Contrapuntal, or stereoscopic, reading felt like an exciting approach to the Russian canon, in which categories like victim and perpetrator—or center and periphery—are particularly fluid. Madina Tlostanova, the decolonial critic, has described Imperial Russia, along with the Ottoman sultanate, as a special kind of “secondary” empire, one that formed on the margins of Europe, and that compensated for its resulting inferiority complex by “modernizing” its own subject peoples. Peter the Great’s Westernization of Russia can be seen as an unacknowledged trauma. In the words of the scholar Boris Groys, this “cruel inoculation” protected Russia against “real colonization by a West that surpassed it both technically and militarily.”
A contrapuntal approach would mean thinking about Russian classics alongside works by Zabuzhko and Tlostanova—and Dato Turashvili, Nana Ekvtimishvili, Nino Haratischwili, Taras Shevchenko, Andrey Kurkov, Yevgenia Belorusets, and Serhiy Zhadan, to name a handful of the important Georgian and Ukrainian writers whose works exist in English. It would mean not bracketing off novelists’ political views, as I initially tried to do with Dostoyevsky. One editorial in The Spectator , responding to the proposed suspension of a Dostoyevsky lecture series in Milan, called it ironic to “censure” a writer who had himself been “sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books that attacked the Tsarist regime.” As it turns out, being a victim of imperial repression doesn’t make you incapable of perpetuating repressive ideas. One of Dostoyevsky’s fellow-prisoners in Siberia, a Polish nationalist, wrote in his memoirs about Dostoyevsky’s insistence that Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland “had forever been the property of Russia,” and would, without Russia, be mired in “dark illiteracy, barbarism, and abject poverty.”
In 1880, near the end of his life, Dostoyevsky gave a famous speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in what is now Moscow’s Pushkin Square, extolling Pushkin as the most Russian and the most universal of writers. He linked Pushkin’s achievements to Peter’s reforms, through which Russia didn’t just adopt “European clothes, customs, inventions and science” but actually incorporated into its soul “the genius of foreign nations.” Russia, like Pushkin, knew how to transcend national limitations, and was on a course to “reconcile the contradictions of Europe,” thereby fulfilling the word of Christ. The speech was received with hysteria, weeping, screaming, and shouts of “You have solved it!,” referring to the eternal mystery of Pushkin. Dostoyevsky’s “Pushkin speech” is quoted on the Russkiy Mir Foundation’s Web site.
The point of drawing a connection between Dostoyevsky and Putin isn’t to “censure” Dostoyevsky but to understand the mechanics of trauma and repression. Among the writer’s formative memories was an incident he observed at age fifteen, at a post station on the road to St. Petersburg. Before his eyes, a uniformed courier rushed out of the station, jumped into a fresh troika, and immediately started punching the neck of the driver—who, in turn, frantically whipped the horses. The troika took off at breakneck speed. Dostoyevsky imagined the driver going back to his village that night and beating his wife.
Dostoyevsky eventually adapted this memory into Raskolnikov’s nightmare in “Crime and Punishment.” In it, Raskolnikov dreams that he is a child and has to watch a peasant beat a horse to death. On waking, he clearly connects the dream to his own impending plan to kill someone with an axe. He then gets out of bed and kills someone with an axe. In other words, being a middle link in a long chain of violence—even knowing you’re a middle link in a long chain of violence—doesn’t magically rapture you out of the chain. In his own life, Dostoyevsky didn’t always apply this insight—but, like all good novelists, he enabled his future readers to see further than he could at the time.
My talk about how we don’t need to stop reading Russian literature was received warmly by the audience of assembled Russian majors and educators. One student, bringing up Pushkinopad, asked whether my ideal vision of the world was one in which the Pushkin monuments were toppled. I wondered aloud whether, in an ideal world, we might recognize literary achievement in some way other than by building giant bronze men who tower above us.
Later that evening, I heard that one live-stream viewer of the lecture had written in, protesting the decision to broadcast a talk about Russian literature. As I walked back to the Writers’ House, past a bar with a chalkboard that said “ FREE WINE on the occasion of PUTIN’S DEATH ,” I contemplated the vast difference between an ideal vision of the world and the world we live in. Feeling a wave of pessimism, I thought back to the essay in which Zabuzhko, quoting Tolstoy’s line “There are no guilty people in the world,” characterizes Russian literature as a two-hundred-year festival of misplaced sympathy for criminals, rather than for their victims, enabling crimes—including war crimes—to continue.
Something in her argument resonated with me. Wasn’t there a way of celebrating the ability to feel sorry, the ability to “see all sides,” to “objectively” take in the whole situation, that ended with seeing painful outcomes as complicated, interesting, and unchangeable? It was as if “good” novels had to make human affairs seem insoluble and ambiguous. If a problem in a novel looked too clear-cut—if the culprit was too obvious—we called it bad art. It was a subject I’d been thinking over for a while, questioning my own decision to write novels. There are signs that Tolstoy had similar worries. After publishing “Anna Karenina,” he underwent a “spiritual crisis” or “conversion,” decided his own novels were immoral, and turned to religious writing. But, eventually, he went back to novels—including “Hadji Murat.”
“Hadji Murat,” which was published posthumously, is considered unique in Tolstoy’s work, and in the nineteenth-century Russian canon, for how thoroughly it enters the perspective of the imperial subject. In consecutive chapters, Tolstoy portrays the destruction of a Chechen village, first from the point of view of a young Russian officer—he can’t believe his luck at being, not in a smoke-filled room in St. Petersburg, but “in this glorious region among these brave Caucasians”—and then from the perspective of the villagers, whose lives have been “so lightly and senselessly destroyed.” The juxtaposition recalls Pushkin’s “Journey to Arzrum”: the gutted village, the iced champagne. But Tolstoy, whose life was many decades longer than Pushkin’s, exposes the terrible calculus facing the villagers, who must abandon their own values and join either the Russian Empire or Imam Shamil’s resistance. The imam’s brutality mirrors Tsar Nicholas’s. As in the image of Dostoyevsky’s troika, it’s easy to see the chain of violence—and maybe to envision its disruption.
Multiplicity is built into the text: ten versions exist, none conclusive. Tolstoy kept the draft at hand until his death, in 1910. In an 1898 diary entry, Tolstoy mentions a certain “English toy”—it sounds stereoscopic—that “shows under a glass now one thing, now another.” Hadji Murat, he writes, must be represented in this fashion: as “a husband, a fanatic, etc.” It occurred to me to think of that “English toy” as the novel itself—a technology inherited by Tolstoy from Austen and Defoe, one that could reveal different truths from different points in space and time, perhaps even destabilizing the structures it once bolstered.