Let us remember a man who had great plans for Russia. He had spent his youth in Saint Petersburg, but also formative years in Dresden. His relationship with Europe was complicated, to say the least, some spoke of a love-hate relationship.
The speech is – you guessed it – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
We are of course also talking about Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who did not feel as comfortable on the Elbe as Putin – the women too ugly, the city too dreary, the casinos far away – but from the Kremlin perspective, this is what matters most at the moment Similarities. During the Soviet era, Dostoevsky had a difficult time; his skepticism towards socialists and revolutionaries, spelled out in the darkest of “demons”, was just as little forgiven as his orthodoxy. His resentment against the Germans in the Great Patriotic War was useful, but it didn’t last forever. Dostoyevsky was seen as yesterday, an ore reactionary. The first stamp appeared in 1956.
If you want to criticize modernity, you can let some of his sentences melt in your mouth
Much of it – the rejection of Europe, orthodoxy, conservatism – is state doctrine in Russia today. And just as little as the assessment of that time and today does justice to one of the most contradicting writers in world literature, just as little can Dostoevsky defend himself against being taken into service on his 200th birthday. As if to catch up on the lack of recognition of decades, Russia is celebrating the writer with new monuments, dedicating underground stations, streets and squares to him, organizing exhibitions and plays, reading competitions and film evenings. In Saint Petersburg a bus carries Dostoevsky’s portrait. In Moscow on Thursday Putin will visit a restored museum in an apartment where the man of letters spent his childhood. For some years now, Dostoevsky’s novels have been adapted as TV series. Dostoevsky is closer than ever, a conversation partner, a contemporary. The right-wing extremist Eurasier Alexander Dugin celebrates Dostoyevsky as does the communist Gennady Zyuganov. the Literaturnaja Gazeta once called him a “superhero” of post-Soviet “mass culture”.
If you only read his works selectively enough, he’ll give it away, no question about it. How could he not warm the hearts of Russian and very Russian nationalists? Anyone looking for Russian messianism in its warming, ecstatic version will find it here. Anyone who wants to criticize modernity from a Russian point of view, a modernity that had not yet really dawned at the time, can let sentences melt on the tongue such as the fact that the only salvation lies in “everyone becoming Russian”, always provided Russia resists the temptations of materialism and godlessness, the scourges of the European Enlightenment.
In February, the director Konstantin Bogomolow presented an essay entitled “The Abduction of Europe 2.0”, in which he described the West as a tyranny of “queer activists, fanatical feminists and eco-psychopaths”. Only in Russia are there still “complex people”, and who would have created more complex people than Dostoyevsky?
He did not see the social misery as a failure of the autocracy, but as a potential
That the writer had described himself in 1854 as “the child of the century, a child of disbelief and doubt”, that in his writings, in addition to his brutal prejudices, anti-Semitism and fake news, there was, yes, women in Dresden, too other positions find that the great novels are a single struggle to find the right path, that just doesn’t fit into the cultural climate.
Anyone who struggles with the hardships of Russia’s present may remember that the writer saw Russia’s mission as a future project anyway. While in prison in Saint Petersburg, in Siberian exile, he had looked into the abyss of society, met criminals and murderers. In a turnaround that has often been described, however, he judged social misery not as a failure or perhaps just a consequence of autocracy, but as a potential: “You don’t judge the Russian people by their outrages, which they commit so often, but by the great and sacred things , for which it always longs in its shamefulness “, he wrote in the” diary of a writer “. The simple, fallible Russian has what it takes to redeem the world. In an often joyless present, that only makes Dostoevsky more attractive. It is certain that it will not be Russia’s last rediscovery of the classic.