Posted on 03/26/2018 6:27:10 PM PDT by GoldenState_Rose
Is life a matter of grand politics or individual souls?
Can human affairs be boiled down to science or theories?
Tolstoy and Chekhov believed: Life is lived at ordinary moments, and what is most real is what is barely noticeable, like the tiniest movements of consciousness.
True life is not lived where great external changes take place—where people move about, clash, fight, and slay one another. It is lived only where these tiny, tiny infinitesimally small changes occur.
American conservatives can learn much from the great literary output of 19th century Russia. Though seemingly distant in time and place, the great Russian novelists faced intellectual and moral circumstances remarkably similar to those we find today in America and in the West generally.
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov all wrote in opposition to the powerful ruling class emerging in Russia and the West, the intelligentsia. The revolutionary doctrines of the intelligentsia pointed toward authoritarianism, sought the destruction of individuality and religion, and the imposition of pseudo-scientific doctrines onto human life. The weapon of choice for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov to combat this was literature—the best means both to appeal to man’s sentiments and reason and to demonstrate their opponents’ utopianism and destructiveness.
(Excerpt) Read more at heritage.org ...
Gary Saul Morson – Pray for Chekhov: Or, What Russian Literature Can Teach Conservatives. VIDEO:
Some conservatives allready have learned from them.
...already...
Funny, but lately I have been in the mood to read the Russian classics. Maybe something is in the air — need for soul, spirituality.
Russian writers are superb.
Whatever boiled down to Ayn Rand was authentic. The rest was trying to figure out how to rationalize living off the labor of others.
May I suggest “The Possessed” by Dostoevsky.
A story that intertwines the lives of a groups of elite, effete, social justice warriors who try to bring about “change” in 19th Century Russia.
The characters are very well drawn, and seem to be lifted from today’s Social Media.
Anyway...my opinion.
…but the fact remained that this was a predatory state which the Czar and a small group of noblemen and bureaucrats ruled for their own exclusive benefit...The ruling group owned all the wealth, enjoyed all the privileges and monopolized all the political power, and it did not intend to give up any of its prerogatives. It considered the peasants to be little better than animals..."
Will look it up. My daughter was a Russian Lit professor at a liberal university. She wrote and lived in Russia for a while researching Dostoevsky. I think she was coming around to reality in the years before she died at age 36.
I have become fond of Solzhenitsyn.
This how our ruling class sees us too.
I had read most of Dostoevsky’s works when i was in high school. However, somehow I missed this one and just read it recently. I was really surprised at how similar leftists were back then, to the SJWs of today.
OL’ FYODOR COULD SEE RIGHT THROUGH THEM.
(((I am so sorry for the loss of your daughter at such a young age. My condolences)))
Also loved English and French literature, occasionally others.
Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward is 0-care in a few more years.
Thanks. I’ll add that to my growing pile of must-reads.
And, of course, there is always “Crime and Punishment” which is a prime example of the atheist, narcissistic youth believing that “everything is permissible” if it furthers HIS cause.
(((Tried and True!)))
You’re so right about Chekhov understanding women!
And indeed I love his stuff till the endings. Probably because he was atheist.
Not saying an ending has to be “happy” for it to be Christian. Examples abound from Russian Lit. But Shakespeare’s tragedies come to mind in terms of ending “sadly” but with a Christian spirit. A sense of God and the afterlife, a final judgment — permeates his plays...
-likely why Chekhov, in his more blatant agnosticism, is considered one of the first truly modern writers.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward." - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
Tolstoy had a theory that history wasn’t made by famous or powerful men, but that certain times and events drove certain men into prominence. When those circumstances changed, the men vanished into obscurity, or were consumed by the very events that inspired their fame.
Napoleon was one from Tolstoy’s period. Churchill came later but suffered much the same fate. And then there were the Jacobins and the other victims of the French Revolution ...
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