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Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
101–110 of 251 posts
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m quite certain a very similar article could be written about, say, UK and Ireland with quotes from famous authors. It’s not that the English lack an imperialist past and feelings of superiority.
If UK will take weapons and go on a killing spree to “restore the great empire”, I’m gonna boycott them just as much.
The point is that you can write a very similar article about a country that doesn’t invade its neighbours, which means that it just doesn’t prove anything.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#103A Ukrainian here - couldn't disagree more with the author. Take a beloved in the West author like Solzhenitsyn, whose "compassion" suddenly evaporates when Ukrainian question is raised. Even a modern sci-fi author Sergei Lukyanenko does not shy away from racial jokes against Ukrainians or Lithuanians in his Dozor books. Ukraine is a pawn at the world stage, but if the West is serious about battling russia (for its ow…
I'm baffled how this seems only to apply to the Ukraine this one time. Any meaningful discussion is labeled "whataboutism" and dismissed. You will surely agree with me that Russia is not the world's pioneer in wars of aggression. What about (oh no, whataboutism! We can safely dismiss the argument without thinking now) all the other countries that did, and do the same? Should we also dismiss their cultural output? I'm…
> That is not the point. I want to know why you think we should dismiss Dostoevsky but not Shakespeare. Basically every great artist and intellectual was part of a war-waging genocidal empire, and many of them pro-regime in varying degrees (Dostoevsky being a good example of the "varying").
I’m not on the “boycott dead Russians” train but the difference is timeliness. Russia is today engaged in a colonial war of aggression. England was last involved in such a thing in the last century.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This makes me wonder, is it possible that the pool of solutions available to Russia's leaders is objectively limited due to Russia's geopolitical and sociopolitical realities and they really don't have too much of a rational choice?
That's a point that deserves deeper study. They have (from memory) 13 countries on their borders, and almost no "natural" borders, e.g. rivers or mountain ranges. They have a history that's blood-curdling. Expecting a new czar to make it like Denmark is a bit much. The West tried in the 90s, and Boris Yeltsin is not remembered fondly over there. The emergence of gangster capitalism was the result.
All the west “tried” in the 90s was to use dubious political techniques to support the guy who believed in democracy so much so that he shot at the parliament with tanks and installed a “successor” we’re all familiar with. The west’s meddling is part of the reason we’re in this mess.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#105I am Russian. We will discuss the problems with Russian culture after the end of the war (with the Ukrainian victory, of course). For now, our time would be better spent not mourning Russian culture, but helping Ukrainians and learning how to fight the criminal Russian regime. When my country has begun the greatest atrocity of our generation, there are now more urgent things to do than write articles about the loss o…
I have two major critiques here: 1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome. 2. Thi…
>This is not the greatest atrocity of our generation. There have been at least three invasions and occupations that are significantly worse crimes: the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan
That depends on what numbers you're going to believe about civilian fatalities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen etc.
It is often claimed that the Iraq War killed anywhere from 0.5 million to over 1.0 million Iraqis.
However these big numbers don't make much sense considering that large scale aerial bombings and artillery strikes stopped after a month into the war and large-scale ground operations stopped after the second battle of Fallujah in 2004. The Iraqis then suffered a horrific decade of weekly and monthly sectarian terror attacks. However adding all the civilian fatalities from the US invasion and the decade of sectarian violence still doesn't add up to ~100,000 and not anywhere near the "millions" range.
Don't get me wrong. The people who started the Iraq War are war criminals. However it doesn't make sense to compare the most widely exaggerated estimates from the 10+ year Iraq War with the current UN confirmed counting of civilian fatalities in the 5 month war in Ukraine. If we go by confirmed civilian fatalities Russia is currently killing Ukrainian civilians at a faster pace than anytime during the Iraq War.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#106[flagged]
Yes, you make some good points about the purposeful dominance of a certain aspect of Russian culture in Ukraine. These people don’t mention that Ukraine schools only teach Russian Literature. There was no Ukrainian Literature. No World Literature. They don’t mention that Russian language classes are the default in schools. That many teachers discourage the learning subjects in Ukrainian language. That many Ukrainians…
> These people don’t mention that Ukraine schools only teach Russian Literature. There was no Ukrainian Literature. No World Literature.
Where did you get that? There is Ukrainian Literature as a subject, and World Literature where Russian literature had some place. It's a mandatory part of the curriculum countrywide. Geez, there even was "Soviet Ukrainian Literature" subject in '80s, although it only had writers in it that were deemed benign for the regime.
I'll grant you that in the eastern parts, there had been very high degree of push to opt-in for Russian Language & Literature classes and Ukrainian had been taught by incompetent twats who couldn't speak it.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#107As someone who's read Anna Karenina three times and yet despises anyone in Russia who puts up a Z, or who idolizes Stalin. The cleanest way out is to separate them. The work of art stands on its own, and you can't critique The Epic of Gilgamesh by complaining that they still had slaves back then and there was no health care system. I haven't read Pushkin, not being into poetry OR speaking Russian, but if Pushkin said…
See, this is a really interesting point there: do we separate the speaker and the speech, or do we lump them together?
I.e., if a Hitler (you saw that coming) says something demonstrably true, while a Pope (yep) says something demonstrably false — who do we agree with? Working out an answer to this question in a clear form has repercussions for the cancel culture, institutions created by slave owners, etc, etc, etc. It isn't new either. People struggled with the oeuvre of writers who supported Nazism way back when: do we read them or do we forget them? Knut Hamsun comes to mind. Rolf Nevanlinna would be a similar example in mathematics.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#108I wonder who Shishkin is writing this for, and why he bothers. Readers interested in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Chekhov are presumably intellectuals. Presumably, they will be familiar with the countless examples from history when, driven by patriotic fervor, countries cleansed themselves from the culture of an adversarial state, including language, literature, music, linguistic borrowings, scientific contributions, com…
I'm going to challenge this because I think it suggests that reading the Russian classics is an intellectual challenge with a perquisite of studying Russian history and culture. Dostoyevsky's works are amazing without any background knowledge. No 'intellectualism' is required, just a love of stories. With a few tweaks they could be set in a modern era and turned into Netflex series. War and Peace is considered a chal…
Dostoyevsky could be read by any random Joe, but the fact is, random Joe does not read Dostoyevsky.
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#109crazy that the case even need be made. Says a lot about where we are, and - how quickly we got there
Do you consider it crazy to think authors can influence culture?
Re: Don’t Blame Dostoyevsky
#110I am Russian. We will discuss the problems with Russian culture after the end of the war (with the Ukrainian victory, of course). For now, our time would be better spent not mourning Russian culture, but helping Ukrainians and learning how to fight the criminal Russian regime. When my country has begun the greatest atrocity of our generation, there are now more urgent things to do than write articles about the loss o…
I have two major critiques here: 1. There's no reason to think the criminal invasion of Ukraine will result in victory for Ukraine. The Russians will fall short of their maximal goals, but they're having significant battlefield successes now. Sometimes, criminal invasions are completely successful. In this case, I suspect that a long, low-intensity conflict with two entrenched sides is the most likely outcome. 2. Thi…
I have 1 major critique:
What "major" battlefield successes?