The following are two statements from members of the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought regarding the influence of the war in Ukraine on reading and discussing Russian Literature. The first is an open letter from Susan McReynolds, Co-Director of the Initiative and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. The second is an except from Mikhail Epstein’s new book The Russian Antiworld. Politics on the Brink of Apocalypse, (New–York: Franc-Tireur, 2023).
On January 27, 2023, members of the International Dostoevsky Society received an open letter from Olena Bystrova, professor at Drohobych University in Ukraine. Like all of us in IDS, she has been preparing for the “longed-for trip” to Japan this summer for our triennial symposium. But Professor Bystrova faces obstacles that are unique to our colleagues in Ukraine: she and her young children live in constant privation and mortal danger, seeking shelter from air raids in basements. She cites the fact that Russia is attempting to murder her family and destroy her culture as the reason why, despite her desire to join colleagues in Japan, she will not attend the IDS Symposium this year:
“When I think, that I will listen to speeches about Christianity, about human suffering, about Dostoevsky’s love for children from Russian colleagues who, with their silence, approve of the everyday murders and sufferings of Ukrainian citizens, the murders of children, I feel disgust and contempt.”
I share her dissatisfaction with those who, whether in Russia or elsewhere, choose to ignore aspects of Russian culture and reality that are frankly repugnant. I understand why she finds the prospect of discussing Dostoevsky with people who exclude his Russian chauvinism, xenophobia, and enthusiasm for holy war from their purview intolerable. I have been drawing our attention to the entwinement of nationalism, antisemitism, and proto-fascism with everything great and valuable in Dostoevsky’s writings (because yes, it is all these things—disturbing, prophetic, and great) for more than twenty years. This terrible entanglement has always been evident; it should not have required mass murder to move it to the center of attention. As I have been publicly arguing for years, since the publication of my book Redemption and the Merchant God: Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism (Northwestern University Press, 2008), we cannot talk about his Christian faith apart from his antisemitism and Russian nationalism. We certainly cannot talk about the Russian Orthodox Church apart from its political activity. And opportunities to confront Russian imperialism abound even in the undergraduate classroom; even those writers with much more nuanced relationships to Russian imperialism than Dostoevsky provide openings, such as scattered references to a “Baltic German” from “Reval” (Riga; Chekhov, “Lights”), or the “russification of Poland” discussed around an aristocratic dinner table in Anna Karenina. As I explain to my students, colonialism and genocide, like much else, began at home: before European powers obliterated indigenous cultures across the seas, they began in Europe itself, with the extermination of Baltic peoples like the real Prussians, for example; people from Estonia to Poland to Kiev can speak to Russian imperialism (remaining just with European examples).
I also reject the soothing self-indulgence of “canceling” difficult and disturbing things. Not Professor Bystrova’s boycott of the IDS symposium—I support her decision. I look forward to the time when, after Ukraine’s victory, our Ukrainian colleagues will not have to make such choices. I am talking instead about the substitution of cultural suppression for meaningful, necessary engagement. We are still reading Nietzsche and Faust after two world wars and the Holocaust, and we will still be reading The Brothers Karamazov in the future. How we will read Dostoevsky (and Tolstoy and Pushkin, whose statues are being toppled across Ukraine) is the question. Business as usual is not an option (it never really was). And so I am more appreciative than ever that we have gathered a global community of scholars in this Initiative: our collaborative work, dedicated to the significance of Russian literature, philosophy, and religious thought precisely now, at this moment in the twenty-first century, is more important than ever, when Ukrainian children are taking shelter from Russian madmen underground.
Susan McReynolds, Co-Director, Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought
Associate Professor and Chair, Northwestern University Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
The following excerpt from Mikhail Epstein’s book The Russian Antiworld. Politics on the Brink of Apocalypse, (New York: Franc-Tireur, 2023, p. 40) was translated by Caryl Emerson. All proceeds from the book, which can be purchased by clicking the above link in the book’s title, will be donated to Ukrainian refugee organizations.
“The time has come to pass judgment on Russian traditions, including the Russian classics. After the collapse of communism many were speaking of ‘lustration’ (from the Latin ‘lux,’ light), but this never came to pass. What is necessary is an internal, spiritual ‘lustration’, which might affect much of what is precious to us—even in Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tyutchev, Blok, Mayakovsky, with their bloated and warlike ‘Scythian’ themes. In his Doctor Faustus (1946), Thomas Mann revealed the deep metaphysical origins of the demonic inspiration that seized Nazi Germany. And here we have Russia, which since 2014 has been falling into such a historical abyss that it’s now hitting up against its own metaphysical bottom. Politics has ceased to be merely politics, to the extent that it has touched the country’s philosophical and religious nerve, its initial and ultimate meanings: where did this come from? Where is it going? To what purpose? This isn’t about canceling the classics but about finding, in ourselves, the roots of the evil that has germinated throughout the entire cultural soil of the country. Not to condemn Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky for their imperialist instincts, but rather to break the inertia of our own obedience to the classics as the ‘great teachers of life’. What we need is some distance in relation to culture: not to abolish culture, but to abolish our own obedient, obsequious, ‘student-like’ attitude toward it.”
Image: Photos of St. Sophia Cathedral, Kievo-Pecherska Lavra, Kyiv, Ukraine, and the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Spilt Blood, St. Petersburg, Russia.