tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca-fr/topics/russian-literature-23818/articlesRussian literature – La Conversation2024-02-21T19:11:58Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2221602024-02-21T19:11:58Z2024-02-21T19:11:58ZGuide to the classics: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We inspired Orwell and influenced the Western imagination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575490/original/file-20240213-16-bwem2w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3394%2C2376&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wassily Kandinsky – Composition 8 (1923).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wassily_Kandinsky_Composition_VIII.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year is the centenary of Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/we-9780241458747">We</a> – a major influence on George Orwell’s dystopia 1984, as well as an important early contribution to the burgeoning genre of science fiction. </p>
<p>We and 1984 (published in 1949) were crucial influences on Cold War western imagination of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state. But Orwell had never been there, and Zamyatin wrote his dystopia in 1920, a time of chaos and civil war just three years after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and two years before the Soviet Union formally came into being. </p>
<p>Both novels portray a state in which the individual has been merged into the collective: “I” has become indistinguishable from “we”. The state is run by a remote but all-seeing leader (the “Benefactor” in Zamyatin, “Big Brother” in Orwell), who is revered as the font of wisdom and universal wellbeing. The leader is backed up by a secret police (the Guardians, the Thought Police), who organise the disappearance of potential trouble-makers. </p>
<p>Life is meticulously regulated according to a state plan, leaving only a minimal personal sphere. In Zamyatin’s novel, houses are all glass. The only time the blinds can be lowered is for the regular hour of sex with a registered partner. Thinking differently is an offence against the state. </p>
<p>In both novels, falling in love is the fateful assertion of an “I” that is not part of “We.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-orwells-1984-and-how-it-helps-us-understand-tyrannical-power-today-112066">Guide to the classics: Orwell's 1984 and how it helps us understand tyrannical power today</a>
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<h2>An instinctive satirist</h2>
<p>Zamyatin wrote his novel while living in a special House of the Arts in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) under the protection of the writer <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Maxim_Gorky">Maxim Gorky</a>, who used his clout with Bolshevik leaders to shelter writers and artists from the worst privations of the Civil War period and the newly established revolutionary police, the <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1917-2/state-security/state-security-texts/the-all-russian-extraordinary-commission-for-struggle-with-counter-revolution/">Cheka</a>. </p>
<p>It might be assumed that Zamyatin was one of many members of the Russian intelligentsia who, having been fashionably radical under the Tsar, recoiled from the reality of rampaging mobs and social and political breakdown that led to the Bolsheviks taking power in October 1917. In fact, Zamyatin had been a Bolshevik, although he was no longer an active party member.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575480/original/file-20240213-28-g7d1en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1075&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Yevgeny Zamyatin c.1919.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zamjatin.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>He was born in 1884 in Lebedian, a town 370 kilometres south of Moscow, undistinguished except for its race track. His father was a priest (the lower rungs of Orthodox clergy were allowed to marry) and his mother, surprisingly, a pianist. This would have made them provincial intelligentsia, marginal to almost all their neighbours. </p>
<p>Judging by his bleak memories of Lebedian, Yevgeny was a lonely child who took refuge in reading. Having become a socialist as a teenager, he joined the Bolshevik party in time to participate in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 in the capital, where he was a student at the St Petersburg Polytechnic. </p>
<p>Arrests and exile to the provinces followed, but he nevertheless managed to graduate as a ship-building engineer. He also started writing, winning praise from the critics for his vivid portrayal of provincial boredom and inertia in a novella, <em>Uyezdnoye</em> (A Provincial Tale), published in 1913. </p>
<p>The Russian government sent Zamyatin to England in 1916 to work on the building of ice-breakers at the Newcastle docks, so he missed the February Revolution and the ferment that followed. He returned just before October in an “antiquated little British ship”. The journey took about 50 hours, the passengers in lifebelts the whole time due to the threat from German submarines. </p>
<p>His late arrival for the revolution was something he always regretted – it was like “never having been in love and waking up one morning ten years married”. But it is difficult to imagine Zamyatin succumbing to the euphoria that gripped the Russian intelligentsia in 1917. He was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-russian-revolution-100669">World politics explainer: the Russian revolution</a>
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<p>It was the oddness of the situation after October that struck Zamyatin first. He remembered the winter of 1917-18 as “merry, eerie […] when everything broke from its moorings and floated off somewhere into the unknown”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575493/original/file-20240214-16-uy74df.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Mikhail Bulgakov (1928).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB-%D0%91%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2.jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Revolutionary Russia, with its privations, dysfunctions, identity adjustments and lofty rhetoric, provided many opportunities for satire. The genre flourished throughout the 1920s in the work of writers such as <a href="https://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/literature/mikhail-zoshchenko/index.html">Mikhail Zoshchenko</a>, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mikhail-Bulgakov">Mikhail Bulgakov</a>, and <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Ilf_and_Petrov">Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov</a>. </p>
<p>This was for the most part the satire of insiders, rueful and affectionate, rather than that of regime critics. Bulgakov, to be sure, ran into political trouble in the late 1920s with his novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita">The Master and Margarita</a>, but the books of Ilf and Petrov, featuring their Soviet conman hero <a href="https://russiapost.info/culture/ostap_bender">Ostap Bender</a>, became Soviet classics, loved by generations of Soviet children as well as adults. </p>
<p>Zamyatin’s satire was colder and harsher. To be a heretic, whether the regime was Tsarist or Soviet, was an internal necessity for him – and, he argued, for “true literature”. He despised the “nimble” writers and artists – “futurists”, “proletarians”, and so on – who jumped on the Bolshevik bandwagon and curried favour with the new regime, proclaiming themselves “the court school” and filling the air with their “yellow, green and raspberry red triumphant cries”. </p>
<p>In the highly political and factionalised world of the arts in early Soviet Russia, this disdain was energetically returned. Denunciation in the literary journals was one of Zamyatin’s perennial problems. He had trouble with the Cheka, too, which arrested him several times. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575534/original/file-20240214-16-mdagf.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The first edition of We (1924).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Weyevgenyzamyatin.png">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Written in 1920, We was turned down for publication by Soviet censors. An American publisher, E.P. Dutton, would produce the first complete edition in 1924, in Gregory Zilboorg’s English translation. The novel would not be published in the Soviet Union until 1988.</p>
<h2>Cogs in the machine</h2>
<p>We depicts a future society in which almost everyone willingly, even eagerly, sacrifices their individuality to become cogs in the machine, with the Guardians there to deal with any dissenters. </p>
<p>Clearly, Zamyatin’s experiences with the Cheka, the censors and his conforming writer colleagues were part of his inspiration. The Benefactor’s “socratically-bald head” was no doubt a swipe at Lenin, but his moral smugness probably owes something to <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Feliks-Edmundovich-Dzerzhinsky">Felix Dzerzhinsky</a>, the first head of the Cheka. </p>
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<span class="caption">Lenin – Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lenin_(Petrov-Vodkin).jpg">Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</a></span>
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<p>For educated contemporaries, however, the Benefactor had loftier literary antecedents: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Inquisitor">Legend of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov</a> and Vladimir Solovyev’s Antichrist in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Solovyov_(philosopher)">Tale of the Antichrist</a>. </p>
<p>Both of these stories have a spokesman for institutionalised collective wisdom (the established Christian church) make the argument against a heretic (Jesus), with whom the authors’ sympathies lie. Zamyatin – a priest’s son, though he had abandoned Christianity in his youth – called the emerging orthodoxy of the Bolshevik Revolution “a new branch of Catholicism, which is as fearful as the old of every heretical word”.</p>
<p>The totalitarian society described in We may have been the Soviet future, but it was far from the Soviet reality when Zamyatin wrote. In the first years after the revolution, the Bolsheviks were trying to run Soviet Russia under an improvised system later called “War Communism”. This meant nationalising everything in sight and using force, rather than market relations, to extract grain from the peasantry and feed the cities and the Red Army, which was fighting foreign-backed White Armies on multiple fronts. </p>
<p>Soviet Russia was indeed cut off from the world, as Zamyatin’s dystopia is by the Green Wall, but at this point that was not the Bolsheviks’ choice. It was the result of war, foreign intervention and economic sanctions. The Bolsheviks believed in economic planning, but it would be ten years before they would seriously try to implement it. </p>
<p>In other words, the Bolshevik government in 1920 was as incapable of achieving the seamless regimentation of We’s dystopia as it was of building the space-craft that provides the novel with its science-fiction theme.</p>
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<p>Zamyatin’s novel is often read as a prescient foretelling of Stalinism, ten to 15 years before it came into being. That could be. But Zamyatin was also drawing on a more immediate source: the vision of a regimented and mechanised Soviet society of the future – seen as a utopia, not a dystopia – that was being trumpeted by the same futurist and “constructivist” artists whose embrace of the Bolshevik Revolution Zamyatin found so suspect. </p>
<p>A particular target, mentioned several times in We, was the worker poet <a href="https://monoskop.org/Aleksei_Gastev">Alexei Gastev</a>. Like Zamyatin, Gastev was a longtime Bolshevik revolutionary. In 1920, he set up a Central Institute of Labour whose mission was to train workers to function like machines. </p>
<p>This revolutionary version of the American capitalist concept of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/Taylorism">Taylorism</a> was aimed at maximising worker efficiency to increase productivity and profit. It did not go down well with the Soviet industrial ministry, still less with Soviet trade unions. It was closed down at the end of the 1920s, about the time serious industrialisation got underway. </p>
<p>But revolutionary regimentation of life, the cult of the machine, and submerging of the individual in the collective were staples of the “futurist” imagination, explored not only by Gastev, but the poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/vladimir-mayakovsky">Vladimir Mayakovsky</a>, the theatre director <a href="https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Vsevolod_Meyerhold">Vsevolod Meyerhold</a>, and constructivist artists like <a href="https://www.theartstory.org/artist/tatlin-vladimir/">Vladimir Tatlin</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/575537/original/file-20240214-18-gutzra.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Vladimir Mayakovsky c.1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Majakovszkij.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>The revolutionary avant-garde had great artistic achievements to its credit, but tolerance was not one of its characteristics. It bullied writers and artists who did not conform to its ideas, frequently appealing to the authorities (usually the Communist Party, but sometimes the Cheka) to put their opponents out of business. </p>
<p>That is one of the subtexts of Zamyatin’s 1921 essay <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1921-2/death-of-a-poet/death-of-a-poet-texts/zamiatin-i-am-afraid/">I Am Afraid</a>, as he was one of the major targets. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Association_of_Proletarian_Writers">Russian Association of Proletarian Writers</a>, a group claiming (with only partial accuracy) to represent the Party, imposed a dictatorial local rule on literature in the 1920s. It gave Zamyatin a relentless bashing – particularly after parts of We were published (perhaps without Zamyatin’s knowledge) in bourgeois Czechoslovakia. </p>
<p>This was the context of Zamyatin’s famous <a href="https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1929-2/proletarian-writers/proletarian-writers-texts/zamiatins-letter-to-stalin/">letter to Stalin</a> in 1931. Stalin was already looking more like the Benefactor than Lenin had ever done, but he occasionally intervened to protect writers who were the Association’s victims. Zamyatin asked permission to go abroad with his wife because he was unable to work in the “atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year”. He named, in particular, the Association’s Leningrad branch and the weekly literary journal it controlled. </p>
<p>Zamyatin phrased the request to leave, which Stalin approved, as a temporary one. He left open “the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men”. </p>
<p>In fact, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers was dissolved by government decree on Stalin’s initiative the next year. Zamyatin’s sometime patron, Maxim Gorky, who had departed for Europe earlier, returned to the Soviet Union. Zamyatin did not. </p>
<p>Perversely, although English was his best language and he was often called “the Englishman” in Russia, he went to France, a centre of Russian émigré culture, whose opinion-makers he anticipated would boycott him because of his Bolshevik past. </p>
<p>After some unhappy and lonely years, still a Soviet citizen, Zamyatin died of a heart attack in Paris in 1937 – the year of the Great Terror which, had he remained in the Soviet Union, would probably have killed him.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-stalins-great-terror-can-tell-us-about-russia-today-56842">What Stalin’s Great Terror can tell us about Russia today</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sheila Fitzpatrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Yevgeny Zamyatin was a born loner and instinctive satirist, whose usual response to collective enthusiasm was to dissent.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Professor of History at the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2206552024-01-24T19:06:29Z2024-01-24T19:06:29ZHow Dostoevsky overcame his gambling addiction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570509/original/file-20240121-27-zvcxdt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C4%2C3190%2C2045&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky – Vasily Perov (1872).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vasily_Perov_-_%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%82_%D0%A4.%D0%9C.%D0%94%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dostoevsky had to write <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gambler_and_Other_Stories/The_Gambler">The Gambler</a> in two months. He had no choice. He had accepted 3,000 roubles from a publisher named Stellovsky to keep his creditors at bay. If he failed to deliver a work of not less than ten printer’s sheets (160 pages) by November 1, 1866, Stellovsky would receive the rights and income for all of Dostoevsky’s previous and future work for nine years. </p>
<p>Dostoevsky broke off writing <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554">Crime and Punishment</a> to take on the seemingly insurmountable task of completing a novel in such a sort period of time. He drew on his experience of being addicted to gambling.</p>
<p>His gambling mania had first seized him in 1863 on a tour of Europe, where he developed a passion for roulette. Dostoevsky soon fell into a pattern of chasing his losses, telling himself that his fortunes would change and he would redeem himself: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>…one turn of the wheel, and all will be changed, and those very moralists will be the first (I am convinced of that) to come up to congratulate me with friendly jests. And they will not all turn away from me as they do now. But, hang them all! What am I now? Zero. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live again! There are still the makings of a man in me.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Boundless egoism</h2>
<p>In Crime and Punishment, an impoverished student named Rodion Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker with an axe. The reader follows his dialogue with himself until he confesses and seeks atonement for his actions. </p>
<p>In The Gambler, there is only a spiral downward with no landing point. Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for the family of a once wealthy general, initially shows no interest or desire to gamble. By the end, he is totally addicted to roulette. His character is transformed. From what Dostoevsky calls an aristocratic disinterest in winning (or losing), Alexi becomes a person with a plebeian willingness to lose his very last coin. </p>
<p>The “aristocratic” type gambles only for pure pleasure. The “plebeian” embraces the risk of gambling in the hope of changing his life – if only he can win big enough. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570510/original/file-20240121-15-3rmndw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The novel reminds the reader of what it is like to be drawn into a culture of gambling, where the first win at a roulette table (or in any form of gambling) is burned into one’s memory for ever. </p>
<p>The compulsive gambler holds on to the idea that continued gambling will, through improved skills, lead to proportionally higher rewards. But what takes hold in reality is the erroneous belief that they can develop an infallible gambling system, governed simply by the power of reason, which will allow them to conquer the ever-spinning roulette wheel. </p>
<p>Another trait evident in The Gambler is “boundless egoism” – this was <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/dostoyevsky-and-parricide#:%7E:text=Source%20Citation,%2C%2021%2C%20173%2D196.">Sigmund Freud’s</a> reading of Dostoevsky. As the gambler becomes addicted, he loses all sense of socially motivated feelings, such as sympathy for family members or friends. </p>
<p>For Alexi, an emotional numbness prevails: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am living, of course, in continual anxiety. I play for the tiniest stakes, and I keep waiting for something, calculating, standing for whole days at the gambling table and watching the play; I even dream of playing – but I feel that in all this, I have, as it were, grown stiff and wooden, as though I had sunk into a muddy swamp. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a heartfelt description of the internal experience of fear, hope, defeat and entrapment. Alexei reflects on where he is in life: his hopes and dreams, the “whole days” spent stuck in one spot “watching the play”. He loses all desire for Polina, his romantic interest at the start of the novel. He has “grown stiff” and “stuck”, despite the love, comfort and connection she might provide.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/crime-and-punishment-is-150-and-its-politics-are-more-relevant-than-ever-69259">Crime and Punishment is 150 – and its politics are more relevant than ever</a>
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<h2>Addiction and revelation</h2>
<p>The treatment of gambling addiction is not a topic in The Gambler – only Alexi’s tragic fall from grace. But without psychiatric knowledge, or perhaps in spite of his personal awareness of what he was describing at the time, Dostoevsky tapped into the raw experience of gambling and the issue of how to understand gambling addiction.</p>
<p>Our understanding of gambling addiction is still evolving. Treatments are being explored and developed. From 1980, the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14459795.2019.1638432">American Psychiatric Association</a> included compulsive gambling in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a form of impulse control disorder, alongside kleptomania and pyromania. </p>
<p>In 2013, gambling was reclassified as gambling disorder, within the substance-related and addictive disorders categorisation. This marked, among other things, a turn towards the investigation and use of pharmaceutical treatments, such as <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00206/full">dopamine</a>, to control the gambling impulse. It is noteworthy, that online gambling or gaming is not classified in this space. </p>
<p>So how does one overcome these challenges when knowledge, while no longer in its infancy, is still expanding? </p>
<p>Dostoevsky offers a potentially valuable example of how one moment or a chance happening can change everything. It might sound counterintuitive to wait for such an event in a modern world such as ours, where advice from professionals or the internet is close to hand, but those cured of gambling addictions have often emphasised the role of chance or sudden revelation in their rehabilitation. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/570538/original/file-20240122-27-va5mdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevsky, née Snitkin (1871).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Dostoyevskaya_in_1871.jpg">Public domain</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eight days after having completed The Gambler, Dostoevsky proposed marriage to his stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkin. She accepted and they soon went abroad for a number of years. During this period, Dostoevsky gambled heavily, often pawning their belongings so he could gamble further. He would travel ahead to a town or resort with gaming tables, then write letters back to Anna chastising himself for losing all their money. </p>
<p>Anna believed Dostoevsky needed gambling as a kind of cathartic, physiological release from his daily frustrations. She felt it cleared his mind to concentrate on his writing. By all accounts, she was unsuccessful in reversing the gambling tendency in Dostoevsky. As with most gambling addicts, Dostoevsky oscillated between confessions to his wife, hope for forgiveness, and promises it will not happen again – promises he would then break. </p>
<p>But then, in a letter to Anna in 1871, he shares a life changing epiphany: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>By half past nine I had lost everything and I fled like a madman. I felt so miserable that I rushed to see the priest (don’t get upset, I did not see him, no, I did not, nor do I intend to!) […] But I lost my way in this town and when I reached a church, which I took for a Russian church, they told me in a store that it was not Russian but a synagogue. It was as if someone had poured cold water over me. I ran back home. And now it is midnight and I am sitting and writing to you.</p>
<p>A great thing has happened to me: I have rid myself of the abominable delusion that has tormented me for almost 10 years. For 10 years (or, to be more precise, ever since my brother’s death, when I suddenly found myself weighted down by debts) I dreamed about winning money. I dreamt of it seriously, passionately. But now it is all over! This was the very last time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so it was. Dostoevsky lost all interest in gambling for good. He no longer dreamed of winning. The delusion that he might win enough to transform his life had left him as easily as it had arrived. The change in his character was permanent. </p>
<p>The key moment, with its many spiritual echoes was: “it was as if someone had poured cold water over me”. Worthy of comment, too, is his inability to access the familiarity and reassurance of the Russian Orthodox church. Disoriented, he arrives instead a Jewish synagogue. Arguably, it was this strangeness that made him uneasy and vulnerable to an experience, spiritual or otherwise, that had a lasting effect on his view of gambling and its personal consequences. </p>
<p>There is, however, another account that does not quite line up with the timeline of his cure – one that is less mysterious, but of interest nonetheless. </p>
<p>Gambling had been for Dostoevsky a “kind of obsession”, an experience defined by the thrill of “half-hanging over an abyss so as to peer into its very depths and – in certain, though not frequent cases – flinging oneself headlong into it”.</p>
<p>In 1871, Dostoevsky went abroad to Ems for a cure. He had a bronchial condition, the first symptoms of which had appeared as early as 1868. Could it be that his abandonment of gambling was related to his not being able to endure the excitement of gambling? His health had deteriorated to such an extent that he lacked the necessary physical strength; it was physiologically too much for him. Perhaps physical incapacity had a hand in his cure?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/220655/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephen Dobson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dostoevsky’s sudden recovery from his gambling mania is an example of how a chance happening can change everythingStephen Dobson, Professor and Dean of Education and the Arts, CQUniversity AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2102892023-08-28T20:03:51Z2023-08-28T20:03:51ZHow Russian history and the concept of ‘smuta’ (turmoil) sheds light on Putin and Prigozhin – and the dangers of dissent<p>In Russia, failed coups portend turmoil and collapse. They also herald greater repression, and a tightening of centralised control. This is because Russian history has swung back and forth between chaos and autocracy, which have become mutually reinforcing symptoms of the same historical condition. </p>
<p>Russians have a word for the periods of turmoil: <em>smuta</em>.</p>
<p>Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has come to symbolise a new cycle of this history taking place in Russia today. While the fallout from his aborted mutiny in June and <a href="https://theconversation.com/wagner-chief-prigozhin-reportedly-killed-but-has-putin-cooked-his-own-goose-212180">recent death</a> remains uncertain, it is possible to see these events as the reverberations of a centuries-old power system grinding forward into new terrain.</p>
<p>Prigozhin’s mutiny had similarities with other failed uprisings in Russian history, from the <a href="https://thesimonscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/IAJ-10-3-2019-pg21-32.p">Decembrist revolt in 1825</a>, to <a href="https://web.mit.edu/russia1917/papers/0825-KornilovAffair.pdf">Lavr Kornilov’s march on St Petersburg in 1917</a>, to the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/20/communist-hardliners-stage-coup-against-gorbachev-russia-1991">attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev by Communist Party hardliners in 1991</a>. </p>
<p>These comparisons led some to warn of growing political instability in Russia, on the grounds that Prigozhin was less a threat to Putin’s rule than a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/04/wagner-group-mutiny-putin-prigozhin-russia">manifestation of its essential fragility</a>. Others have argued, in the aftermath of Prigozhin’s death, that the rebellion has provided Putin with an opportunity to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/24/the-guardian-view-on-prigozhins-fate-putin-couldnt-trust-him-and-didnt-need-him">consolidate his authority</a>.</p>
<p>Whether or not Prigozhin may have exposed Putin’s vulnerabilities, history suggests that what is to come could well be worse. “As Russians know only too well,” Russian author <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-literature-books-ukraine-war-dostoyevsky-nabokov/670928/">Mikhail Shishkin warns</a>, “one should not wish death on a bad tsar. For who knows what the next one will be like?”</p>
<p>To understand this maxim, one needs to understand Russia’s history and its underlying power dynamics. On the morning of Prigozhin’s rebellion, Putin referred to the <em>smuta</em> in a <a href="http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71528">national address</a>. Prigohzin, he said, was attempting to “create internal turmoil” and “split and weaken the country, which is now confronting a colossal external threat, unprecedented pressure from outside”.</p>
<p>There was not a single Russian who wouldn’t have understood the fearsome double meaning of “turmoil” (the literal translation of <em>smuta</em>) and the existential threat to the Russian nation it evoked.</p>
<p>By referencing the <em>smuta</em> Putin was reminding Russians of the profound dangers of dissent – and of his mandate to suppress it.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-is-unlikely-ever-to-return-to-the-russian-empire-in-a-new-book-mark-edele-unpacks-whats-at-stake-in-a-bloody-war-211497">'Ukraine is unlikely ever to return to the Russian Empire': in a new book, Mark Edele unpacks what's at stake in a bloody war</a>
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<h2>The gathering of the lands</h2>
<p>The origins of this historical syndrome can be traced back to Ivan IV, better known as <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DFC46740A994E5BCEF3A2B1E472CE792/9781139054102c10_p240-263_CBO.pdf/ivan_iv_15331584.pdf">Ivan the Terrible</a>, who in the 16th century transformed Russia from a loosely connected group of medieval states into the foundations of a modern empire. </p>
<p>Upon taking power in 1533, Ivan embarked on a brutal and bloody campaign to consolidate his rule over Russian territories. The campaign, begun under his predecessor Ivan III (“<a href="https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=bergen&book=russia&story=ivan3">Ivan the Great</a>”), is known as the “<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/gathering-of-the-Russian-lands">Gathering of the Lands</a>”. </p>
<p>This is another core theme of the Russian cultural tradition. </p>
<p>Ivan the Terrible’s subjugation of rival principalities enabled his expansion eastwards into the Siberian steppe. Under the guise of protecting the Orthodox lands from its Muslim and Catholic foes, he razed any site, inside or outside his realm, with the potential for independent power. Most famously, he <a href="https://historycollection.com/day-history-ivan-terrible-orders-massacre-novgorod-1570/">decimated the ancient Russian city of Novgorod</a>, whose advanced culture and commercial vitality represented a challenge to Muscovy’s hegemony. </p>
<p>Ivan’s expansionism was driven by the recognition, in the wake of the Mongol invasions and the rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire, that Russia’s lack of natural frontiers exposed it to foreign threats. Ever since, Russian leaders have perpetuated the <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2022/regathering-the-russian-lands/">idea that Russia must dominate its peripheral lands</a> as a defensive act of national survival.</p>
<p>Ivan also subordinated Russia’s nobility, terrorising them with the help of his caste of personal henchmen, the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.2753/RSH1061-198324010262"><em>oprichniki</em></a> – before eventually turning on them as well. The terror he wrought on his people, economy and lands through years of war and repression sowed the seeds for the <em>smuta</em> to come. </p>
<p>In the years before his death, Ivan grew isolated and paranoid. When he murdered his favourite son and only viable heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in a manic fit of rage, he created a succession crisis.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on November 16, 1581 – Ilya Repin (1885).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Boris Godunov</h2>
<p>In 1825, just months before the revolt of the Decembrists against Tsar Nicholas I was suppressed, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexander-pushkin">Alexander Pushkin</a> – “<a href="https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2016/06/a-full-circle-around-shakespeare.html">Russia’s Shakespeare</a>” – wrote a historical play about a period of political intrigue and upheaval in Russia similar to the one unfolding around him. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5089/5089-h/5089-h.htm">Boris Godunov</a> was inspired by a period of crisis that forms the bedrock of Russia’s national mythology. At the centre of the play’s dramatic events is the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/650308.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A4d7f64fbf2bd9447476700ca9c397369&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1"><em>samozvanets</em></a>, or “pretender-tsar”, a recurring figure in Russian history. </p>
<p>The <em>samozvanets</em> historically appears during periods of upheaval or dynastic uncertainty as a challenger to the Russian throne. In many ways, Prigozhin was a modern iteration of this Russian historical figure. </p>
<p>Pushkin’s play tells the story of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/3DF14EF505FA803B1A5548B6B44F31E9/9781139054102c11_p264-285_CBO.pdf/fedor_ivanovich_and_boris_godunov_15841605.pdf">Boris Godunov</a>, a Russian nobleman who came to power at the end of the 16th century during the “<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/40761D949BD0F37F53394601AB545D23/9781139054102c18_p409-432_CBO.pdf/time_of_troubles_16031613.pdf">Time of Troubles</a>”, the first period of <em>smuta</em> – a succession crisis that began in 1598 with the death of Tsar Fyodor I, the last of Russia’s founding Rurikid dynasty. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=728&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544453/original/file-20230824-17-cympvs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=915&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alexander Pushkin – Vasily Andreevich Tropinin (1827).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Fyodor’s reign had been marred by his incompetence, which exacerbated the power struggles that began after the death of his father, Ivan the Terrible. When Fyodor died childless with no appointed heir, his brother-in-law Boris seized the throne, becoming Russia’s first non-Rurikid Tsar. </p>
<p>As the play implies, Boris had been plotting his ascent to power for years. Despite his desire to restore order to Russia, his reign was beset by famine, financial instability and civil unrest. He struggled to maintain control. </p>
<p>Even worse: rumours grew of Boris’s involvement in the mysterious death of Fyodor’s younger brother and heir apparent Dmitry several years earlier, fomenting doubts about Boris’s legitimacy as Tsar.</p>
<p>Amid this period of turmoil, an opportunistic young priest named Grigory Otrepyev posed as the dead Dmitry and amassed a grassroots following on the pretence of being the true Rurikid heir. Garnering support from the Polish nobility, who were keen to exploit Russian factionalism, Otrepyev (who is now known by the sobriquet “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2697492.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A34ca27972db2a1e66e0547fa324ed603&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1">False Dmitry</a>”) advanced on Moscow in 1604, flanked by the Polish army and ordinary Russians compelled to fight for the man they believed to be the only legitimate Tsar. </p>
<p>Pushkin’s play ends as Boris, haggard in the face of increasing dissent, dies as a result of foul play.</p>
<h2><em>Smuta</em></h2>
<p>The political crisis that followed the events depicted in Pushkin’s play has become deeply embedded in the Russian consciousness. </p>
<p>Otrepyev was crowned Tsar Dmitry I, but his reign lasted less than a year. Over the following eight years a brutal struggle for sovereignty took hold. Waves of new False Dmitrys emerged, each making claims to throne. </p>
<p>The crown changed hands numerous times through a series of bloody coups. The country descended deeper into civil war. At the height of this breakdown of central authority, the unthinkable happened: a Polish king, <a href="https://tvpworld.com/64226840/on-this-day-in-1611-russian-tsar-kneeled-before-polish-king">Sigismund III Vasa</a> – a Catholic – occupied the Russian throne.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544458/original/file-20230824-21-4m331x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grigory Otrepyev, aka ‘False Dmitriy’ (1606).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With the shared mission, finally, to unite against their common foe and defend the Orthodox faith, the Russians expelled the Poles in 1612. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4210028.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3Ac4634d3ae2dda368d8d0c6c163d73683&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1">Mikhail Romanov was crowned Tsar</a> the following year. The <em>smuta</em> thus ended with the founding of a new autocratic bloodline that would rule and expand the Russian Empire for the next 300 years.</p>
<p>From the collective trauma of this experience came the notion that questioning the political legitimacy of Russian leaders creates social strife and exposes Russia to foreign occupation. In the centuries since, this idea has coalesced into a national myth. It has been used to justify the absolutism and revanchism of Russian leaders from Tsars through to Soviet Commissars and modern-day politicians. </p>
<h2>Divine right</h2>
<p>Russian Tsars were legitimised by the myth of divine right, meaning their power and authority as “<a href="https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/stable/pdf/2847182.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A3c849fc7aa9b5fe6724548d300de4fd1&ab_segments=&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1">Guardian of Holy Russia</a>” was derived from God, rather than the Russian people. This placed them beyond political accountability.</p>
<p>Soviet leaders, outwardly atheist, exercised a similar prerogative. The General Secretary of the Communist Party was vested by the laws of History to lead Russians and their Soviet comrades along the true path to their glorious future. This, too, placed Soviet leaders above political accountability. </p>
<p>When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he instituted the policies of <em>glasnost</em> (“openness”) and <em>perestroika</em> (“restructuring”), both of which introduced real politics into the Russian system. These changes gave Russians previously unthinkable levels of freedom. It created the possibility – for the very first time – to elect a government accountable to the people. </p>
<p>Yet after centuries of paternalism, Russians had very little experience with democracy and civic participation. Gorbachev’s reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the ruins, Boris Yeltsin built the corrupt foundations of the current political system.</p>
<p>For the past 23 years under Putin – a man described by Russia’s Orthodox patriarch as <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-russia-putin-religion-idUKTRE81722Y20120208">God’s earthly representative</a> – the pious impetus has returned to Russian politics. Putin has made it his spiritual mission to shield Russia from the chaos of democratic and liberal freedoms. He has also invoked religion as a <a href="https://time.com/6167332/putin-russian-orthodox-church-war-ukraine/">pretext for invading Ukraine</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/today-is-not-my-day-how-russias-journalists-writers-and-artists-are-turning-silence-into-speech-185120">'Today is not my day': how Russia's journalists, writers and artists are turning silence into speech</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The roots of Russian silence</h2>
<p>When Putin took power from Yeltsin after the <a href="https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/russia-a-short-history-of-failed-coups/"><em>smuta</em> of the 1990s</a>, he was not merely a new proponent of Russia’s historical syndrome, but a new symptom. He promised to restore order and stability in Russia after years of lawlessness and anomie. All he asked for in return was “unity”, which in Russian is a byword for passivity and acquiescence.</p>
<p>The backbone of Putin’s enduring popular domestic support is that this restoration of order has been achieved. The fact it has come at the cost of human rights, freedoms – and lives – was merely a small price to pay. </p>
<p>The passivity of the Russian people often baffles the Western world, particularly in response to the war in Ukraine, which is being waged in their name. But as <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russian-literature-books-ukraine-war-dostoyevsky-nabokov/670928/">Shishkin writes</a>, “quiescence has been the survival strategy of Russians for centuries”. </p>
<p>Pushkin describes the <em>narod</em> – the Russian people – as “obedient to the suggestion of the moment, deaf and indifferent to the actual truth, a beast that feeds upon fables”. They are portrayed in his play as a rabble that is roused by False Dmitry. It is not long before they demand Boris Gudanov’s death, along with that of his innocent wife and young son. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=743&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544454/original/file-20230824-32559-ka1ekn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boris Godunov (1552-1605).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Public domain</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the last lines of Boris Godunov, when faced with the shocking fruits of their cause, Pushkin writes that “the people are silent with horror”. When they are called on to cry out in support of the pretender they sanctioned, “the people remain speechless”. </p>
<p>This silence is best understood as passive complicity. It represents the horror of what is taking place in the <em>narod’s</em> name, but also their resignation. They tolerate the situation: their silence is equivalent to looking away.</p>
<p>“The persistence of autocracy in Russia,” the historian <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/story-of-russia-9781526631671/">Orlando Figes has observed</a>, “is explained less by the state’s strength than by the weakness of society.” This dynamic has shaped, and continues to shape, the course of Russian history. </p>
<p>Legitimacy, in Russia, comes from maintaining order and control, not from being democratically accountable. The face of the system may change, but never its underlying patterns, structures or forms. “The principle of Russian power hasn’t even remotely changed in the last five centuries,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladimir-putin-russia-ukraine-power">wrote Vladimir Sorokin</a> three days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “I consider this to be our country’s main tragedy.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=775&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/544459/original/file-20230824-17-j2xtmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=974&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vladimir Sorokin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Haemmerli/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Autocratic culture reproduces itself in the sociopolitical structures of the modern Russian state, but also in the mentality of its people. The truth is that the Russian ruler’s <a href="https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1987-801-15-Dallin.pdf">prerogative as <em>tsar-batiushka</em></a> or “Father Tsar” can only hold sway over an acquiescent, even infantilised realm.</p>
<p>Prigozhin’s mutiny will only cement Putin’s – or his successor’s – autocratic prerogative. As <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hannah-arendt-the-origins-of-totalitarianism">Hannah Arendt argued</a>, authoritarian regimes hold out the carrot of stability, while constantly manufacturing the threat of instability. It is a self-perpetuating system. Chaos provides the impetus for autocratically imposed unity.</p>
<p>We don’t know who might eventually succeed Putin, but history suggests the next leader is unlikely to be liberal or democratic. </p>
<p>An old question arises: will the Russian people remain silent?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Danica Jenkins does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The connection between periods of crisis and autocratic rule is deeply embedded in the Russian consciousness.Danica Jenkins, Postdoctoral Teaching and Research Fellow, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1799322022-04-06T12:25:41Z2022-04-06T12:25:41ZHow should Dostoevsky and Tolstoy be read during Russia’s war against Ukraine?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456171/original/file-20220404-15-noq6es.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=73%2C258%2C2510%2C1656&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A statue of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy in Moscow.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/man-jogs-past-a-monument-to-russian-writer-leo-tolstoy-news-photo/1237069295?adppopup=true">Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As someone who teaches Russian literature, I can’t help but process the world through the country’s novels, stories, poems and plays, even at a time when <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1086282867/a-russian-pianists-shows-are-canceled-even-though-he-condemns-the-war-in-ukraine">Russian cultural productions are being canceled around the world</a>. </p>
<p>With the Russian army <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-atrocities.html">perpetrating devastating violence in Ukraine</a> – which includes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-civilian-deaths.html">the slaughter of civilians in Bucha</a> – the discussion of what to do with Russian literature has naturally arisen.</p>
<p>I’m not worried that truly valuable art can ever be canceled. Enduring works of literature are enduring, in part, because they are capacious enough to be read critically against the vicissitudes of the present.</p>
<p>You could make this argument about any great work of Russian literature, <a href="https://slavic.ku.edu/ani-kokobobo">but as a scholar of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, I will stick with Russia’s most famous literary exports.</p>
<p>After World War II, German critic Theodore Adorno described the Holocaust as a profound blow to Western culture and philosophy, even going so far <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Can_One_Live_After_Auschwitz/nMd67tJAwuEC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Theodore+Adorno,+Can+One+Live+After+Auschwitz%3F:+A+Philosophical+Reader,&printsec=frontcover">as to question</a> the very ability of human beings to “live after Auschwitz.” </p>
<p>This idea, born of the very specific context of the Holocaust, shouldn’t be haphazardly applied to the present moment. But following Adorno’s moral lead, I wonder whether – after the brutal shelling of the city of Mariupol, after the horrors on the streets of Bucha, along with atrocities committed in Kharkiv, Mykolaev, Kyiv and many more – the indiscriminate violence ought to change how readers approach Russia’s great authors. </p>
<h2>Confronting suffering with clear eyes</h2>
<p>Upon learning that Russian writer <a href="https://www.neh.gov/article/ivan-turgenev-was-distrusted-left-and-right">Ivan Turgenev</a> had looked away at the last minute when witnessing the execution of a man, Dostoevsky <a href="http://dostoevskiy-lit.ru/dostoevskiy/pisma-dostoevskogo/dostoevskij-strahovu-11-23-iyunya-1870.htm?fbclid=IwAR2ESTC-fe_znD0yqCgAcc9l3O311MHksjzoUZyG60qSzB7x2qZELV7BC4s">made his own position clear</a>: “[A] human being living on the surface of the earth has no right to turn away and ignore what is happening on earth, and there are higher moral imperatives for this.” </p>
<p>Seeing the rubble of a theater in Mariupol, hearing of Mariupol citizens starving because of Russian <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/world/europe/mariupol-ukraine-russia-war-food-water.html">airstrikes</a>, I wonder what Dostoevsky – who specifically focused his piercing moral eye on the question of the <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/brothers-karamazov/oclc/319669">suffering of children</a> in his 1880 novel “The Brothers Karamazov” – would say in response to the Russian army’s bombing a theater where children were sheltering. The word “children” <a href="https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/03/17/mariupol-ukraine-children-russia">was spelled out</a> on the pavement outside the theater in large type so it could be seen from the sky. There was no misunderstanding of who was there. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Vintage photograph of man with beard seated." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456207/original/file-20220404-24-r4aqce.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People have ‘no right to turn away and ignore what is happening on earth,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fyodor-dostoevsky-russian-novelist-c1860-c1881-dostoevsky-news-photo/464426915?adppopup=true">Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ivan Karamazov, the central protagonist in “The Brothers Karamazov,” is far more focused on questions of moral accountability than Christian acceptance or forgiveness and reconciliation. In conversation, Ivan routinely brings up examples of children’s being harmed, imploring the other characters to recognize the atrocities in their midst. He is determined to seek retribution.</p>
<p>Surely the intentional shelling of children in Mariupol is something Dostoevsky couldn’t possibly look away from either. Could he possibly defend a vision of Russian morality while seeing innocent civilians – men, women and children – lying on the streets of Bucha? </p>
<p>At the same time, nor should readers look away from the unseemliness of Dostoevsky and his sense of <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/dostoevsky-in-context/DC34ECA1110F3078AF95872B9C8BF95B">Russian exceptionalism</a>. These dogmatic ideas about Russian greatness and Russia’s messianic mission are connected to the broader ideology that has fueled Russia’s past colonial mission, and current Russian foreign politics on violent display in Ukraine.</p>
<p>Yet Dostoevsky was also a great humanist thinker who tied this vision of Russian greatness to Russian suffering and faith. Seeing the spiritual value of human suffering was perhaps a natural outcome for a man <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/31/books/how-siberia-concentrated-his-mind.html">sent to a labor camp in Siberia for five years</a> for simply participating in a glorified socialist book club. Dostoevsky grew out of his suffering, but, arguably, not to a place where he could accept state-sponsored terror.</p>
<p>Would an author who, in his 1866 novel “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/42242/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevsky/">Crime and Punishment</a>,” explains in excruciating detail the toll of murder on the murderer – who explains that when someone takes a life, they kill part of themselves – possibly accept Putin’s vision of Russia? Warts and all, would Russia’s greatest metaphysical rebel have recoiled and rebelled against Russian violence in Ukraine? </p>
<p>I hope that he would, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/05/eminent-writers-urge-russian-speakers-to-tell-truth-of-war-in-ukraine">many contemporary Russian writers have</a>. But the dogmas of the Kremlin are pervasive, <a href="https://twitter.com/bopanc/status/1510950346742509570">and many Russians accept them</a>. Many Russians look away. </p>
<h2>Tolstoy’s path to pacifism</h2>
<p>No writer captures warfare in Russia more poignantly than Tolstoy, a former soldier turned Russia’s most famous pacifist. In his last work, “<a href="https://www.swarthmore.edu/muslim-russia/leo-tolstoys-hadji-murat">Hadji Murat</a>,” which scrutinizes Russia’s <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/From_Conquest_to_Deportation/O19gDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Russia+north+caucasus+empire&printsec=frontcover">colonial exploits</a> in North Caucasus, Tolstoy showed how senseless Russian violence toward a Chechen village caused instant hatred of Russians.</p>
<p>Tolstoy’s greatest work about Russian warfare, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/208646/war-and-peace-by-leo-tolstoy-a-new-translation-by-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky/">War and Peace</a>,” is a novel that Russians have <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300198164/leningrad-blockade-1941-1944/">traditionally read</a> during great wars, including World War II. In “War and Peace,” Tolstoy contends that the morale of the Russian military is the key to victory. The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, in which soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their home.</p>
<p>Even then, he’s able to convey the harrowing experiences of young Russian soldiers coming into direct confrontation with the instruments of death and destruction on the battlefield. They disappear into the crowd of their battalion, but even a single loss is devastating for the families awaiting their safe return.</p>
<p>After publishing “War and Peace,” Tolstoy publicly denounced many Russian military campaigns. The last part of his 1878 novel “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm">Anna Karenina</a>” originally <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Architecture_of_Anna_Karenina/7ihRwQ7Q9AYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=part+eight+Anna+Karenina+katkov&pg=PA30&printsec=frontcover">wasn’t published</a> because it criticized Russia’s actions in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Russo-Turkish-wars">the Russo-Turkish war</a>. Tolstoy’s alter ego in that novel, Konstantin Levin, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Anna_Karenina/W4r7lF_MSMYC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22The+people+sacrifice+and+are+always+prepared+to+sacrifice+themselves+for+their+soul,+not+for+murder,%22&pg=PT924&printsec=frontcover">calls</a> the Russian intervention in the war “murder” and thinks it is inappropriate that Russian people are dragged into it.</p>
<p>“The people sacrifice and are always prepared to sacrifice themselves for their soul, not for murder,” he says. </p>
<p>In 1904, Tolstoy penned a public letter denouncing <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-russo-japanese-war">the Russo-Japanese War</a>, which <a href="https://institutedd.org/blog/posts/echoes-of-the-past-ukraine-the-russo-japanese-war-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-21">has sometimes been compared</a> with Russia’s war in Ukraine.</p>
<p>“Again war,” he wrote. “Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.” One can almost hear him shouting “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27189/27189-h/27189-h.htm">Bethink Yourselves</a>,” the title of that essay, to his countrymen now. </p>
<p>In one of his most famous pacifist writings, 1900’s “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/tolstoy/1900/thou-shalt-not-kill.html">Thou Shalt Not Kill</a>,” Tolstoy presciently diagnosed the problem of today’s Russia. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The misery of nations is caused not by particular persons, but by the particular order of Society under which the people are so bound up together that they find themselves all in the power of a few men, or more often in the power of one single man: a man so perverted by his unnatural position as arbiter of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers more or less from a mania of self-aggrandizement.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The importance of action</h2>
<p>If Dostoevsky would insist that one not look away, it is fair to say that Tolstoy would contend that people must act upon what they see.</p>
<p>During the <a href="http://people.loyno.edu/%7Ehistory/journal/1994-5/Lilly.htm">Russian famine</a> of 1891 to 1892, he <a href="https://press.uottawa.ca/leo-tolstoy-in-conversation.html">started soup kitchens</a> to help his countrymen who were starving and had been abandoned by the Russian government. He worked to help Russian soldiers evade the draft in the Russian empire, visiting and supporting jailed soldiers who did not wish to fight. In 1899 he sold his last novel, “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1938/1938-h/1938-h.htm">Resurrection</a>,” to <a href="https://press.uottawa.ca/leo-tolstoy-and-the-canadian-doukhobors.html">help a Russian Christian sect</a>, the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dukhobor">Doukhobors</a>, emigrate to Canada so they would not need to fight in the Russian army.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Man hunches over group of children, patting one on the back." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/456195/original/file-20220404-16429-qqn7t5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy worked tirelessly to alleviate poverty and protest war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/leo-tolstoy-with-village-children-russian-writer-1828-1910-news-photo/588181320?adppopup=true">Culture Club/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These writers have little to do with the current war. They cannot expunge or mitigate the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine. But they’re embedded on some level within the Russian cultural fabric, and how their books are still read matters. Not because Russian literature can explain any of what is happening, because it cannot. But because, as Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan <a href="https://www.eurozine.com/rockets-and-russian-culture/">wrote in March 2022</a>, Russia’s war in Ukraine marked a defeat for Russia’s great humanist tradition.</p>
<p>As this culture copes with a Russian army that has indiscriminately bombed and massacred Ukrainians, Russia’s great authors can and should be read critically, with one urgent question in mind: how to stop the violence. Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny <a href="https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1503801236881133575?s=20&t=haDdXcQUdGCP9K-rXMIWnw">noted</a> during his <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/ce56e0bc-8d5b-4b67-9c4c-354458c31540">March 2022 trial</a> that Tolstoy urged his countrymen to fight both despotism and war because one enables the other.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1503801236881133575"}"></div></p>
<p>And Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze cited “War and Peace” in a February 2022 entry in <a href="http://www.alevtinakakhidze.com/drawings.html">her graphic diary</a>. </p>
<p>“I’ve read your f—ing literature,” she wrote. “But looks like Putin did not, and you have forgotten.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179932/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ani Kokobobo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If Dostoevsky insists that one cannot shy away from horror and tragedy, Tolstoy would contend that people must act upon what they see.Ani Kokobobo, Associate Professor of Russian Literature, University of KansasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1528072021-01-13T13:19:49Z2021-01-13T13:19:49ZDostoevsky warned of the strain of nihilism that infects Donald Trump and his movement<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378325/original/file-20210112-15-1ub4o6q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C272%2C4802%2C2987&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Trump supporter climbs scaffolding in an effort to breach the U.S. Capitol.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trump-supporters-clash-with-police-and-security-forces-news-photo/1230454041?adppopup=true">Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Nihilism was notably cited during U.S. Senate deliberations after rioting Trump supporters had been cleared from the Capitol. </p>
<p>“Don’t let nihilists become your drug dealers,” <a href="https://www.sasse.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/1/sasse-america-can-t-do-big-things-if-we-hate-our-neighbors">exhorted</a> Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse. “There are some who want to burn it all down. … Don’t let them be your prophets.”</p>
<p>How else to describe the incendiary rhetoric and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/12/12/trump-grievance-addiction-444570">grievances</a> that Donald Trump has peddled since November? What else to call the denial of the electorate’s will and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/outlook/siskind-list-trump-norms/">his deep disdain for American institutions and traditions</a>?</p>
<p>In 2016, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-dostoevsky-predicted-trumps-america-63799">I wrote</a> about how Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had, in his work, explored what happens to society when people who rise to power lack any semblance of ideological or moral convictions and view society as bereft of meaning. I saw eerie similarities with Trump’s actions and rhetoric on the campaign trail.</p>
<p>Fast-forward four years, and I believe the warnings of Dostoevsky – particularly in his most most political novel, “<a href="https://tinyurl.com/y3nsukvt">Demons</a>,” published in 1872 – hold truer than ever.</p>
<p>Although set in a sleepy provincial Russian town, “Demons” serves as a broader allegory for how thirst for power in some people, combined with the indifference and disavowal of responsibility by others, amount to a devastating nihilism that consumes society, fostering chaos and costing lives. </p>
<h2>Power for power’s sake</h2>
<p>Before “Demons,” Dostoevsky had been writing a novel about faith, “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57050/57050-h/57050-h.htm">The Life of a Great Sinner</a>.”</p>
<p>But then a disturbing public trial spurred him in a more overtly political direction. A young student had been murdered by members of a revolutionary group, The Organization of the People’s Vengeance, <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sergey_Nechayev">at the behest of their leader</a>, Sergei Nechaev. </p>
<p>Dostoevsky was appalled that politics could be dehumanizing to the point of murder. His focus turned not only to moral questions but also to political demagoguery, which, he argued, if left unchecked, could result in devastating loss of life. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Sporting a beard, Dostoyevsky stares solemnly into the camera." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=812&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378324/original/file-20210112-21-1wyxfr6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1020&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky from around the time he wrote ‘Demons.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fyodor-m-dostoyevsky-russian-author-ca-1870-news-photo/526189050?adppopup=true">adoc-photos/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The result was “Demons.” It featured two protagonists: Pyotr Verkhovensky, a former student with no political convictions beyond a lust for power, and Nikolai Stavrogin, a man so morally numb and emotionally detached that he is incapable of purposeful action and stands idly by as violence engulfs his society. </p>
<p>Through these two figures, Dostoevsky tells a broader story about the many flavors of nihilism. Pyotr infiltrates the town’s local social circles, recruits a group of disciples to a revolutionary group and spins lies to band them together so they may do his bidding. Pretending to lead a broad movement of international socialism, Pyotr manipulates those around him into committing violent acts and insurrection against the local government. As a result, one woman is crushed by a mob, a mother and her baby die from chaos and neglect and a fire breaks out that kills multiple others.</p>
<p>Different townspeople espouse multiple and contradictory ideologies; none translates into purposeful action. Instead, they merely leave characters whiplashed and susceptible to being instrumentalized by Pyotor, the master manipulator.</p>
<h2>The allure of feeling something</h2>
<p>But Pyotr would not prevail without the nihilism of Stavrogin, a local nobleman. </p>
<p>Many townspeople see him as a leader with a strong moral compass. Throughout the novel, Pyotr seeks to loop Stavrogin into his quest for power by either doing him favors that corrupt him or hinting that he will install him as dictator once he successfully carries out a revolution. </p>
<p>On some level, Stavrogin knows better: He should be protecting the town and its people. He ultimately fails to do so, out of sheer despondence and because of the emotional appeal of chaos and violence have for him; they seem to jolt him out of the ennui he often appears to feel. </p>
<p>When given the chance to restrain and turn in to the authorities the escaped convict who perpetrates most of the violence in town, Stavrogin captures him only to eventually let him go. “Steal more, kill more,” he says to a criminal who has already admitted to killing and stealing. Later, when the political climate gets so heated that it seems an insurrection is imminent, he flees town. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A page covered in Dostoevsky's handwritten script, doodles and drawings." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C14%2C4695%2C3217&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378321/original/file-20210112-17-126efy9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A page from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s manuscript for ‘Demons.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-autograph-manuscript-of-a-page-of-the-roman-the-demons-news-photo/961438628?adppopup=true">Heritage Images via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In surrendering his responsibility to serve as a moral guardian, Stavrogin becomes complicit in Pyotr’s schemes. He ultimately kills himself – perhaps, in part, out of guilt for his passivity and moral indifference. </p>
<p>Among the two men, Pyotr is the authoritarian figure. And he cleverly insists that members of the revolutionary group break the law together, cementing a loyal brotherhood of criminality. </p>
<p>By contrast, Stavrogin is the novel’s empty center, idly standing by while Pyotr incites violence. </p>
<p>He doesn’t help Pyotr. But he doesn’t stop him, either. </p>
<h2>From nihilism to annihilation</h2>
<p>A range of nihilistic justifications – each successively hollower than the rest – seems to have shaped the violence at the U.S. Capitol.</p>
<p>The homegrown American insurrection lacked any sort of ideological foundation. Most ideas fueling it are negations of persons or facts. The immediate rallying cry of the insurrection was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-voter-trust/2020/12/20/00282aa6-407a-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html">the falsehood that the election was stolen</a>. Beyond denying the will of <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_election,_2020">over 80 million people</a> who voted for Joe Biden, this lie also qualifies not as an ideology, but as an absolute denial of truth. </p>
<p>Other ideas fomenting the insurrection – such as “America first” or “MAGA” and even white supremacy itself – are quintessentially founded on the denial of others, whether they are immigrants, foreign nationals or persons of color.</p>
<p>From what we have learned since, some of Trump’s supporters were even imploring him to “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55592332">cross the Rubicon</a>,” a reference to <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2017/03-04/julius-caesar-crossing-rubicon-rome/">Julius Caesar’s initiation of the civil war that eventually transformed Rome into a dictatorial empire</a>, expressing a longing to smash American systems and eviscerate the republic.</p>
<p>The only real purpose that seems to have brought the group together was devotion to Donald Trump, who strikes me as the arch-nihilist in all this, the Pyotr Verkhovensky of this American tragedy. Then there are the other public figures who should have known better, who might have helped stop it all, but couldn’t and didn’t. Some, like Stavrogin, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-republicans-greet-trumps-push-to-overturn-the-election-with-a-customary-response-silence/2020/11/20/91948292-2b52-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html">excused themselves and were silent for far too long</a>, as the lie about the election grew bigger and bigger. <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/09/hawley-cruz-2024-capitol-riots-456671">And others seemed to outright encourage the lie</a> through formalized objections in Congress last week. </p>
<p>Playacting at revolution at the behest of a man seeking to cling to power, the rioters ultimately only managed only to vandalize the building, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/us/who-died-in-capitol-building-attack.html">though they left five people dead in their wake</a>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, to act violently on the basis of such fictions – and to transgress against the humanity of others for nothing at all – is perhaps the most nihilistic act of them all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152807/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ani Kokobobo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What would happen, the Russian novelist wondered, when people lacking any semblance of ideological or moral convictions rise to power?Ani Kokobobo, Associate Professor of Russian Literature, University of KansasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/692592016-12-20T09:50:22Z2016-12-20T09:50:22ZCrime and Punishment is 150 – and its politics are more relevant than ever<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/150740/original/image-20161219-24271-zyu8v8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Fyodor Dostoyevsky.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>It is now 150 years since the publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/09/crime-and-punishment-by-fyodor-dostoevsky-book-review/">Crime and Punishment</a>. An incredibly influential novel, Crime and Punishment also has a particularly contemporary political significance.</p>
<p>The plot hinges on how, one summer’s day in St Petersurg, a penniless student, Rodion Raskolnikov, murders an old woman pawnbroker. He does it partly to prove an idea that he has written about: that exceptional people, like Napoleon, can be above the law. Besides, to him the pawnbroker is a “louse” whose murder will be a net benefit to society. But during the murder, the victim’s kind and vulnerable sister walks in. Raskolnikov kills her, too, without a second thought. The reader sees how Raskonikov has become desensitised and how his ideas (influenced by his reading of Hegel and Bentham) have unintended consequences. </p>
<p>Raskolnikov’s name means “split in two” or “schismatic”. His split personality inspired Stevenson’s story of Jekyll and Hyde. One of the first psychological novels, Crime and Punishment is also deeply political. It reflected a wave of reaction against economic liberalism, not unlike that which has occurred during 2016. Raskolnikov is shown to be a confused hybrid, both reflecting liberal thought and rebelling against it. </p>
<h2>Balzac and Dostoevsky</h2>
<p>Widespread disillusion with liberalism emerged in France during the <a href="http://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/chronology4.html">July Monarchy</a> (1830-48) of Louis Philippe, for whom liberalism meant the rule of the self-made rich. Liberalism became a <a href="http://4liberty.eu/laissez-faire-capitalismmanchesterism-truth-and-myths/">convenient scapegoat for social problems</a>, especially if it could be presented as an alien (Anglo-Saxon) import.</p>
<p>Balzac’s novels, especially Le Pere Goriot (1835), portrayed Paris under the July monarchy as mired in corruption, social climbing and materialism. The anti-liberal Balzac became an admirer of Russia. In his Lettre sur Kiew of 1847, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wyqQVA3nSaUC&pg=PA128&lpg=PA128&dq=balzac+anti+liberal&source=bl&ots=7ltbYLoMjB&sig=eoN8qxOHeJHDoUcmgZgfo-AiKjE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjp0beH1tXQAhXDJMAKHUk6DKwQ6AEIHjAB#v=onepage&q=balzac%20anti%20liberal&f=false">he praised</a> Russia’s absolute power and “so-called despotism” as preferable to France’s “mob rule”. Balzac’s influence <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1178">can be seen in the concepts and characters</a> of Crime and Punishment. And the anti-liberal message is even stronger.</p>
<p>Liberalism in Crime and Punishment is represented by its most negative character, the wealthy businessman, Luzhin (meaning “puddle”). When we meet him, he is arguing the case for what would now be called “<a href="https://www.thebalance.com/trickle-down-economics-theory-effect-does-it-work-3305572">trickledown economics</a>”. Luzhin seeks to marry Raskolnikov’s sister, taking advantage of the family’s genteel poverty. </p>
<p>The indignity of this proposal is, in Raskolnikov’s mind, the last straw that propels him towards murder (although the pawnbroker is in no way responsible). Later, Luzhin’s attempt to frame Sonya, Raskolnikov’s saint-like friend, as a thief, provides the dramatic climax of the novel – as if to make quite sure that the reader sees Luzhin, and what he represents, in the worst possible light.</p>
<p>Another powerfully negative character, Svidrigailov – the upper-class predatory libertine who represents the <a href="https://home.isi.org/dostoevsky-vs-marquis-de-sade">evil amorality of de Sade</a> – is given some redeeming features by Dostoevsky, but Luzhin is given none. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ge5E1YHUSSQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<h2>Identity politics</h2>
<p>Dostoevsky’s hostility to liberalism may have been irrational but he succeeds in depicting the social and psychological dislocation brought about by rapid economic change. Dostoevsky’s poor are drawn from the downwardly-mobile middle class whose deprivation is compounded by loss of status. </p>
<p>This recalls the fate of many in the years following the the decline and collapse of the Soviet Union but also those “left behind” English Brexiters or Mid-Western Trump voters who lost their livelihoods or social roles through economic globalisation from the 1980s onwards. </p>
<p>Dostoevsky also anticipates how the dislocation brought about by economic change leads to identity politics (whether of the right or left). Raskolnikov is finally redeemed, not by priests, but by Sonya’s preaching. Forced into prostitution by her stepmother, Sonya’s spiritual strength transcends her suffering and she symbolises “rootedness” in the people – <em>pochvennost</em> in Russian. </p>
<p>For Dostoevsky, religion is primarily <a href="http://ww2.d155.org/pr/tdirectory/RKautz/Shared%20Documents/Crime%20and%20Punishment%20%20%20The%20Theory%20and%20Life.pdf">about identity</a>. Crime and Punishment shows how those, like Raskolnikov, who are alienated or confused by liberal modernisation may take refuge in mystical nationalism or collectivism. It happened in Russia following the reforms of the 1990s and it may explain the upheavals in Western democracies during 2016.</p>
<h2>Russian psychology</h2>
<p>Crime and Punishment may also provide an insight into the psychology of Russia as a geopolitical player. As with Raskolnikov, there is currently much speculation about Russia’s real motives in its international relations. </p>
<p>The most likely explanation, for both, is wounded pride. Raskolnikov’s state of mind is influenced by his family’s loss of status and reduced circumstances. He sees them as vulnerable to predators like Luzhin and Svidrigailov. This recalls the parlous state of Russia and (for many) the sense of national humiliation during and after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. </p>
<p>Raskolnikov’s reaction to his humiliation is to step over the line to prove that he is exceptional, like Napoleon. The word for crime in Russian, <em>prestupleniye</em>, means “stepping over”. Whether or not the annexation of Crimea was a “crime”, it was without doubt the moment when Russia “stepped over”, as if reasserting its own version of <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/American_exceptionalism">American exceptionalism</a>.</p>
<p>Dostoevsky would no doubt have approved. His messianic nationalism was, <a href="https://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ecavitch/pdf-library/Freud_Dostoevsky_Parricide.pdf">as Freud put it</a>, “the weakness of this great personality … a position which lesser minds have reached with smaller effort”. But his depiction of the tensions between individual, community and modernity in Crime and Punishment cuts across political lines and has lost none of its insight or relevance.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69259/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adrian Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dostoevsky’s infamous novel reflected a wave of reaction against economic liberalism, not unlike that which has occurred during 2016.Adrian Campbell, Senior Lecturer in International Development, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/650902016-09-08T20:05:21Z2016-09-08T20:05:21ZFriday essay: Svetlana Alexeviech didn’t make it to the Royal Commission<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137010/original/image-20160908-25231-5ksdsi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A doll lies in the ghost town of Pripyat, abandoned since the nearby Chernobyl power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown in 1986.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Henrik Ismarker/Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is an edited version of a public lecture given at Melbourne University this week.</em></p>
<p><br></p>
<p>Just the other day I was sitting in my office here on campus waiting to chair some event I stupidly said yes to, eating a Portuguese tart out of a brown paper bag. I had ten minutes.</p>
<p>I picked up Svetlana Alexievich’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/357486.Voices_from_Chernobyl">Voices from Chernobyl</a> (1997). Started reading the prologue. The prologue has a name: “A Solitary Human Voice”. I’d read it many times before, in Russian and in English, and I taught it too and I loved my students for being devastated by it, for not judging a six-months pregnant woman who touches the husband she is forbidden to touch, hugs him, holds him, kisses him, cuts his hair when clumps start falling out, a husband called to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor when the fire broke and who went as he was, in his short sleeves, and now is dying torturously, it’s a phantasmagoric death, in front of her, and I loved them for not thinking this woman is unethical or a child murderer or deranged by trauma or the victim of a system in which her husband’s life, and hers, and their already dead unborn child’s, are worth nothing. Somehow my students knew this woman’s, Lyusya’s, capacity for love and pity was incredible, too big to witness fully.</p>
<p>The prologue goes –</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Someone is saying: ‘You have to understand: This is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You’re not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself.’ And I’m like someone who’s lost her mind: ‘But I love him! I love him!’ He’s sleeping, and I’m whispering: ‘I love you!’ Walking in the hospital courtyard, ‘I love you.’ Carrying his sanitary tray, ‘I love you.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was in my office with Portuguese crumbs all over my jeans while reading Alexievich. Several of my friends who discovered Alexievich post-Nobel (she got the NP last year) said this to me: “She is something else.” That evening a few days ago, she emptied out my office, in a minute, and refilled it with her air.</p>
<p>More –</p>
<blockquote>
<p>None of the doctors knew I was staying with him at night in the bio-chamber. The nurses let me in. At first they pleaded with me: ‘You’re young. Why are you doing this? That’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor. You’ll just burn together.’ … In the mornings, just before eight, when the doctors started their rounds, they’d be there on the other side of the film: ‘Run!’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was by the way in the Ukraine when Chernobyl happened. Eleven, clueless, but then the whole country was clueless. We’ll talk about clueless countries again tonight.</p>
<p>I’ve listened to and read most things I can find on Alexievich, every interview Alexievich has given, just about – in English and in Russian – including the one hosted by New York Public Library where Masha Gessen asked about her <a href="https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2016/06/13/svetlana-alexievich">experience of “extreme fame”</a>. “Oh, Masha, it’s terrible,” Alexievich said so very quickly.</p>
<p>And I haven’t been able to find an explanation of what happens in her books.</p>
<p>She says, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alexievich’s people exist on the edge of what is tolerable. Each of their voices is a solitary human voice. And then they come together – Alexievich makes them – into a chorus. And it’s this chorus that is history. The kind of history you write after Chernobyl.</p>
<p>Music, at least in the West, has become the language for talking about the Alexievich method: voices, a choir, symphonic, polyphonic. I am not a musical person. Besides I don’t think taking a mystery and simply transposing it onto another domain, flooding it with another kind of language, is a way of getting close to it.</p>
<p>Of the method, we know Alexievich uses only a small proportion of actual transcripts and picks a hundred or so voices out of sometimes three or five hundred interviews, and of the hundred, ten to twenty will become “pillars”. Alexievich goes back and speaks to her pillars up to twenty times each. She describes it as having “conversations about life” with people, as distinct from conducting interviews, and she says “if the person is older, they are like an older sister or brother to me” and “if they are younger, they are like a younger sister or brother to me”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136991/original/image-20160908-25266-f9rroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Svetlana Alexievich.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Margarita Kabakova</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>That still doesn’t begin to explain what happens on the page.</p>
<p>I think you know by now I don’t want to talk about music tonight.</p>
<p>For me, the idea of common humanity is linked inextricably to witnessing other people’s suffering. And it is unwitnessed human pain that I think of when trying to understand why this idea – common humanity – feels particularly, acutely fragile in today’s world. It is what <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/primo-levi-9380562">Primo Levi</a> described all those years ago. “The ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story.”</p>
<p>This is the bit I know. What I don’t know, what I believe is becoming harder to know, is what witnessing is.</p>
<p>I do know, I think, what it is not.</p>
<p>It is not taking someone’s pain and putting it in a box with your name or some organisation’s name on it and calling this box a book, or a report, or a recommendation, film script or thesis. It is not an act of taking, or of re-assembly, or of what Nicolas Rothwell has described, in relation to books of <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/the-art-of-time-travel-historians-and-their-craft-by-tom-griffiths/news-story/bd4c125fc08417510386cb8788bfacc2">Aboriginal history written by non-indigenous historians</a>, often with great intentions, as works of preservation that always get sucked into processes of cultural dispersion.</p>
<p>Primo Levi talked about the story being unlistened-to. But pain doesn’t fall out of most people in the form of a story; more often that kind of personal and shared history comes to us as, in the words of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/apr/28/internationaleducationnews.socialsciences">Eva Hoffman</a>, “speech broken under the pressure of pain”. It comes to us as a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/409167.After_Such_Knowledge">certain kind of silence</a>. Or as words, but words seemingly about something else. As a glimpse of a human body – the vehicle? the vessel? the temple? the damn prison? – twisting, contorting under the burden of suffering and secrecy.</p>
<p>It was Alexievich who made me ask whether witnessing was more like spending the night with the person in the bio-chamber. The night in which you burn together: this may sound almost obscenely romantic. Burning together! Bio-chamber without the protective gear! But this is what she does, isn’t it? And this thing she does has nothing to do with insisting that vicarious traumatisation is an ethical precondition to witnessing, and it cannot be summed up by Dominick LaCapra’s good term “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1032212.Writing_History_Writing_Trauma">empathic unsettlement</a>”. It’s just, as my friends say, “something else”.</p>
<p>Until recently I thought taking someone else’s pain and putting it in a box and filling this box with people in wigs and special costumes and calling this box a Tribunal, or a Royal Commission, and giving the people in costumes expressions of sorrowful intensity and the tasks and the tools of naming previously unnamed things, and of bringing to justice those people who are as skilled at hiding in the shadows as they are at torturing other human beings – I’d thought this was one of the main kinds of witnessing available to us. Nuremberg. The Hague. South Africa. Justice. Truth. Criminal prosecution. Public validation of the truths of people’s broken lives. Spade being named a spade in a public square through a loudspeaker.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136979/original/image-20160908-25266-u4c54a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An Australian ‘survivor’ of sex abuse outside the Quirinale Hotel in Rome, Italy, 28 February 2016. He is wearing a shirt with an image of himself as a child printed on it. Australian Roman Catholic Cardinal George Pell was in Rome at the time to give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse via video link.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/CLAUDIO PERI</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>All these things must continue, they must be done, but I wonder what price we may be paying for believing that’s pretty much all there is to witnessing. Or perhaps it’s never “we” who pay the price. It’s always those people who testify of their anguish into what might end up feeling like a black hole. Another echoey box with an empty centre.</p>
<p>I ask Nigel Denning and Linda Tilgner, “Have we outsourced the witnessing of child sexual abuse in Australia to the Royal Commission?” Nigel and Linda are psychologists. Nigel is here tonight. They work with survivors of institutional sex abuse. They are not surprised by my question. They say, “Yes, we have outsourced it.”</p>
<p>How does one witness the earth-shattering revelations and testimonies the <a href="http://childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/">Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse</a> has been eliciting and documenting?</p>
<p>Linda Tilgner says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>there is a perception that those proceedings in themselves have produced something. And they haven’t. Royal Commission – the danger is that people see it as the first and the last step. I think it is an absolutely essential first step. It focuses a large amount of energy, mobilises research, mobilises discussion, has the potential to lead to something very transformative.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Linda says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a window of opportunity around the Royal Commission. If that window closes, it’s gone. The opportunity is to make some kind of meaningful change on a societal level. The danger is that the Royal Commission actually becomes a destructive process because it creates a false perception that we have done something when we haven’t.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nigel Denning says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Testifying at the Royal Commission … I can think of a few people who felt relieved, thank God, two years of my life have gone into writing my story. This is literally what people are doing – putting lives on hold for a year, or more, to write their childhoods. There’s relief in vocalising and for a week, two weeks, a month afterwards, they feel that relief but, by and large, there is a collapse back. There is no redress, no social support out there to perpetuate their witnessing. They’ve had that one experience and now they’re back to washing dishes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Is there a role for our society in all of this?” I ask.</p>
<p>Linda and Nigel answer in unison, “Totally.”</p>
<p>“What is that role?”</p>
<p>“Witnessing,” says Nigel. “It’s being there and being present. Saying it happened, it was wrong, and as a society we’re doing things for it to stop.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136983/original/image-20160908-25237-4ipm4s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Justice Jennifer Coates (right) looking on as Chair of Royal Commission into child sex abuse Justice Peter McClellan speaks during the first day of the Royal Commission into the Sexual Abuse of Children at the County Court in Melbourne.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Les O'Rourke/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The problem with “being there and being present” is not only us having to reckon with so many stories and lives, a total sickening epidemic, everywhere, whole networks of them supporting each other, covering up for each other – if only this was all we were faced with. It goes beyond that. We need to find a way of witnessing not just the crimes of individuals, the betrayal of institutions, the pain of these children now talking to us from their hurting adult bodies, it’s the betrayal of the whole society, a breaking of the fundamental social contract.</p>
<p>We – I’ve said “we” so many times already tonight; g-d knows I am not a friend of “we” and look at me now – is already a kind of a disaster. We, the social debt, community, the wider society … So easy for that “we” to become polemical, to become nothing. Worse, so easy for that “we” to dilute or dissolve altogether the essence of what is being called to attention. Susan Sontag’s injunction from decades back holds: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.”</p>
<p>I want you to hear a solitary human voice tonight. I want this voice to talk to you directly about the Royal Commission. I thank profoundly the woman whose voice it is, who spoke to me, she too is “something else” but I will not reveal her name. She will, I hope, use her name for the telling that is hers and hers only. I’ve taken all the specific details out about what happened to her in one of those institutions. That part of the story is not mine to tell.</p>
<p>She says,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I chose to do a statement. My health wasn’t good. It was an almighty time for all of us. So hard to do everything – reliving a lot of things and being ill at the same time. I got a friend to drive me there. My psych. She has been with me for twenty years. I went into the room. There were six or seven people and a glass table. People taking notes.</p>
<p>I was trying to tell of a male officer who abused me. I couldn’t say what he did to me. All my life I have feared retribution. And someone in the room said, ‘The person you are talking about is dead.’ I felt the dead weight lift off me. I was able to talk.</p>
<p>It does something to the body, talking about it. I broke out in sweat. Put my head down. Didn’t touch the glass table. I was not going to leave fingerprints. I told them very clearly that no one should shake my hands. They kept their hands down respectfully. I wondered, if I am telling people something horrible, will they get sick?</p>
<p>Two hours of talking to them, maybe two and a half. Time disappeared. I felt like I told a story that could be turned into a horror movie. They didn’t me ask many questions. Just listened. You travel back, you go back to all the horrible stuff, you re-experience it. My kids didn’t even know.</p>
<p>I came out and the first thing I said to my friend, ‘How did I sound? Did I sound all right?’ Straight away I had no memory about what happened in the room. She said, ‘You did really, really well.’ When I came out I had to sleep. It’s the fear thing. I’ve reached an overload.</p>
<p>When I left that room I walked out with the burden. There isn’t a band-aid big enough to fix abuse. Therapy shifted it to another part, but it’s still inside of me.</p>
<p>Not once in my life did anyone come up to me and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ I always had to scream out.</p>
<p>My children, when I finally told them, had great fear that I would get sick again. I worked hard to be well. I am a government child. I am a government adult. How dare they do it to me? How do I get over it?</p>
<p>I don’t look at monetary things. I just want the respect. The government owes me peace. I don’t want to sign any papers anymore. I just don’t want the government to come anywhere near me ever again. They don’t own any rights to me. They blew their rights when I was ten years old.</p>
<p>I put myself out there. My name is out there. Why aren’t we hearing any more about the Royal Commission? It has served no purpose to many women I know who testified. We have been re-traumatised. We have no result. There is no one to reassure us that it will continue. They will run out of money.</p>
<p>If someone would come to me and say, ‘I am really sorry. I want to take away what you experienced. Let me take the burden off your shoulders. I want to take it away from you,’ it would be amazing. You know, just amazing.</p>
<p>The Commission is still happening, is it? Everything’s taking so long.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How does a society witness itself? Witness itself failing at its most fundamental duty?</p>
<p>When this feels like an impossible task, I read Alexievich. The “we” Alexievich speaks to in her books doesn’t exist, it is created by her address, by the space she makes for the solitary human voice to speak, and be heard, anew.</p>
<p>I was having a chat to my friend Melinda Harvey (Melinda’s here, tonight) about this lecture, I was feeling rather anxious about it, and I said, “Why am I talking about Alexievich in trying to talk about the Royal Commission?” And my smart friend said, “Partially, it’s because institutional sexual abuse is like radiation poisoning.”</p>
<p>And of course it is like radiation poisoning, omnipresent and invisible. It stays in people’s lives like radiation stays in the soil for thousands of years. It stays in families and physical places. It kills people. It makes people sick for generations to come. It is that future that is already here. No colour. No smell. Nothing to tell us it’s here.</p>
<p>I think a lot about invisibility. When I am walking streets of Melbourne, I cannot stop myself from imagining abused children hiding in adult bodies. Could witnessing call on us to make invisible suffering visible?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136980/original/image-20160908-25266-88iugi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former head of the central Queensland diocese of Rockhampton Brian Heenan (right) and Francis Sullivan from the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, leave after giving evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse public hearing in Rockhampton, Friday, April 17, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Miranda Forster/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“There is no social movement,” Nigel Denning says to me, “around systemic child sexual abuse. We are so far off as a society in acknowledging the systemic perpetration.” He says, “It’s almost a public shaming of institutions that’s needed. Like holding a mirror to an institution to say this is what you have done. This is the result of your strategies, your management.”</p>
<p>“But then,” says Linda Tilgner, “if you think about society as a series of systems, or a series of institutions, everything is a form of an institution. Educational institutions. Family is a type of an institution. Workplace. In a sense, it’s like a series of boxes on boxes on boxes.”</p>
<p>Remember Lyusya’s husband, the “human nuclear reactor”, from Voices from Chernobyl? He was buried barefoot – no shoes would fit him – in his formal wear. They took his body and put it in a cellophane bag and tied the bag up. They put the bag with the body in it in a wooden coffin. They tied the coffin with another plastic bag. The plastic bag was “thick like a tablecloth”. Then they put the wooden coffin wrapped in the plastic bag into a zinc coffin. How many boxes does one dead man need?</p>
<p>Some years ago I interviewed psychiatrist <a href="http://www.paulvalent.com/">Paul Valent</a> and he said, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some people call child sexual abuse ‘soul murder’. It is a real destruction of a person’s value and dignity … Generationally too … It interferes with love. It is the opposite of loving. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He told me that of all the traumatised populations he had come across in his work, child survivors of sexual abuse, at least some of them, were more traumatised than any other group. Paul Valent is a child survivor of the Holocaust.</p>
<p>The Royal Commission is flawed, disappointing, necessary, vital, too institutional, too diffuse, a massive improvement on everything else, a let-down, a revolution, but it will not matter in the end if we continue relying on it to do the work of public reckoning with the history of systemic sexual abuse of children in this country. Our work.</p>
<p>The Royal Commission has inspired one of the best episodes of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3198302/?ref_=ttep_ep5">Rake, Season 3</a>. In which criminal barrister Cleaver Green, played by Richard Roxburgh, is just out of jail, but still in disgrace, desperate for the shittiest gigs going, he’s practically begging drink-driving offenders to let him represent them, when all of a sudden he has three Royal Commissions to be at in one day because Sydney has run out of lawyers and even Cleaver can now get a Royal Commission gig. Yes, three Royal Commissions in one day: a Royal Commission into institutional child sex abuse, plus one into government corruption, plus another called the Orphanos Royal Commission, investigating unlawful stock market trading.</p>
<p>Three in one afternoon – it cannot be done, smart people tell Cleaver. Yes, it can, he says. He runs between these Royal Commissions like a madman. And his best friend Barney, he’s a solicitor, runs between them too – except Barney is sick as buggery having just finished the latest course of chemo – and in all that slapsticky, desperate running, Cleaver pushes a pram down some steps in a scene that references slyly the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec">Odessa steps sequence</a> in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015648/">Battleship Potemkin</a>.</p>
<p>The Rake baby survives, please be assured. And Cleaver makes it, just.</p>
<p>It’s inspired comedy. Unbelievably good. This may seem frivolous; except I am convinced it’s not. Laughing and crying at the same time. Talking about it as part of our lives, not as something completely separate. Not as something over there. It is over here. Right in the centre. Where the heart is. Where our culture is. We are running to it. We are running away from it. It’s impossible to get there. We’ll get there somehow. What choice do we have?</p>
<p><br></p>
<hr>
<p><em>An expanded version of this lecture was originally given on Wednesday September 7 as part of the series The Wednesday Lectures, held at the University of Melbourne.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65090/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Maria Tumarkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has documented heart-rending testimonies and elicited shattering revelations. But how does a society witness itself failing at its most fundamental duty?Maria Tumarkin, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/637992016-08-23T01:16:26Z2016-08-23T01:16:26ZHow Dostoevsky predicted Trump’s America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134806/original/image-20160819-30370-kdhnd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, by Vasily Perov (1872).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Vasily_Perov_-_Портрет_Ф.М.Достоевского_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Vasily Perov/Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As a professor of Russian literature, I’ve come to realize that it’s never a good sign when real life resembles a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel. </p>
<p>Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with its riotous rhetoric and steady stream of scandals, calls to mind Dostoevsky’s most political novel, “<a href="http://bit.ly/2b58dwB">Demons</a>,” written in 1872. In it, the writer wanted to warn readers about the destructive force of demagoguery and unchecked rhetoric, and his cautionary messages – largely influenced by 19th-century Russian political chaos – resonate in our present political climate. </p>
<p>To show his readers just how bad things could get if they didn’t pay attention, Dostoevsky linked his political nightmare to unhinged impulses and the breakdown of civility. </p>
<h2>A passion for destruction</h2>
<p>Dostoevsky was as addicted to newspapers as some of us are to social media, and he often plucked crises and violence right from the headlines, refashioning them for his fiction. </p>
<p>Russia during the 1860s and 1870s – the heyday of the author’s career – was experiencing massive socioeconomic instability. Tsar Alexander II’s <a href="http://historyofrussia.org/emancipation-of-the-serfs/">Emancipation of the Serfs</a> freed Russian peasants from a form of class bondage, while the subsequent <a href="http://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/reform-and-reaction-in-russia/">Great Reforms</a> aimed to restructure the executive and judidical branches, as well as the military, tax code and education system. The reforms were supposed to modernize the country by dragging it out of the caste-like system of estates and legal privilege. But it didn’t do much to improve the economic lot of the peasant. </p>
<p>It was a reversal of America’s present political landscape. While today there’s simmering discontent from the right, in 19th-century Russia it was leftists who were enraged. They were angered by the reforms for not going far enough and had lost hope in the government’s ability to produce meaningful change. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=825&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/134808/original/image-20160819-30366-8cn837.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1037&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sergei Nechaev influenced Dostoevsky’s Pyotr Verkhovensky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Nechayev.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the only unifying ideas among the more radical left-wing political factions of the period was the belief that the tsarist regime must be eliminated. Important public figures, like Russian anarchist <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/">Mikhail Bakunin</a>, advocated for destruction of the status quo as an end greater than all ideologies. As Bakunin famously <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1842/reaction-germany.htm">exhorted</a>: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.” </p>
<p>Bakunin’s conviction that a new world could rise only from the ashes of tsarism was actually put into practice by his one-time disciple, <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sergey_Nechayev">Sergei Nechaev</a>, who was the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s protagonist in “Demons,” Pyotr Verkhovensky. </p>
<h2>A slippery slope from incivility to violence</h2>
<p>In 1869, Nechaev <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Sergey_Nechayev">orchestrated the murder</a> of a young student, an event that so shocked and angered Dostoevsky that it became the basis for “Demons.”</p>
<p>The novel begins in a boring provincial backwater inhabited by middle-aged people and ineffectual young liberals, all engrossed in their romantic lives. Pyotr Verkhovensky arrives and persuades many of these same characters to join his underground revolutionary society. Passions are stirred and the local order destabilized as the town enters a downward spiral that concludes with arson and several murders.</p>
<p>What’s most relevant to our time in “Demons” is not its ideologues but the anti-intellectual and impulse-driven nature of Pyotr’s rebellion. In Pyotr, Dostoevsky created a demagogue and pure nihilist, a political figure who appeals to people’s baser desires. Under his influence, the townspeople lose all impulse control and grow reckless, rebelling against all conventions of decency for a good laugh. At one point they desecrate a sacred icon; at another, they gleefully gather around the body of someone who has committed suicide and eat the food he’s left behind.</p>
<p>If their pranks, insults and disorder seem harmless, the decline in the level of public discourse act as a precursor to the violent and destructive acts at the novel’s conclusion. A skilled psychological writer, Dostoevsky never saw violence as divorced from normal human behavior. What’s most haunting about his works is just how close otherwise ordinary people are from doing extraordinarily awful things. </p>
<p>In “Demons,” narrative tensions escalate in a deliberately gradual way. What begins as minor impoliteness becomes scandal, arson, murder and suicide. Dostoevsky is essentially saying that criminal acts are rooted in social transgression; uncivil behavior facilitates scapegoating, dehumanization and, eventually, violence. </p>
<h2>‘Make America Great Again!’</h2>
<p>Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign for president powerfully evokes Dostoevsky’s novel. Aside from his pro-gun and anti-immigration positions, Trump doesn’t offer many concrete political plans. As we evaluate what motivated 14 million Americans to vote for him in the primaries, we might consider <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/12/a-massive-new-study-debunks-a-widespread-theory-for-donald-trumps-success/">new research showing</a> that his candidacy has a primarily emotion-based – rather than ideological or economical – appeal. There are notable anti-establishment sentiments among his supporters; many are disaffected, middle-aged white people who believe that American institutions aren’t working on their behalf. </p>
<p>And while his notorious campaign motto “Make America Great Again” is framed in a positive way, it actually advances a version of Bakunin’s creative destruction. It stands for purging the establishment, for recreating a nostalgia-tinged version of some lost, past America. We’ve already seen this destructive drive in its more Nechaevist, low-brow form at Trump rallies, where several people have been <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/02/a_list_of_violent_incidents_at_donald_trump_rallies_and_events.html">attacked</a>. </p>
<p>There’s another aspect of Trump’s popularity that ties him to Dostoevsky’s “Demons.” Trump, in the way he carries himself, embodies the complete disavowal of impulse control we see in the novel. Unlike most political candidates, he speaks off the cuff, simultaneously reflecting and stoking the anger and pessimism of his supporters. </p>
<p>For instance, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/28/politics/donald-trump-dnc-response/">he said he wanted to “hit”</a> some of the speakers who criticized him at the Democratic National Convention; in his words, there’s anger, a need to provoke and deep-seated irreverence. His supporters <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-advertising-research-explains-donald-trumps-profound-appeal-47059">feel empowered by this</a>. Without weighing his policies, they’re viscerally drawn to the spectacle of his candidacy, like the townspeople following Pyotr Verkhovensky in “Demons” who delight in the gossip and scandals he creates.</p>
<p>To complete the parallel, we might turn to the novel’s ending, which could have a sobering effect. Basic incivility gives way to an anarchic vision of creative destruction; many die or lose their minds due to Pyotr’s machinations. At one point, seemingly without thinking, crowds crush a female character to death because they falsely believe she’s responsible for the violence in town. </p>
<p>When audiences at Trump rallies verbalize violence by screaming “<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/rnc-2016-lock-her-up-chant-hillary-clinton-225916">Lock her up</a>” and “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/us/politics/donald-trump-supporters.html?_r=0">Kill her</a>,” or when Donald Trump – either wittingly or unwittingly – <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton.html?_r=0">advocates Second Amendment violence</a>, I wonder whether they aren’t coming dangerously close to the primal violence of “Demons.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/63799/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ani Kokobobo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When penning his novel ‘Demons,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky was influenced by political turmoil in Russia. But his impulsive, crass antagonist bears a striking similarity to the GOP’s candidate for president.Ani Kokobobo, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, University of KansasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/528452016-01-08T12:54:15Z2016-01-08T12:54:15ZWar and Peace: a user’s guide<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107574/original/image-20160107-14027-1wt2q6e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Robert Viglasky</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>War and Peace is more than a novel. It’s a reflection of Leo Tolstoy’s strongly held beliefs – a philosophical tract, not just about politics, war, love, marriage and property, but about history itself and the way the affairs of society are reported. </p>
<p>Central to the book is his antipathy towards the way in which historians of his time presented events as entirely influenced by powerful people: monarchs, politicians and generals. Tolstoy felt that human history was an infinite chain of small, insignificant moments in which all individuals, mighty or humble, were involved. War and Peace reflects this view through the characters and their interactions. To drive home his point, Tolstoy also inserts explanatory essays at various stages in the text.</p>
<h2>Tolstoy knew whereof he wrote</h2>
<p>In his first major novel, Tolstoy chose familiar territory. <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/leo-tolstoy-9508518">He was born an aristocrat</a> – Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy – inheriting a number of country estates and the peasant serfs who lived on them. His background was one of comfort and privilege and he understood well the conventions and practices of gentry society. </p>
<p>In order to generate a familiar and authentic atmosphere for his readers, Tolstoy used names of existing aristocratic families, but changed letters here and there, for example “Bolkonsky” comes from his mother’s family name “Volkonsky”.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107579/original/image-20160107-14007-t9hmyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1848 aged 20.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pavel Biryukov</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some of the fictional characters have sources in real life. When creating the character of Pierre Bezukhov, Tolstoy drew on his own experience as an earnest but socially clumsy young man, easily tempted into excesses of alcohol, womanising and gambling. His wife’s vivacious little sister Tatiana provided a perfect model for the heroine Natasha.</p>
<p>The young Tolstoy chose a post as artillery officer and served at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He was distinguished for outstanding bravery during his military service – but his experiences taught him not only the exhilaration of battle but also its terrors and moral minefields. He brought this first-hand knowledge to life in stories such as the <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/117102/tolstoy-crimea">Sevastopol Sketches</a> and War and Peace.</p>
<h2>Love and marriage</h2>
<p>War and Peace broadly reflects Tolstoy’s own happily married state at the time – the book gives us a positive picture of marriage. The main characters eventually learn how to distinguish superficial physical attraction from a deeper, more meaningful attachment. But his recognition that many marriages were economic and political arrangements is reflected in the mercenary matching of Hélène Kuragin with Pierre Bezukhov and in the loveless relationship between Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky and his sweet, well-meaning wife Lise. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107580/original/image-20160107-13983-11kux20.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Leo Tolstoy and Sofia Tolstaya in Crimea in 1902.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As his own relationship deteriorated over the years, Tolstoy grew more cynical about marriage, even going to far as to advocate celibacy within marriage in the novella <a href="http://www1.umn.edu/lol-russ/hpgary/russ1905/kreutzer%20sonata.htm">The Kreutzer Sonata</a>. </p>
<h2>Storm in a teacup</h2>
<p>Judged against a culture in which works of literature were heavily censored, parts of War and Peace were pretty risque. But the furore about the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vr0mCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT279&lpg=PT279&dq=I+have+been+told+that+her+brother+Anatole+was+in+love+with+her&source=bl&ots=GEYc6fbcjD&sig=wGtqMoHZj-oRTB7yHm-HJhhYO8Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGp7jSlprKAhWKaRQKHQQtAtAQ6AEIJzAB#v=onepage&q=I%20have%20been%20told%20that%20her%20brother%20Anatole%20was%20in%20love%20with%20her&f=false">incestuous relationship</a> between Anatole and Hélène Kuragin is a storm in a teacup – the relationship is remarked on twice <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c4HEAN-ti1MC&pg=PA246&lpg=PA246&dq=Anatole+used+to+come+to+borrow+money+from+her&source=bl&ots=4l147zXYZQ&sig=trkNw_Y0bnWHow8aHS0WOqRku7g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiigNqEl5rKAhWLvxQKHdpzArkQ6AEILTAC#v=onepage&q=Anatole%20used%20to%20come%20to%20borrow%20money%20from%20her&f=false">in the book</a> and all the television adaptation has done is to make it more explicit.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107575/original/image-20160107-13986-o3l3r9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Affair: Anatole and Hélène Kuragin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Mitch Jenkins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tolstoy was no monk himself – he lost his virginity to a prostitute at the age of 14 and experienced several bouts of STIs during his life. Tolstoy’s obsession with sex is woven into many of his works, and War and Peace is no exception. </p>
<p>He was not a man to be unduly coy in his work – indeed he kept diaries of his sexual experiences and insisted his wife Sofia read them at the outset of their relationship. </p>
<h2>The death penalty</h2>
<p>Alongside Tolstoy’s ideas on sex and love, other deeply held views find their expression in War and Peace – for example, his aversion to the death penalty. He had witnessed a guillotining in Paris in 1857 which left a profound impression on him. Some years later, he defended a soldier faced with the death penalty at a court-martial and lost the case. In War and Peace, his revulsion towards the death penalty was expressed through the eyes of Pierre Bezukhov who reports on the horror expressed by French soldiers forced to execute Russian prisoners of war. </p>
<h2>Tolstoy and Gandhi</h2>
<p>The battle sequences of War and Peace are thrilling and have served to make Tolstoy’s novel a byword for patriotic love for the motherland in Russian culture. But Tolstoy detested the idea of ordinary men being forced to kill each other at the behest of a country’s rulers. He used a radical interpretation of the Gospels to develop the concept of non-violent resistance to evil, in his essay <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4602/pg4602-images.html">The Kingdom of God is Within You</a>. </p>
<p>This text was a major influence on the young Gandhi, who called Tolstoy “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RLUUx6J54xMC&pg=PA24&lpg=PA24&dq=the+greatest+apostle+of+non-violence+that+the+present+age+has+produced&source=bl&ots=_4c7t-al6X&sig=69mJBZDfVvTWNpHpiQPFwerK7DQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj9tpWjjZrKAhWBUxoKHU9bBaEQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=the%20greatest%20apostle%20of%20non-violence%20that%20the%20present%20age%20has%20produced&f=false">the greatest apostle of non-violence that the present age has produced</a>” and corresponded with him until Tolstoy’s death in 1910.</p>
<h2>Tolstoy the rebel</h2>
<p>Part of the appeal of War and Peace is its lavish setting and the rich depictions of the Russian nobility in St Petersburg and Moscow. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1707&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1707&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1707&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=2145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=2145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/107581/original/image-20160107-13994-berb7z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=2145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Tolstoy in peasant costume by Ilya Repin (1901).</span>
</figcaption>
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<p>But, as is reflected in the novel through Pierre’s gradual growth to maturity, Tolstoy found a greater simplicity and authenticity in rural life. As he grew older, he distanced himself from his privileged status more and more, giving up alcohol, tobacco and meat, dressing in traditional peasant clothes and making his own shoes. He even renounced the copyright to his works. </p>
<p>He became a vocal critic of the establishment on matters such as the hypocrisy of organised religion, militarism and the penal system. After a biting satire of the corruption of Russian Orthodox Church officials in his last novel, Resurrection, the Church excommunicated him in 1901. </p>
<p>Tolstoy famously also held an <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventures-in-old-age/200912/battle-the-titans-tolstoy-disses-shakespeare">unconventional view about Shakespeare</a>, denouncing him as a mediocre talent and inferior to Christopher Marlowe who he rated as a far better dramatist: “I read and re-read the dramas, the comedies, the historical plays, and invariably, each time I experienced the same thing: disgust, boredom, astonishment.”</p>
<h2>Why is it so long?</h2>
<p>Tolstoy wrote War and Peace at one of the happiest times in his life – he was recently married and enjoying the honeymoon stage of his relationship. His finances were secure, and his reputation as a writer was burgeoning. He felt that an artist had a responsibility to make people “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_mmFzZ6PEjYC&pg=PA99&lpg=PA99&dq=tolstoy+love+life+in+all+its+innumerable,+inexhaustible+phenomena&source=bl&ots=v9GRjN4--k&sig=TVWLVbfWFu0ZwWFK9rni7tyPnq4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAtvyI9ZnKAhUHnBoKHdVpB1QQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=tolstoy%20love%20life%20in%20all%20its%20innumerable%2C%20inexhaustible%20phenomena&f=false">love life in all its innumerable, inexhaustible phenomena</a>” (as he wrote in a letter of 1865) and, to capture this enormous concept, he needed to cover a vast canvas with vivid detail.</p>
<p>He took great pains to polish and redraft his manuscript, relying on his wife Sofia who read, corrected and re-copied his work at least seven times, and some passages up to 21 times. </p>
<p>Tolstoy’s readers at the time would not have felt the length of the novel so keenly, as it was first published in monthly instalments in the literary journal The Russian Herald between 1865 and 1867. It was so successful that when the whole book was subsequently published as a single edition, it went into a second print run almost immediately. Several more editions were published during Tolstoy’s lifetime.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52845/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Hudspith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>You don’t need to wade through the whole novel – we’ve done it for you.Sarah Hudspith, Associate professor in Russian, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/528462016-01-08T11:27:57Z2016-01-08T11:27:57ZTolstoy made sure War and Peace was ‘Phwoar and Peace’ long before the BBC got their hands on it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/107558/original/image-20160107-14016-opnwb5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Mitch Jenkins/Kaia Zak</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much of the recent commentary about the BBC’s new adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace has focused on the “sexing-up” of the original story line by its director, Andrew Davies. Even before the first episode aired on January 3 2016, the British press was outraged at the portrayal of an incestuous relationship between Anatole Kuragin and his sister, Hélène. </p>
<p>“It’s Phwoar and Peace”, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3337868/It-s-phwoar-peace-BBC-screen-racy-version-Tolstoy-epic-created-incestuous-storyline-really-OK-skip-reading-tricky-bits-novel.html">hollered the Daily Mail</a>, adding: “new series of War And Peace has left scholars up in arms over ‘ripe’ scenes that go beyond scenes in the book”.</p>
<p>This presumption that this detail was invented to titillate contemporary audiences is a revealing one because it’s false; if there is any “sexing-up” in War and Peace, it is Tolstoy who is responsible. WARNING: LITERARY SPOILERS AHEAD. </p>
<p>Rumour surrounds Hélène and Anatole wherever they go. And towards the end of the novel, Hélène dies after treatment for a heart condition, which may in fact be an abortion.</p>
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<p>Even in his lifetime, Tolstoy was a controversial figure, never afraid of telling the truth as he saw it. War and Peace abounds in scenes that can still shock today. Tolstoy’s description of the corpse of Prince Andrey’s wife, Lise, who dies giving birth to their child, is touching and terrifying in equal measure. Anna Karenina is little different. Its accounts of childbirth, breastfeeding and birth control (the latter detail nicely caught in Joe Wright’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/sep/02/anna-karenina-joe-wright-shepperton">2012 film version</a>) are uncommonly frank for a 19th-century novel, even if these are all delivered with a good dose of male voyeurism that some modern readers find unsettling. </p>
<p>Sex and death are never far apart in Tolstoy. Kitty’s examination by a series of doctors when she falls ill after being rejected by Vronsky chillingly foreshadows the depiction of Anna’s mutilated corpse at the end of the novel. Little wonder that Tolstoy was described by the symbolist novelist and thinker, <a href="http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.81cab8e9-56c4-38dd-8727-fb48e6bb3794">Dmitry Merezhkovsky</a>, as “the seer of the flesh” – as opposed to that great “seer of the spirit”, Fyodor Dostoevsky.</p>
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<h2>Writing for the fourth wall</h2>
<p>A better way of looking at things may be to see the TV adaption as one of tone, rather than content. The camera makes things explicit, where a novelist can rely on readers to interpret covert hints. And Tolstoy’s audience was well able to read between the lines. Censorship was an established feature of Russian literature at the time, even if it had been relaxed under the more tolerant rule of Tsar Alexander II from 1855. Writers were adept at using inference and implication to make their points – and readers were well used to analogy and allegory as literary devices. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most innovative feature of War and Peace was not so much its treatment of sex, as its handling of history. When Tolstoy first began work on what would become War and Peace, he planned to write a novel about the <a href="http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Decembrist_Revolt">Decembrist uprising of 1825</a>, when a group of reformist Russian nobles and military officers protested against the accession of Nicholas I. </p>
<p>The suppression of the rebellion – which sought to replace Russia’s autocratic system with something more liberal and democratic – was brutal. Its ringleaders were either hanged or exiled to Siberia. Yet, as he worked, Tolstoy realised that to discuss the uprising, he needed to go back to the Napoleonic wars in the early 19th century, when the ideas of the Decembrists were first formed. In this, he was helped by the growing number of memoirs that were published in the 1860s. Yet despite Alexander II’s reforms, there was still much that could not be mentioned directly; reading between the lines remained a necessary practice.</p>
<h2>Two Tolstoys</h2>
<p>Tolstoy underwent a deep spiritual crisis after he completed War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Rejecting his great novels, and indeed all art, as immoral, he tried to find solace in religion and the simple life. Yet peace eluded him and his works of this later period explore all the themes of his earlier works in even more extreme form. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tolstoy/leo/t65kr/">Kreutzer Sonata</a> is the story of a man who murders his wife because he fears she has been unfaithful, but its most scandalous feature is Tolstoy’s conviction that even sexual relations within marriage are immoral and that the human race should give itself up to celibacy. His fearlessness made him a hero to many, but he was <a href="http://people.opposingviews.com/tolstoys-relation-russian-orthodox-church-4397.html">excommunicated by the Orthodox Church in 1901</a> for his unconventional religious beliefs.</p>
<p>It is often felt that there are two Tolstoys; a novelist of genius and a tawdry moral prophet with a messy personal life. In fact, there is hardly a distinction to be made between these two extremes. Everything that characterised the life of the late Tolstoy is there in the earlier novels and we do War and Peace a great injustice if we try to smooth over the seething moral indignation that underlies Tolstoy’s depiction of characters such as Hélène in whom beauty and corruption are fatally entwined. “Sexing-up” War and Peace may be one way to teach us to read Tolstoy again – but this time perhaps more carefully.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Philip Bullock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Leo Tolstoy didn’t blush over racy themes.Philip Bullock, Professor of Russian Literature and Music, Fellow of Wadham College and Lecturer at Worcester College, University of OxfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.