Russian Authors

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has drawn censure and ire around the glob. An anti-Russo tone runs through recent stories of all types. So, the same Russia that has produced, like any other, both good and bad, and produced the likes of Tolstory and Dostoevsky, is now, understandably enough, being judged by its worst, most recent moment. 

An enemy today can be a friend tomorrow. Countries fall into and out of alliances.  The crazed murderous fanaticism with which the world characterized Imperial Japan, say, is quite out of place with what we now see of that country--a staunch ally and cool producer of anime and boy bands. Similarly, we would not want to judge the US civilization based on one episode in History. One is tempted to recite Vietnam as the obvious example, except that in retrospect, Vietnam seems less the disaster it was portrayed. It did give us the concept of PTSD, and also weakened the Soviet Union and other communist countries to the point they could not sustain themselves through the eighties.  Probably the McCarthy hearings were a low point in the 20th century.

How do you reconcile a country that produced Solzhenitsyn or Pavlov as having produced the Ukrainian invasion?  I wonder what the great Russian authors of the past,  would say about the invasion, were they alive. My guess is they would not be enthusiastic.  It's hard to imagine Gogol or  Checkov lauding the invasion. Dostoevsky's dark novels fascinated me as an adolescent and young man, with the grappling of issues of good and bad.  What would Dostoevsky say about current events? What allusions would Father  Zossima make about the invasion?  Or, would the protagonist in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in bed and regarding the falsities of life, have anything but contempt for the invasion?  Perhaps the Russian who comes to mind here most, is the glossy and refined Vladimir Nabokov, maybe the greatest prose writer I have ever read. What mincemeat would he would make of Putin, no doubt another "tyrant destroyed." True, he was a white Russian, and in exile, but possibly the true Russianisms in his thinking and writing were put all the more in relief by his expatriotism.

In regarding a country, possibly it is better to look at the best of the batch instead of the worst exemplars.