Russian Genius for Suffering, Part II

Much of what I have to say in this post is derived from Rosenstock-Huessy, in his magisterial Out of Revolution, a History of Western Man. However, it can be substantiated quite easily by reading a history of the last two centuries of Russian Literature. Believe it or not, the genius of literature was not snuffed out under Bolshevism, but survived in spite of itself, even in devoted Communists. Pasternak and Mayakovsky (Stalin's favorite poet, whom Lenin admitted he didn't understand) make this quite clear. In Soviet Russia, and before, literature somehow managed to be both tenditious (as Dostoevksy hated and eschewed) and yet also aesthetically pleasing. In a word, literature in Russia is revolutionary. For France, it was rhetoric and pamphlets and theatre that had incendiary purposes (one thinks immediately of Beaumarchis' the Wedding of Figaro). In Russia, literature was where the malcontents named Judas and Ishmael and Azael found their redemption in an inspired struggle against, not an ancien regime, but the very concept of regime itself. The early Russian literature was anarchistic, inspired, and deeply Christian (although both they and Christians would deny it).
Dostoevsky was too spiritually oriented to delve into politics, but his novels had political implications, or rather, possibilities, which the radical revolutionaries were quicker to exploit than the Social Revolutionaries, Kerensky's Democrats, or the Czarist reactionaries. I can do no more, at points, than quote Rosenstock-Huessy:
Tolstoy (the wizard of Yasnaya Polyana) and Dostoevsky together composed a new creed...one gave to is his doctrine of the weak and trembling individual, the other enriched it by his faith in the majesty of the people, which reacts like the ocean, the cornfield, the forest, because it is patient, passive, obedient...the men (he) describes have nothing to do with the hilarious and creative geniuses of the West (Don Quixote)...they are as dirty and weak and horrible as humanity itself...but they are highly explosive...in this inner vision...the prodigal son is the central figure (man between 14 and 30)...our demons are faced without the fury of the moralist or the indifference of the anatomist, but with a glowing passion of solidarity in our short-comings...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_literature
Which, by the way, is why Reformed Christians love Dostoevsky so much. Sin is presented as potentially redemptive. The underbelly of the underbelly is the tapestry of deathless Light.
There is no convention, no concealment here in this literature, and yet there is still hope. That is the point of Varlaam Shalamov's horrible vignettes of the death camps, Solzenitsyn's entire corpus of work, and Pasternak's saga of Revolution. And it is no less true of Sholokhov's stories about the Don and the Cossacks. Humanity, said William Faulkner in his acceptance speech, shall not only endure, but prevail. That is the true creed of Russian (and Southern literature), and also of men like Herman Melville, who, along with O'Connor, may be the closest thing America has produced to literature of this grandeur and calibre.
Even the "official" Communist literature could not escape the nachtenshein of this Light. They, like their giant predecessors, know that denying God does not cut one off from His grace, His uncreated energies. In fact, the biggest deniers of all may be those closest to the kingdom, certainly more than the small affirmers.
It is worthwhile noting that Derrida and Stanley Fish would have had a hard time "deconstructing" Dostoevsky. That would be like "updating" or "modernizing" Don Quixote. It not only simply isn't done, but can't be. The two geniuses have already explored that possibility in their own works. Dostoevsky deconstructs himself. Cervantes modernizes his own history as a knightly hero of Lepanto. Good luck, haters of all that is good and beautiful and true. You will need it.