The other day, Pope Francis said that the cruelty of the Russian military in Ukraine is not inherent in the Russian people. Because “the Russian people are a great people; and cruelty comes from mercenaries – soldiers who go to war as an adventure. I prefer to think so, because I have great respect for the Russian people, for Russian humanism,” the high priest concluded. At the same time, he remembered the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was especially popular in the West. According to the pontiff, Dostoevsky still "inspires Christians to comprehend Christianity."
The words of Francis caused a wide discussion not only in Ukraine (many perceived them as an attempt to shield the aggressor). They also caused a dull murmur in Catholic Poland and Lithuania. These countries found themselves in a cognitive dissonance: it is impossible to sharply condemn the head of one's own church, but not everyone wanted to agree with him. Thus, on the website of the Lithuanian national television in the “Fact-checking” section, a program article was published with mild criticism of the pontiff and an analysis of why Dostoevsky was not really a humanist. The author of the material also ran through other writers:
“Other Russian writers, in particular Leo Tolstoy, also passed the path from free-thinking, anti-government views to glorifying the empire. He, like another Russian classic, Mikhail Lermontov, personally participated in the colonial wars of the Russian Empire. Lermontov's work is also permeated with colonialism in relation to the peoples of the Caucasus, with imperialism.
However, the last statement is incorrect even factually: Leo Tolstoy simply could not go from anti-government views to glorifying the empire, if only because he had neither anti-government views nor glorified empire at any stage of his work. On the contrary, throughout his life Tolstoy held distinctly anti-militarist views. He showed the war not as something bravura-glorious, but as something existentially terrible – this is especially felt in the novel War and Peace. Moreover, in Sevastopol Tales, when young Tolstoy was, as they would say today in Russia, “a military commissar in the Crimea,” he wrote:
"…Either war is madness, or if people do this madness, then they are not quite reasonable creatures, as we somehow usually think."
And it was published without censorship! The Russian government, whose department was the Orthodox Church, was indeed at odds with the already elderly Count Tolstoy for his own interpretations of the Gospel, but this position can hardly be called anti-government.
If, on the other hand, we are looking for Tolstoy's position in terms of "imperialism", then we must open Hadji Murad, the most anti-colonial text in its optics in the entire corpus of Russian literature. At the same time, for Tolstoy himself, he is rather psychological, imbued with empathy for a formal enemy. In general, he was always consciously outside the political dimension, outside the party camps of magazines – in contrast to, for example, Turgenev and Nekrasov.
Tolstoy's "Hadji Murad" is the most anti-colonial text in its optics in the entire corpus of Russian literature
Mikhail Lermontov cannot be called either an imperialist or a colonialist – he himself was exiled in 1837 to the Caucasian War for poems on the death of Alexander Pushkin, which caused the displeasure of Nicholas I.
So, except for a few odes of the 18th century, similar panegyrics to Stalin, and perhaps Blok’s “Scythians” (obviously created as a slap in the face), nowhere and never has really good Russian literature glorified the government, the ruler and the imperial idea. Of course, there were royal hangers-on like Faddey Bulgarin in Pushkin's time, and in Soviet times there were production novels, but history has left them on the sidelines.
In general, the corpus of Russian literature, and, in particular, school classics, is so large that, if desired and able, it is possible to draw enough citations and examples from it to fit any narrative.
Do you want to prove that Russian literature has consistently belittled and insulted Ukraine and Ukrainians? First, give a quote from Pushkin's "Poltava", where the traitor and "foreign agent" Mazepa speaks of the independent power of Ukraine:
For a long time we have planned the matter;
Now it boils with us.
A good time has come to us;
The hour of the great struggle is near.
Without sweet liberty and glory
We bowed our heads for a long time
Under the auspices of Warsaw,
Under the autocracy of Moscow.
But an independent power
It's time to be Ukraine:
And the banner of liberty is bloody
I raise to Peter.
It is also necessary to recall the verses “To the Slanderers of Russia”, which bored the teeth, were written during the period when Pushkin, returned from exile, tried to reconcile with Nicholas I and adapt his former liberal views to the new post-Decembrist realities:
Leave: this is a dispute between the Slavs,
Domestic, old dispute, already weighed by fate,
A question that you can't answer.
It is also worth adding a couple of obviously snobbish-offensive passages about the Ukrainian language from Turgenev in Rudin:
“You say: the language… Is there really a Little Russian language? I once asked a Ukrainian to translate the following, the first phrase that came across to me: "Grammar is the art of reading and writing correctly." Do you know how he translated it: “Khramatyka is artfully correct chitaty y pysaty …” Well, this is a language, in your opinion? Independent language? Yes, rather than agreeing with this, I am ready to let my best friend grind in a mortar … "
And Bulgakov in the "White Guard":
“The day before yesterday I asked this channel, Dr. Kuritsky, he, if you please, has forgotten how to speak Russian since November of last year. There was Kuritsky, and now there is Kuritsky… So I ask you, how do you say "cat" in Ukrainian? He answers "whale". I ask, "how is the whale?" And he stopped, widened his eyes and was silent. And now he doesn't bow."
And crown it all with Brodsky's verses:
… Let's tell them, with a voiced mother, marking pauses, strictly:
a tablecloth for you, crests, and a towel for the road.
Get out of us in a zhupan, not speaking in a uniform,
by address by three letters by all four
sides. Let now in the hut Hansa's choir
with Poles put you on four bones, bastards.
How to climb into the loop, so together, choosing bitches in more often,
Is it sweeter to nibble chicken from borscht alone? ..
It turns out a simple, black-and-white narrative: Russian literature looked down on Ukraine and taught its readers to look at it the same way. But for any other narrative, it is also easy to find suitable examples. For example, about the longstanding anti-war and humanistic traditions of Russian literature. Recall Nikolai Rostov from "War and Peace" – in his first fight, when he had to set fire to cities. Or the pacifist poems of Nikolai Nekrasov, written at the end of the Crimean War in 1855:
Listening to the horrors of war
With each new victim of the battle
I feel sorry for not a friend, not a wife,
I feel sorry for the hero himself.
Alas! The wife will be comforted
And the best friend will forget a friend;
But somewhere there is one soul –
She will remember to the grave!
Among our hypocritical deeds
And all the vulgarity and prose
Alone I spied in the world
Holy, sincere tears –
Those are the tears of poor mothers!
They can't forget their children
Those who died in the bloody field,
How not to raise a weeping willow
Of their drooping branches…
In the same Pushkin, you can find a completely different quote: "When the peoples, having forgotten strife, unite into a single family."
Or Lermontov:
Pitiful man! What does he want!.. The sky is clear,
Under the sky there is a lot of space for everyone, but incessantly
And in vain does he fight alone – why?
In 2022, Yevtushenko’s poems “Do Russians Want Wars” were recalled many times. From a different angle, one can also look at the references to Ukraine in his work.
Or start with the already mentioned Mazepa in Pushkin's Poltava. Yes, it's kind of like a negative character. But this is a fighter for the freedom of his Fatherland – a romantic figure. He directly articulates the idea of the need for an independent Ukraine – in fact, for the first time in Russian literature!
However, Ukraine consistently appears in Russian literature as a completely different place compared to sleepy Moscow and depressive St. Petersburg. It is clear to any reader that this is a flourishing place where life is in full swing and where free people live – so unlike Russian peasants.
These are approximately all the Ukrainian works of Nikolai Gogol – after all, he writes about his homeland:
“Do you know the Ukrainian night? Oh, you don't know the Ukrainian night! Take a look at her. The moon looks from the middle of the sky. The immense vault of heaven resounded, parted even more immensely. It burns and breathes. The earth is all in silver light; and the wonderful air is cool and stuffy, and full of bliss, and moves an ocean of fragrances. Divine Night! Charming night! The forests, full of darkness, became motionless, inspired, and cast a huge shadow from themselves. Quiet and calm these ponds; the cold and gloom of their waters is sullenly enclosed in the dark green walls of the gardens. The virgin thickets of bird cherry and sweet cherry timidly stretched their roots into the spring cold and occasionally murmur with their leaves, as if angry and indignant, when the beautiful anemone – the night wind, sneaking up instantly, kisses them. The whole landscape is asleep. And above everything breathes, everything is wonderful, everything is solemn. And in the soul it is both immense and wonderful, and crowds of silver visions harmoniously arise in its depths. Divine Night!
Or Lermontov:
On worldly chains
On the shine of a tiresome ball
Blooming steppes
She changed Ukraine
But the south of the native
It has a mark on it
Among the ice
In the midst of merciless light.
Like the nights of Ukraine
In the twinkling of unsunsetting stars,
Filled with secrets
The words of her fragrant lips.
In Chekhov's "The Man in the Case": "Little Russian language with its tenderness and pleasant sonority resembles ancient Greek."
In Bunin's "Life of Arseniev": "Shevchenko is an absolutely brilliant poet! There is no country in the world more beautiful than Little Russia.
Mayakovsky:
“I say to myself:
Comrade Muscovite,
To Ukraine
no jokes.
Learn
this language
– on banners
– scarlet lexicons, –
this language
majestic and simple.
It is very easy to pull quotes from Russian classics and quickly concoct any conclusion on a current political topic. It doesn't take much intelligence to "diagnose" an entire culture from a few quotations. If in general one can talk about the responsibility of Russian literature for the war and war crimes, then one should speak, rather, not about Russian literature as such, but about "Russian literature" as a school subject. So, Brodsky, in addition to insulting poems about Taras Shevchenko, wrote that “at the word “future”, black mice run out of the Russian language and gnaw off from a tidbit of memory that your cheese is full of holes.”
If at all it is possible to talk about the responsibility of Russian literature for war crimes, then we should rather talk about “Russian literature” as a school subject.
From our collective memory, at the words “Russian literature”, the teacher comes out with a heavy tread. And he enters the classroom, where it smells of chalk and wet rags. Above the dusty cabinets hang no less dusty portraits of the classics with stern faces. In the hands of the teacher is a training manual, approved almost personally by Comrade Stalin. It has long been determined who is a ray of light and who is not. Who has freedom-loving lyrics, and who is a reactionary and generally slandering despotism. Who is an extra person, who is small, and who is new. The teacher walks between the desks, like a jailer in the yard, and dictates. It is necessary to write down and memorize, and in the next lesson to tell that Katerina is nothing but a ray of light in a dark kingdom, and why and what it means in general – this question is vicious in nature and counterproductive, it leads to a slippery path of reflection and doubt . School literature teaches you to cram, not to reason or empathize. And school literature also gives the skills of conformism – almost at a reflex level. First, you learn to write in an essay what is said in the book, and not what you think. And then you "simply" follow the order of the commander.