From The Wall Street Journal:
Vladimir Putin is reputed to love Russian literature. So did Joseph Stalin, who read voraciously and even gave “advice” to authors after reading their manuscripts carefully. For that matter, Czar Nicholas I made himself Alexander Pushkin’s personal censor, a dubious honor the poet would rather have forgone. Even Lenin was influenced as much by Nicholas Chernyshevsky’s utopian novel “What Is to Be Done?” as by Karl Marx.
Why would Russian leaders take such an interest in literature? Even if Mr. Putin only pretends to be guided by great writers, why should he feel the need for such pretense? American presidents don’t claim to get their ideas from “Moby-Dick” or “The Scarlet Letter.”
The answer is that in Russia literature has greater prestige than anywhere else. It is important for leaders to situate themselves in their country’s cultural tradition, and in Russia that means literature.
Not all Russian literature conveys the same message. While some works express the most profound truths about human existence, others voice various forms of opprobrium and hatred. Some Russian thinkers adhere to a kind of nationalism Americans rarely understand. Whereas Americans presume that the state exists for the benefit of its citizens—what else could it be for?—nationalist Russians often presume the reverse: People come and go, but the state endures. That is why Russians are ready, sometimes eager, to die for it.
The profound contempt for anything “bourgeois” among many Russian writers—Alexander Herzen, for example—reflects a distaste for any view of life that does not transcend individual contentment. For Nikolai Gogol and other 19th-century writers, the bourgeois outlook was fit only for Germans. More recently, it is attributed to Europeans and Americans, who allegedly care for little but economic prosperity. To someone like Mr. Putin, this understanding of life characterizes people too weak to defend themselves. A famous paraphrase of Lenin reads: “When we are ready to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope.”
In the Soviet period, “class” replaced “nation.” The Communist Party represented the most progressive class in history, the working class, and the Soviet mission was to ensure its final triumph and the destruction of its enemies everywhere. Much Soviet literature celebrates violence against class enemies. When one of Mikhail Sholokhov’s characters can’t bring himself to take food from starving Ukrainian peasant children, the novel’s model hero expresses rage: “You’re sorry for them. . . . You feel pity for them? And have they had any pity on us?” Another echoes this sentiment: “You could line up thousands of old men, women and children, and tell me they’ve got to be crushed . . . for the sake of the revolution, and I’d shoot them all down with a machine-gun.” The world divides neatly into “us” and “them.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Should be a free link, but PG apologizes if it goes stale)