I build my home from?

Vasily Perov, Wikimedia Commons

Varvara Lyapneva

Russian culture is a creature so animate, it “out-humans” people at times. The literature, the art is treasured so deeply, cradled - by those who call themselves Russian and the foreign intellectual - as a child protege, evidently unmatched, yet requiring defense from earthly concerns. A synonym for culture and things alike in the Russian language is “the high” - unquestionably above. One might say, for instance: “I am not so interested in politics, and I would rather talk of The High”.

I am Russian myself. As I frequently need to specify in America, “from Russia kind of Russian”. I grew up in Moscow. A French woman - a scholar of Russian and Soviet history - once responded to my anxious recollections of history in the search for what went wrong and the role I played in it. Straightforwardly and exhaustedly, she said there was no point in history for me now, as I was young, and should rather focus my energies on the future. I was affected by the statement back then: easily susceptible to guilt in my suddenly palpable affiliation with war crimes, I was happy when people told me I was doing something wrong. However, as a few years passed, I returned to the conviction that the past is not easy and unnecessary to let go of. Our cultural past, in particular, remains a cornerstone of many peoples’ feeling of being Russian, and as long as that culture is beyond reproach, the very idea of Russia stays unquestioned and dodges critical consideration. Unavoidably, we are to borrow from history when rebuilding the future anew, and so I say, we are obliged to pay attention to history and be critical of culture for there are lessons to be learned.

Mikhail Shishkin - a contemporary Russian writer with a great sense of subtleties - published a piece in The Atlantic titled “Don’t Blame Dostoevsky”. It starts like this: “I understand why people hate all things Russian right now. But our literature did not put Putin in power or cause this war.” The article was quite vulnerable, I thought, as Shishkin puts himself on the line to defend Dostoevsky from cancel culture. Cancel culture that turned into the eyes of the previously unacquainted into the biggest threat to what remains of us, Russians abroad, as it promises to bury what we know ourselves to be.

Although, is that what is going on? In the brief three years spent around intellectuals and literati in America, I saw classes on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky populated by hundreds of students semesterly, met people taking Russian language classes just to read our literature without translation, and witnessed the knowledge of the Russian classics serving as a marker of sophistication. I am sure one can recall an example, find a distant friend or forgotten relative who had a negative experience of Russian literature being removed from the curriculum, or perhaps, an art piece rejected from an exhibition, yet these are not indicative of a persistent trend of repealing all of Russian culture. It is alive and well, praised and protected, so much so that there is a class being taught at Harvard on contemporary Russian culture and how it resists Putin and the products of his authoritarian regime. Our persistent identification with the fruits of the literary and artistic labor of fellow nationals is not merely internal but recognized internationally as well. Many of us have left the country, but our nation-state travels with us through the pages and the undying names inscribed on them. Because of the cultural contributions made in the Russian language, an excuse is granted to me, a luxury of being unaffiliated with my government even before I can say a word, a luxury that the world is not so readily given to others and a luxury that I recurrently doubt I deserve.

All of us are products of our environments, but some things, apparently, are less of a constitute environment than others. At least, that is what saying that Russian culture is vital for the nation, yet exempt from leading to the invasion of Ukraine would mean. Dostoevsky was a pochvennik - an ideology that is interlocked with slavophilism, and Russian exceptionalism. Tatyana Kasatkina, a cultural and literary scholar, writes about Dostoevsky’s politics: “Dostoevsky represents Russia as the mother and guardian of all Slavic peoples, a caring and selfless mother” (Kasatkina, 1997). Such ideas of imposed unity and the view of Russia as a leader amongst the Slavic ethnicities are not just relevant to the war that Russia is waging right now, they are at the very core of it. Beliefs like these lead us to believe there is a right that Russia has to other territories and lives, and that our presence is somehow of benefit. I will not be the first one, by any means, to say that our entire cultural corpus is laced with ideas as such that make even those who oppose the war itself prone to have beliefs that enable this war. Shishkin himself, in his article, is responding to the claims that our literature is the source of the imperialist crimes that we commit and support. Or, to be particular, he is attempting to respond, yet ends up blaming this invasion on Putin and the “civilizational gap that still exists in Russia between the humanist tradition of the intelligentsiya and a Russian population stuck in a mentality from the Middle Ages” (Shiskin, 2022). Although blaming Dostoevsky is surely meaningless, I am saying that defending his writing from accusations blindly is not an option either.

Dostoevsky’s speeches about Russian colonizing advances in Asia are wildly orientalist as well: “In Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, but in Asia, we will be masters. In Europe, we were Tatars, and in Asia, we are Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia, will captivate our spirit and draw us there, if only the movement would begin…” (Dostoevsky, 1881). While in line with the general narrative of the 19th century and, thus, not surprising to the point of complete rejection or dreadful disappointment, these are beliefs that we must be aware of if we are to rely on our literature for guidance. Dostoevsky has volumes to teach us about love and duty. I would be blessed if I could master his ideal of forgiveness. Qualities of character of such nature are salient for fighting and rebuilding, and so I will allow Dostoevsky to influence my political tools as well. However, the danger of bigotry and relapse into conquest is there as well, in bold red letters that should be your warning to shield your politics from them.

Dostoevsky’s politics were complex, his persona was even more complicated. I am not making pretenses to “cancel” Dostoevsky, erase him, and “throw off the steamboat of modernity”, as Mayakovsky threatened, but asking merely for critical sharpness. As darling as the texts of Russian literature are to many of us, they are a unit of history’s chain, stemming from what precedes them, and allowing for what is to come. And so, as not all of the imperialism that infects our brain is to be traced to Dostoevsky, neither are his texts immune to being searched for traces of it. I say history could not be fragmented into elements that led and did not lead to the present. And as we look back, despite what the French woman told me, we cannot excuse what we love from having contributed to what we hate. We learn infinitely much from Dostoevsky and other Atlases of Russian culture - is it not natural to admit that not all of what we learn is “good”? As many of us are woken up to the imperialist realities of our state, it is only fair to recognize imperialism, despite unpleasantries, in the places that might be the core of our identity. It is necessary to recognize it within ourselves.

I am not blasphemous, you must know. Dostoevsky is an indispensable figure of my young adulthood, Chekhov keeps me laughing and turns me pensive, at times wistful, always forgiving, Pasternak helps me to orient myself, Pushkin pushes me to precision and search for essence - I owe to the Russian-speaking writers of past and present, and I will never pretend I hold no admiration for them. Yet, a nation is a narration. It is real in the way we tell its story, and to the extent that we believe it. This is why my senses are alarmed when it comes to narratives. My plea is to alarm your senses as well.

Neither are these paragraphs that I am writing an attempt to pick a fight with Mikhail Shishkin - I carry a lot of tenderness for his Pismovnik and respect for his intelligence. Moreover, the simplest of thoughts is, surely, that all of us are not each others’ enemies, but allies against the common evil. As a 20-year-old Russian, I am interested, more than in anything else, in looking for a path forward that would not loop back to this point. So, all my efforts are to make this path a radically new one, defying all that lays as a foundation for the current regime - nationalism and colonialism, denial of indigeneity, racism and xenophobia, and Russian exceptionalism. Call me idealist and naive - in fact, I’ll do that myself first - but I have hopes for the future that is left for us to build. My hopes are that we are careful and aware, critical and revisional, and know better than to not erect our home again on ideas that will lead us right back.

What is created by humans, even as great as literature and art, is not to be deified. In fact, only by criticizing culture can we keep what we treasure in it so much. The texts are not produced to dress the nation in its identity, but to learn from, to scrutinize. And if we are diligent in our scrutiny, if we detach ourselves from the canon and utilize our histories for building our futures, we won’t need to discard Dostoevsky to prove our commitment to justice, and we won’t need to cling to him to remain Russian. In my youthful naivete, I hope for a world in which I am unburned by the requirement to worship a national culture. I am imagining, instead, examining its contents for answers on how to eradicate the poisonous idea of a nation-state. I will wake up one day to find myself learning from all of these books not how to be Russian, and not what Russia is, but how to be human, rebuilding my home out of love for life.

Bibliography

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Дневник писателя. 1881. Январь. Глава вторая. IV. Вопросы и ответы // Достоевский Ф.М. Собрание сочинений в 15 томах. СПб.: Наука, 1995. Т. 14. С. 508—513

Kasatkina, Tatiana. 1997. “Философские и политические взгляды Достоевского.” Достоевский и мировая культура, no. №М.

Shishkin, Mikhail. 2022. “Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky.” The Atlantic. July 24, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-literature-books-ukraine-war-dostoyevsky-nabokov/670928/.