Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War
The New Yorker · by Elif Batuman · January 23, 2023
The first and only time I visited Ukraine was in 2019. My book “The Possessed”—a memoir I had published in 2010, about studying Russian literature—had recently been translated into Russian, along with “The Idiot,” an autobiographical novel, and I was headed to Russia as a cultural emissary, through an initiative of PEN America and the U.S. Department of State. On the way, I stopped in Kyiv and Lviv: cities I had only ever read about, first in Russian novels, and later in the international news. In 2014, security forces had killed a hundred protesters at Kyiv’s Independence Square, and Russian-backed separatists had declared two mini-republics in the Donbas. Nearly everyone I met on my trip—journalists, students, cultural liaisons—seemed to know of someone who had been injured or killed in the protests, or who had joined the volunteer army fighting the separatists in the east.
As the visiting author of two books called “The Possessed” and “The Idiot,” I got to hear a certain amount about people’s opinions of Dostoyevsky. It was explained to me that nobody in Ukraine wanted to think about Dostoyevsky at the moment, because his novels contained the same expansionist rhetoric as was used in propaganda justifying Russian military aggression. My immediate reaction to this idea was to bracket it off as an understandable by-product of war—as not “objective.”
I had years of practice in this kind of distancing. As a student, I had often been asked whether I had Russian relatives and, if not, why I was so interested in “the Russians.” Was I perhaps studying the similarities between Peter the Great, who had Westernized Russia, and Atatürk, who had Westernized Turkey, where my relatives were from? Such questions struck me as narrow-minded. Why should I be studying whatever literature happened to have been produced by my ancestors? I was reading Russian literature from a human perspective, not a national one. I had chosen these books precisely for the universal quality expressed in titles like “Fathers and Sons,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “Dead Souls.”
Of course—I saw, in Kyiv—you couldn’t expect people in a war not to read from a national perspective. I thought back to what I knew of Dostoyevsky’s life. As a young man, he had been subjected to a mock execution for holding utopian-socialist views before being exiled to Siberia. In the eighteen-sixties, after his return, he wrote “Crime and Punishment” and “The Idiot,” contributing to the development of the psychological novel. I remembered that a later work, “A Writer’s Diary,” included some dire tirades about how Orthodox Russia was destined to unite the Slavic peoples and re-create Christ’s kingdom on earth. Looking back, I could definitely see a connection to some parts of Russian state propaganda.
But wasn’t that why we didn’t admire Dostoyevsky for his political commentary? The thing he was good at was novels. Anyone in a Dostoyevsky novel who went on an unreadable rant was bound to be contradicted, in a matter of pages, by another ranting character holding the opposite view: a technique known as dialogism, which features prominently both in Russian novels and in my own thinking. In the months following my trip, I often heard the Ukrainian critique of Dostoyevsky replaying in my mind, getting in arguments with past me, and resonating with other reservations I’d had, in recent years, about the role of Russian novels in my life.
These questions took on a sickening salience late last February, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once I was on the lookout, it wasn’t hard to spot Russian literature in the discourse surrounding the war—particularly in Vladimir Putin’s repeated invocations of the “Russian World” (“ Russkiy Mir ”), a concept popularized by Kremlin-linked “philosophers” since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Russian World imagines a transnational Russian civilization, one extending even beyond the “triune Russian nation” of “Great Russia” (Russia), “Little Russia” (Ukraine), and “White Russia” (Belarus); it is united by Eastern Orthodoxy, by the Russian language, by the “culture” of Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky—and, when necessary, by air strikes.
In early March, I wasn’t altogether surprised to learn that a number of Ukrainian literary groups, including PEN Ukraine, had signed a petition calling for “a total boycott of books from Russia in the world!”—one that entailed not just cutting financial ties with publishers but ceasing to distribute or promote any books by Russian writers. Their rationale was similar to the one I’d encountered in 2019: “Russian propaganda is woven into many books which indeed turns them into weapons and pretexts for the war.” The boycott wasn’t totally consonant with the PEN charter (“In time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion”). PEN Germany quickly put out a press release to the effect that deranged twenty-first-century politicians shouldn’t be conflated with great writers who happened to be from the same country. The header read “The enemy is Putin, not Pushkin.”
Pushkin was at the center of the storm. Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, he serially published “Eugene Onegin,” often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was conducted in French. Pushkin’s own relationship to the Russian state was not untroubled. In 1820, at the age of twenty, he was banished from St. Petersburg for writing anti-authoritarian verses (notably “Ode to Liberty,” which was later found among the possessions of the Decembrist rebels). In 1826, he was allowed to return to Moscow—with Tsar Nicholas I as his personal censor. He eventually went back to St. Petersburg, where he died, at the age of thirty-seven, after an eminently avoidable duel. The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union went on to erect bronze Pushkins all over the world, from Vilnius to Havana to Tashkent. Many monuments were built during the height of Stalin’s purges, in 1937: the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin’s death.
In April, a movement known as Pushkinopad—“Pushkin fall”—began sweeping Ukraine, resulting in the dismantling of dozens of Pushkin statues. A pair of Ukrainian I.T. workers created a chatbot on Telegram (@cancel_pushkin_bot) to identify Russian writers who didn’t deserve to have things named after them in Ukraine. It describes Pushkin and Dostoyevsky as Russian chauvinists. (Tolstoy—a vocal pacifist for the last three decades of his life—gets a pass.)
Around that time, I received an invitation to give a talk on Russian literature in Tbilisi, Georgia. It came from a Russian-language study-abroad program that normally took place in St. Petersburg but had relocated, along with its founder, a British educator named Ben Meredith. The invitation gave me pause. There was surely much to be learned at this rich juncture of geospatial and historical currents. But was I really going to inflict myself, in my capacity as an eternal student of Russian literature, on another former territory of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union?
Georgia’s tangled history with Russia seemed to open out before me like another pathway in an ever-forking maze. In 1783, King Erekle II signed a treaty with Catherine the Great that secured Russian protection of Georgian lands against the Persian Empire (and the Ottoman Empire, and various neighboring tribes and khanates). Russia never fulfilled the treaty and, in 1801, began its annexation of Georgia. Tiflis, as Tbilisi was then known, became a colonial capital, with printing presses, schools, and an opera. It also became the base for Russia’s expansion into Chechnya and Dagestan. In response to Russian incursions, many of the North Caucasus highlanders came together to form a Muslim resistance army, led by a series of Dagestani imams, the last of whom, Imam Shamil, surrendered in 1859. During the war, generations of Russian literary youths—among them, Pushkin and Tolstoy—went to the region. They wrote about their experiences, forming what came to be known as the Russian literature of the Caucasus: works I had been hugely excited to learn about in college, because they often included Turkic words. As the nineteenth century progressed, Georgian literary youths began to study in St. Petersburg, read Pushkin, and adopt Russian Romantic rhetoric to describe Georgian national identity.