Lately, I wanted to back to the classics to give myself a bit of difference, and I am reading through highly regarded Russian classics like short stories of Leo Tolstoy and Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. They are exceptionally written stories. They allow me to think about struggles of characters and the historic context they are living through in an enjoyable way. However, as I read them, I can’t shake the feeling that they offer a very specific slice of human condition that appeals to the learend elite, and that is a part of the reason why they are so highly regarded.
For instance, the human experience of Rodion Raskolnikov, the main character of crime and punishment, is very specific to the learned elite. Though his character and struggles, much of it brought by himself, are not presented as something to be sympathetic toward to, but the learned elites would see the story of it valuable. They would see the flaws of their colleagues or even themselves through such story.
However, I think about the general public at the time and now, and how they would feel about this story. How would people going about their daily lives, trying to get by with what they have, reading a story about a mentally and physically capable person who squander every opportunity he has and obsess over high concepts. I think such story might not be just irritating to them, but irrelevant.
Even Leo Tolstoy’s later stories which present the idealistic view of working people, I wonder how much of an appeal it would have to the actual working people. When I read his stories I think about his attempt to forsake his title and wealth and become a farmer, and the actual farmers finding such attempt absurd.
I am not saying these stories are worthless. Even a battle hardened WW I veteran like J. D. Salinger wrote about inner struggles of a teen in Catcher in the Rye, and I found that book captivating. Nevertheless, I feel like these stories present a human condition relevant to a very specific demographic that matches nicely with the fans of literature leading to their high positions in the history of literature.
I am pretty sure there is name for such criticism, and wonder about people more articulate than I wrote about them.
by keytemp11
3 Comments
Tolstoy, as far as I understand, was aware of his own absurdity as well. I’m reminded of a recent article in the Journal of Ethics that calls into question phenomenological experience versus theoretical understanding. The argument of the author of the article boiled down to: poor people generally have all the phenomenological experience of being impoverished and being discriminated as a result. People, academics, scholars etc., have much of the knowledge of discrimination and poverty but that theirs is more useful because it can be put to better purposes. It was arguing against the centering of people who are actually poor because they may have lived experience of being poor but they can’t necessarily articulate it most of the time.
That’s not my argument, I don’t agree with it, let me clarify, but it is interesting. I wondered about the act of ‘redlining’ and housing and how this can displace people or force them to live in horrid locations because racism, discrimination etc. But how many poor people would be able to say, “hey I’ve noticed that I’m poor because xyz and I live in this community because xyz” and then go on to describe the history of thought behind why they have been put down and discriminated against.
My point is, maybe Tolstoy, being a former serf owner, was able to explain the shit and ways he fucked up his peasants or his family had ruined peasants lives or high class landowner friends of his ruined the lives of their peasants better than the peasants were themselves.
Highbrow/lowbrow. Part of what you’re running into with the Russian classics is going to be literacy in the 19th century. Sure, if the serfs could have read and had access to money and bookstores they might’ve had strong opinions on Dostoyevsky, but these books are definitely being written for the reading audience at the time.
There are certainly classics that attempt to represent the thoughts and experiences of working people or of the poor, sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much. There are writers who have an awareness that their own experiences limited and writers who don’t.
If you look at Dickens, for example, in the 19th century, he attempts to represent the experience of the poor and of the working poor in many of his books. Mary Gaskell also did this. But it’s probably not a coincidence that they were publishing much of what they wrote as serials, and there was a varied group of middling class/literate working class audience that was going to be paying to read those stories. It was very common, well into the 20th century in the US in sweatshops, for the women to pool their money and pay one woman to read aloud to them while they worked because the work was so boring.
Also you’ll find authors writing about the experiences of the poor or oppressed in order to teach middle- or upper-class people about them. In the US, for example, classics like Iola Leroy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin attempted to depict the lives of enslaved people in order to garner the sympathy and understanding of a northern reading audience, including a white audience.
> However, as I read them, I can’t shake the feeling that they offer a very specific slice of human condition that appeals to the learend elite
Another way to think about the term “human condition” is that the conflicts, themes, and arcs explored in these stories are exploring a slice of what it means to be human. It’s not meant to be an all-encompassing, universal term as if you’re looking at something in a laboratory. For example, I learned about a group of people in a non-Western culture who once looked at a play by Shakespeare and came away with a completely different reading from it than how Westerners might interpret it. Their interpretation was centered around their culture. Some parts were also confusing to them since they didn’t fit how someone might act in their culture. That’s why it’s important to read across cultures and genres.