Terror in Russian Culture and Literary Imagination

Abstract

From the seventeenth through the twentieth century, torture, cruelty, and violence have prospered in the Russian state. has been applied both by the authorities and their opponents and has become a naturalized, domesticated fact of Russian life. In the twentieth century, terrorism has grown into one of the major functions of the state, beginning with the Red Terror in 1918 and continuing under Stalin. It has manifested itself in the imprisonment in labor camps of entire classes and nationalities of people and has taken the form of arrests, executions, mass deportations, creations of artificial famines and, ultimately, of random, arbitrary violence. It would not be an exaggeration to state that since 1918 tens of millions of people have died as a direct result of terrorism by the Russian state. The subject of terror in Russian literature can be approached in many ways. I shall leave out of the account some important aspects of the theme1 in order to concentrate, first, on Russian culture's traditional reactions to terror, and, second, on salient literary depictions of terror in the last three hundred years. I conclude by noting that the insights to be gleaned from this cultural/literary tradition may be useful in resolving the problem of terror in Russia. To say this does not mean that one is anti-Russian. Russian culture has supplied us with treasures of literature and music and many other positive contributions to our understanding of man. Our topic is terror, however, not poetry or warmth of human contact, and we must face the facts as we see them.