First of all, I’d like to thank you all for the claps and comments on my previous article here: Russia Just Played Us All. Again. (It was a theory, and I’m pleased to see that so many people support it.)
Today’s story is about great russian literature at the service of propaganda.
The picture is the slogan of the April 2022 information campaign at the Metropolitan Opera, a leading theatre in the USA, and one of the world’s musical culture centers. Today, the “great russian culture” reputation whitening and support continues regardless of world-respectful cultural historians and studies explaining why it’s wrong.
It hurts to see how many people and institutions are “bitten” by Sovietology and are stubbornly unwilling to dispel their illusions about the “greatness” of russian culture to finally see its real “face.”
Why is Pushkin not out of politics? Why is russian literature not as old and not as great as they are trying to convince everyone?
For those who don’t like reading long texts, here is a must-watch video on the topic: Great Russian literature is FAKE!? How the Kremlin uses it for war | BIG RUSSIAN LIES (Eng subs available).
“Literature was never out of politics, either in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Due to political decisions, desirable authors were published and translated, and undesirable ones were repressed and destroyed. Through propaganda literature, Russia discredited the Ukrainian national liberation movement to the whole world.”
For those who prefer reading, stay with me.
Great Russian Literature at the Service of Propaganda
What’s the first thing russians do when they invade Ukrainian territory and occupy it? (Except for killing, looting, and torturing the locals)
Right:
They change street names and street signs at once, burn Ukrainian books, put up banners with quotes from rus classics about the rus language, and send trucks with rus books to local schools and libraries.
Russian writers are always at the service of propaganda.
Two Main Myths About Russian Literature Debunked
“Great Russian Literature.”
This phrase seems to have become ingrained in the subconscious: If it’s russian, it’s immediately great. But does this mean that German, French, or English literature is inferior to russian? Were Shakespeare or Goethe lesser poets than Pishkin?
Why do we speak about “great russian literature” or “great russian culture” when we don’t speak about any other cultures in that way?
Russian culture has never been separated from the context of russian political history, which has been largely about empire and imperialism. It’s a completely political construct.
“Our task is to draw special attention of the society to russian literature. To make russian literature and the russian language a powerful factor in russia’s ideological influence in the world.” (Putin in 2013)
Russian literature has been a factor of russia’s ideological influence for centuries, though, for a long time, its imperialism remained out of researchers’ attention.
Literary critic Rostyslav Semkiv reveals two false narratives about russian literature:
- Rus literature is ancient. In fact, it’s not ancient at all. Rus literature emerged when St. Petersburg appeared (the 18th century).
- Rus literature is great. It doesn’t matter how this definition came about, but it’s not true. It’s as big (great) as many other European literatures.
“When we talk about Russian classic literature, the first question that arises is whether this is really world literature. If we take the images of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, do these images speak to all people? Are they understandable?”
— Vakhtang Kebuladze, philosopher
What’s Wrong With Pushkin and Other Russian Classics?
What do most intellectuals and artists from civilized countries fail to understand?
Russian culture was primarily an instrument of imperial influence. This doesn’t mean that there were no talented authors there. There were talented authors.
But the more talented they were, the more dangerous they were.
Even those who aren’t ready to accept Putin, the Kremlin, and russian official policy are still likely to open up when it comes to Dostoevsky, Chechov, Tolstoy, or other components of the russian humanist tradition. Because it disarms. It works on the level of stereotypes and long-established narratives that are built into people’s firmware.
Russian literature began to be turned into a cult in the late 19th century.
In the 20th, the Soviet Union consolidated and actively promoted this myth of greatness using political methods: Rus literature was actively translated and promoted — this has always been driven by state cultural policy. Departments of Russian Studies, thousands of translators who were funded and supported. Grants, scholarships, programs, seminars — it all worked and is still working.
“It’s naive to think that Chekhov has translations into a hundred languages because he is so brilliant. Behind this was a powerful state that understood the importance of Chekhov as an argument.”
— Serhii Zhadan, writer
That’s why when it comes to the abolition of russian culture, russians (and not only them) get hysterical.
“Cancel Russia” is called Russophobia.
Good literature in the USSR is the one that corresponds to the politics of the ruling party and explains the Soviet logic of the universe.
“To include a writer in the Soviet canon, one had to find a social theme in his or her work and reject all other themes. That is, they were such dissected classics.”
— Rostyslav Semkiv
Pushkin: An Imperialistic Poet
In 1830, the national liberation uprising of Poles and Lithuanians against the Russian Empire began. Pushkin, who was already the main court poet at that time, reacts quickly to these events:
“The news of the Polish uprising completely shocked me. We can only feel sorry for the Poles. We are too strong to hate them. The war that’s beginning will be a war of extermination. Or at least it should be. After all, the Poles must be strangled. And our slowness in doing so is intolerable.”
Pushkin’s poem “To the Slanderers of Russia,” written in 1831, was quickly translated into other languages. After all, it was nothing more than political propaganda in poetic terms. Pushkin, who is now being separated from politicians, believed that Poland’s independent state existence was contrary to russia’s interests and called the uprising “Russia’s internal affairs.”
In general, Pushkin was very skeptical about the cultural rights of people enslaved by the Russian Empire.
“Get ready, Caucasus, Yermolov is coming!” the poet wrote.
(He lived during russia’s active military campaign in the Caucasus. Pushkin was the glorifier of russia’s war of aggression in his time. The campaign of russian General Yearmolov in the Caucasus, beginning in 1816, was brutal and devastating. The Imperial army under Yermolov’s leadership organized a genocide of the indigenous people.)
“And I will remember the glorious time, when,
hearing the bloody battle,
our double-headed eagle flew
to the troubled Caucasus.” (Pushkin)
“For me today, Pushkin has split into two completely different poets. One is a salon poet, very skillful. No one is saying that he is not skillful. But does this poetry speak to me today? No. It gives me nothing but a set of beautiful phrases. And the other Pushkin is a xenophobe, an imperialist, he hates the Caucasus, he hates Ukrainians.”
— Vakhtang Kebuladze
To understand Pushkin’s attitude towards Ukrainians and Ukraine’s independence, read his poem “Poltava” and see how he described the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa.
“Why do you need to cancel innocent authors who died long ago and did not live in our time?” russian classics’ defenders ask
It’s simple:
Their ideas still work.
All the wars of modern Russia — Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine — find their spiritual basis in russian literary classics.
“The glorification of the war in the Caucasus, for example, was repeated later during the Chechen wars. Because ‘well, this is history — we were constantly at war with them. It’s normal, it’s cool. Pushkin himself wrote about it, right?’”
Yulia Lipske, deputy director of the Museum of Propaganda
The russians, the ones who are at the top of the state today, those millions supporting them, and those who have come as soldiers to a foreign land and committing inhuman crimes were all shaped by this culture.
“This lays solid foundations for our archetypes, for our assessment of what is happening now. We are so used to it. It has always been like that. And later it transforms, for example, into the fact that the propagandist Solovyov says: ‘We need to liberate Odesa, we need to liberate Kharkiv. And what should we do? We have to liberate.’”
Yulia Lipske
It turns out that great Russian literature shapes a worldview in which the murder of millions of people can be explained or justified.
Dostoevsky: “The Enjoyment of One’s Own Degradation”
“Dostoevsky is several desperately bold steps ahead of his time. You follow him, dizzy, fearful, disbelieving, but you follow him anyway. He does not let go.”
— Joseph Goebbels, one of the ideologists of Nazism and the father of propaganda
Goebbels repeatedly mentioned Dostoevsky in his diaries as an author who greatly influenced the formation of his worldview.
“What is Dostoevsky? He’s what I call the enjoyment of one’s own degradation. This is Dostoevsky’s line. It’s threatening because usually the world reads only the top layer, about some mysterious Russian soul. But it’s not a mysterious Russian soul that’s hidden behind this, but rather a mysterious Russian degradation. And this is intoxication, fascination with the process of one’s own degradation.”
— Vakhtang Kebuladze
Below are just two of many quotes from the russian genius Dostoevsky (his “A Writer’s Diary,” 1876):
- “War refreshes people. Humanity develops the most on the battlefield.”
- “International war brings only benefit from every point of view, and therefore is absolutely necessary.”
Tolstoy: An Image of Russia That Never Existed
Until the 19th century, russia was completely unknown to Western Europe. Most people learned about the mysterious great country in the East from literature, mistaking that fictional image for the real russia.
“If you look at ‘War and Peace’, the start of it, you see a party being held in St. Petersburg. And who’s at that party? The very top of Russian society, not just nobility, very high aristocracy, that’s very important. Because we frequently think, you know, the family of Rostovs, Bolkonskys, or Bezuhovs was typical for Russia. No, this was, you know, the 400 families of Russia, they were completely separate from real russian society. This is not how Russian families act and behave.”
— Ewa Thompson, Slavist at Rice University
If you look at the movement of troops in Tolstoy’s novel, russia begins behind East Germany. The nations between Germany and Russia are simply not important. They don’t exist. And so millions of readers get a simplified and favorable picture of the world: West — Russia.
“Tolstoy created an image of Russia that never existed. He created fictional images in his novels: they are attractive and create a completely false picture. The picture that the Russian Empire was a beautiful country where everyone had a wonderful life. No, it was not. It was a xenophobic proto-fascist Russian Empire.”
— Vakhtang Kebuladze
Most of the literature that russia aggressively promotes in the world is filled with the imperial spirit:
- It romanticizes conquest.
- It glamorizes violence.
- It convinces russians that the neighboring people are smaller, dependent, and derivative, and they need to carry their, russian, identity. If they don’t understand this, then it must be explained by force.
Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, and other so-called russian liberals
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the Nobel laureates and dissidents in the USSR. In his “The Gulag Archipelago,” he seems to be liberal on the Ukrainian issue:
“Why are we so irritated by Ukrainian nationalism? The desire of our brothers to speak, to raise children, to write signs in their own language?”
But that was 1973, when Ukraine was in the grip of the Soviet Empire, which Solzhenitsyn criticized so much. In 1991, his rhetoric in his letter to Boris Yeltsin was completely different:
“This is very acute with the borders of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, which were arbitrarily drawn by the Bolsheviks. The south of the present-day Ukrainian SSR (Novorossiya) and many cities on the Left Bank have never belonged to historical Ukraine.”
The Ukrainian issue has broken down many so-called Russian liberals.
Here goes another Nobel laureate, a man who fled Russia himself, Joseph Brodsky:
“God bless you, eagles, Cossacks, hetman choppers,
Only when you come, you will die.
You will wheeze, scratching the edge of the mattress,
Lines from Alexandr*, not Taras’s** lie.”
*Pushkin
**Shevchenko
“A Rissian Jew, Brodsky, who was forced to flee the Soviet KGB system, who was forced to leave his homeland. He went abroad and made his career there. And he retained the imperial worldview until the end of his days. These are things that Europeans and Americans simply do not understand.”
— Serhii Zhadan
Russian Literature in the War
Mikhail Lermontov lays down xenophobia in his lullabies for children:
“Muddy Terek River splashes
Boulders in the shade;
Evil Chechen creeps ashore while
Sharpening his blade;”
And what do modern Russians do when they come to Ukrainian land?
They place a monument to Pushkin there. And kill a Ukrainian children’s poet.
Volodymyr Vakulenko was a Ukrainian writer and translator; killed during the occupation in the Kharkiv region in 2022. His body was found in a mass grave among hundreds of other tortured people.
“Volodymyr Vakulenko was not killed by Putin or Shoigu. He was killed by ordinary russian guys who came to Izium. Perhaps they were mobilized, perhaps they were volunteers, perhaps they were contractors. God knows who they were. They are ordinary Russian guys who have their own families and their children. They love Mom and Dad, they love Russia, and they love Russian culture. Maybe they weren’t very intellectual, but they hadn’t done anything wrong in their lives before. But they came here and just killed a Ukrainian. Because someone told them that he was a khokhol who supported Ukrainian independence.”
— Serhii Zhadan
In the cities of the occupied Kherson region, russians put up banners with quotes from their classics about the russian language.
Russian writers are always at the service of propaganda.
“We saw when the theatre in Mariupol was bombed, we saw that the russian authorities came and put up giant billboards around the destroyed theatre with the pictures of great Russian writers. We’ve seen truckloads of Russian literature being shipped into the occupied territories. So the Russian state is using culture, it’s using literature as part of its military operations, essentially as a complement to them, as an addition to them.”
— professor of Ukrainian Studies at University College London Uiilleam Blacker
This footage also illustrates how russian cultural expropriation works. Ukrainians Mykola Gogol and Taras Shevchenko, who had already been used in the USSR as Russian classics, are being put at the service of propaganda again.
Thanks for reading!
Please, spend some time watching the YouTube video I mentioned and cited at the beginning. There are also stories of modern russian writers serving russian lies and supporting its messages: Zakhar Prilepin, Sergei Lukianenko, Alexandr Pelevin, and many others.
In today’s world, few people will re-read Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, except as part of school curricula. So, the mass market plays an important role in justifying russia’s current policy: The necessary ideas are conveyed by mass popular culture just as effectively.
More read:
- No guilty people in the world? Reading Russian literature after the Bucha massacre, by Oksana Zabuzhko
- Philosopher Vakhtang Kebuladze: Everyone who considers themselves Russian is affected when you treat them and their culture with irony
- Ewa Thompson: Russians Have Not Yet Discovered a Very Painful Road to Self-Understanding
- Signs of Ethnic and Cultural Genocide in Ukraine: The Murder of Children’s Book Writer Volodymyr Vakulenko
- Mysteries of “Great Russian literature”
