How Gogol* Explains the Post-Soviet World (*And Chekhov and Dostoyevsky) - By Thomas de Waal | Foreign Policy: So here is a not entirely frivolous suggestion: How about skipping the political science textbooks when it comes to trying to understand the former Soviet Union and instead opening up the pages of Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky?
This is not just a thought experiment; the works these authors wrote in the 19th and early 20th centuries turn out to be surprisingly applicable to today's politics in a broad swath of the former Soviet space, whether it's the unexpected fragility of Putin's authoritarian rule in Russia or the perpetually failed efforts to modernize next-door Ukraine. There's a reason: Most of the former Soviet countries emerged from two centuries of Russian-dominated autocracy, an autocracy that just happened to have produced some of the greatest literature the world has ever seen. Some have argued that the one helped produce the other, that the rigors of tsarist-era censorship, the aridity of public service, and the educated classes' hunger for intellectual nourishment all helped stimulate great writing. Pushkin and Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky were more than just cultural commentators -- they were public celebrities and the key moral and intellectual voices of their age. They were idolized because they described the predicament readers found themselves in -- and still do.