Russian Arts #
Suffering: #
An unhappy nation makes great artists. Alfred de MUSSET
Ireland and Russia give evidence of that.
Suffering is a recurring motif and cause of all great literature.
We live a life of balanced between agony and ecstacy.
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.
When 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.
Once suffering is called sacred, those who cause it, no longer have to justify it.
The heart must be broken for it to open. Mark Wolynn
No pain; no gain.
However, suffering can also brutalise us. People who suffer an abusive childhood can become utter monsters. Nietzsche warns us that we should not become the monsters we are fighting.
The Russians suffered due to brutal, savage and cruel Czars, while the Irish suffered from centuries of brutish, savage and cruel subjugation of an imperialist English empire.
The Russians became tough, while the Irish responded with satire. - Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Heaney.
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 by a paranoid Nicholas I. 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.
However, during and following the French Revolution, Catherine became increasingly repressive of liberalism.
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 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 generations, 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 #
1821 - 1881
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, subversive, but 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.
Underground could refer to the many secret societies agitating for liberal reforms.
It appears more a rambling rant than a carefully constructed Novel. Most victims of shock or trauma, 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.
From the time of the French Revolution, secret societies began to form in the higher cirles of the Russian intelligentsia. To avoid persecution, they went underground. Undercover agents from the Czars frequently infiltrated these as happened to Dostoevsky in 1849. However, Alexander II, in an attempt to modernise Russia opened the flood gates to liberal thought. Doestoevsky returned to St Peterburg and Tolstoy in Moscow, were the main beneficiaries of a freer society until Alexander II was assassinated by a bomb in 1881.
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.
The persona, 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,
Tolstoy #
Leo Tolstoy, Russian Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy, ( 1828 — 1910)
The scion of prominent aristocrats, Tolstoy spent much of his life at his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. After a somewhat dissolute youth, he served in the army and traveled in Europe before returning home and starting a school for peasant children.
His mother, Mariya Nikolayevna, died before he was two years old, and his father Nikolay Ilich, Graf (count) Tolstoy, followed her in 1837. His grandmother died 11 months later, and then his next guardian, his aunt Aleksandra, in 1841.
Tolstoy and his four siblings were then transferred to the care of another aunt in Kazan, in western Russia. Tolstoy remembered a cousin who lived at Yasnaya Polyana, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Yergolskaya (“Aunt Toinette,” as he called her), as the greatest influence on his childhood, and later, as a young man, Tolstoy wrote some of his most-touching letters to her. Despite the constant presence of death, Tolstoy remembered his childhood in idyllic terms. His first published work, Detstvo (1852; Childhood), was a fictionalized and nostalgic account of his early years.
Educated at home by tutors, Tolstoy enrolled in the University of Kazan in 1844 as a student of Oriental languages. His poor record soon forced him to transfer to the less-demanding law faculty, where he wrote a comparison of the French political philosopher Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws and Catherine the Great’s nakaz (instructions for a law code).
Interested in literature and ethics, he was drawn to the works of the English novelists Laurence Sterne and Charles Dickens and, especially, to the writings of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau; in place of a cross, he wore a medallion with a portrait of Rousseau. But he spent most of his time trying to be comme il faut (socially correct), drinking, gambling, and engaging in debauchery.
What counts in making a happy marriage is not how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.
Chekhov #
(1860 - 1904)
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”.
Alexander Howard University of Sydney writes:
Chekhov’s genius lies precisely in his ability to achieve a great deal with seemingly very little. He conveys emotional depth and intellectual profundity through subtle, almost imperceptible, shifts in tone and characterisation, all while eschewing conventional dramatic action.
The Kiss - a short story, 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.
Mikhail Sholokhov: #
(1905 - 1984)
And Quiet Flows the Don; 1928
Some writers have suggested that Sholokhov stole the story from Cossack memoirs and diaries. But then so did Chaucer and Shakespeare appropriate their tales.
It’s not where you take it from; it’s where you take it to.
Sholokhov had trouble with the Soviet authorities, who complained that his book did not fully portray the worker point of view, that it was too anti-Bolshevik and pro-Cossack and that it was not sufficiently Communist, denounced as fabrications of “rotten Trotskyist attempts to discredit the most significant Soviet writer”.
Stalin, like Augustus, Elizabeth I, and Nicholas I valued writers like Sholokhov for their potential to curate their image. Cultural capital to promote and preserve Stalin’s prize reputation in creating art for his time so Stalin censored his works. After Stalin died in 1953, Sholokhov rewrote them.
Sholokhov chose literary integrity over political compliance with “artistic force and integrity” and controversially received the Nobel Prize in 1968.
Sholokhov’s “deep Stalinist programming”, however, was not so easily undone. While he lacerated the mediocre and unreadable output from the politically-sanctioned 3773 members of the Writers’ Union whom Sholokhov called “dead souls” luxuriating in their literary sinecures, he spurned writerly solidarity with jailed dissident writers. He also spoke positively of “the unity of party and literature”, and he was a supportive voice of Moscow’s armed suppression of the 1956 revolt in Hungary.
The Cossacks are historically semi-nomadic, semi-barbaric, militarised Slavic frontiersmen who originated in the 14th and 15th centuries within the vast Pontic–Caspian steppe. The term “Cossack” derives from the Turkic word kazak, meaning “free man” or “adventurer”. Gregor is offended when he is called a peasant or serf. (Pg. 35)
Living in the fluid, lawless frontier zones of modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, they evolved from groups of escaped serfs, bandits, and traders fleeing feudal oppression, found refuge and acceptance blending with indigenous steppe nomads into a distinct, highly formidable military class with superb horsemen skills.
The collapse of the Mongol Golden Horde left a vast, un-governed buffer zone between Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and the Crimean Khanate, filled briefly by the Ottoman Empire until they were pushed out under Catherine the Great.
Cossacks formed self-governing military brotherhoods known as “hosts”. They practiced direct democracy, electing a supreme leader called a Hetman or Ataman at an annual assembly.
In the 16th–17th Century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recruited The Ukrainian Zaporozhian Cossacks, Dnieper River warriors, putting them on an official “military register” to guard frontiers.
The Cossacks became staunch defenders of Orthodox Christianity against Catholic Polish rule. The Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654), secured protection from Poland. Khmelnytsky signed a fateful alliance with the Russian Tsar. This treaty marked the beginning of centuries of Russian domination over Ukraine.
The Don Cossacks, centred along the Don River, were Russian-aligned hosts acting as specialized border guards and scouts for the growing Russian state. Cossacks became the primary explorers and imperial colonisers of Siberia under leaders like Yermak Timofeyevich, extending Russia’s frontiers all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Crushed Rebellions:
Whenever Tsars tried to centralize authority and restrict Cossack freedoms, bloody uprisings erupted—led by famous figures like Stenka Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev. The rebellions failed, and Catherine the Great ultimately dismantled their autonomy.
By the 19th century, the Cossacks were completely absorbed into the imperial system as an elite cavalry class. In exchange for tax exemptions and land, every male owed lifetime military service to the Tsar.
The Czars, from Alexander I frequently deployed Cossack regiments to ruthlessly suppress domestic worker strikes and peasant revolts. They became renown for their brutal, savage and cruel enforcement of Czarist decrees. Nicholas II depended heavily on them to keep his military in check.
The Cossack hosts split during the revolution and The Russian Civil War (1918–1920):. The majority joined the anti-communist “White Armies”.
Following the Bolshevik victory, the Soviet regime launched violent campaigns of “decossackisation,” liquidating their administrative privileges, executing thousands, and forcing communities into collective farms. Cossacks are romanticized as foundational figures of early Ukrainian statehood, symbolizing liberty, democratic rule, and a fierce spirit of sovereign independence.In Russia:
Following the Soviet collapse, Cossack communities were legally rehabilitated. Today, state-sanctioned Cossack paramilitary auxiliaries operate as conservative, nationalist law-enforcement entities within Russia and have participated actively in regional military conflicts.
The novel concerns the Melekhovs, a Cossack family, with a Turkish antecedent.
Gregor Melekhov is having an affair with Aksinia, the wife of a neighbour, so his father forces him to marry Natalia Korshunov. He continues the affair with Aksinia and she has a baby by him. The couple run away and Gregor then goes off to join the army. When he returns he finds that Aksinia has been unfaithful to him and that their daughter has died so he is reconciled with Natalia. He goes back to the army but then joins the Red Army but is disgusted by the brutalities of the Bolsheviks and joins the White Army. Gregor goes back to Aksinia and when Natalia hears about it, she tries to abort Gregor’s child but dies in the attempt. Gregor again joins the Red Army, to fight the Poles but finally realises that fighting is not what he wants and effectively retires from fighting, ending up back with his family. All of this, of course, is against the background of both the Don region and the civil war in Russia in the early 1920s.
During the winter a small group of villiagers began to meet in Stockman’s room at Lukieshka’s hut. They played cards, read Poetry and the History of the Don Cossaks. They read about the free life of the past, comparing it to the miserable existence of the present. They jeered at the authorities and the system of how the cossackry had hired itself out as the Czar’s bodyguards. Later a student brings back news of the chief rebel of Germany, Karl Marx. (pg. 120). Stockman began to instil repugnance and hatred to the existing system.
World War I
Sholokhov captures the early allure and euphoria of war, (even the horses share their excitement) that soon becomes dampened by its horror and waste of human life.
PTSD
Ch. 4 pg. 224
After his first battle Gregor Melekhov was tormented by a dreary inward pain. He grew noticeably thin, lost weight, and frequently whether attacking or resting, sleeping or waking, he saw the features and form of the Austrian he had killed by the railings. In his sleep he lived again and again through that first battle and even felt the shuddering convulsion of his right hand clutching the lance. He would awake and drive the dream off violently shading his painfully screwed up eyes with his hand.
Austrians, their closest allies during the Napoleonic Wars, are now the enemy.
Later, to his brother Piotra - (pg. 227) My conscience is killing me. I sent my lance through one man….in hot blood…I couldn’t have done it otherwise…
Piotra: You’re not used to it yet; that’s what’s wrong.
Many soldiers find it difficult to fire their first shot. Once they have been blooded, they may become consumed with blood lust. Killing another human being is not natural, and can cause a moral injury of lingering trauma.
As Voltaire expressed it:
killing another person is always murder; except if there are trumpets!
……… In the second assault the fog of war descended:
Somewhere someone had blundered. The infantry regiment did not arrive on time; the 211th Sharpshooter regiment was ordered to cross over to the left flank, and during the offensive movement initiated by another regiment it was raked with fire from its own batteries. (Friendly fire) Ch 4 pg. 235
Lieutenant Kalmikov, traces of Mongolian origin, prefers the more primitive war;
“to thrust at your opponent in honourable battle and to split him in two with your sword, - that’s the battle I understand”.
In future wars there will be no part for the cavalry to play, another officer observed. (pg 243)
When Gregor’s father Pantaleimon Prokovffievitch is informed of Gregor’s presumed death, Father Vissarion attempted to rally him with: “Gregor’s death was a holy one; don’t be angry with God, old man. Your son has received a crown of thorns for his Tsar and his Fatherland. And you…it’s a sin and God won’t pardon you.
That’s just it, holy father! That’s my torture. “Died the death of the brave”. That what the commander said. (Pg. 350-51)
Aksinia received only brief infrequent letters from Gregor, informing her that that he was well and growing stronger - never let slip any complaint that he felt service was difficult and dreary. He wrote as someone who had to, and asked after his daughter. (Pg. 258)
Natalia goes to visit Aksinia to see if there is any hope of getting Gregor back, her eyes , drunk with suffering, and when Aksinia asked her’ why did you come? Natalia replies, “my yearning drove me”. (260)
Gregor wakes after his injury: So vivid that it was almost a blinding pain, the night after the battle remained imprinted in Gregor’s memory. (262)
Revolutionary Talk.
Two officers of the fifth company Kamikov and the subaltern Chubov bring news of the defeats at the front and express political views that the government keeps the cossacks from the front line to use as a back-up for the unrest leads to desertions the cossacks will be called up to repress the revolts. Captain Bunchuk is accused of being a Social Democrat.
They are accused of not supporting the war and guilty of treason.
“Workers have no fatherland, “we workers grow like wormwood steppe….We and you can’t flourish together.
Bunchuk then quotes Marx and reads from an article from a newspaper written by the Bolshevik Lenin:
The bourgeoisie is deluding the masses by cloaking the imperialist spoliation with the old ideology of a “national” war. The working class exposes the deception raising the cry of transforming the imperialist into a civil war. (293)