
How the Great Truth Dawned - portobello
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/9/how-the-great-truth-dawned
======
atemerev
I am Russian, and I consider the author to be mostly right. Indeed, we hold
our literature to be the most valued of all arts; there were many Russian
painters, and musicians, and architects, but these classical novelists (and
poets) will always have a special place in our hearts.

The French have probably the closest level of respect to their men and women
of letters, but their ideal is an intellectual in general, not necessarily the
novelist. For the Germans, their beacons of culture are their philosophers.
For the Americans — their inventors and visionaries, nowhere else they have
achieved so much respect and so many accolades. But for us, Russians, — our
idols are indeed our novelists.

------
dwaltrip
I hadn't previously read much about Bolshevik ethics. Fascinating and also a
bit terrifying. Ideology wholly unrestrained and completely ungrounded is
unimaginable thing. Makes me want to read more Soviet history.

I must have had some prior vague sense of the importance of Russian literature
and it's place in their culture (faint memories of struggling through Crime
and Punishment in high school are coming back to me). But this article put it
an entirely different light, which was quite interesting.

However, I did find it strange how the religious belief described in the
article was not critically examined in any depth, and was instead simply
dusted with this hue of great significance. The only caveat I noticed was the
sentence describing how it didn't seem to matter which religious faith the
individual had, just that they had some.

------
hydrox24
> It is worth noting that Russia’s most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for
> literature, Svetlana Alexievich, also produced literary works that were
> purely factual.

Alexievich won with "Secondhand Time"[0], which I absolutely loved. It is
essentially a transcribed oral history, but composed in such a way so as to
become literature. It is particularly admirable for the way in which it allows
narratives which contradict each other to stand in adjacent chapters, which is
jarring, but also very honest.

Please read it if you have the patience for hard reading and some deeply sad
stories.

[0]:
[https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541184/secondhand-t...](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541184/secondhand-
time-by-svetlana-alexievich/9780399588822/)

~~~
myth_drannon
She is Belorussian not Russian by the way.

~~~
rubberstock
From the article:

>Alexievich echoed Korolenko by claiming three homelands: her mother’s
Ukraine, her father’s Belarus, and—“Russia’s great culture, without which I
cannot imagine myself.” By culture she meant, above all, literature.

------
hamilyon2
Tolstoi's "War and peace" is pure literature. It is factually incorrect all
over the place, I don't know of anyone claiming otherwise.

------
umadon
Solzhenitsyn's Ex‐Wife Says ‘Gulag’ Is ‘Folklore’:

[https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-
ex...](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-
gulag-is-folklore.html)

~~~
flannery
That doesn't contradict the article. Literary truth is its own thing.

~~~
umadon
Sure, just weird that everyone is enamored of a "literary" truth at the
expense of grown-up historical research.

------
dmaldona
I was really surprised that this article was written by a humanities
professor. I understand he's trying to make a point, but the premises in the
first paragraphs are indigestible.

> No Westerner would call such a work “literary"

Why? There are plenty of works such as this in western literature.

> Russians revere literature more than anyone else in the world.

Again, I feel this claim is a bit baseless. Let's see why he thinks that:

> When Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina was being serialized, Dostoevsky, in a
> review of its latest installment, opined that “at last the existence of the
> Russian people has been justified.” t is hard to imagine Frenchmen or
> Englishmen, let alone Americans, even supposing that their existence
> required justification; but if they did, they would surely not point to a
> novel.

Well, this is the opinion of Dostoevsky, a writer. I'm sure similar hyperbolic
comments were made by the french naturalists (Zola about Flaubert... ) or
German idealists (about Goethe...)

Then the author proceeds to engage in other baseless generalizations about
Russians' attitude to literature compared with other cultures.

I appreciate his insights on Russian literature in general and Solzhenitsyn
vision in particular. But I do not understand why he needs to precede his text
by such myopic comments.

------
seibelj
What a fantastic read. The sad truth is that all countries that have descended
into authoritarianism, whatever their preferred political ideology, result in
mass murder. Such pain and suffering caused by such misguided beliefs. Just
let people be free! Stop controlling other people.

~~~
viburnum
Sure, but can you even count the people killed under capitalism?

~~~
dang
Please keep ideological tit-for-tats somewhere other than this site.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
claudiawerner
I will preface this comment by saying that I am sympathetic to the author's
criticism of the Soviet system which he has inherited from Solzhenitsyn, but
being sympathetic to the communist hypothesis myself, I feel like there are
omissions in the article worth picking up on.

The article reads,

>The contrary view, held by ideologues and justice warriors generally, is that
our group is good, and theirs is evil. “Evil people committing evil deeds”:
this is the sort of thinking behind notions like class conflict or the
international Zionist conspiracy.

This is wrong, and a cursory investigation of Marx's late works would show
that. Not only does the theory of class conflict not rest on the idea that
capitalists are "evil people committing evil deeds", but it does not project
Marx's "proletariat" as inherently virtuous. Marx, in fact, takes great pains
to avoid this misinterpretation of his work; take for example the 1867 preface
to the German edition of Capital[0]:

>To prevent possible misunderstanding, a word. I paint the capitalist and the
landlord in no sense couleur de rose [i.e., seen through rose-tinted glasses].
But here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the
personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-
relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the
economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can
less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose
creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself
above them.

It is a theory of society, not of some people who, somehow, are evil due to
their economic position. Modern commentators on Marx argue that he does not
argue for a socialist society on the basis of "justice" or what is "right" \-
in fact, he does the opposite - his claim is that would be in the "best
interests" of the working class to overcome this unintentionally constructed
system. Would the author have compared Smith's invisible hand to people doing
intentionally good deeds? I don't think it would - so it's a mystery why it
feels the need to misrepresent Marx, especially given the fact you can read
all of Marx's works online... for free.

Not so with the theory of the international Zionist conspiracy, which is a
right-wing idea predicated on the "fact" of Zionists who are intentionally
coordinating with each other for malicious purposes. Of course, the article
omits Solzhenitsyn's anti-semitism from this discussion. It would be
inconvenient to mention it, I suppose.

The article then reads,

>Mercy, kindness, compassion: these were all anti-Bolshevik emotions, and
schoolchildren were taught to reject them. I know of no previous society where
children were taught that compassion and mercy are vices.

As much as they may have been anti-Bolshevik emotions, they are also anti-
capitalist emotions, and this is exemplified on a massive scale in modern
society where even in developed ("first world") countries people starve and
die because they cannot afford insulin. The compassion, in fact, only comes
from people who aren't out to make a profit even if it means the misery of
another.

Later,

>For a true materialist, Lenin maintained, there can be no Kantian categorical
imperative to regard others only as ends, not as means. By the same token, the
materialist does not acknowledge the supposed sanctity of human life.

The author is clearly unfamiliar with Marx's own theories of morality (which
Sean Sayers elucidates in _Marxism and Human Nature_ [1]) and misunderstands
the conflict between materialism and idealism in Marx's sense. The materialist
argues that morality derives from actual social formations, the "tradition of
all dead generations" \- this does not make the morality "invalid" or "wrong",
but it is an acceptance of the scientific method as applied to the gaeneology
of morals. One can be both a moral realist and a Marxist, since Marxism
entails a material analysis of how things have developed in society. In the
same way, one can be a moral realist and believe, with Kant's categorical
imperative, that it is morally impermissible to lie at any time for any
reason, which conflicts with many perspectives on what it is right for a
Christian to do.

Then,

>They may have insisted that high moral ideals do not require belief in God,
but when it came down to it, morals grounded in nothing but one’s own
conviction and reasoning, however cogent, proved woefully inadequate under
experiential, rather than logical, pressure.

This is simply a re-statement of the old myth that when in mortal danger an
atheist will also pray. It's not backed up by anything, but then again -
nothing else in the article is either. The author used a pithily inaccurate
characterization of class conflict (and failed to link it to the scientific
aspect of historical materialism), argued that the core capitalist tenets of
thrift and stinginess driving accumulation which are seen so essential to
entrepeneurship today are not found in "any previous society", and then tried
to reclaim the horrific actions of the Soviet state as being due to atheism
while ignoring the fact that it is secularism that brings the tolerance the
liberal author is so proud of in Western democracies.

[0] Available here:
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm)

[1]
[https://books.google.fr/books/about/Marxism_and_Human_Nature...](https://books.google.fr/books/about/Marxism_and_Human_Nature.html?id=Vnr2zjct2-kC&redir_esc=y)

~~~
jacques_chester
> _This is wrong, and a cursory investigation of Marx 's late works would show
> that._

The focus here is on Lenin and his progeny, particularly Stalin. Marx claimed
the discovery of objective laws of reality through generous application of the
Hegelian world-spirit concept[1]. The Bolsheviks expanded Marx's ideas.

The expansion was thus: the Party is the agent of the Proletariat. The
liberation of Proletariat is the ultimate end of History. The laws of History
dictate that this is so. But if there are objective laws of history, someone
must explain what those laws are and act on them: this is the Party. And if
the Party observes such laws, then the concept of democracy or debate _within_
the Party is nonsensical, so the Party must follow the doctrinal rulings of
the Politburo. But it also follows that debate or democracy within the
Politburo is _also_ nonsensical, therefore, only one leader may give meaning,
purpose and weight to the objective laws of history.

Leninism laid the ideological rails that Stalin used to railroad Russia
straight to hell. Marx's work was not sufficient, but it was necessary.

[1] There is a view that Marx's ideas were purely economical in nature. I
don't think this holds up. He was a philosopher first and an economist second.
The concept of alienation for example is not just about effort or property, it
is a quasi-mystical notion of a fundamental schism of persons, from themselves
and from each other.

~~~
ptx
Didn't Lenin advocate "freedom of discussion, unity of action" i.e. democratic
centralism?

~~~
jacques_chester
Lenin advocated a lot of things depending on the audience, but in tactical
terms he was perfectly happy to advocate what we might today call terrorism.

------
Fins
This might be also because while our writers (I am not really sure about poets
(Pushkin just does not seem to travel as well as Dostoyevsky, or Shakespear)
from the 19th century on actually are "world class" so to speak, Russian
painters, composers and architects up until early 1900s were really quite
derivative and second rate. With all the complexes Russians tend to have
aboutr being compared to Europe, or being considered (or not considered) a
part of Europe, idolization of writers is quite understandable.

~~~
ivanhoe
Well, there was certainly much more great writers at the same time, but
composers like Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin were first class by any measure...
and those are two I could recall from the top of my head, with my very limited
knowledge of 19th century Russian culture, I'm sure there's more...

~~~
yesenadam
Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky

~~~
ivanhoe
totally, now I feel like an idiot for forgetting Tchaikovsky :)

------
Myrmornis
It's so hard to read literary criticism with its deluge of questionable logic
in every sentence. Whatever Russian word appears in the subtitle and was
translated as "literary", how am I supposed to know how the
semantics/implications compare between (then) Russian and (then) English?
Obviously that is to miss the point of the essay. But my point is I never
found out what the point of the essay was because literary criticism is such
torture to read.

