Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War

As for “Anna Karenina,” it actually does begin the place Onegin ends: with a flawlessly dressed heroine married to an influential imperialist. The stress between middle and periphery is woven into the plot. The character of Karenin, a statesman concerned within the resettlement of the “topic races,” seems to be partly based mostly on Pyotr Valuev, the Minister of the Inside from 1861 to 1868. Valuev oversaw the Russian appropriation of Bashkir lands across the Ural Mountains—and in addition issued a infamous decree limiting the publication of Ukrainian-language instructional and non secular texts all through the Empire. (It reads, partially, “A separate Little Russian language by no means existed, doesn’t exist, and shall not exist.”)

Not like Tatiana, Anna doesn’t stay trustworthy to her empire-building husband. She leaves Karenin for Vronsky, who turns down a prestigious army submit in Tashkent with the intention to journey together with her to Italy. However the Imperial Military will get Vronsky again ultimately. That last picture of Anna’s lifeless head is definitely a flashback Vronsky has, on his method to be part of a Pan-Slavic volunteer detachment combating the Ottomans in Serbia. With Anna useless, and the love plot over, his solely need is to finish his personal life, and to kill as many Turks as potential within the course of. To cite a current assume piece titled “Decolonizing the Mysterious Soul of the Nice Russian Novel,” by Liubov Terekhova—a Ukrainian critic who was reassessing “Anna Karenina” from the United Arab Emirates, as Russia bombed her dwelling metropolis, Kyiv—“Russia is all the time waging a struggle the place a person can flee in the hunt for loss of life.”

Literature, in brief, appears totally different relying on the place you learn it: a topic I discovered myself discussing one afternoon over lunch, in a backyard overlooking Tbilisi, with Anna Kats, a Georgian-born, Russian-speaking scholar of socialist structure, who immigrated to Los Angeles as a toddler. We talked in regards to the essay “Can the Put up-Soviet Suppose?,” by Madina Tlostanova, an Uzbek-Circassian proponent of “decoloniality,” a concept that originated in Latin America across the flip of the millennium. A key tenet is that “pondering” is rarely placeless or disembodied. The primary precept of thought isn’t, as Descartes mentioned, “I feel, due to this fact I’m,” however “I’m the place I feel.”

I remembered the primary time I learn Pushkin’s travelogue “Journey to Arzrum,” the summer season I turned twenty—throughout my very own preliminary foray into journey writing, for a pupil guidebook. I had requested an project in Russia, however my Russian wasn’t ok, so I used to be despatched to Turkey. To enhance my Russian, I used to be studying Pushkin on evening buses, feeling excited each time I noticed Erzurum (Pushkin’s Arzrum) on the schedule board at intercity stations.

Turkey hadn’t been Pushkin’s first-choice vacation spot, both—he had needed to go to Paris. Denied official permission, he resolved to go away the nation the one approach he might consider—by accompanying the army within the Russo-Turkish Struggle of 1828-29. The tone of the ensuing travelogue fluctuates unsettlingly between chatty verbiage and dispassionate horror. “The Circassians hate us,” Pushkin writes at one level. “We have now compelled them out of their open grazing lands; their auls”—villages—“have been devastated, entire tribes have been worn out.” 9 years after his first go to to the Caucasus, Pushkin appears to have gained some readability on the Circassians’ plight. (In 2011, the Georgian parliament voted to characterize Russia’s actions there as a genocide.) Nonetheless, within the subsequent sentence, he goes on to look at, implausibly, that Circassian infants wield sabres earlier than they’ll speak. Later in his account, Pushkin describes a lunch with troops throughout which they see, on a going through mountainside, the Ottoman Military retreating from Russian Cossack reinforcements—abandoning a “decapitated and truncated” Cossack corpse. Pushkin shortly segues to the congeniality of camp life: “At dinner we washed down Asiatic shashlik with English beer and champagne chilled within the snows of Taurida.”

What can we afford to see, as writers and as readers? Might Pushkin afford to see that he benefitted from the “resettlement” of the Circassians? How clearly might he see it? For a way lengthy at a time?

After lunch, Kats and I took a funicular to the highest of Mt. Mtatsminda, the place she maintained that Tbilisi’s finest custard-filled doughnuts have been to be discovered. Rising above the treetops, pondering again alone nationwide and world privileges, the extent of which have grown clearer to me with the passing years, I didn’t, I made a decision, discover it obscure Pushkin’s simultaneous means and lack of ability to understand the reality.

The connection between literary benefit and army energy isn’t a pleasant topic for contemplation. I favor to assume that I’d have cherished Pushkin even when Peter and Catherine the Nice hadn’t waged intensive international and inside wars, dragging Russia into the European steadiness of energy. However would Pushkin’s work nonetheless have been translated into English and stocked within the Barnes & Noble on Route 22 in northern New Jersey—on the planet superpower to which my dad and mom got here within the seventies, in pursuit of the most effective scientific gear? Even when it had been translated, and I had learn it, I may not have acknowledged it nearly as good. Wouldn’t it have been good?

In Tbilisi, I remembered a line from Oksana Zabuzhko’s basic 1996 novel, “Fieldwork in Ukrainian Intercourse,” which I learn on my 2019 journey to Kyiv. “Even should you did, by some miracle, produce one thing on this language ‘knocking out Goethe’s Faust,’ ” Zabuzhko writes, of Ukrainian, “it might solely lie across the libraries unread.” Her narrator, an unnamed Ukrainian-language poet visiting Harvard, suffers numerous indignities. She’s broke, and her work is never translated. However she refuses to jot down in English or in Russian. A self-identified “nationalist-masochist,” she stays trustworthy to her forebears: poets who “hurled themselves like firelogs into the dying embers of the Ukrainian with nothing to fucking present for it however mangled destinies and unread books.”

Had been these books unread as a result of they weren’t nearly as good as Pushkin’s—or was it maybe the opposite approach spherical? If a ebook isn’t learn, and doesn’t affect different books, will it maintain much less which means and resonance for future readers? Conversely, can a “good” ebook be written with out sturdy literary establishments? “Eugene Onegin” is clearly a product of Pushkin’s fixed dialogue with the editors, associates, rivals, critics, and readers whose phrases surrounded him, even in exile. Nikolai Gogol, born in 1809 in Ukraine with Pushkin-scale skills, turned a well-known author solely after shifting to St. Petersburg.

Gogol, now a central determine within the post-2022 discourse about Russian literature, first discovered vital success within the capital by writing, in Russian, on Ukrainian themes. However the identical critics who praised him additionally urged him to jot down about extra common—i.e., extra Russian—topics. Gogol duly produced the Petersburg Tales and Half 1 of “Useless Souls.” A celebrated literary hostess as soon as requested Gogol whether or not, in his soul, he was actually Russian or Ukrainian. In response, he demanded, “Inform me, am I a saint; can I actually see all my loathsome faults?” and launched right into a tirade about his faults, and in addition different folks’s faults. He ultimately suffered a religious breakdown, got here to consider that his literary works have been sinful, burned a part of his manuscripts (presumably together with Half 2 of “Useless Souls”), stopped consuming, and died in nice ache at forty-two.

The Kremlin now makes use of Gogol’s work as proof that Ukraine and Russia share a single tradition. (An essay about Gogol’s Russianness seems on the Site of the Russkiy Mir Basis, which Putin began in 2007.) In accordance with a 2021 article by Putin, Gogol’s books “are written in Russian, bristling with Malorussian”—Little Russian—“people sayings and motifs. How can this heritage be divided between Russia and Ukraine?”

In Tbilisi, the Gogol story I stored coming again to was “The Nostril”: the one the place Main Kovalyov, a mid-level civil servant, wakes up one morning with no nostril. Fearing for his job and his marriage prospects, he hits the streets of St. Petersburg, looking for his lacking proboscis. A carriage pulls up close by. A personage emerges, carrying a uniform and plumed hat that denote a better rank than Kovalyov’s. It’s Kovalyov’s nostril. “Don’t you understand the place you belong?” Kovalyov calls for. “Don’t you understand you’re my very own nostril! ”

The nostril coldly replies, “My expensive fellow, you’re mistaken. I’m an individual in my very own proper.”

Learn sufficient Putin speeches and Kovalyov’s angle towards his nostril begins to sound acquainted. How dare a mere appendage masquerade as an impartial entity? What cruelty, to separate the Little Russian nostril from the Nice Russian face! In “The Nostril,” as in a lot of the Russian literature that I had been revisiting, the pursuits of empire prevail. The police apprehend Kovalyov’s runaway organ “simply because it was boarding the stagecoach certain for Riga.” Tellingly, the nostril had been headed west.

The morning of my lecture, I went for a stroll on Rustaveli Avenue. The broad tree-lined sidewalks have been flanked with used booksellers purveying, alongside Georgian books I couldn’t learn, lone volumes of Tolstoy and Turgenev. At one stall, a collection of Soviet-era classroom maps—certainly one of them exhibiting the altering eighteenth-century borders of the Russian and Ottoman Empires—have been held in place by a Latvian cookbook and a Dostoyevsky omnibus.

Dostoyevsky: we meet ultimately. I opened it to “Crime and Punishment,” the story of Raskolnikov, a poor pupil, who decides to homicide an outdated pawnbroker to fund his schooling. Turning the yellowed pages, I observed a number of mentions of Napoleon. I believed again on Raskolnikov’s concept about how “extraordinary” people have the precise to kill others for “the achievement of an thought.” If Napoleon, who murdered 1000’s of Egyptian folks and stole their archeological treasures, is lauded because the founding father of Egyptology, why shouldn’t a pupil be capable of kill one individual to advance his research? The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I noticed, was the logic of imperialism.

“Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed a lot to Dostoevskyism,” Oksana Zabuzhko wrote in an essay final April, after the bloodbath in Bucha. She referred to as the invasion “an explosion of pure, distilled evil and long-suppressed hatred and envy,” including, “ ‘Why must you reside higher than us?’ Russian troopers have been saying to Ukrainians.” It was straightforward to see that message in “Crime and Punishment.” Why ought to “some ridiculous outdated hag” have cash, when Raskolnikov is poor?

Dostoyevsky didn’t, after all, endorse Raskolnikov’s views. (The clue is within the title: the story ends in a Siberian jail.) Nonetheless, he discovered his concepts fascinating sufficient to be the topic of a ebook. Ought to we nonetheless learn that ebook? In “Tradition and Imperialism,” Edward Mentioned raises an identical query about Jane Austen. He concludes that to “jettison” “Mansfield Park” is to overlook a chance to see literature as a dynamic community, quite than because the remoted experiences of victims and perpetrators—however that the answer isn’t to maintain consuming Austen’s novels in a geopolitical vacuum. As an alternative, we have to discover new, “contrapuntal” methods of studying. Which means seeing “Mansfield Park” as a ebook with two geographies: one, England, richly elaborated; the opposite, Antigua, strenuously resisted—but revealed, all the identical.