Essay: Constance Garnett s love of Russian literature and radical politics nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Russia, that half-barbarous country, whose leaders, be they czars or commissars, Rasputins or Putins, have always treated their own people as if they were a conquered nation, this same Russia, in the course of little more than a century brought forth the greatest body of literature the world has ever known. That is a large but, I believe, not risky generalization. Think only of the dazzling cavalcade of Russian writers: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Chekhov, and then, later, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vasily Grossman, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
This is the 50th anniversary of "The Gulag Archipelago," which documented Communist atrocities. Its author, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said that ideology is what allows people to do evil while considering it to be good. This echoes Biblical teachings. But Christianity too can be distorted into an ideology.