In some circles Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has called into question not just the value of reading Russian masterworks, but also the morality
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask, Oksana Zabuzhko, a Ukrainian writer, argued powerfully that Western readings of major Russian authors had ignored their imperialist attitudes and indulged their drastic moral relativism and sympathy for criminals. Literature, she observed, “is of one flesh with the society for which and about which it writes”. Books are “the camouflage net” of Russia’s tanks in Ukraine.
Pushkin’s imperialist bent also shows up in “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”. The poem describes a young Russian officer who is captured in the Caucasus before being saved by a Circassian woman. In the epilogue the narrator celebrates Russia’s violent subjugation of the region and declares that “everything is subject to the Russian sword”. Here, too, it seems that Pushkin’s critique of tsarist power does not extend to its imperialism.
Dostoyevsky’s Russian chauvinism is often expressed in spiritual rather than militaristic terms. Following his lengthy exile in Siberia during the 1850s—the result of his association with the Petrashevsky Circle of radical intellectuals—he became a devout Orthodox Christian. In his thinking, those who rejected the Orthodox God, such as Catholics or Jews, were anathema. Dostoyevsky’s long-standing hostility to both crops up in his novel “The Idiot”.
Yet elsewhere Tolstoy repudiates militarism and violence of all kinds. His exquisite late novella “Hadji Murat” tells the story of a Caucasian warrior trying to save his family amid a Russian conquest; it sympathises with his plight and excoriates tsarist aggression. As the mix of patriotism and pacifism in Tolstoy’s work shows, literature is an inherently ambiguous medium. Great books can rarely be simplified to a single meaning or moral.
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