How the Great Truth Dawned

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.

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.

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.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex...

> 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.

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

[1] https://books.google.fr/books/about/Marxism_and_Human_Nature...