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I think it’s important to understand that russian culture has failed. If it can’t guide a nation towards humanistic values, what is a culture’s point?

• Ma8ee 4y ago
  To survive? I don’t think cultures have points. They survive or die, and it’s a bit strange to use a specific cultural value as a measure of success of all other cultures.
  • _glsb 4y ago
    The point of spammers or ransom ware authors is to survive as well. Doesn’t mean they are valuable. If you say that russian culture is valuable, you must set the context why. It doesn’t communicate anything particularly original. It’s not especially beautiful (arguably). It didn’t stop and some might argue even enabled the carriers of that culture to either tolerate a genocidal regime or actively support it. What’s the point of it then? What’s the point of the moral dilemma in “Crime and punishment” for example, if their choice is always “let’s kill another old lady because we can”?
    • Ma8ee 4y ago
      You can certainly say that you don’t think Russian culture is valuable, or that you just don’t plain like it, and that is certainly understandable given the current circumstances. But that is something very different from saying that it has failed. And you have clearly not read and understood Dostoyevsky if that is what you got out of Crime and Punishment. Maybe you shouldn’t be that fast to condemn a whole culture if your understanding of it is on the level your last paragraph reveals.
      • jevgeni 4y ago
        Of course I can say it failed given the context. The usual way of framing it and especially russian classical literature in russian schools, like in my case, was that it is the moral guiding light of the nation. As such it has clearly failed. Also, I'm confused by the notion that I have the obligation to you to interpret a work of art just like you to have an opinion on it.