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Since the second phase of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began on 24 February 2022, there have been heated debates in the press and social media about the extent to which Russian culture—not Soviet culture, but precisely classic Russian culture, starting with the nineteenth century (if not earlier)—is culpable for what has been happening. The accusers say, for example, that all of Russian culture and its leading figures have invariably been infected by the imperialist spirit and the oppression of other countries and cultures. The objections raised against this view can be grouped into several lines of argument. Some opponents say that we shouldn’t ascribe today’s problems to classic writers, while others argue that an entire culture cannot be blamed for this aggression, even if it is supported by the political elite and a considerable portion of society. A third group claims that the Russian officers hurling missiles at civilian settlements or the Russian soldiers looting occupied villages have hardly been immediately influenced by any books whatsoever, so the question of culture’s culpability is entirely irrelevant. Some of the people who object to the notion of a “single and unified” Russian culture hold that those who allege its unity are unwittingly playing into the hands of Kremlin propaganda, which also asserts that Russian culture in its entirety is founded on a “code” and immutable “values,” which the state is supposedly taking great care to uphold by bombing neighboring countries and arresting all dissenters.

I would argue that these debates about culture’s culpability are a psychological trap that takes us back to the early twentieth century, when the humanities were dominated by essentialism—that is, a view of society founded on the absolute certainty that, for example, women and men, or sexual minorities (see Vasily Rozanov’s People of the Moonlight, 1911), or different nations and religions have an immutable essence that predetermines the behavior of individual members of these groups. In the early twentieth century, essentialism was used as an argument in favor of inequality: the “innate characteristics” of women were supposedly such that women should not be allowed to vote, and the “innate characteristics” of colonized peoples were such that they did not deserve the right to self-governance. It is no accident that the twentieth century witnessed the unfolding of two deeply interlinked processes: one social—the fight for the civil and political rights of marginalized groups (feminism, anti-colonialism, queer emancipation), and one in the humanities and sciences that sought to overcome essentialism and affirm the view that the self-consciousness of men and women, the self-consciousness of large cultural or racialized groups, etc., is internally variable and always the result of a long process of historical evolution. Today, we seem to be plunging back down the ladder onto an older rung. As cultural studies scholar Jan Levchenko has astutely noted, Putin’s hostility toward modernity and his rejection of the idea of the future has unleashed an archaization of consciousness in several countries. It is important to resist this process.

A distressing example of the new essentialism can be found in a column published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 8 September 2023 by the Berlin journalist Nikolai Klimeniouk, titled “Sie wollen, dass wir sie ‘lieben’” (“They want us to ‘love’ them”).^[1] Klimeniouk claims that contemporary Russian culture (or all Russian culture? his article does not make this clear) is supposedly founded on the idea of a non-consensual love that does not respect personal boundaries and demands reciprocal “consent” from those nations who were subjected first to Soviet and now to Russian aggression. This belief in the unimportance of other people’s boundaries, Klimeniouk argues, is shared by the intellectuals of Russian descent who defended Andrei Desnitsky, the biblical scholar who was recently fired from Vilnius University following a heated public campaign in the Lithuanian media. The organizers of that campaign took Desnitsky to task for publishing an article in 2012 about the 1940s Soviet occupation of Baltic countries in which he made statements that, in spite of all his caveats at the time, have been read in today’s context as an expression of sympathy for the occupiers. 

In his discussion of Desnitsky, Klimeniouk makes an unexpected logical leap. First, he rehashes the viewpoint of the scholar’s supporters:

“The journalist [who wrote about Desnitsky – I.K.] was [not a journalist but] a denouncer. The decision was undemocratic. Desnitsky is an important scholar who brought renown to the university. This would never happen in a civilized country. In Lithuania, they punish you for expressing your opinion, and Russians are hated everywhere.

“This framing is frighteningly similar to a discussion of significance to contemporary Russian culture, which began in 1985 on the pages of the New York Times Book Review, and, it appears, was never concluded.”

Klimeniouk then summarizes two essays which appeared in The New York Times Book Review at that time: “An Introduction to a Variation,” by Milan Kundera, and “Why Milan Kundera is Wrong about Dostoyevsky,” a response by Joseph Brodsky. The turn to this older polemic is symptomatic: Klimeniouk believes that it is possible nowadays to make arguments of the same sort that these two writers exchanged almost forty years ago—although, truth be told, these arguments already sounded quite outmoded even at the time. That’s why it is worth going over these essays in more detail than Klimeniouk provides, since his column revives a debate that already proved unfruitful once.

Milan Kundera’s essay begins with the tale of how, in 1968, a Soviet military patrol stopped him—expelled from all Czechoslovak institutions, his books banned—as he was driving from Prague to Budějovice. The officer in charge tells Kundera, “It’s all a big misunderstanding, but it will straighten itself out. You must realize we love the Czechs. We love you!” This strange declaration of love by an officer of the occupying army makes Kundera recall Dostoyevsky, with his irrationalism and fetishization of strong emotions, as well as Solzhenitsyn, whose Harvard commencement speech criticized the spirit of the European Renaissance. In his essay, Kundera positions himself as a defender of the European cultural values that emerged during the Renaissance: self-consciousness, rationalism, irony, and playfulness.

Joseph Brodsky, already famous in the States but not yet а Nobel Prize winner (that would happen a year after the events described here), took it upon himself to defend Dostoevsky against Kundera on the pages of the New York Times Book Review. However, he also resorted to the same kind of essentialist rhetoric—perhaps to an even greater degree—as his opponent, and to top it off, he also tried to humiliate Kundera, possibly out of sheer irascibility. “[Kundera’s] fear and disgust [toward the occupiers] are understandable, but soldiers never represent culture, let alone a literature – they carry guns, not books. […] Mr. Kundera is a Continental, a European man. These people are seldom capable of seeing themselves from the outside.”

These are more or less the kind of thoughts, according to Klimeniouk, that can be found in the minds of today’s Russian émigré intellectuals, which is why they defend Desnitsky and refuse to entertain the idea of a connection between Russian culture and Russian aggression—they don’t see a link between “guns” and “books” either.

Klimeniouk devotes the rest of his column to a discussion of statements made by Russian writer Maria Golovanivskaya on the topic of love (in an interview with Lev Oborin on the website Polka) and a now-deleted Facebook post by Tatyana Tolstaya (rather unconscionable musings about the rapes of German women by Soviet soldiers). Finally, he quotes a new history textbook for the eleventh grade, written by [former Russian culture minister] Vladimir Medinsky and Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) rector Anatoly Torkunov, before concluding, “[In contemporary Russia,] high culture has once again lost the battle with state repression.”

This conclusion seems to me both illogical and, perhaps, formulaic: it seems to follow from a different argument than the entire preceding column. In order for culture to “once again [lose] the battle” with the state, there must be a conflict between the two, and Klimeniouk had so far tried to show that there was no conflict whatsoever between Russian culture and the Russian government. What is more, Klimeniouk ascribes to Russian culture “perennial” motifs that can be expressed with equal success using quotes from Brodsky, Golovanivskaya, or Tolstaya. These same “perennial” motifs underlie, in his view, the connection between Russian culture and today’s war of aggression.

It’s not clear whether one should argue with Klimeniouk. This is a scathing newspaper column, published, albeit, in one of Europe’s most influential papers. As for Klimeniouk’s attack on Desnitsky, the composer Boris Filanovsky has already offered an excellent response on his Facebook page. Is there anything we must add to his objections?

I think that we should analyze the psychological stance underlying Klimeniouk’s article. These days, this approach threatens to spread much farther than a single newspaper article, and not just in the media, but also in scholarship. This is precisely why I think that what matters now is not whether Klimeniouk is interpreting Brodsky correctly, or even what all this has to do with Andrei Desnitsky getting fired. What matters is methodology. How can we contextualize and explain this rhetoric of “love” that Klimeniouk apparently considers something akin to an incurable (or, at any rate, intractable) disease of Russian culture?

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A newspaper column certainly has its own generic rules: it is meant to quickly convince readers that the author is right. Nevertheless, even taking these rules into account, it is surprising that Klimeniouk does not bring in several rather obvious nineteenth-century texts in which the “love” rhetoric he describes is most effectively expressed. Looking at these texts, however, makes it clear that this rhetoric is an expression of a specific historical-evolutionary line that can be traced to the mid-nineteenth century, rather than reflecting universally shared qualities of Russian culture. This line could be called expansionist universalism. The texts created within its framework became a crucial intellectual resource that facilitated the emergence of the Russian state’s current rhetoric of war—but not as texts per se, but because this rhetoric was later substantially reworked by late-Soviet Russian nationalists.^[2]

The first example is Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem “Two Unities” [“Dva edinstva,” September 1870). Addressed to the “Slavic world” (the same sort of ideological construct as the “Russian world” is in our time), with its famous second stanza pointing to Otto von Bismarck as the “oracle of our day”:

«Единство, — возвестил оракул наших дней, —
 Быть может спаяно железом лишь и кровью…»
 Но мы попробуем спаять его любовью, —
 А там увидим, что прочней…

“Unity,” declared the oracle of our day,
“Can be forged solely through iron and blood.”
 But we shall bond our unity through love,
 And then we shall see which of the bonds gives way.

Tyutchev called for the creation of a Slavic federation led by Russia, which was to be founded on “love.” The famous Czech poet and journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821­–1856) once wrote about this “love”: “Russians call everything Russian Slavic in order to later call everything Slavic Russian.” But Havlíček did not mean all Russians when he said “Russians”; he meant the Slavophiles, who were unwittingly playing along with their government. And, while Havlíček criticized the Slavophiles and the Russian state’s autocracy, he also translated Gogol and Lermontov into Czech.

The second example is Dostoyevsky’s “Pushkin Speech,” delivered in 1880. It declares love as the basis of the Russian people’s “world-scale kind-heartedness”:

«…Мы [русские] разом устремились <…> к самому жизненному воссоединению, к единению всечеловеческому! Мы не враждебно (как, казалось, должно бы было случиться), а дружественно, с полною любовию приняли в душу нашу гении чужих наций, всех вместе, не делая преимущественных племенных различий, умея инстинктом, почти с самого первого шагу различать, снимать противоречия, извинять и примирять различия, и тем уже выказали готовность и наклонность нашу, нам самим только что объявившуюся и сказавшуюся, ко всеобщему общечеловеческому воссоединению со всеми племенами великого арийского рода…»

“Indeed, we [Russians] then impetuously applied ourselves to the most vital universal pan-humanist fellowship! Not in a spirit of enmity (as one might have expected) but in friendliness and perfect love, we received into our soul the genius of foreign nations, all equally, without preference of race, able by instinct from almost the very first step to discern, to discount distinctions, to excuse and reconcile them. Therein we already showed what had only just become manifest to us—our readiness and inclination for a common and universal union with all the races of the great Aryan family.”

The third example is Alexander Blok’s poem “The Scythians” (1918), which literary scholars have noted was directly influenced by the “Pushkin Speech”:

Да, так любить, как любит наша кровь,
       Никто из вас давно не любит!
 Забыли вы, что в мире есть любовь,
       Которая и жжет, и губит!

Мы любим все — и жар холодных числ,
       И дар божественных видений,
 Нам внятно все — и острый галльский смысл,
       И сумрачный германский гений…

Yes, to love the way that our blood loves,
      None of you has loved in countless years!
 You have forgotten that there is a love
       That burns and wrecks and wakens fears!

We love it all—the sear of ice-cold numbers,
       The gift of divine illuminations,
 We grasp it all—the sharp-edged Gallic wit,
      The gloomy genius of the Germans.

The version of universalism on which Tyutchev, Dostoyevsky, and Blok insisted assumed that practitioners of Russian culture, who had arrived late to the dialogue of European culture(s), could occupy a central place in that dialogue because they (speaking as it were on behalf of “Russians”) could allegedly understand everything, and this ability to understand was underpinned by the unique Russian capacity for “love.” Mastering a foreign culture, as based on this universal “love,” becomes a form of self-affirmation for the “lover.” This rhetoric was a means of alleviating and masking the constant tension between two images of Russia produced in the press and in government publications, a tension felt ever more strongly over the course of the nineteenth century: Russia as the nation-state of Russians and Russia as a multi-ethnic empire. But this task of “all-conquering love” was not declared on behalf of the government, but rather on behalf of society. While the “we” in Tyutchev’s poem could still encompass the and society, in Dostoyevsky’s speech and Blok’s poem the “we” points first and foremost to a society that was ready, in their opinion, to bring about cultural expansion in place of the state.

Some of their contemporaries sharply criticized this rhetoric. For example, the well-known critic Nikolai Mikhailovsky noted very soon after the publication of the “Pushkin Speech” that Dostoyevsky’s calls for a “united Aryan tribe” had anti-Semitic undertones.

If we examine the examples given by Klimeniouk with a view to older history, it becomes clear that the Russian intelligentsia’s universalism has not always and across the board had an expansionist character. There have been at least two variations. The first is westernizing, which assumes that Russian culture is too archaic and that it can and must be renewed with the help of transfers of Western European culture into Russia. This thinking was, for instance, foundational for the translation strategy of the Russian Symbolists, who were able in the 1900s and 1910s to “catch up” to French poetry, which was developing rapidly at the time. This westernizing conception influenced the program of the World Literature publishing house, founded by Maxim Gorky in 1919. At a different historical stage, westernizing universalism manifested itself in a passion for Polish culture (jazz, poetry, fashion magazines) among the nonconformist intelligentsia in the 1950s-1960s; Brodsky himself was a Polonophile in his youth. Of course, Thaw-era Soviet Polonomania was rarely marked by a deep interest in the other; it was often just the urge to imagine an alternative, better life for oneself, but cultural transfers often occur in exactly this fashion.

The second, rarer variation is philanthropic, whereby the popularization of different cultures in Russia served to express sympathy and moral support for the bearers of said culture(s). In 1916, immediately following the Armenian (and Assyrian) genocide in the Ottoman Empire, an enormous book of translations entitled The Poetry of Armenia from Ancient Times to the Present Day was published under the editorship of the prominent poet and critic Valery Briusov. The translators included other well-known poets such as Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Konstantin Balmont, Ivan Bunin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladislav Khodasevich—and even Alexander Blok, author of “The Scythians.” The anthology did not have colonial or expansionist intentions, however; instead, it voiced Russian civil society’s solidarity with a people subjected to genocide (even though that word didn’t even exist yet). Briusov took on direction of the project only after he gave himself a crash course in basic Armenian and read several books about the history of Armenian literature.

The anthology was the first in a series of translated compendiums of ethnic minority literatures of the Russian Empire, for whom the catastrophes of the First World War were particularly hard. These anthologies were of major philanthropic significance and were edited by Briusov, Maxim Gorky, and several other Russian writers. They included An Anthology of Armenian Literature (Sbornik armianskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1916, edited by Gorky); An Anthology of Latvian Literature (Sbornik latyshskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1916, edited by Briusov and Gorky); and An Anthology of Finnish Literature (Sbornik finliandskoi literatury, Petrograd: Parus, 1917, edited by Briusov and Gorky). Adjoining them is an anthology of translations from then-contemporary Hebrew poetry, The Jewish Anthology, published in 1918 by the Moscow publishing house Safrut, and edited by Khodasevich and Leib Yaffe.

In the Soviet context, beginning in the mid-1930s when Stalin veered into isolationism and “Russocentrism” (David Brandenberger’s term), universalism became a stealth-oppositional attitude. It expressed­—to use Osip Mandelstam’s coinage—a longing for the world culture beyond the “iron curtain,” and was a way of resisting the notion of Russian culture as something absolute, self-important, and completely adapted to Soviet conditions. There was a reason why in late Stalinism any attempts to study the influence of Western literary traditions on Russian literature were subject to persecution. Research of this sort was stigmatized as “cosmopolitanism” and “kowtowing to the West.”

In the late Soviet period, there was an official universalism in which the rhetoric of “love” à la Tyutchev or Dostoyevsky was invoked only rarely, but which reproduced a construction typical of their texts: “the primacy of the one who loves.” The Russian people were to be understood as an “elder brother” implicitly united with the Soviet state (“The unbreakable Union of free republics / was bound all together by Great Rus,” as the first line of the Soviet national anthem declared).^[3] This Soviet official universalism appears to be exactly what the officer whom Kundera encountered was relaying: “we” love “you,” the Czech people, and this is exactly why we saved you from the Prague Spring, from the “pernicious” desire to live as you wish. And this paternalistic, protective, colonialist universalism, ramped up into a sort of cargo cult (“we will repeat what was said then—and it will be as it was then”) is replicated by Margarita Simonyan in one of her tweets (13 July 2023), in which she writes:

“What did you not like about living with us? What was so bad about it? Most of you have us to thank for statehood, you got culture thanks to us. Who was oppressing you? Who messed with you?”

This Soviet version of universalism is exactly what today’s stylistics of “re-enactment” has been replicating, and it is one of the intellectual resources driving Russia’s war against Ukraine. The people who have written and write in this tradition can certainly be held responsible for what is happening today. But there are other forms of universalism that have been preserved and survive in Russian culture. Understanding universalism as a complex, evolving discursive system containing many variations makes it possible to look at Russian culture not as a single, unified, and timeless whole invested with a unified, singular culpability, but as a space open to polemics in which different ideas grapple with each other.   

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Let me move on from the discussion of the varieties of universalism to more general thoughts on the methodology of the contemporary humanities and social sciences. They might seem trivial to my colleagues in history, but over the last year and a half these basic tenets of the profession have seemingly been overshadowed, and it would behoove us to recall them.

A historian is not required to forgive or rehabilitate the figures they write about, but it is important to understand these figures within the context of their own time—what they could or could not think about, what concepts they used, what kind of knowledge or resources were available to their characters, or to whose questions they were responding. This paradigm of historical knowledge was established by the French historians of the Annales school and further developed by the intellectual historians of the Cambridge school—e.g., John Pocock and Quentin Skinner.

Proponents of historicism are sometimes accused of enabling relativism: general rules do not exist; each era has its own norms. Still, the example of late-Soviet humanities scholars—of figures such as Sergei Averintsev, Aron Gurevich, and Mikhail Gasparov—shows that they did not think of historicism as a branch of relativism but as a tool for understanding people from different eras and cultures, and this work of understanding (especially for Gasparov) enabled them to grasp the limitations of the cultural conventions of their own time. They developed their concepts of historicizing interpretation as a tool for understanding over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, and this approach was one of the most significant advances in the late-Soviet humanities and social sciences in terms of both its scholarly and existential utility.

This interpretative sequence—understanding the other so as to better understand one’s own situation and, by reflecting on one’s own situation, gaining an even more accurate understanding of the other—was laid out by proponents of the philosophical school of hermeneutics. Yet neither the hermeneutic philosophers (Paul Ricœur and Hans-Georg Gadamеr) nor the unofficial Soviet humanities scholars directly inquired into the consciousness of an interpreter belonging to a repressed or silenced societal group (even though unofficial humanities scholars in the USSR certainly belonged to such a group), or to one identifying their own sense of self with those in an unprivileged position. (Yuri Lotman’s persistent discussion of the history of the Russian intelligentsia as a stigmatized and marginal group shows that he understood the position from which he was speaking quite well.) In hermeneutics, the interpreter of the world appears as a kind of “default subject” (implicitly, a white European man), so it may seem as if hermeneutics were at odds with critical theory and its closely affiliated approaches—feminism, postcolonial and decolonial theory, queer studies. But the current intellectual state of affairs shows that these approaches can be synthesized.

Critical theory teaches researchers to ask themselves questions—and not just about their own privilege (“check your privilege”), but also about the conceptual tools they are using. For example, I myself should consider whether my mind retains the traces, the discursive debris, of the expansionist universalism which I discussed earlier.

Today, when we talk about history as the result of human efforts with specific social, discursive, and conceptual parameters, feminist, queer, postcolonial and decolonial theory all help to focus our gaze more sharply. But these methods could also benefit from the acuity afforded by historicism, because the human conflicts and interactions they study have differed in different eras and took on a particular shape in each specific instance. Now, let’s turn to why this kind of synthesis is necessary.

In 2011, Stanislav Lvovsky wrote that, sooner or later, Russian culture would have to be reconstituted on new foundations. It is now obvious that he was right. When undertaking this project, it will be important to take stock of the resources available to сultural professionals in their fight against the tendencies that Russia’s leaders have let proliferate and become dominant—no matter how many states emerge out of the ruins of today’s regime at the end of the current political cycle. I think that if we examine the different versions of Russian universalism historically, using the methods developed by the Annales school, we will find that, alongside the passive-aggressive tradition observed by Kundera, Russian culture also has resources for resisting the state’s rhetoric of “paternalistic love.” These resources are primarily found in works of unofficial literature and unofficial scholarship.    

I dearly hope that Ukraine wins this war, but a mere military victory would not be enough for me. At the end of the Second World War, scholars in different countries set to  thinking up ways to undermine the intellectual foundations that gave rise to Nazism. (Many years after the war, Michel Foucault’s foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus called the book “an introduction to non-fascist life.”) Today, people in many different countries also have reason to think about how they can subvert the intellectual foundations which are producing an aggressive right-wing populism that stigmatizes minorities. When right-wing populism is implemented by former security-service officers gripped by ressentiment, you get the nightmare that is playing out in Russia today.

I think that the future of humanity lies not in national but post-national states—societies organized as federations of different minorities. The methodology of the contemporary humanities and social sciences can function both as a common language that different minority groups can use for collective action, and as a crucial tool for understanding the other, and others.

Source: Ilya Kukulin, “Dostoyevsky, Kundera, and the culpability of Russian culture,” Colta.ru, 11 September 2023. Translated by Ainsley Morse and Maria Vassileva. I am grateful to them for their fine translation, and to Mr. Kukulin for his permission to publish it here. ||| TRR

^[1] The excerpts from Klimeniouk’s article quoted here were first translated from the original German into Russian by the author himself, and then rendered in English by the translators.

^[2] See, for instance, the uncensored version of Stanislav Kunyaev’s poem “Okinu vzgliadom Severo-Vostok,” [“I will cast a gaze at the North-East”], which was first published in 1986: “Let the Mansy salute Yermak, / And it is meet for the Uzbek to praise Skobelev, / for the fact that we now have gas and timber and cotton, / and have room for lots of missiles.”

^[3] Text by Sergei Mikhalkov and Gabriel El-Registan.