Louis sits down in his seat and looks around: the Paris subway car is almost empty. Three people are getting ready to go out, a couple is hanging out on social networks, a guy in the corner is filming Stories, and an elderly French woman is looking at one point aloofly. Louis has been waiting for this moment all day and enthusiastically takes «Crime and Punishment» out of his pocket – it's time for great prose.
Hundreds of thousands of people discover Russia through literature, plunging into this special world. But why are Russians interesting, what can they teach and what can they open your eyes to?
Russian word
Russian literature is a time-tested brand: the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Gogol have long been registered in Western charts and ratings of the best fruits of human thought. Classics can be easily found in dozens of languages, they are remembered, loved and studied in the best educational institutions for a long time.
Moreover, their books have become part of the modern reality of foreigners: it is not for nothing that Jacqueline Kennedy, the wife of the 35th President of the United States, was a great admirer of Chekhov's work, the Hollywood actor Orlando Bloom walked the streets with a volume of Dostoevsky, and George Clooney read Tolstoy. And there are many such examples.
But Russian literature is not only the classics of the golden age and not even the bright stars of the silver age like Bulgakov or Pasternak. Contemporary authors also attract the attention of audiences from all over the world. Fiction by Sergei Lukyanenko has been translated into 15 languages and published in almost 40 countries of the world, and there are also Pelevin, Stepanova and many others.
Interest in Russian books can be traced in all forms: rare editions are sold at the most prestigious world auctions, and film adaptations attract hundreds of thousands of viewers. And this interest is global: Russian authors are read in China and Cuba, analyzed in the USA and Great Britain, bought in Uzbekistan and discovered in Brazil. In Japan, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Dmitry Bakin, Alexandra Litvina are in special demand, in Korea – Alexei Varlamov, Evgeny Vodolazkin and Olga Gromova.
The Russian literature is known and loved in China: it is not for nothing that the so-called father of the new Chinese journalism, Lu Xun, read and translated the works of Lermontov and Chekhov. And since 2013, 40 works of the latest Russian literature have already been translated into Chinese: the Chinese are interested in the books of Andrey Bitov, Olga Slavnikova, Vladimir Sharov.
What is so special about Russian classics?
Why is Russian literature so appealing to people who have never even been to Russia?
As Professor Richard Tempest of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) notes, Russian writers act as goodwill ambassadors of Russia to America. After all, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and other writers created heroes that can be found almost anywhere in the world.
“The classic example of this is the novel Anna Karenina,” says Professor Tempest. “The suffering of children in a dysfunctional marriage, the varying degrees of closeness of mother and father to children - all of this is familiar to readers in both Russia and the United States. Karenina's fate is repeated in different cultures at different times. The same problems in the relationship between a woman and a man from 19th-century aristocratic Russia are still relevant in America today.”
“The Brothers Karamazov left me speechless and in awe of the man who wrote such a profound and beautiful work about such burning and poignant matters," states one review on British Amazon.
This is not surprising. After all, foreigners have traditionally described Russian literature as an eye-opener, revealing new facets of emotion and sensory perception, contrasting this with the cold calculation of European culture.
In the Asian region, books by Russian authors are loved even more. For example, in China many Russian classics are included in the school curriculum, therefore local readers are familiar with the works of our compatriots from childhood. This, on the one hand, introduces them to the cultural heritage of Russia and, on the other hand, prepares them for the modern prose.
Books by the classics strike a chord with the Japanese soul as well:
“Russian literature was a great discovery for me. I was fascinated by it, literally reading (in Japanese translation, of course) the Russian classics: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev. That's where it all started. I was particularly attracted to Dostoevsky, whose works had a kind of power force which I didn't feel when I read Japanese literature,” notes Mitsuyoshi Numano, a literary critic.
Opening a Russian book, the reader is assured that what awaits him is not a list of facts and actions, but a holistic, completely different picture of the world, to touch which means to know another facet of reality. There was, is and will be a demand for it. But what is behind this global demand?
Changing conjuncture and timeless meanings
The growth of interest in Russian culture and literature may be stimulated by a variety of factors. For example, during the FIFA World Cup 2018 held in Russia, translations of works by Bulgakov, Pushkin, Tolstoy and other Russian wordsmiths were especially popular among tourists. The same phenomenon can be seen with the release of a film dedicated to Russia, a TV series, a comic book or any other work. Anyone who wants to delve into the Russian soul will inevitably find themselves with a book in their hands.
But the opposite is also true: the external conjuncture is just as capable of, if not "killing" interest in culture, then significantly complicating its situation. By the way, recent appeals to "cancel" Russian culture and its classics have already been noted in many Western countries. Yes, attempts to remove Tchaikovsky from the repertoire of philharmonics or to shelve works of Gorky can hardly be called successful, but the fact speaks for itself.
It is fair to note that such efforts were not welcomed either in the United States or in Europe. Furthermore, as Louise Amtsberg, the German government commissioner for human rights, stated, it would be wrong to boycott Russian art and culture and remove them from shop shelves. This conclusion implies cooperation with the world today and tomorrow.
It is not just words, but a widespread global practice. The best illustration of the effectiveness of books as a tool of diplomacy is the promotion of English, for example, with Harry Potter books. The works of British author Joanne Rowling have been sold over 500 million copies worldwide, and even without a translation, they have been sold well all over the world.
Here you can see the benefits in two ways. Firstly, pupils and students learning a language tend to read the books in their original language – it works equally in China and Germany. Secondly, the literature already translated serves as the foundation for cultural expansion to other populations, including adults who read books aloud to their children, introducing them to a world, albeit fictional, that is Western in spirit.
Such works, distributed widely, promote the image of a country and its culture by interacting directly with public, which is more effective than traditional diplomacy or official statements. This tool is universal: Japan is judged by the works of Murakami, China by the books of Mo Yan or Liu Cixin, Norway by the works of Erlend Lu, which fill readers with new meanings and understanding of reality.
Russia is no exception. Whether by the classics or by contemporary authors who sometimes even flout the foundations of literature, they all have one thing in common: justice, a sense of duty, and overcoming adversity are universal concepts that resonate in the heart of everyone. Whether reading a book in a restaurant in Europe, on a school bench in Africa, or even in outer space.
Contemporary Russian literature, appealing to universal values and ideals understood anywhere in the world, acts as a guide for the Russian word and thought. Further popularizing it through mass, children's literature and stories about people living here and now, like the heroes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky at the time of their work, will be an essential help in this.
And then the reader, who sees the reflection of his own soul in the book, understands that hardly anyone can more eloquently and more accessible reveal the globality of thought. Every foreigner who has ever opened a work of a representative of Russian culture understands the answer to eternal questions (what is happiness, the conflict of fathers and children, good and evil, and many others). After all, Russian literature combines all the central meanings and ideas that have ever been expressed on the territory of Eurasia.