I 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…
And Anna Karenina was in production too...