Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones. The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station’s call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity. But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence.
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Inside the Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma

From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

The amplitude and pitch of the buzzing sometimes shifted, and the intervals between tones would fluctuate. Every hour, on the hour, the station would buzz twice, quickly. None of the upheavals that had enveloped Russia in the last decade of the cold war and the first two decades of the post-cold-war era—Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, the end of the Afghan war, the Soviet implosion, the end of price controls, Boris Yeltsin, the bombing of parliament, the first Chechen war, the oligarchs, the financial crisis, the second Chechen war, the rise of Putinism—had ever kept UVB-76, as the station’s call sign ran, from its inscrutable purpose. During that time, its broadcast came to transfix a small cadre of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who tuned in and documented nearly every signal it transmitted. Although the Buzzer (as they nicknamed it) had always been an unknown quantity, it was also a reassuring constant, droning on with a dark, metronome-like regularity.

But on June 5, 2010, the buzzing ceased. No announcements, no explanations. Only silence.

Cosmic forensics: signs of a Tunguska meteorite? “The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt was on fire… I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few metres… When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops.” This eyewitness account doesn’t describe the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The events occurred in 1908, long before the Manhattan Project. The account describes the Tunguska Event, an enigmatic explosion in central Siberia thought to be caused by a comet or meteoroid. It must have exploded before reaching the ground, unleashing the energy of a thousand Hiroshima bombs. The blast flattened over 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, though the trees at ground zero were left standing, stripped of their branches and charred. Bright night skies and strange sunsets were reported across central Asia and northern Europe for several days. Due to its extremely secluded location, it would be nearly two decades before an expedition examined the destruction. What they found was baffling—all the signs of a major impact, but no crater and not a single piece of an impactor. L.A. Kulick, the Russian mineralogist who led the first expedition, undertook massive efforts to dig for fragments, but his effort was never rewarded. Consequently, it was thought that the impactor, possibly an icy comet, had utterly vaporized in the explosion, leaving no trace. But the comet hypothesis has some issues. Researchers examining the peaty sediment have found slight anomalies of iridium and isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen suggestive of chondritic (stony) asteroids. Others have also found meteorite-like microparticles in the remains of trees there. Still, there’s no smoking gun. This week in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (or G3), a team of Italian researchers reports that they’ve found tantalizing evidence of what could be a stony chunk of meteorite beneath a small lake eight kilometers from the epicenter of the blast.
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Cosmic forensics: signs of a Tunguska meteorite?

“The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt was on fire… I wanted to tear off my shirt and throw it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few metres… When the sky opened up, hot wind raced between the houses, like from cannons, which left traces in the ground like pathways, and it damaged some crops.”

This eyewitness account doesn’t describe the detonation of a nuclear bomb. The events occurred in 1908, long before the Manhattan Project. The account describes the Tunguska Event, an enigmatic explosion in central Siberia thought to be caused by a comet or meteoroid. It must have exploded before reaching the ground, unleashing the energy of a thousand Hiroshima bombs.

The blast flattened over 2,000 square kilometers of Siberian forest, though the trees at ground zero were left standing, stripped of their branches and charred. Bright night skies and strange sunsets were reported across central Asia and northern Europe for several days. Due to its extremely secluded location, it would be nearly two decades before an expedition examined the destruction.

What they found was baffling—all the signs of a major impact, but no crater and not a single piece of an impactor. L.A. Kulick, the Russian mineralogist who led the first expedition, undertook massive efforts to dig for fragments, but his effort was never rewarded. Consequently, it was thought that the impactor, possibly an icy comet, had utterly vaporized in the explosion, leaving no trace.

But the comet hypothesis has some issues. Researchers examining the peaty sediment have found slight anomalies of iridium and isotopes of hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen suggestive of chondritic (stony) asteroids. Others have also found meteorite-like microparticles in the remains of trees there. Still, there’s no smoking gun.

This week in the journal Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (or G3), a team of Italian researchers reports that they’ve found tantalizing evidence of what could be a stony chunk of meteorite beneath a small lake eight kilometers from the epicenter of the blast.

In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the stately 1979 film. In an account that combines summary, memoir, meditation, tribute, and citation into a kind of deluxe version of the TV recap, Dyer sets out to convey the hypnotic effect Stalker has had on decades of viewers, and on himself. And yet, after reading the book, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version. It may at first seem improbable that a decades-old art film in which very little happens could be embellished with firefights and mutant psychics and converted into a violent action game. Adapted from a popular Russian science fiction novel, Stalker depicts three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” their guide and the film’s protagonist) journeying into a mysterious, dangerous “Zone,” which supposedly contains “the Room,” capable of granting wishes. This fraught, high-stakes quest consists mainly of the three men walking a couple hundred yards in a grassy, abandoned landscape and talking (with a break for a nap); the film ends after 163 minutes with no wishes apparently made or granted. But one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned, radioactive “zone of alienation”—over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in last year — that to many was eerily similar to the Zone of the film. It is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Pripyat is the name of the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers). The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are detailed (though thoroughly fictionalized) recreations of Pripyat, the cordon itself, and so on. Released between 2007 and 2010, the games have been absurdly successful; Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world (and, bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novelizations based on the game were released in Russia). On the face of it, the games don’t have much in common with the film. A large part of the genius of Tarkovsky’s Stalker was its singular combination of mystical yearning and artistic precision. The actors, even in the midst of weighty metaphysical discussions, always seem like real people, dirty, contradictory, and changeable. Stalker is all anxious faith. The Zone is, he says, the only place he feels at home, and he knows its dangers enough to fear them utterly. Professor moves from phlegmatic commonsense to righteous violence, threatening near the end of the film to destroy the Room with a homemade bomb. While Writer, for his part, begins the film drunk and foolhardy, attempting to bring a floozy along on the expedition, and ends it in anguished, self-loathing sanity. As they move from the grimy city on the edge of the Zone to the verdant Zone itself, the cinematography switches carefully from a rough-hewn sepia to gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly lush color (Tarkovsky sometimes painted the leaves of trees to make them properly green). The soundtrack slides back and forth between an unsettling electronic score and natural sounds, often combining both. None of this cinematic intensity or psychological depth remains in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, which have subpar graphics, horrid writing, abysmal voice-acting, tasteless menus, and tediously clichéd music. Tarkovsky’s enigmatic title has been turned into a ridiculous acronym (“Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber,”) and the series is ridden with technical glitches, even after a host of corrective delays and patches. But it doesn’t really matter. As games, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are remarkable, the first one especially so (few have much cared for Clear Sky). While they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it. Each game has an overarching plot—you’re a stranded soldier, or an amnesiac with a mission tattooed on your arm—but these are largely beside the point. The focus of the action is simply exploring: skirting battles or fighting in them, completing optional missions from other Zone residents, hunting for hidden treasure. The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last. Yet there is something deeper that sets the series apart. Most video games are designed to unfold entirely around you, the player: everything happens for your benefit; you’re always coming into a room at the most dramatic moment, and only you can complete the mission. In many, if you simply don’t move for a few minutes, the entire world comes to a standstill. The signal new feature of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, in contrast—the source at once of all those delays and bugs, and much of their unique power—was something called “A-Life,” an elaborate artificial intelligence system that populated the world with thousands of creatures and people who go about their business with no special regard for the player’s actions.
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In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game

Zona, Geoff Dyer’s recent book about Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece Stalker, has been much discussed for its almost comically thorough dissection of the stately 1979 film. In an account that combines summary, memoir, meditation, tribute, and citation into a kind of deluxe version of the TV recap, Dyer sets out to convey the hypnotic effect Stalker has had on decades of viewers, and on himself. And yet, after reading the book, I was left feeling that something was missing. In both the book and the deluge of Stalker coverage its release has occasioned, perhaps the most crucial, and most popular, part of the film’s afterlife has gone entirely unremarked: the video game version.

It may at first seem improbable that a decades-old art film in which very little happens could be embellished with firefights and mutant psychics and converted into a violent action game. Adapted from a popular Russian science fiction novel, Stalker depicts three men (“Writer,” “Professor,” and “Stalker,” their guide and the film’s protagonist) journeying into a mysterious, dangerous “Zone,” which supposedly contains “the Room,” capable of granting wishes. This fraught, high-stakes quest consists mainly of the three men walking a couple hundred yards in a grassy, abandoned landscape and talking (with a break for a nap); the film ends after 163 minutes with no wishes apparently made or granted.

But one aspect of Stalker’s enduring fascination has been the way it seems to prefigure the Chernobyl disaster that occurred seven years after its release: the nuclear meltdown created an abandoned, radioactive “zone of alienation”—over a thousand square miles considered too radioactive to enter, though tourists began to be allowed in last year — that to many was eerily similar to the Zone of the film. It is this parallel that inspired a Ukrainian video game developer named GSC Game World to create a series of first-person shooter game adaptations of the film called, respectively, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (Pripyat is the name of the abandoned city built to house Chernobyl workers). The different “levels” or settings in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are detailed (though thoroughly fictionalized) recreations of Pripyat, the cordon itself, and so on. Released between 2007 and 2010, the games have been absurdly successful; Shadow of Chernobyl alone sold several million copies around the world (and, bringing the cycle of adaptation full circle, a series of novelizations based on the game were released in Russia).

On the face of it, the games don’t have much in common with the film. A large part of the genius of Tarkovsky’s Stalker was its singular combination of mystical yearning and artistic precision. The actors, even in the midst of weighty metaphysical discussions, always seem like real people, dirty, contradictory, and changeable. Stalker is all anxious faith. The Zone is, he says, the only place he feels at home, and he knows its dangers enough to fear them utterly. Professor moves from phlegmatic commonsense to righteous violence, threatening near the end of the film to destroy the Room with a homemade bomb. While Writer, for his part, begins the film drunk and foolhardy, attempting to bring a floozy along on the expedition, and ends it in anguished, self-loathing sanity. As they move from the grimy city on the edge of the Zone to the verdant Zone itself, the cinematography switches carefully from a rough-hewn sepia to gorgeous, almost overwhelmingly lush color (Tarkovsky sometimes painted the leaves of trees to make them properly green). The soundtrack slides back and forth between an unsettling electronic score and natural sounds, often combining both.

None of this cinematic intensity or psychological depth remains in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, which have subpar graphics, horrid writing, abysmal voice-acting, tasteless menus, and tediously clichéd music. Tarkovsky’s enigmatic title has been turned into a ridiculous acronym (“Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber,”) and the series is ridden with technical glitches, even after a host of corrective delays and patches.

But it doesn’t really matter. As games, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are remarkable, the first one especially so (few have much cared for Clear Sky). While they all have the elements of a standard action game—guns, monsters, missions, traps, loot—much of the player’s activity is oddly in keeping with Stalker’s spirit, sometimes even managing to expand upon it. Each game has an overarching plot—you’re a stranded soldier, or an amnesiac with a mission tattooed on your arm—but these are largely beside the point. The focus of the action is simply exploring: skirting battles or fighting in them, completing optional missions from other Zone residents, hunting for hidden treasure.

The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.

Yet there is something deeper that sets the series apart. Most video games are designed to unfold entirely around you, the player: everything happens for your benefit; you’re always coming into a room at the most dramatic moment, and only you can complete the mission. In many, if you simply don’t move for a few minutes, the entire world comes to a standstill. The signal new feature of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, in contrast—the source at once of all those delays and bugs, and much of their unique power—was something called “A-Life,” an elaborate artificial intelligence system that populated the world with thousands of creatures and people who go about their business with no special regard for the player’s actions.

Roland Chambers on Revolutionary Russia

FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic.

The Russian revolution was the beginning of the modern age, says the award-winning author. He tells us what Solzhenitsyn imagined Lenin was like, and about the children’s author who led a double life as a spy in Bolshevik Russia.

Much of the drama in your biography of Arthur Ransome – who is probably best known as author of the children’s book Swallows and Amazons – takes place in revolutionary Russia. How did you stumble on his extraordinary story?

In 2002, there was a bundle of papers released by the British public archives which showed that Ransome had been a spy for the British intelligence services during the Russian revolution. I thought this was fascinating. Although I hadn’t been one of Ransome’s biggest fans when I was a child, I saw a man who had completely reinvented himself through his children’s books, becoming one of the safest pairs of hands in the whole of literature – the quintessential Englishman. So it was a surprise to me and many people that Ransome was a spy. Most people thought he just sailed boats in the Lake District. The idea that he was one of the most controversial British correspondents writing out of Russia during the revolution was just not generally known.

Can you tell us more about Ransome’s time in Russia?

In 1913 Ransome ran away from a disastrous first marriage. He wanted to go to Russia to write fairy tales, but instead he got caught up in World War I and started to write for the Daily News, a radical left-wing British newspaper. He started by backing the reformist right of Russian politics, but after the tsar lost power in the first revolution in February 1917, he moved progressively to the left. Why? Because the power was moving progressively to the left, and Ransome was a pragmatist. Having demonised Lenin and the Bolsheviks, along with most of his colleagues in the press, he became – a rare thing amongst his peers – an avid apologist of the Bolshevik cause.

He fell in love with Trotsky’s secretary, whom he eventually married, and his closest friend was Karl Radek, the Bolshevik propaganda chief. He spent the next seven years until Lenin’s death in 1924 writing pro-Bolshevik propaganda, either in the form of articles published in the Western press or political pamphlets published through the Bolshevik bureau of international propaganda. After Lenin died, and Ransome’s wife finally gave him a divorce, he returned to England with his lover, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, and joined the Royal Cruising Club, becoming the man most people recognise today – the most English of Englishmen.

While writing these pro-Bolshevik articles, he was also working with British intelligence. How did that work?

In 1918, there was an Allied invasion of Russia to try and get rid of the Bolshevik government. Ransome found himself in an impossible situation. He was friendly with the British diplomats and journalists that remained in Russia, but he was also friendly with the Bolsheviks. He wanted to remain friends with both sides and, while it was a sensible thing to try, it wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish. Not without cutting a few corners.

As the situation worsened in Russia, he decided to get out. He escaped to neutral Sweden where he was recruited by the British secret service. They wanted him because he had unrivalled access to the Bolshevik leadership, though many among them were suspicious of his real allegiance. In any case, Ransome went back into Russia following the end of the war as a British agent, and came out again in the spring of 1919 with lots of information for the British authorities and a pro-Bolshevik political pamphlet, Six Weeks in Russia, which is the first of the books on my list.

Within weeks of its publication, however, Ransome was back in Russia to rescue his lover, Evgenia, from the civil war – a very daring business, which relied heavily on his contacts in every quarter. He got her out of Moscow and for the next five years he lived with her in a kind of limbo in the Baltic States, working as Russian correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, providing information to the British intelligence services but also helping out the Bolshevik intelligence service, the Cheka, now and then. So in terms of his affiliation to one or other country, he looks like a double agent. But Ransome didn’t think of himself that way. He thought of himself as a peace broker, or at worst a sort of freelance private eye. He was good at telling himself stories.


Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.”  That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist? As it turned out, I was not the first to consider the provocation. The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel. Still, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I found online so I decided to get a second opinion — or rather, eight more opinions. I reached out to the foremost scholars of Russian literature as well as avid lay readers I know and asked if they’d be willing to contribute 500 words weighing the respective merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Almost everyone said yes, though a few echoed the sentiments of a distinguished emeritus professor who replied to me from a beach in Mexico, writing, “There really is no competition on Parnassus. From my point of view at least, they are both great writers and now live in a realm beyond competition.” And of course that’s true — just as it’s true that it is fun (and often illuminating) to debate Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic even though at the end of the day we acknowledge that they’re all irreducibly great. So with that, enjoy eight very knowledgeable, passionate takes on two of the great storytellers of all time. Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor of Russian and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, and author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible. Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental. Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones. Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima. I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.
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Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?

This past winter I wrote a pair of essays about The Brothers Karamazov that included the admission that I preferred “Tolstoy’s ability to see the angles of everyday life to Dostoevsky’s taste for the manic edges of experience.”  That line elicited more of a reaction from readers than anything else I wrote, which prompted me to dive deeper into the question: Just which of these two titans of Russian literature is considered the greater novelist?

As it turned out, I was not the first to consider the provocation. The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.

Still, I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I found online so I decided to get a second opinion — or rather, eight more opinions. I reached out to the foremost scholars of Russian literature as well as avid lay readers I know and asked if they’d be willing to contribute 500 words weighing the respective merits of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Almost everyone said yes, though a few echoed the sentiments of a distinguished emeritus professor who replied to me from a beach in Mexico, writing, “There really is no competition on Parnassus. From my point of view at least, they are both great writers and now live in a realm beyond competition.” And of course that’s true — just as it’s true that it is fun (and often illuminating) to debate Williams vs. DiMaggio and Bird vs. Magic even though at the end of the day we acknowledge that they’re all irreducibly great.

So with that, enjoy eight very knowledgeable, passionate takes on two of the great storytellers of all time.

Donna Tussing Orwin, Professor of Russian and Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto, and author of Consequences of Consciousness: Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy

I inclined first to Tolstoy. His combination of moral sensibility and love of life appealed to me, and I didn’t like Dostoevsky’s over-the-top world of the self in crisis. The two authors have much in common, and yet diverge in ways that make comparison irresistible.

Both associate the self with moral agency; for both therefore, the individual is the ultimate source of good and evil. For both, goodness, which consists in overcoming selfishness, is natural but weak. For both feelings trump reason in the soul, though Tolstoy is closer to the Greeks and the Enlightenment in his association of virtue with reason. For Dostoevsky, reason is always tainted by egotism, and therefore he relies on love to spur moral impulses. Dostoevsky concentrates more on evil; for this reason his writings anticipate the horrors of the twentieth and the nascent twenty-first centuries. Tolstoy depicts crimes, such as the lynching of Vereshchagin (War and Peace) or uxoricide in Kreutzer Sonata, but not the pure malice embodied in such Dostoevskian characters as Stavrogin (Demons) or Smerdyakov (Brothers Karamazov). Tolstoy’s most evil characters, like Dolokhov in War and Peace, seem to invade his texts from another (Dostoevskian?) world. Dostoevsky also portrays pure goodness. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (The Idiot), even though he is named after Tolstoy, is more virtuous than any Tolstoyan character could be, and so is Alyosha Karamazov. Both authors are wicked satirists. Tolstoy’s rationalizing solutions to social ills can seem naive, while Dostoevsky’s high-minded ones seem sentimental.

Tolstoy’s fiction encompasses a broader range of experience than Dostoevsky’s. No one has described childhood, family life, farming, hunting, and war any better. This reflects his affinity for the physical and the body. Not coincidentally, Tolstoy is also celebrated for his portraits of nature and animals. Dostoevsky usually associates the physical with the base. (Compare fleshy old Fyodor Karamazov with his ethereal son Alyosha.) In his writings illness often brings insight, while Tolstoy mostly (though not always) prefers healthy states to unhealthy ones.

Dostoevsky’s fiction aims at the revelation of character to the fullest extent possible. He believes that each individual is unique, however, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to others. His protagonists vacillate between good and evil; this makes the future of any one of them, even the most virtuous, unpredictable. Tolstoy’s characters are complex but not unique. The variety among them (greater than in Dostoevsky) is a result of a practically but not theoretically infinite number of combinations among all the possibilities inherent in human nature, and the interaction of these with the outside world. Tolstoy depicts the intersection of chance, historical forces, and character. In his view, the more disengaged we are from outside circumstances, the freer we are. Tolstoy gravitated in old age toward Christian anarchy, while Dostoevsky in his last novel (Brothers Karamazov) seems to advocate for a Christian theocracy headed by someone like Zosima.

I still prefer Tolstoy’s earthiness and expansiveness to Dostoevsky’s brilliant, edgy anatomy of the psyche, but I can’t imagine life without them both.

“Another Russia” (1987)

This photo exhibition travelled around the world visiting Great Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and France. It was that popular because it revealed what had been concealed from both people from other countries and those from the totalitarian state.

The Space Craze That Gripped Russia Nearly 100 Years Ago Newspapers proclaimed that hundreds of starships would soon venture out into the cosmos. People dreamed of moon colonies that were just a few years away. Ordinary citizens organized competitions to build rockets to reach the edge of space. Welcome to Russia in the 1920s. America’s fascination with space grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. But the Russians had already beaten us to it a generation earlier, during the world’s first space craze. The entire country seemed to become captivated by the idea of interplanetary travel. Between 1921 and 1932, Russian media published nearly 250 articles and more than 30 nonfiction books about spaceflight. In contrast, only two nonfiction works on the subject appeared in the U.S during same period. Despite the huge technological hurdles, ordinary Soviet citizens were convinced that routine spaceflight was just around the corner. “In the 1920s, the line between lunar aspirations and lunacy was often invisible,” wrote historian Asif A. Siddiqi of Fordham University in New York, in a 2008 paper in the science history journal OSIRIS describing this remarkable period in Russian history. On the 51st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to reach space, it’s logical to look back to the famous Space Race between the U.S. and Russia. But the space fad that came before it is in some ways even more interesting. Russians have long had a spiritual fascination with space. For centuries, the people told parables, folk tales, and myths about space travel. A mystical early-20th century Russian philosophy known as Cosmism wanted humans to travel into the universe, recover the ashes of the deceased, resurrect the dead, and settle throughout the cosmos. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, the 1920s were a hopeful period for many Soviet citizens. People wanted to come together and help build a utopian socialist society. The obsession with space travel was born in this climate, beginning in earnest in 1923 following the publication of an article titled “Is Utopia Really Possible?” in the newspaper Izvestiia. The piece focused on two early pioneers of rocketry — the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert Goddard — and their ideas of spaceflight. This led Russians to rediscover their own homegrown rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1903 produced the first mathematical calculations indicating that spaceflight was possible. Tsiolkovsky’s work was republished in 1924, and sparked many newspaper stories about the imminent rockets and spaceships that would be carrying people into space. Soviet citizens were convinced that Robert Goddard was planning to launch a rocket to the moon (he had earlier speculated about such a mission, though no real plans existed). Mars was in opposition — coming closer to Earth than it had been in hundreds of years. And Moscow university students formed the world’s first spaceflight advocacy group, the Obshchestva Izucheniia Mezhplanetnykh Soobshchenii (Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communication).
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The Space Craze That Gripped Russia Nearly 100 Years Ago

Newspapers proclaimed that hundreds of starships would soon venture out into the cosmos. People dreamed of moon colonies that were just a few years away. Ordinary citizens organized competitions to build rockets to reach the edge of space.

Welcome to Russia in the 1920s.

America’s fascination with space grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. But the Russians had already beaten us to it a generation earlier, during the world’s first space craze. The entire country seemed to become captivated by the idea of interplanetary travel.

Between 1921 and 1932, Russian media published nearly 250 articles and more than 30 nonfiction books about spaceflight. In contrast, only two nonfiction works on the subject appeared in the U.S during same period. Despite the huge technological hurdles, ordinary Soviet citizens were convinced that routine spaceflight was just around the corner.

“In the 1920s, the line between lunar aspirations and lunacy was often invisible,” wrote historian Asif A. Siddiqi of Fordham University in New York, in a 2008 paper in the science history journal OSIRIS describing this remarkable period in Russian history.

On the 51st anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first human to reach space, it’s logical to look back to the famous Space Race between the U.S. and Russia. But the space fad that came before it is in some ways even more interesting.

Russians have long had a spiritual fascination with space. For centuries, the people told parables, folk tales, and myths about space travel. A mystical early-20th century Russian philosophy known as Cosmism wanted humans to travel into the universe, recover the ashes of the deceased, resurrect the dead, and settle throughout the cosmos.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the end of World War I, the 1920s were a hopeful period for many Soviet citizens. People wanted to come together and help build a utopian socialist society.

The obsession with space travel was born in this climate, beginning in earnest in 1923 following the publication of an article titled “Is Utopia Really Possible?” in the newspaper Izvestiia. The piece focused on two early pioneers of rocketry — the Romanian-German Hermann Oberth and the American Robert Goddard — and their ideas of spaceflight.

This led Russians to rediscover their own homegrown rocket scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1903 produced the first mathematical calculations indicating that spaceflight was possible. Tsiolkovsky’s work was republished in 1924, and sparked many newspaper stories about the imminent rockets and spaceships that would be carrying people into space.

Soviet citizens were convinced that Robert Goddard was planning to launch a rocket to the moon (he had earlier speculated about such a mission, though no real plans existed). Mars was in opposition — coming closer to Earth than it had been in hundreds of years. And Moscow university students formed the world’s first spaceflight advocacy group, the Obshchestva Izucheniia Mezhplanetnykh Soobshchenii (Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communication).

Edward Lucas on Putin and Russian History

The international editor of The Economist and author of a new book about Russia gives an excoriating critique of Putinism and explains how Russia’s amoral present is rooted in a failure to come to terms with its past.

Wherever you turn – from contemporary literature to media reporting – there seems to be an unremittingly negative portrayal of modern Russia as corrupt, undemocratic and gangster-run. Is that a fair description?

Well, it’s both better and worse than the popular perception. It’s worse in the sense that I think the country is really run by what amounts to a gangster syndicate which is ruthless in its pursuit of wealth and power, and distorts the machinery of the state in order to achieve that and to perpetrate crimes against the Russian people. So I think Russia is worse than the slightly sanitised picture we get in the media, not least because of libel laws that mean it’s quite hard to write clearly and bluntly about some of the people involved.

But I think things are also better, because you have a new generation of Russians who don’t remember the Soviet Union, except possibly for childhood memories, are living lives largely unclouded by fear and official propaganda, and are integrated into the world in a way in which Russians haven’t been for 100 years. It’s those people who made up a chunk of those protesters who were filling the streets of Moscow and other cities during the weeks after the phony Duma elections in December [2011]. There’s cause for hope there, and the Putin propaganda bubble seems to have popped pretty substantially. Although he’s still in power he no longer enjoys the hypnotic popularity that he’s had over the last 10 years.

Rather than compare Russia with Europe, might it be more appropriate to compare it with other countries whose oil exports make up a disproportionate amount of their wealth and are often ruled by corrupt, undemocratic and potentially dangerous regimes?

There’s a danger of being patronising and deterministic. It’s like saying African countries can’t be democratic or Asian values are antithetical to democracy. Actually, what we have seen in Europe in the last 25 years is that countries that conventional wisdom thought were doomed to poverty and chaos have become very successful ones and countries that we thought were doing very well have fallen into great difficulties. So I’m very hesitant to say that Russia is beset by eternal woes that mean it can never be democratic, prosperous or law abiding.

I do think the shock of the Soviet collapse was very deep, and many people underestimated how difficult things were going to be after that. The country was ruined in so many ways – from brains to bridges – and a huge work of reconstruction is still needed to get over the terrible damage done by communism. I think it was fanciful to think it was ever going to be very easy, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t deplore things that have gone wrong. I think the 12-year Putin experiment in retrospect looks like a very serious wrong turn for Russia, rather than being a gateway to a bright and better future as it was portrayed at the time.

The dominance of the oil and gas sector has allowed Russia to punch above its weight in the world. Without it, the Russian government would surely behave differently.

I think that’s true. The main business of the regime is stealing natural resource rents. Rents is a rather technical economic term, but it’s the windfall money you get from just digging something out of the ground and selling it for a lot of money. There are also what people call bureaucratic rents, which is a fancy word for bribes. I think there are two pyramids in Russia – one of natural resource rents and one of bureaucratic rents or bribes. The regime sits at the top and sucks money up from both of those and then squanders some of it on high living in Moscow but pumps a lot of it into the West, where it’s laundered in places like Vienna and even London and New York.

You’ve chosen five books for us, all of which have been published relatively recently. Is there a single thread that ties your choices together?

I think history and the legacy of the past is something of a thread. The communist party has gone but the KGB is still there, and the difficulty in confronting the crimes of KGB – and the regimes whose instrument it was – is a very big deal. I spent a lot of time in West Germany in the 1980s and was very aware of the very painful and sometimes rather intrusive idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is the coming to terms with the past. It’s always been striking that once you go east of the Iron Curtain, people are often ignorant about the misdeeds of their country’s history or relativise them in a way that is really shocking by the standards of Western Europe.

There is a feeling that the Soviet Union is gone and forgotten, when it shouldn’t be. There should be a memory of the totalitarian past in a country like Russia. Which is not to say that every Russian should feel personally guilty for it, but everything you see is built on the bones of millions of innocent people and that should be a really big deal in Russia. But sadly – and partly because of the Putin regime – it is not.

Moscow by Yevgeniy Fiks My book Moscow (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), of which the following is an extension, documents ideologically charged Communist sites appropriated by gay subculture in the Soviet era, as photographed in 2008: Sverdlov Square with its monument to Karl Marx, the lavatories of the Lenin Museum, and other public spaces adopted as cruising sites that have become countermonuments of the queer experience under “really existing socialism.” Vladimir Lenin’s government decriminalized homosexuality in 1918; in 1933–34, Josef Stalin’s recriminalized it. British Communist Harry Whyte’s 1934 letter to Stalin, excerpted here, went unanswered; it was released from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation in 1993, published that year in the journal Istochnik, and translated for Moscow by Thomas Campbell. To Comrade STALIN. The content of my appeal is briefly as follows. The author of this letter, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, requests a theoretical grounding of the March 7 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee on [the institution of] criminal liability for sodomy. Since he strives to approach this question from a Marxist viewpoint, the author of this letter believes that the decree contradicts both the facts of life itself and the principles of Marxism-Leninism. […] Although I am a foreign Communist who has not yet been promoted to the AUCP(b), I nevertheless think that it will not seem unnatural to you, the leader of the world proletariat, that I address you with a request to shed light on a question that, as it seems to me, has huge significance for a large number of Communists in the USSR as well as in other countries. The question is as follows: Can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party? First and foremost, I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the coloured races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination. Read more.
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Moscow by Yevgeniy Fiks

My book Moscow (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse), of which the following is an extension, documents ideologically charged Communist sites appropriated by gay subculture in the Soviet era, as photographed in 2008: Sverdlov Square with its monument to Karl Marx, the lavatories of the Lenin Museum, and other public spaces adopted as cruising sites that have become countermonuments of the queer experience under “really existing socialism.” Vladimir Lenin’s government decriminalized homosexuality in 1918; in 1933–34, Josef Stalin’s recriminalized it. British Communist Harry Whyte’s 1934 letter to Stalin, excerpted here, went unanswered; it was released from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation in 1993, published that year in the journal Istochnik, and translated for Moscow by Thomas Campbell.

To Comrade STALIN.

The content of my appeal is briefly as follows. The author of this letter, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, requests a theoretical grounding of the March 7 decree of the USSR Central Executive Committee on [the institution of] criminal liability for sodomy. Since he strives to approach this question from a Marxist viewpoint, the author of this letter believes that the decree contradicts both the facts of life itself and the principles of Marxism-Leninism. […] Although I am a foreign Communist who has not yet been promoted to the AUCP(b), I nevertheless think that it will not seem unnatural to you, the leader of the world proletariat, that I address you with a request to shed light on a question that, as it seems to me, has huge significance for a large number of Communists in the USSR as well as in other countries.

The question is as follows: Can a homosexual be considered someone worthy of membership in the Communist Party?

First and foremost, I would like to point out that I view the condition of homosexuals who are either of working-class origin or workers themselves to be analogous to the condition of women under the capitalist regime and the coloured races who are oppressed by imperialism. This condition is likewise similar in many ways to the condition of the Jews under Hitler’s dictatorship, and in general it is not hard to see in it an analogy with the condition of any social stratum subjected to exploitation and persecution under capitalist domination.

Read more.

Whereas I think: I’m lying here in a haystack… The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of space, which I don’t occupy and which has no relation to me. And the period of time in which I’m fated to live is so insignificant beside the eternity in which I haven’t existed and won’t exist… And yet in this atom, this mathematical point, blood is circulating, a brain is working, desiring something… What chaos! What a farce!
— Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Currently Reading: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle’s discomfort, by a strange friend “who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith.” Turgenev’s masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero. Radicals perceived the novel as a crude caricature of progressivism, while the right saw it as a distasteful, even dangerous glorification of nihilism. For in Bazarov, the novel’s protagonist, Turgenev creates one of the first, and one of the finest, in a long literary line of angry young men. The interaction of Bazarov with his parents, his friends and the woman he loves is fast, furious, and fascinating for the psychological truths it unveils.
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Currently Reading: Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

When a young graduate returns home he is accompanied, much to his father and uncle’s discomfort, by a strange friend “who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith.” Turgenev’s masterpiece of generational conflict shocked Russian society when it was published in 1862 and continues today to seem as fresh and outspoken as it did to those who first encountered its nihilistic hero. Radicals perceived the novel as a crude caricature of progressivism, while the right saw it as a distasteful, even dangerous glorification of nihilism. For in Bazarov, the novel’s protagonist, Turgenev creates one of the first, and one of the finest, in a long literary line of angry young men. The interaction of Bazarov with his parents, his friends and the woman he loves is fast, furious, and fascinating for the psychological truths it unveils.

This is what happens when I walk in a Russian bakery. The place is called Vova, it’s on Avenue du Parc in Montreal. “Kosonak” is a kind of brioche filled with vanilla and walnut cream. The flat thing is an almond cookie and on top of it is a piece of a pecan-caramel pie. They also make some traditional Russian food to take out for dinner. I’ll probably try some next time.
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This is what happens when I walk in a Russian bakery. The place is called Vova, it’s on Avenue du Parc in Montreal. “Kosonak” is a kind of brioche filled with vanilla and walnut cream. The flat thing is an almond cookie and on top of it is a piece of a pecan-caramel pie. They also make some traditional Russian food to take out for dinner. I’ll probably try some next time.

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One can say many things about the history of the world—except that it is rational. Give man every earthly blessing, satisfy his every desire, quench his slightest thirst, and he would still destroy what he has—just to prove his freedom.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
And what is it in us that is mellowed by civilization? All it does, I’d say, is to develop in man a capacity to feel a greater variety of sensations. And nothing, absolutely nothing else. And through this development, man will yet learn how to enjoy bloodshed. Why, it has already happened… Civilization has made man, if not always more bloodthirsty, at least more viciously, more horribly bloodthirsty.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground