Russian Arts #

Suffering: #

Alfred de MUSSET wrote An unhappy nation makes great artists.

Un peuple malheureux fait les grands artistes.

Suffering is a recurring motif throughout all literature.

Pain is inherent in the human condition; it can lead us to a noble form of dignity or it leads to a brutalising state of inhumanity - a desperation to strike back with violence.

Suffering is depicted as enobling. At the end, order is restored, god is on his throne and all is right with the world. Fate is controlled by Nemesis; divine retribution – poetic justice.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion taught suffering how to kneel and thank its executioner.

Any God who requires innocent pain to justify the world, is not sacred - He is guilty. Dostoevsky

When suffering is dressed as virtue, power escapes blame and pain is told to be grateful. Any belief that asks innocence to bleed for meaning does not reveal holiness—it exposes moral collapse disguised as faith.

The heart must be broken for it to open. Mark Wolynn

No pain; no gain.

Ivan IV - the Terrible 1st Romanov 1533 - 1548

Suffering from violent, paranoid delusions, he earned a ghastly reputation for slaughtering his political opponents while suppressing free speech in Russia. Ivan’s armies once destroyed an entire town, simply because the Tsar had a misinformed hunch they were plotting against him. Oh, and he “accidentally” killed his own son with a giant walking stick in 1581.

While Peter and later Catherine the Great opened the window to the west, from 1801, Alexander I began an attempt to close the window to preserve the Monarchy in face of Napoleon’s drive towards liberation. Pushkin was exiled from St Petersberg to the eastern, but Nicholas I, recognising his talent and popularity brought Pushkin back from the cold under his confining censorship. No wonder he and other writers resorted to subtle satire and literature of the absurd.

The Decembrist revolt, 1830 revolts in France and the 1848 revolutions across Europe, threatened the status quo resulting in the arrest, death sentence of Dostoevsky. After his reprieve with ten years of hard labour in Siberia, Dostoevsky came back a stronger man obsessed with freedom, suffering, faith, and the darkest corners of the human psyche.

Russian writers and thinkers responded to their country’s experience, which, in its very extremity, did not invite euphemisms. Evil was evil, as no one in the Gulag could doubt; if ever there was goodness, it was amidst immense suffering.

Kissinger embarks on a disquisition about Russia’s “almost mystical” tolerance for suffering.

Turgenev’s entire body of work is about, the impossibility of separating love from suffering, devotion from delusion, choice from compulsion.

Dostoevsky wrote his best novels after his arrest in 1849, sentenced to death, but commuted to ten years in Siberian gulags. His writing is an attempt to exorcise the demons of his traumatised memories.

Solzhenitsyn writes with the moral intensity of Dostoevsky and the clarity of someone who has lived through what he depicts. His prose is unhurried but relentless, probing like a scalpel, peeling away layers of pretense to expose the raw nerves beneath. He does not offer easy symbols or simplified villains. What he offers instead is a haunting moral inquiry, dressed in the quiet realism of everyday suffering.

Alienation #

The reason Russia feels so alien to most Westerners is that it has never been Latin (and was never disciplined by either the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation).

The reason it feels so threatening is that its alienness is less immediately apparent than that of the other “East” (Near, Middle, or Far), while looming much larger because of its size, proximity, and imperial expansion. And of course the less coherent and self-confident “the West” is, the more it needs an outside threat.

Russia has emerged as a major player in the Arts in the last 200 years with some of the world’s greatest artists in music, painting, literature and during the Soviet Cultural Revolution of the late 1920s. Lenin claimed,

“If I keep listening to music, I will never finish the revolution.”

Classical musicians include iconic composers like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, known for their powerful symphonies, ballets, and nationalistic styles.

During the Cold War, classical ballet companies such as the Kirov and the Bolshoi were among the most prominent cultural weapons of the Soviet Union.

It was Peter the Great who opened Russia’s window to the world by going on long tour to be educated in Western ways. He and his large entourage brought back new ideas in industry and ship building.

Catherine the Great furthered the cause by encouraging the aristocracy to study abroad - mostly in Paris. French became the language of the court as in most European ones.

French thinkers, like , Michel de Montaigne, B: 1534, who questioned everything, urged people to be comfortable with uncertainty. In an age demanding dogmatic certainty about salvation, politics, morality, Montaigne recommended doubt. Deeply disturbed by the savage brutality of the religious wars, he kept neutral, but lost his faith in all religions.

Rousseau (1712 - 1778) argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the corruption of virtue and morality. His second, work, was The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. The central claim is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society.

Rousseau’s praise of the natural state of man and his major work The Social Contract: published in 1762 caused great controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities. Rousseau fled France, settled in Switzerland but became increasingly paranoid.

The social base of Western liberalism, a commercial middle class, was almost entirely lacking in nineteenth-century Russia. Liberalism’s appeal there was not economic but intellectual, and its proponents were not businessmen or industrialists but enlightened noblemen, professionals, and academicians.

The first Russian authors began to appear after 1800, with Pushkin the most popular.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, #

1799, - 1837, (aged 37)

Widely revered as the founder of Russian literature, 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).

Pushkin was banished from St. Petersburg in May 1820 to a remote southern province. Sent first to Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine), and later to Crimea.

The collapse of the rising had been a grievous experience for Pushkin, whose heart was wholly with the “guilty” Decembrists, five of whom had been executed, while others were exiled to forced labour in Siberia.

In 1826, because he was so popular with the people, the new Tsar Nicholas I, allowed him to return to Moscow— 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.

Boris Godunov dramatises the succession after the death of Ivan the Terrible, who is presented as the murderer of Ivan’s little son, Dmitri. The development of the action on two planes, one political and historical, the other psychological, is masterly and is set against a background of turbulent events and ruthless ambitions.

The play owes much to Pushkin’s reading of early Russian annals and chronicles, as well as to Shakespeare, who, as Pushkin said, was his master in bold, free treatment of character, simplicity, and truth to nature.

In May 1823 he started work on his central masterpiece, the novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin (1833). It was published serially, often considered the first great Russian novel, starting in the eighteen-twenties, at a time when much of Russian aristocratic life was still conducted in French. In that way it represents a nation’s first writing in its vernacular - like Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in English, Charles Harpur’s Four Graves… Dante imitated Virgil, Chaucer - Boccaccio, and Harpur - Milton.

Pushkin reveals influences by Ovid, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Byron and Thomas Wyatt.

Eugene Onegin illustrates the corrosive effects of the hollow core of being an Aristocrat during the 19^(th) century. Like the quintessential gentleman of the English class system; a man not expected to do anything but live an indulged dissipate life, purposeless, non-productive, haughty, imperious, destructive and unaccountable. His lifestyle is ridiculed as irresponsible, wanton and decadent.

Like Wyatt’s They Flee From Me… Onegin is rejected by someone who used to dote on him. Bored with his jaded lifestyle in St. Petersburg, he inherits a country estate after his uncle’s death.

Eugene Onegin is a tragic story about a wealthy, bored dandy, Eugene Onegin, who rejects the love of a young, romantic woman named Tatyana. He then kills his best friend, Vladimir Lensky, in a duel after a series of misunderstandings and flirting with Olga, Lensky’s fiancée. Years later, after traveling, Onegin returns to St Peterburg and finds Tatyana married and no longer in love with him, leaving him with regret and despair.

Pushkin’s political writing is constrained by censorship, but his writing about love is given free rein. He demonstrates a respectful attitude to women revealing the pain of unrequited love in both genders. The women are treated with dignity luring men to higher aspirations. While the style imitates Byron, the attitudes are more like Keats.

Duels have been fought since Cain killed Abel because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice over his. Duels were deemed God’s justice as Trial by Combat in the 13th century. Shakespeare relies on them in most of his histories - Hamlet, Macbeth… The winner of a duel obviously indicates devine justice.

Pushkin took part in many duels and died, at the age of thirty-seven, after the last of a rash duels.

His lament:

I have outlasted all my desires, my dreams I have grown apart; my grief alone I am left entire; the gleaming of an empty heart.

Mikhail Iurevich Lermontov #

In the early 17th century, a Scottish lieutenant George Learmont, who took part in the Polish intervention in Russia, fell into Russian captivity. He took it as a chance for a new life, as he entered the service of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich. He married Maria Lermontova, an heiress to rich estates. When she died Mikhail was educated by his grandmother and entered a boarding school for noble sons at 14. He was also tutored by experts from France, Germany and England. His grandmother looked down on his father and Lermontove grew up without a father figure, except for Pushkin.

He developed his passion for poetry, along with a reputation for cruel and sardonic humour. In 1828 he was admitted to Moscow University, where he began writing poetry influenced by Lord Byron and the latter’s cult of personality.

After being expelled for disciplinary reasons he attended cadet school in St. Petersburg and in 1834 he was stationed in the city with the Hussar regiment of the Imperial Guards. By 1832 Lermontov had already written two hundred lyric poems, ten long poems and three plays. His passionate eulogy on Pushkin’s murder, “A Poet’s Death, which was published in 1837, was enthusiastically received in liberal circles but annoyed Tsar Nicholas I, with the result that Lermontov was exiled to the Caucasus.

He wrote:

The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure of torturing others.

Victims become perpetrators.

A Hero of our Times is an ironic title as most of the characters are anti-heroic. he does not attempt to romanticise Russian History. He peoples his books with ordinary peasants, Cossacks, brigands and other low life set in beautiful nature and majestic mountains.

A Male Manifesto:

Pechorin, like most of the men, deal with the problem of male masculinity.

You suffer for being a man, and you suffer for not being a man.

Men must prove themselves by being strong and conquering others including women.

Women are the prize of war used to incubate more warriors. Women are drawn to men who conquer them, not to ones who pursue them.

In the barbeque of life, women get to choose between CHOPs and SNAGs. They tend to chose the CHOP, but when it doesn’t work out, cry on the shoulders of the SNAG.

(Cauvinistic, Hedonistic, Opinionated Pricks) (Sensitive New Age Guy)

The chase is more exhilerating than the prize. You fight to entangle with a woman and then untangle. Men pursue many women out of the biological necessity of spreading their seed. Women look for males who will protect them.

The basic inner congenital contradictions in men are their peternatural impulsive drives and their apirations for noble deeds.

Beauty and The Beast, Leonard Cohen’s trysts.

Men are conflicted by passion and reason. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, has rational qualms about his feelings for Elizabeth, but eventually his heart wins over his social misgivings.

Lermotov followed Pushkin’s philosophy that life is not about finding peace, but a struggle to find meaning in living dangerously.

In a late poem The Sail Lermontov writes:

As if in tempest there is peace.

The paradox remains that a soul finds true solace in struggle and upheaval.

Nicholai Vasilevich Gogol #

1809 - 1852

Born in the Ukraine to the lower nobility, Gogol showed early talent in writing biting comedic satire of the pompous.
After school in Moscow he attempted to be successful in St Petersburg with little success. Luckily he came under the influence of Pushkin. With money from his mother meant to pay a debt he travelled to Germany.

His great comedy, The Government Inspector mercilessly lampoons the corrupt bureaucracy under Nicholas I. Nicholas apparently found it entertaining.

But during the triumph, after the bogus inspector’s departure, the arrival of the real inspector is announced—to the horror of those concerned. It was only by a special order of the tsar that the first performance of this comedy of indictment and “laughter through tears” took place on April 19, 1836.

He mercilessly lampoons the dullness of the bureaucracy under Nicholas I.

All art attempts to reflect society, and when we don’t like what we see, we smash the mirror.

The hue and cry raised by the reactionary press and officialdom was such that Gogol left Russia for Rome, where he remained, with some interruptions, until 1842. It was in Rome he wrote his most famous “poetic novel”.

Dead Souls

Due to severe censorship and threats of exile, most writers have to write on two levels, the obvious one and a hidden one.

Satire originated with Aesop’s famous Book of Fables, which date back to the 5th Century BC. Of course Homer already used irony in The Iliad and could be mocking the brutality and futility of armed combat.

Most profound thinkers — including Horace, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Shakespeare—were not free to write explicitly about their most controversial ideas but had to disguise the truth under a conventional veneer -dressed up as comedy.

In sharp contrast with our idealized fantasy of Merrie Olde England, writers back then were jailed, tortured, and maimed for offending those in power. Ben Jonson, , Thomas Kyd……

Giovanni Boccaccio, in his 1357 Life of Dante, said that great poets write on two levels, so that their work -

“simultaneously challenges the intellect of the wise while it gives comfort to the minds of the simple” (quoted in Melzer 460).

But pity and tolerance are rare in satire, even in clash with it, producing in the result a deep sense of tragic humour. It is this that makes of Dead Souls a unique work, peculiarly Gogolian, peculiarly Russian.

Gogol was closely associated and influenced by Pushkin, who in turn was influenced by Ovid, Dante, French writers, Lord Byron and Shakespeare.

Ovid and Dante had both also been exiled for their writing. Lord Byron inherited his title from an uncle, went into voluntary exile at 22, identified with freedom movements in Italy and Greece. Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies reveal a strong sense of true justice and abhorrence of all forms of tyranny.

Montaigne and Rousseau advocated for free thinking, equality and the consent of the governed.

Dead Souls, the great prose classic of Russia, a masterpiece , that practically all the Russian masterpieces that have come since have grown out of it. Dostoieffsky goes so far as to bestow this tribute upon an earlier work, The Cloak; “We have all issued out of Gogol’s Cloak.”

Pushkin, said of Gogol that “behind his laughter you feel the unseen tears,”.

Gogol was also one of the earliest absurdists -

The human obsession with purpose is merely a distraction from the absurdity of existence.

He also claimed:

evil is ineradicable in the world.

Chichikov, the main character can be regarded as a universal character. We find an American professor, William Lyon Phelps 1, of Yale, holding the opinion that:

“no one can travel far in America without meeting scores of Chichikovs; indeed, he is an accurate portrait of the American promoter, of the successful commercial traveller whose success depends entirely not on the real value and usefulness of his stock-in-trade, but on his knowledge of human nature and of the persuasive power of his tongue.”

Due to his status as an urban man, travelling to a regional centre where pompous small fish look up to their superiors, Chichikov manages to impress all. Everyone plays homage to heirarchy.

In Russian society there exist clever folk who can speak in one manner to a landowner possessed of two hundred peasant souls, and in another to a landowner possessed of three hundred, and in another to a landowner possessed of five hundred Chap. 3

In, Chapter 11, the last one, writing in exile of Rome, Gogol gives us his ambivalent paeanic apostrophe to his motherland:

Ah, Russia, Russia, from my beautiful home in a strange land I can still see you! In you everything is poor and disordered and unhomely; in you the eye is neither cheered nor dismayed by temerities of nature which a yet more temerarious art has conquered; in you one beholds no cities with lofty, many-windowed mansions, lofty as crags, no picturesque trees, no ivy-clad ruins, no waterfalls with their everlasting spray and roar, no beetling precipices which confuse the brain with their stony immensity, no vistas of vines and ivy and millions of wild roses and ageless lines of blue hills which look almost unreal against the clear, silvery background of the sky. In you everything is flat and open; your towns project like points or signals from smooth levels of plain, and nothing whatsoever enchants or deludes the eye.

Yet what secret, what invincible force draws me to you? Why does there ceaselessly echo and re-echo in my ears the sad song which hovers throughout the length and the breadth of your borders? What is the burden of that song? Why does it wail and sob and catch at my heart? What say the notes which thus painfully caress and embrace my soul, and flit, uttering their lamentations, around me?

What is it you seek of me, O Russia? What is the hidden bond which subsists between us? Why do you regard me as you do? Why does everything within you turn upon me eyes full of yearning? Even at this moment, as I stand dumbly, fixedly, perplexedly contemplating your vastness, a menacing cloud, charged with gathering rain, seems to overshadow my head. What is it that your boundless expanses presage? Do they not presage that one day there will arise in you ideas as boundless as yourself? Do they not presage that one day you too will know no limits? Do they not presage that one day, when again you shall have room for their exploits, there will spring to life the heroes of old? How the power of your immensity enfolds me, and reverberates through all my being with a wild, strange spell, and flashes in my eyes with an almost supernatural radiance! Yes, a strange, brilliant, unearthly vista indeed do you disclose, O Russia, country of mine!

Ivan Turgenev #

Turgenev began Fathers and Sons on the Isle of Wight, in 1860, five years after the death of Nicholas I and four years after the liberation of the serf. Alexander II ushered in relaxed censorship and the ferment of liberal ideas aroused a new generation giving rise to a surfeit of revolutionary secret societies. This tragi-comedy of age and youth, pitted the old order and the new, the conservating fathers and the revolutionary sons.

Ivan Turgenev fell in love with Pauline Viardot, a Spanish married opera singer, and though she never left her husband, he followed her around Europe for forty years. The whole time, he wrote some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking novels about love and missed opportunities that Russian literature has ever produced. Turgenev’s entire life was an exercise in unfulfilled longing. And he turned that longing into art.

Turgenev could have walked away. Could have built a different life. Could have found someone who loved him back with the intensity he deserved. But he didn’t. He chose the pain because being near her, even as a satellite, felt more true than happiness without her.

That’s either the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard or the saddest, maybe both. Maybe that’s what Turgenev’s entire body of work is about, the impossibility of separating love from suffering, devotion from delusion, choice from compulsion.

He spent forty years proving that you can know exactly what’s destroying you and still walk toward it every single day.

Turgenev does not seek to resolve. He seeks to reveal. In doing so, he shows us that life is not a problem to be solved, but a ( mystery) contradiction to be lived. And in this contradiction, this dissonance between head and heart, progress and memory, we find ourselves.

He allows all the characters to reveal themselves through their actions and dialogue. Turgenev gives balanced perspectives of all sides of an issue.

Sons have always threatened fathers; Cronus overthrows Uranus, Zeus, Cronus, and Oedipus - Lais. Bob Dylan, in The Times They Are A-changing claims:

Your children are beyond your command.

Both fathers, Nikolai Petrovitch of Arkady, and Vasili Ivanitch of Bazarov, are extremely proud of their sons and allowed them their independence.

Arkady Kirsanov brings Bazarov, his university friend home to meet his father and uncle Paul where they have arguments over how Russia should move forward with reform.

The liberal ideals of the 1840s generation give beautiful speeches covering up their failure to actually change anything. It’s about whether Russia should modernize or preserve its soul, whether science destroys meaning or reveals it, whether the people who inherited estates and serfs have any right to lecture the generation that has to actually fix their mess. These questions were tearing Russia apart in the 1860s.

The old generation does talk more than it acts. Their aesthetic refinement hasn’t prevented widespread poverty and injustice.

Romantic love is chemistry. Art serves no purpose.

Dostoevsky #

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Europe was determined to stamp out liberalism and the three Emperors of Austria, Prussia and Russia formed a Holy Alliance to preserve the divine rights of Monarchism. Their greatest fear was losing their power to democratic forces. Various revolutions occurred in all countries, the Decembrists in Russia in 1825, various ones in 1830’s.

The 1848 Revolutions across all of Europe marked the end of monarchism in most countries, except Russia, causing Nicholas I to become even more repressive.

1848 also saw the publication of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, ushering in a new age of individual thinking and the rise of various competing “isms” - liberalism, conservatism, imperialism, nationalism, clericalism, atheism, socialism, marxism, capitalism, nihilism, absurdism….

Nicholas I turned into an oppressive tyrant - his reign became known as the “Nicholas System” characterised by its severe repression of liberal ideas.

Fyodor Dostoevsky served in the Russian army twice: first as a trained military engineer (1843–1844) and later as a forced soldier in Siberia (1854–1859) following his imprisonment, which severely impacted his health but fueled his literary career. He left the army in 1844 to join a secret writing society in St Peterburg.

The 1848 revolutions across Europe successfully prepared the seed ground for liberty. This alarmed Nicholas I and he reacted with even more repression.

At 28 years of age, Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested with a group of young intellectuals accused of reading and spreading “dangerous” ideas in tsarist Russia. He was sentenced to death, lined up before a firing squad — and at the last moment, the execution was halted. His punishment was commuted to four years of hard labor in Siberia and six years of military service.

That brush with death and the long, brutal exile that followed reshaped Dostoevsky forever. Before prison, he had been a promising young writer, eager to impress. After prison, he became the Dostoevsky we know: the writer obsessed with freedom, suffering, faith, and the darkest corners of the human psyche.

It may have been his six years of military service giving him insight into the most terrifying truth about power that Dostoevsky discovered that changed how he understood human nature forever. Power is only given to those who dare to lower themselves.

When someone gains the ability to crush another person, something dies inside them first. The victim suffers, but the oppressor loses their humanity entirely.

Oppressors don’t do their own dirty work - they give agency - uniforms, guns and immunity to thugs.

His return to civil society requires him to find his humanity again. Most returned soldiers have to make the same adjustments. Many soldiers experience symptoms of PTSD while re-integrating with civil society. Drone pilots have the highest rates suggesting it is not fear, but trauma that causes a moral psychological injury. PTSD is an inadequate label for a broad and long spectrum of dealing with situations beyond our control and outside of our usual psychological defensive shields.

Nicholas I died in 1855 and Alexander II began his liberal reforms, emancipating the serfs and relaxing free speech. When Dostoevsky returned in 1859, he produced Notes from the Underground (1864) — a strange, bitter, and brilliant creative essay often called the first existentialist novel. Its narrator, the “Underground Man,” is angry, self-contradictory, and almost impossible to like. He rails against reason, mocks utopian dreams, and insists that human beings would rather destroy themselves than live in a perfectly ordered society.

It appears more a rambling rant than a carefully constructed Novel. Most victims of shock take years to recover their sense of balance and transform their pain - “cri de cœur,” into detached works of art. Elizabeth Bishop took 25 years to produce The Moose - a cultivated artefact of her painful childhood. Other famous artists who created works due to their suffering include Munsch’s The Scream, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour.

Dostoevsky’s four years in prison had shown him firsthand the complexity and perversity of the human spirit.

His next six years conscripted into military service at the lowest level was also belittling, He sees himself as and insect - a bee - powerless.

From that darkness, he created a work that inspired philosophers and writers from Nietzsche, Kafka, Camus to Sartre, and continues to unsettle readers today.

This isn’t just philosophy - it’s a warning carved from the darkest corners of human experience.

The irony is striking: a government tried to silence Dostoevsky by locking him away, but it was precisely that punishment which like Ovid, gave him the vision and the fire to write his masterpieces.

Without Siberia, there would be no Underground Man, no Crime and Punishment, no Brothers Karamazov. The prison bars forged the writer who would go on to expose the prisons of the human soul.

Notes from the Underworld #

Dostoevsky explores the depth of the human mind and the complextiy of morality, faith and freedom. He combines psychological insights with philosophical depth.

Human suffering can either brutalise or imbue redemption and resilience to cope with our harsh reality.

Shakespeare in Lear:

EDGAR to Gloucster:

*Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all: *

In Hamlet:

readiness is all:

Dostoevsky claims:

suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”

He rejected a romantic view of life in favor of a realistic one of resistance.

Dostoevsky warns of a distorted form of tolerance where truth is silenced. When sensitivity outweighs reason, intelligent voices risk suppression. In times of universal deceit, we need to balance compassion with freedom of thought.

Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.

It is not considered gracious to criticise authority figures.

His 1864 novella, Notes from Underground, is considered to be one of the first works of existentialist literature. Written about 15 years after his mock execution it reflects some of his raw unprocessed trauma.

His brutal experiences with forced labor and military service in Siberia were directly reflected in his writing, particularly in his depictions of suffering, imprisonment, and redemption.

After he sent a letter of formal apology in 1856, Dostoevsky had his rights to marry and to publish again restored.

A former bureaucrat had retired and expresses his extreme nihilistic rants. 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 most great literature - Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare - juxtaposing opposing points of view.

Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. (Machiavellian)

This is countered later with:

I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. …

Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has long been accepted that lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. (lack of rectitude)

Dostoevsky was the master of the darkness, the madness, the guilt -because he knew the price of being alive. He knew the absolute, terrible value of every single day.

Sometimes, history shows us that confinement doesn’t kill genius — it ignites it.

What is my object precisely in writing? To gain relief from painful memories by putting them on paper? … it is more imposing on paper. There is something more impressive in it; I shall be better able to criticise myself and improve my style.

Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow. I have hundreds of such reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and oppresses me. For some reason I believe that if I write it down I should get rid of it.

This is writing as therapy. Most writers write early in the morning when their sub-conscious memories are still fresh from their nightmares.

But Dostoevsky also writes to right wrongs, to avenge. He has a compulsion to expose hypocrisy and the abuse of power in order to create a better society.

Dostoevsky didn’t become a victim of his ordeals; he became a strengthened survivor.

The Gambler #

The Gambler, a story of obsession, risk, and compulsion. Its narrative drew from Dostoevsky’s own life, transforming personal turmoil into literary brilliance. Every character, every scene, every description reflected the high stakes of his own existence at the time.

Desperate to pay off his brother’s debts and fund his gambling addiction, he had signed a predatory contract with publisher Fyodor Stellovsky. The terms were brutal: deliver a complete novel by November 1, 1866, or lose the rights to all his past and future works for nine years. With only 26 days remaining and not a single word written, Dostoevsky faced literary death.

Anna Snitkina, a young stenographer, was hired to help him write.

For the next 25 days, Anna arrived at noon and stayed until four o’clock. Their dictating sessions were punctuated by tea breaks and increasingly intimate conversations. Dostoevsky began addressing her as “golubchik” - Russian for “little dove,” his favorite term of endearment. He cherished her seriousness, her extraordinary powers of sympathy, and how her luminous spirit could dissipate even his darkest moods.

Anna was equally enchanted. She was touched by his kindness, his genuine respect for her opinions, and how he treated her like a collaborator rather than hired help. Neither realized that their deep mutual affection was the seed of something legendary.

On November 10, exactly 26 days after they began, The Gambler was complete. Dostoevsky had accomplished the impossible with Anna’s help. He paid her the agreed 50 rubles (about $1,500 today) and thanked her warmly.

Anna found that “all my old activities had lost their interest and seemed empty and futile”. Dostoevsky, unable to imagine life without her, asked Anna to help him finish Crime and Punishment.

On November 20, exactly ten days after completing The Gambler, he performed the most romantic marriage proposal in literary history. Fyodor and Anna married on February 15, 1867,

Chekhov #

Anton Chekhov, the literary genius who lived a double life.

“Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.” And you can feel that tension in everything he wrote.

He displayed a mischievous nature - “Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our strainings and striving after a meaningful life.” Wittgenstein and Robert Frost echoed those sentiments.

Chekhov believed that art shouldn’t solve life.

It should show it honestly. The role of the artist is not to answer questions but to ask them correctly.

His characters aren’t redeemed. They aren’t punished. They don’t arrive at clarity by the final page.

What he gave instead was clarity. A mirror.

They just… continue. Regretful. Hopeful. Petty. Kind. Stuck. Alive.

Ovid - Yet I live! Shakespeare - endurance/readiness is all.

Often ambiguous, at times humorous, gritty, haunting, ironic, anecdotal, facetious, lyrical, apathetic, bizarre, passionate and tragic, Chekhov’s works explore the entire range of the human spirit. Through his use of such Chekhovian elements as subjective observation, stream of consciousness, character epiphanies, and juxtapositions of pessimism and humour we are immersed in the lives of Chekhov’s complex characters. He spurned the more traditional story as moral lesson found in the style of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Chekhov focusses on the internal conflicts and interpersonal dynamics of his cast of characters. They represent, as the cultural theorist Raymond Williams says,

“a generation whose whole energy is consumed in the very process of becoming conscious of their own inadequacy and impotence”.

The Kiss illustrates much of Russian values. Military officers were still highly regarded, welcomed and worshipped in regional areas. The protagonist, the hapless Staff-Captain Ryabovich, whose “lynx-like side whiskers and spectacles seemed to be saying ‘I’m the shyest, most modest, and most insignificant officer in the whole brigade!’”.

Entering a dark room, he hears the swoosh of a skirt, padded feet, and gets an unexpected kiss from an unknown woman, who immediately realises her mistake and runs from the room. He is severly affected by the incident due to the rebuff.

He could represent a contemporary INCEL; socially awkward, uncomfortable with women, also depicted by T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock. He, like others finally resigns himself to the comfort of his fantasies.