In a sharp accusation, the well-known Ukrainian writer Oksana Sabushko put forward the thesis that Europe had allowed itself to be blinded by a supposed “humanism” in Russian literature disguised as a cult of suffering. This ultimately led to the Butscha massacre. – A replica.
A Z for Putin’s Ukrainian “special operation” in Russian Chita.
On April 28, the NZZ published an article in which the Ukrainian writer Oksana Sabushko settled accounts with Russian literature against the background of the Bucha crimes. With her moral relativism and her “sympathy for the criminals”, she prepared the ground for the misdeeds of the Russian soldiery, according to the author. Your text wants to make it clear once and for all that Russia and Russian culture do not belong to Europe, and that, strictly speaking, they do not even belong to the human world.
Because Russia is the kingdom of evil. Even the “attempt to take the criminal’s point of view, to understand his motives and goals” is, according to Sabushko, morally reprehensible. Just like any attempt at differentiation that would show, for example, that many soldiers in the Russian army themselves became victims of a structurally racist authoritarian regime: Otherwise, remote and underprivileged regions such as Buryatia and Dagestan would hardly have suffered the highest proportion of casualties register.
mythical worldview
Sabushko does not think historically, but mythically; processes in the real historical and political world, in which even Putin and his henchmen are people with motives and interests that can be described and analyzed, elude their worldview. In Ukrainian social networks, the Russian soldiers are described as either “orcs” or “non-humans”, and there are rants about the fact that their burned flesh is intended to fertilize the “already very fertile Ukrainian soil”. Such rhetoric may be emotionally understandable, but it remains inhuman.
In her polemic, Oksana Sabushko flatly takes responsibility for all of Russian literature. Because Russian literature has sold itself to the rulers, it has prostituted itself – just like the female heroine in Tolstoy’s last novel “Resurrection”. In doing so, Sabushko falls into the patriarchal pattern of evaluation and humiliation that Tolstoy is currently attacking in his novel: it is not the young woman who sells herself who is guilty, but the young nobleman Dmitri Nekhlyudov, who put her in this situation to gratify his sex drive. The novel tells of how he gains insight into his guilt. Is telling that people make mistakes and later regret them supposed to be moral relativism?
Oksana Sabushko accuses Russian literature of showing sympathy for criminals. And that is hopelessly un-European. Now, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were by no means the only European authors who grappled with questions of the social, psychological, or even genetic causes of crime in the late 19th century. Nor were they the only ones interested in trials and prison conditions. To dismiss this as un-European reveals a crooked image of Europe. Or should it be empathy with the sinner that is branded here?
Tolstoy was the author of pacifist tracts and was effectively excommunicated for making fun of the dogmas and liturgical rituals of the orthodox state church – and that too in a novel entitled “Resurrection”, which ends in quotations from the Bible. Incidentally, with the proceeds from the sale of this novel he financed the relocation of the members of the Dukhoborse sect (spiritual fighters) from the Tsarist Empire to Canada: The Dukhoborse were persecuted because they refused to do military service. That is why Tolstoy interceded for them.
Tolstoy’s world is complex
In the eighth and last part of his great novel “Anna Karenina”, Tolstoy describes how a society falls prey to war propaganda: It was the time of the uprisings of the Serbs and Bulgarians against the Ottomans. The Russian newspapers were full of reports of atrocities committed by Ottoman soldiers against the Slav civilian population. Solidarity was expressed in Russia with the Slavs in the Balkans. Aid funds were collected, young men joined volunteer regiments.
Konstantin Levin, the second main character in the novel alongside the title heroine, has his doubts about the moral blackmail to which the Russian public is subjected. He feels no immediate sympathy for the Slavs in the Balkans, so he doesn’t want to get involved with them. Unlike his half brother. He’s a publicist; his last book was a flop and now he sees the war in the Balkans as a welcome opportunity to relaunch his career. Vronsky, Anna’s lover, joins the Russian units in Serbia after her suicide because he doesn’t know what else to do with his life.
Tolstoy’s world is complex: Solidarity with war victims serves as a vehicle for personal vanity, participation in the war becomes an alibi for young men in crisis. Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the magazine that serialized Anna Karenina and a staunch nationalist and imperialist, was naturally outraged. He declined to print the last part of the novel. Instead, in a small note, he explained to the readers that the novel would end with the heroine’s death anyway: what followed would be some trivial conversations about the situation in the Balkans that were irrelevant to the plot. In times of national upheaval people read selectively.
In the chorus of those who want to devalue Russian literature, like Oksana Sabushko, or even call for its “total boycott”, like the Ukrainian PEN center in a statement of March 1, 2022, there is probably a hint of anger that Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are still read so much today. As if their continued popularity was due solely to Russia’s former position as a great power. As if it were somehow shocking that some of the greatest novels in world literature were written in Russian.
This is national vested interests in the spirit of the 19th century. The meaning of the term world literature is that these works belong to all of us, regardless of the language in which they were written. Now it is political and economic factors that determine whether a work is translated and received international attention. This explains the importance of Russian literature in the world and above all the huge backlog in the translation of Ukrainian literature. But world literary exchange is not a zero-sum game in which one has to withdraw attention from one text in order to be able to give it to others.
Two misfortunes
The invasion of Ukraine is a disaster for Russian culture. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made this clear in an interview with Russian journalists: “Vladimir Putin did the greatest damage to the Russian language.” A Russian writer friend of mine told me dejectedly: “Russia is becoming like North Korea, only less organized.”
Of course, the misfortune of many Russians is different from being shot, bombed or raped. But life in Russia is also life-threatening if you were born as a young man in Buryatia or Dagestan and are then sent to a war effort using unfair methods. Or if you are an opposition politician. Or if you write as a journalist about corruption or the machinations of Chechen death squads. The list goes on; above all, it is getting longer every day.
Oksana Sabushko does not want to acknowledge that it is Russian authors who are critical of the regime, such as Vladimir Sorokin, Lyudmila Ulitzkaja, Mikhail Shishkin, Sergei Lebedev or Boris Akunin, who have made the most enlightening statements about the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the crimes in recent weeks of the Putin regime have published. In general, she looks at the history of violence in the 20th century with remarkable glasses: there are only Ukrainian victims.
She also knows that it was not least Russian writers who fought against totalitarianism and fell victim to it. And she should also know that from the early 19th century it was considered good manners for poets in the tsarist empire not to show solidarity with power. Dostoyevsky was sentenced to death for being part of an opposition discussion circle and was under police surveillance until a few years before his death. Tolstoy’s house was searched; he was not arrested only because he was a world-famous author.
However, it is true: the same authors were often enough blind to the imperial mindset that they conveyed in their works. Joseph Brodsky’s much-criticized 1991 joke poem “On the Independence of Ukraine” is an eloquent testimony here. But on closer inspection it turns out to be role poetry in its grotesque exaggeration of national stereotypes: It is not the voice of Brodsky, who accuses the Ukrainians of wanting to eat their borscht alone in the future. At most, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, thinks so primitively.
Russian literature is rich and diverse. She tries to capture all possible spheres of human experience. Above all, she doesn’t oversimplify the world, but rather imposes complexity on us, a complexity that Oksana Sabuschko refuses to recognize behind her ethno-nationalist glasses.
Jens Herlth teaches Slavic Studies at the University of Freiburg.