Does Russian culture as a universal value (still) unite the world?

The onset of the new “cold war” and its escalation following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen a rending asunder of cultural and even collegial ties between Russia and the West. However, a counter-trend can also be observed on the Russian-Western cultural scene in the wake of this terrible division: a determination to “rescue” Russian culture and extract it from the pernicious politization to which the current Russian regime is subjecting it.

We can take as an example the commemoration, in 2021, of the 200 the anniversary of the birth of one of Russia’s major writers, F. M. Dostoevsky. Numerous countries around the world have observed Dostoevsky’s birthday with conferences and special issues of journals run by national Dostoevsky societies. But let us take just four: 1. MOD (RF); 2. IDS (USA); 3. ADS (AUS) and 4. Hece Journal, Turkey. What do they have in common? What approaches to Dostoevsky are privileged and can be characterised as “Eastern” (Russian) or “Western”? When we examine the special issues of 1, 2, 3, 4, we find that there is a lot of common ground in approaches to FMD.

Personal ties have also been kept alive, even if it meant being ‘disloyal’ to the official line in one’s country. A new phenomenon is the rift between the Russians “abroad” and the Russians who stayed. Some examples will be discussed.

Finally, what emerges as the cultural “mission” of Western scholars of Russian literature? To re-read the Russian canon through a new lens. One cannot blithely go back to topics such as “Dostoevsky’s Orthodoxy” or “the Russian Christ” without taking into account the entire context of Russian history in which these topics were and are posited. The “mission” is therefore to “recover” the lost memory of older Russian literary studies and to re-read Russian canonical texts in the present historical context which has many similarities with the repressive circumstances in which the early Russian critics (the Formalists and Structuralists) and subsequent generations of Soviet scholars had to work.