1755 and all that

The lady, Mother Russia that is, doth protest too much. Like Mohammed Ali in his prime, she keeps screaming “I’m the greatest!”

Actually, if you want to be pedantic about this, it’s not Russia that screams. It’s everyone who presumes to speak for her: politicians, writers, journalists – just about every Russian with access to public media.

Some of them, Putin and his merry men, see violent imperial expansion as a factor of greatness. Others, known as ‘liberals’, don’t mind imperial expansion but wince at too much violence.

Since the first group of Russians is busily imprisoning, murdering and banishing the second, most commentators highlight the differences between them. The more significant similarities are overlooked.

The two groups converge in their loudmouthed insistence that Russia’s great culture, especially literature, makes her people spiritually superior even to Western Europe, never mind the country’s neighbours. Such smugness would be unbearable even if it were justified. But is it?

Russians tend not to ask that question. For them, the presumption of cultural greatness is axiomatic.

If anyone disagrees, they start wielding names as single-word counterpunches: Pushkin! Tolstoy! Dostoyevsky! If the doubting Thomas still isn’t convinced, the litany of names will continue. Gogol! Lermontov!

Please stop bragging, chaps, I get it. Russia has indeed produced a great literature. But I can refute her claim to cultural greatness with a single numeral: 1755.

That was the year when Russia got her first University, 767 years after Christianity arrived at her shores. More to the point, Poland got her first university in 1364, Lithuania in 1579, Estonia in 1632 – and these are the neighbours Russians look down on. I could strike out farther afield and mention Italy, France and England where universities began to spread in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, but there is no need.

Tarde venientibus ossa, the Romans used to say. Nothing but bones for the latecomers, and that applies to cultures as well.

Until the mid-18^th century (and for a long time thereafter) Russia satisfied her need for educated people by sending a few aristocratic youngsters to European universities, while importing swarms of European scientists, academics, administrators, engineers, generals, historians and so forth.

Russia was largely run by foreigners, mostly Germans variably Russified, until the 20^th century, and it was German immigrants who wrote the first history books in the country. Thus Russian culture couldn’t help being derivative and provincial, adding its own indigenous touches to foreign implants as it went along.

French became the dominant language of cultured discourse, a tendency often satirised in Russian literature, from Griboyedov to Tolstoy and Chekhov. Even in the 19^th century French-speaking aristocrats like Karamzin were still creating Russian words by translating (not simply borrowing) French ones.

(But for that court historian and poet, Russian wouldn’t have words for impression, charity, free thought, responsibility, industry, touching, amusing, concentrate, aesthetic, epoch, harmony, catastrophe and many others.)

For all their efforts, the Russian vocabulary remains small to this day, a third the size of English, for example. But it’s true that Russian is big enough to have accommodated an impressive number of great writers.

But a dozen or so great writers do not make a great national culture. Especially in Russia, where literature has always had to assume functions that civilised countries delegate to other disciplines, such as philosophy, political science, history, economics and so on.

Practitioners of those disciplines have always been hamstrung by censorship, backed up by the punitive machine of the Russian state. For example, any critical analysis of Russian culture could have serious consequences for a thinker.

The first Russian philosopher Chaadayev (d. 1856) found that out the hard way when he published his essay Lettres philosophiques, written in French of course. As a result, he was officially declared insane and confined to home arrest – the first, but far from last case of penal psychiatry used as an extension of censorship in Russia.

Yet poets and novelists could get away with taking a few liberties, albeit within very narrow limits. Thus they had to assume a didactic role, teaching the population the essential ingredients of culture and civilisation.

Since at the time when great literature was produced most Russians were illiterate, the poets and novelists had to go through intermediaries by teaching the teachers, who’d then disseminate these lessons to those unable to receive them from the horse’s mouth.

So what did they teach? Take Pushkin, Russia’s national poet in the same sense in which Shakespeare is England’s, Goethe is Germany’s, Dante is Italy’s, and Racine is France’s. Though toying with the odd liberal idea here and there, underneath that veneer Pushkin was a dyed-in-the-wool Russian imperialist and supremacist.

When the Poles rose against their Russian masters in 1830-1831, Pushkin showed his true colours by publishing the poem To the Slanderers of Russia, in which he issued an open threat to Europe:

Ye’re bold of tongue — but hark, would ye in deed but try it
Or is the hero, now reclined in laurelled quiet,
Too weak to fix once more, Izmail’s red bayonet?
Or hath the Russian Tsar ever, in vain commanded?
Or must we meet all Europe banded?
Have we forgot to conquer yet?

Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and numerous lesser figures wrote about the innate moral and spiritual superiority of Russians to anyone else. They glorified Russia as a great empire, implicitly entitled to civilise her neighbours, by flogging them if need be.

That sort of thing has been not so much the omnipresent motif of Russian culture, but the dominant one. When expressed with the artistic mastery of Pushkin or Tolstoy, the theme enchanted readers – and inspired men of action.

When you describe your country as the greatest, that’s both a superlative and a comparative. ‘Greatest’ means greater than anyone else – in Russia’s case, specifically the West and any other place that’s not Russia.

When those countries are smaller and weaker, pouncing on them is depicted as a cultural mission, not merely naked aggression. This is especially pronounced in the way Russia treats her former dependencies trying to break free, such as Georgia and the Ukraine.

The great Russian culture is touted as a justification for invasion – in exactly the same way that Pushkin called for disciplining Poland and anyone else who dared support her. I’d suggest no culture that teaches such lessons can be great – regardless of the number of accomplished artists it has produced.

The ultimate role of culture is to elevate man to a perch as near God as possible, not to reduce him to a feral beast or, at best, a smug, provincial Johnny-come-lately.

A message to the Russians: stop thumping your chest and screaming how great your country is. If it really is, quiet self-confidence, backed up by good and noble actions, will communicate that message much better.

And do leave others to their own vices and devices. They may have a point, you know.