The Collapse of Language

 

Dostoevsky, Liberal Love, the United States of Europe

One of the traits of ‘liberal, leftist, progressive’ is obviously enough to hate one’s own nation - the national is a painful insult to their sensitive and vulnerable psyche (I won’t say to their soul, that word might wound them also). With that in mind, I think this is interesting from Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky where, in a letter from 1867 to the writer Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky writes:

All those trashy little liberals and progressives find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia. They openly wish for its collapse, whilst adding that they ‘love Russia’. But meanwhile not only is everything at the slightest originality in Russia hateful to them, so that they deny it and immediately take enjoyment in turning it into a caricature, but that if one really were to present them finally with a fact that they could not overturn or ruin in a caricature, but which they definitely would have to be reconciled. I think they would be unhappy to the point of torture to the point of pain to the point of despair. 

One other detail from this period. Dostoevsky was living in Geneva at the time, and when there attended a congress under a group of progressive and radices called themselves the League of Peace and Freedom who had appointed the celebrated revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin to represent their native land. Bakunin made a stirring speech calling for the breakup of the Russian empire and expressing the hope that his armies would be defeated in the future. He also assailed the principle of nationality as a tool of reaction, and called destruction of all centralised states to make way for the formation of the United States of Europe.