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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“Who are we? And for what are we going to fight? Are we the titled slaves of George the Third? The military conscripts of Napoleon the Great? Or the frozen peasants of the Russian Czar? No—we are the free born sons of America; the citizens of the only republic now existing in the world; and the only people on earth who possess rights, liberties, and property which they dare call their own.”
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“The doctrine of the immortality of the soul has more threat than comfort.”
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