To know Russia, know its classic novels

On what Russian literature means:

Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy don't require any particular training to understand.

In fact, if you asked any great writer or poet whether they wanted to be taught via lecture classes, assignments, and secondary literature, they would say 'No, just read me again, don't read about me.'

Especially in Russia, the great artist of the 19th century was supposed to directly contact the reader. I want to help people maximize their own personal experience, so that you ask the types of questions that the texts want you to ask of your own life.

You have to design an attitude in literature, the way you design a building in architecture or develop an ear in music training. Literature is a fine art, and the real learning has to be dialogic, between student and student, or student and teacher.

On the relationship between Russia's literature and its history:

It strikes me that the real wisdom of cultures has to be in literature - especially [in] Russia. The country simply doesn't have a literature outside her history, and the literature is a great deal more than entertainment.

The Russians are a very philosophical people. This has been deeply ingrained in them, which is one of the reasons the Communists were able to tap such genuine enthusiasm.

Whether they were always that way and thus produced Dostoyevsky, or they read Dostoyevsky and became that way, it's hard to know. Great writers [whose works] become classics in their own culture are both a product of and a contribution to those stereotypes.

The Russians really believe in reading their literature and taking their identity from it. So while it would be hard to find an "American" text that we could all agree was "American," it's not hard to find a Russian text. Start with Pushkin and end with Dostoyevsky and you can combine them and form an identity.

On the influence of the West in Russian culture today:

I think a lot of people assume that if you're studying a culture, you're interested in what's happening right now.

In fact, I'm not especially interested. Any time you have an intact culture, one with a strong self-image - even a culture that has been tormented in a lot of ways - and you open it up indiscriminately to all sorts of pressures, it takes some time to discover itself.

As Solzhenitsyn said in 1991, when the Iron Curtain began to rise, all the slop from the West flowed in first. This is the problem with the free world: The things it most easily exports are its least valuable aspects - junk food, junk pulp literature, junk values.

There are excellent values in the West, like liberal democracy, but those are the product of a thousand years of integral development on the soil of Western countries. They don't import. The whole problem with liberalism is that it doesn't happen quickly. Well, McDonald's and pornography happen quickly.

It's sad to see an ancient culture bombarded. But I also don't think it will last for long, and there won't be anything like a total westernization.

The Russian people are going to want something that's more their own.

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