Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The great drama of Russian history has been between its state and society. Put simply, Russia has always had too much state and not enough society.
The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
The Russian revolution is one of history's car wrecks. We do know the ending, but we continue to watch. It expresses aspects of human nature we find unacceptable.
A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.
Russians clearly perceive America's global influence as being in irreversible decline and American society shattered by major political, economic and ideological crises.
We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Tragedy is a literary concept.