Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on June 6, 2007
Literary Imagination 2007 9(3):354-358; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm048
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Shattered Russian Souls: A Review of James Meek's People's Act of Love
James Meek, The People's Act of Love. New York: Canongate, 2005. 391 pages.
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Czes
aw Miosz observed that, unlike so much modern literature, Russian writing persisted in asking, how should one live? It may be the urgency of the question that Western readers go on admiring, or even envying. We speak of America having spirit, but Russia having soul. The West has destiny; Russia has fate. Already in the 1920's, Virginia Woolf noted "the fanaticism" of English admiration for Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. The chief character in its fiction, Woolf noted, was "the soul," and it was a soul deepened by intense suffering. Who is the American equivalent of Akhmatova standing in line to take letters and loaves to her imprisoned son? Or Dostoevsky enduring a mock execution before being sledged to a Siberian prison? All art, one suspects, is stoked by deprivation, but in Russian literature suffering becomes the medium of profundity, and not just its condition. As historian Orlando Figes