![]() And yet the book numbers among the greatest works of world literature, largely because Turgenev gets so close to the world he is describing, the Russian society of the 1840s. A man strolls through the forest with a shotgun over his shoulder, he exchanges a few words with someone he happens to meet, possibly shoots a bird or two, possibly spends the night in a barn on the way home - and that’s it, that’s the whole story. There is nothing here of Dostoyevsky’s psychological and emotional savagery and depth, nor of Tolstoy’s epic complexity or his ability to encapsulate an entire society with a few strokes these stories are in all ways modest, aimless even. Published in 1852, “A Sportsman’s Sketches” is a collection of simple stories about a hunter’s encounters as he wanders around the woods. But what do the people who live inside of that entity think? What is “Russia” to them, what are the stories they tell themselves? A hundred years after the revolution, 25 years after the fall of Communism? ![]() Every day there is news from Russia - we hear about Putin, about his imprisoned dissidents, about his meddling in the elections of his rivals - all of it serving the notion that “Russia” is a singular, comprehensible, clear-cut entity. Russia is still an enigmatic country to me. When I got older and started to read, the situation became more complicated, because it was from Russia that the best and most intense literature came: Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman.” What sort of a country was this where the souls were so deep and the spirit so wild? And why was it there that the thought of the profound inherent injustice of the class society was transformed into action, first by the revolution of 1917 and then by the proletariat’s 70-year dictatorship? And why did a beautiful story about the equality of all human beings end in horror, inhuman brutality and misery? When I was growing up, Russia was not only closed, and therefore mysterious, it was presented as our antithesis: We were free, the Russians were oppressed we were good, the Russians were evil. And how did he do that? With stories of the past, retold in such a way that everything in them led up to and justified the Russia that exists today.įor almost my entire life, these stories have exerted a powerful pull on me. officer who climbed to power amid chaos and re-established order. Then the story of Stalin’s reign of terror, the story of a country that ossified and stagnated and eventually collapsed, the story of Vladimir Putin, the K.G.B. Stories of the czar and his people, of Lenin and the revolution, of the Great Patriotic War of the transformation of a backward land into a mighty, modern industrial state of Sputnik, of Laika, of Gagarin.
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