The Western View of The Russian Soul
The Russian soul can be best understood in the West through western characterizations for the authors who were thought best to epitomize these characteristics:
- Ivan Turgenev — Melchior de Vogüé who popularized Russian culture in Europe in the late 19th century, attributed to the poet Turgenev "the dominant qualities of every true Russian, natural kindness of heart, simplicity and resignation. With a remarkably powerful brain, he had the heart of a child."
- Leo Tolstoy — de Vogüé found about him that "the skill of an English chemist with the soul of a Hindu Buddhist."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Martin Malia says of Dostoyevsky that "Dostoevsky's power of insight into the lower depths and the higher yearnings of the human soul was particularly Russian, born at once with the Russian people's intimate acquaintance with suffering and their unusual vitality of character."
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Famous quotes containing the words western, view, russian and/or soul:
“It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, that, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)