Making a Case for Cancelling All of Russian Literature
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine a year ago there
have been vocal and persistent outcries—not only among Ukrainians, who, somehow
have the right to voice extremist views, but all over the world—to cancel
utterly and all-comprehensively the entirety of Russian literature. The
argument is that any work of literature by a Russian writer, even what may
appear totally innocent, is somehow intrinsically tied to the promotion of
Russian imperialism. In a recent article in The New Yorker (“Novels of
Empire,” January 30, 2023) the writer Elif Batuman, an erstwhile lover of
Russian literature, faces up to the problem and discovers Russian lit wanting.
As if in proof of the old adage, “You can always find what
you’re looking for, if you look hard enough,” Batuman combs through certain
Russian works with a fine comb and discovers what she is looking for. In Crime
and Punishment Raskolnikov’s motivations for the crime he commits—the
murder of an old pawnbroker—are the central issue of the whole novel. Raskolnikov
does not know why he committed the crime, running perpetually various
possibilities through his deranged mind. This led one of my students once to
call the novel not a Whodunnit, but a Whydunnit. Batuman centers in on only one
motivation, the issue of the Napoleon complex, and, pushing this to extremes,
decides somehow that Raskolnikov committed murder by way of promoting Russian
imperialism: “The logic of Raskolnikov’s crime, I realized, was the logic of
imperialism.” Okay.
As if that were not enough of a stretch, she addresses
Nikolai Gogol’s immortal piece of farce, his story “The Nose,” in which a nose
escapes from the face of a rather frivolous man and goes off to lead its own
private life, while its owner pleads for it to return. Scholars have sought out
the “meaning” of this story for eons of ages and found, exactly, none. The
story is a marvelous joke, open to any number of preposterous interpretations. Given
Gogol’s struggles with his own sexuality and his fear of women, a favorite has
been the Freudian approach. The story, ostensibly, is about a castration
complex, and the nose is a stand-in for the penis. Based on zero evidence in
the text, Batuman suggests something similar. This story, she opines, features
the absconding of the Little Russian (Ukrainian) nose from the Great Russian
face. Once again, the ending suggests that “the interests of the empire
prevail.” The runaway nose (Ukraine) is apprehended and forced back where it
belongs: on the phizog of the Great Russian empire. One more work about Russian
imperialism!
What???
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