During Russia's war against Ukraine, how can Dostoevsky and Tolstoy be read?

Followers of Russian affairs know the strong influence of ancient Russian literature on society and historical events in modern Russia.

Annie Kokopopo, an academic of Russian literature at the University of Kansas, writes that she is treating the world through the country's novels, stories, poems, and plays, even as Russian cultural productions are disavowed and "cancelled" around the world.

As the Russian war in Ukraine continued, the debate over what to do with Russian literature naturally emerged.

The writer says she's not worried that truly valuable art can be "cancelled", as literary works endure because they have enough capacity to be read critically in the face of the vicissitudes of the present, but she wonders: Should Russia's military war in Ukraine change the way readers treat Russian writers? .

Facing suffering with clear eyes

The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) turned his face away at the last moment when he witnessed the execution of a man, and the famous Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky explained his position by saying, "A human being who lives on the surface of the earth has no right to turn away and ignore what is happening on earth, and there are higher moral imperatives for that." ".

Seeing the ruins of a theater in Mariupol, and hearing the city's citizens starving from Russian air strikes, the writer wonders what Dostoevsky - who focused his keen moral eye on the issue of the suffering of children in his 1880 novel "The Brothers Karamazov" - would do in response to the bombing of the Russian army A theater where Ukraine says children were sheltering.

The word "Children" in large font appeared on the sidewalk outside the stage so that it could be seen from the sky.

There was no misunderstanding who targeted this place with the bombing, according to the writer.

Ivan Karamazov, the protagonist in Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, focuses more on questions of moral accountability than on notions of Christian acceptance or tolerance and reconciliation. I fell in the midst of them, seemingly determined to take revenge.

Surely the bombing of children in Mariupol - whether intentional or not - is something Dostoevsky cannot turn his face from. Can he defend his vision of Russian morals while he sees innocent civilians - men, women and children - lying in the streets of Bucha?

The writer asks

At the same time, readers should not ignore what the author calls Dostoevsky's "lowness" and his sense of Russian exceptionalism.

These "militant" ideas about Russian greatness and Russia's messianic mission are linked to the broader ideology that fueled Russia's past colonial mission, and to the current Russian foreign policy that is most prominent in Ukraine.

However, Dostoevsky was also a humanist thinker who linked this vision of Russia's place with Russian suffering and faith.

Perhaps seeing the spiritual value of human suffering was a natural consequence of a person who was sent to a labor camp in Siberia for 5 years just to participate in a socialist book club.

Could an author, in his 1866 novel, Crime and Punishment, give horrific details of the losses to a murderer who shows that when he kills someone, he kills a part of himself, would Dostoevsky have rebelled against the Russian war on Ukraine had he lived now?

asks the writer.

"I hope he will, as many contemporary Russian writers have done," she says. "But the Kremlin's doctrines are widespread and many Russians accept them. Many Russians look away."

Tolstoy's path to peace

No writer has portrayed the war in Russia more poignantly than Tolstoy, the ex-soldier turned Russia's most famous pacifist.

In his latest work, Haji Murad, which examines the effects of Russian colonization in the North Caucasus, Tolstoy showed how senseless Russian violence toward a Chechen village caused instant hatred toward Russians, according to the author.

Tolstoy's most notable work on the Russian war is War and Peace, a novel traditionally read by Russians during major wars, including World War II.

In his book "War and Peace" Tolstoy asserts that the morale of the Russian army is the key to victory.

The battles most likely to succeed are defensive ones, where soldiers understand why they are fighting and what they are fighting to protect: their homeland.

However, he is able to convey the harrowing experiences of young Russian soldiers who came into direct confrontation with the instruments of death and destruction on the battlefield.

They have disappeared into the crowd of their battalion, but even one loss is devastating to families waiting for their safe return.

After publishing War and Peace, Tolstoy publicly denounced several Russian military campaigns.

The last part of his novel "Anna Karenina" was not published in 1878 because it was critical of Russia's actions in the Russo-Turkish war.

Tolstoy's hero in that novel, Konstantin Levin, describes Russia's intervention in the war as "murder" and believes it inappropriate to drag the Russian people into it.

"People are sacrificing and are always ready to sacrifice themselves for their lives, not for the sake of killing," he says.

In 1904, Tolstoy wrote a public speech condemning the Russo-Japanese War, which has sometimes been compared to the Russian War in Ukraine.

He wrote, "War again, again afflictions, absolutely unwarranted, again fraud, and again the astonishment and savagery of men."

One can almost hear him shouting “Think of yourselves” to the citizens of his country now, says the author.

In one of his most famous pacifist writings, in 1900 entitled “Thou shalt not kill,” Tolstoy deeply diagnosed the problem of today’s Russia, and said, “The misery of nations is not caused by specific people, but by the special order of society in which people are so closely bound together that they find themselves All under the power of a few men, or often under the power of one, a man so perverted by his unnatural position as ruler of the fate and lives of millions, that he is always in an unhealthy state, and always suffers to some extent from the obsession of grandiosity.”

The importance of working

The writer says that if Dostoevsky insists he does not look away, it is fair to say that Tolstoy would assert that people should act on what they see.

During the Russian famine of 1891-1892, Tolstoy began setting up kitchens for the poor to help his starving compatriots abandoned by the government.

He worked to help soldiers evade conscription in the Russian Empire, and visited and supported imprisoned soldiers who did not wish to fight.

In 1899, he sold his last novel, Resurrection, to help a Russian Christian sect immigrate to Canada so that they would not have to fight in the Russian army.

These writers have little to do with the current war.

They cannot erase or mitigate the atrocities of the Russian military in Ukraine.

But they are embedded on some level in the Russian cultural fabric, and the fact that their books are still read is important, not because Russian literature can explain any of what is happening, because it cannot.

But because, as the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zahadan wrote in March 2022, Russia's war in Ukraine was a defeat for the Russian humanist tradition.

Since this culture fits with the vision of the Russian army indiscriminately bombing Ukrainians, Russian authors can and should be read critically, with one urgent question in mind: How do we stop the violence?

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny noted during his March 2022 trial that Tolstoy urged his countrymen to fight both tyranny and war because one empowers the other.

Ukrainian artist Olftina Kakhidze cited the novel "War and Peace" in her graphic diary in February 2022, and wrote, "I have read your current literature, but it seems that Putin did not, and he forgot about it."