Comments on Gibian's "Terror in Russian Culture and Literary Imagination"

Abstract

Both the erudition and the sheer scale of Mr. Gibian's paper make it absorbing reading and stimulating food for thought. What he has done is to suggest that the Russian cultural tradition bears primary responsibility for the fact that modern Russian history is so permeated with terror and violence by both rulers and ruled. The literary representations of terror by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn and others not only reflect accurately the historical reality of this violence, but they go a long way towards explaining it. Professor Gibian argues, especially, that the more recent religious roots of Russian culture produce in the people a drive for self-sacrifice and martyrdom that is translated into incomparable brutality. Thus Professor Gibian concludes that Solzhenitsyn's idea of a return to early Muscovite Orthodox Christianity offers the best hope for a Russian society free from terror. These brief comments will attempt to work backwards from Professor Gibian's conclusion to his thesis, less to refute the argument than to question a few of its suppositions, to be sure from the perspective of my own work on nineteenth-century Russian terrorism. Is a return to Muscovite Orthodox Christianity the solution to the problem of violence in Russian culture? History suggests not. Indeed, there is very little in the pre-Petrine Russian past to nurture dreams of a peaceful postSoviet future. Violence and terror did not begin in Russia in the seventeenth century. The reign of Ivan the Terrible, for example, was one of the most violent epochs in all of Russian history. If in any eras torture and cruelty can be said to have been the law of the land, certainly the Muscovite period whose cultural and spiritual life Solzhenitsyn so admiresmust be counted among them. In fact Berdiaev argues that it is the asceticism of the early Orthodox Church that explains the later excesses of the Russian terrorists. Let us now turn to the main contribution of Professor Gibian's paper, the literary representations of terror. For purposes of convenience, we can