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FOREIGN POLICY
JUNE 2, 2015
The country's great authors put Russia’s aggression in
context better than any intel briefing can.
Want to really understand
what’s going on in Russia? Get rid of that CIA report full of dusty Cold War
tropes. Forget the NSA intercepts or spy satellite imagery. And drop the
jargon-filled scholarly analysis from those political science journals.
Instead, get back to the
richest literary gold mine in the Western world: Russian novels and poetry.
Read Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn,
and Bulgakov. That’s where you’ll really find how Russians think. And it’s all
unclassified!
Begin with Nikolai Gogol’s
1842 masterpiece, Dead Souls. It is the blackest of black humor, a story in
which a mysterious businessman moves through the Russian countryside “buying up
souls” (i.e., taking away a tax burden from the estate owners). It is an
absurdist construct, and the novel functions as a satiric portrait of the
dysfunctional Russian landowner society that eventually fell in the 1917
revolution. It tells us that Russians see the world as somewhat absurd and
contradictory, and hardly a place where overarching humanist value systems
triumph. For a nation whose leader struts around the world stage without a
shirt on, plays with a pet Siberian tiger, and flies in a motorized mini-plane
chasing white storks, there is a certain appeal to the absurd. It is a novel
that evokes the most skeptical and cynical in the human condition and
appropriately ends abruptly in mid-sentence — a signal of the inability to
predict a coherent future.
How will Russians fight and what kind of leaders do they follow?
Want to understand their patriotism? Go read the master, Leo Tolstoy.
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