241–250 of 251 posts
Freedom fries went back to french fries. I wouldn't worry too much about Russian culture disappearing in the long run.
If you want to keep commenting on HN in the future, please review the site guidelines and make sure you're using this site as intended: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
We all know there's a war going on. That doesn't mean the rules here don't apply. It means we have to work harder to stick to them. If you don't want to do that, or feel too strongly to be able to, please don't post until you do and can.
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I don't think I can, not really — it's like throwing away the whole corpus of Kipling's works for his imperialist verses, cancelling J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter because of her feminist tweets, or calling to boycott Noam Chomsky's linguistic works because of his political statements — but I can pretend that I do :-) However, I don't think the commenters in this thread are all Ukrainians.
I mean when the Russian president makes a televised speech before the invasion saying that he is going to “find the solution to the Ukrainian question” another author and another book seems a more appropriate comparison…
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The point of spammers or ransom ware authors is to survive as well. Doesn’t mean they are valuable. If you say that russian culture is valuable, you must set the context why. It doesn’t communicate anything particularly original. It’s not especially beautiful (arguably). It didn’t stop and some might argue even enabled the carriers of that culture to either tolerate a genocidal regime or actively support it. What’s t…
You can certainly say that you don’t think Russian culture is valuable, or that you just don’t plain like it, and that is certainly understandable given the current circumstances. But that is something very different from saying that it has failed. And you have clearly not read and understood Dostoyevsky if that is what you got out of Crime and Punishment. Maybe you shouldn’t be that fast to condemn a whole culture i…
The usual way of framing it and especially russian classical literature in russian schools, like in my case, was that it is the moral guiding light of the nation. As such it has clearly failed.
Also, I'm confused by the notion that I have the obligation to you to interpret a work of art just like you to have an opinion on it.
Right, blame Gogol: “We all come out from Gogol's 'Overcoat'.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/513055-we-all-come-out-from...
Gogol is an interesting one though. There being no Ukrainian state at the time, he was appropriated by the Russian literature as a quintessential Russian writer, but his sympathetic sentiment towards the Cossack tradition is well-known (and obvious in his texts), and one can make a good argument that in his early stuff he is more subversive about the entire Russian empire thing than a naive reader may think. (Ok, his…
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> Why do you ignore that the one Federation that didn't teach Russian in schools was forced to change their policy? What federation? I have no idea what you're talking about. I made a specific claim about the status of minority languages in Russia and Ukraine. Do you have any evidence to show that it is inaccurate? > Russia can have all the written rules they want What exactly are you implying in this specific instan…
1. There was one republic that did not include Russian as the primary language for education, and they were forced to change that. I will try to dig up something on it, I didn't bookmark such a random thing. 2. They are free to have official languages, as long as they include Russian. They are not free to exclude Russian. Ukraine did not clamp down on Russian prior to Russia annexing 10% of Ukraine in 2014.
This is the most proper thing to implement in all national republics that form a larger federation. This policy makes sure that younger generations are not deprived of economic and cultural opportunities due to language barriers.
> Ukraine did not clamp down on Russian prior to Russia annexing 10% of Ukraine in 2014.
If the Ukrainian government feels like to clamp down on Russian due to their own uncivilized messing with the right to representation of East Ukrainians (mostly russian-speaking) via the violent coup against a democratically elected president that didn’t break a law, then it tells a lot about their self-awareness and general ability to reflect on the matter. Have they ever studied how civil wars get started?
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But in "Dead Souls" and elsewhere he never referred to himself as a Ukrainian. He called himself, proudly, Russian, through and through.
And 1000 years ago Rus was an empire centred on its capital, Kyiv. Ukrainians used to be called Rusyn or Ruthenian. There was a Rus empire encompassing Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia before Moscow even existed. Ukraine as a country is a relatively modern construct. Born out of centuries of oppression at the hands of Muscovites. That doesn't mean that Ukrainians didn't exist just because they were called somethin…
Also, your claim of oppression needs to be cited or else it's hot air.
Again, I didn't say Ukrainians didn't exist: they were called Russians the same way Bavarians are called German now.
finally, once again, I didn't say Gogol didn't reference Ukrainian culture: he did, but he never called it a "Ukrainian" culture. In his writings, he always said: "My Russia". It is the same as saying a Texan says he is American. Does that mean we are denying Texas their Texan culture and dialect?
And for reference, Germany has always been called that--Germania.
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One of my nits is implications that Great Works require some sort of extra mental exertion. I've read many Great Works and it's not just that Crime and Punishment is better than As the Crawdads Sing but it is also more engaging. People think that these books shouldn't be read without understanding Russian history or society and without careful comparisons of the best translations but it isn't necessary. One of my man…
While you don't need to study history, you should definitely read the Wikipedia article on Napoleon's invasion of Russia before starting War and Peace. Not even from an intellectual standpoint, but to just so you're not taken out of the book every other sentence by another reference to a figure or event.
I'm a science fiction fan and I like to approach books as though they were set in Jupiter in the far future. One of my beliefs is that great literature transcends the time and place of where it was written. I haven't been disappointed yet.
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I have seen very few people contesting his election. It’s the snipers shooting at crowds and sending the army to the Maidan square that people really objected to. Also, his cosying up with Putin and showing the finger to the EU. And corruption.
Look, the obvious point here is that you can't take someone's pretext for war at face value like the fuckhead who thinks it's okay to starve Yemeni children because of Iran did. There's always some kernel of truth to hang them on, but it doesn't justify criminal military aggression, either in Ukraine or Yemen.