What Americans Today Can Learn from the Russian Past: Lessons from Turgenev and Dostoevsky for American Hillbillies

National identity has been a preoccupation in the tradition of Russian political thought since Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), who led a cultural revolution in Russia that replaced some of its traditional social and political systems with ones based on the Enlightenment.[1] This “opening to the West” raised the question whether Russia’s future would reside in Europe or would instead develop on a different and separate path. Pyotr Chaadayev’s (1794–1856) by claiming that Russia had lagged behind Europe, contributed nothing to the world’s progress, and therefore must start de novo.[2] Chaadayev’s Letters sparked the debate about Russia’s national identity and its role in the world, with two groups emerging: the Westernizers—liberals who sought to modernize Russia by imitating Europe—and the Slavophiles, conservatives who sought to revitalize the country by drawing upon Russia’s own traditions, particularly Russian Orthodoxy.[3]

Central to this debate was the role of the newly liberated peasantry, who were emancipated as a class in 1861 under Alexander II (reigned 1855–81) in response to Russia’s disastrous defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56). More than twenty-three million people peacefully received the full rights of citizens, such as the right to marry without having to obtain consent of their masters, in the hope of rejuvenating Russia socially, politically, and militarily Westernizers wanted to reeducate the peasantry into a new middle class of merchants and moneymakers, while Slavophiles believed that the peasantry’s customs, traditions, and values could reorganize and revitalize Russian society The Westernizer Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48) called for “raising the people to the level of society” and not, as the Slavophiles wanted, “forcing society back to the level of the people.” The Slavophiles, in turn, of the sobornost, an organic community of people living together for spiritual rather than material concerns.[7]

Because of political censorship laws in nineteenth-century Russia, this debate about Russia’s national identity and its role in the world transpired in both public and private among the intelligentsia: educated people who were in engaged in the ideas that shaped Russian politics, culture, and society.[8] In private this exchange took place in circulated letters, political essays, and philosophical treatises; in public it mostly transpired in literature. This chapter consequently will focus on two writers of nineteenth-century Russia—Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoevsky—to see what Fathers and Sons and The Brothers Karamazov can tell us about what role the peasantry should play in the formation of Russia’s national identity and its future. It will explore from the vantage point of political theory how a Westernizer like Turgenev perceives the peasantry in contrast to the Nihilist’s perspective and how a Slavophile like Dostoevsky defends the peasantry’s traditions against European values.

Whatever interest this study may be, it is more than an academic exercise. What Americans can learn from this account is how to frame the debate about their own national identity and role in the world. The ideological and political polarization of the past fifty years is not one based on institutional disagreement, demographic changes, or a form of false consciousness but is rooted in differing cultural, constitutional, and philosophical views about the nature and direction of the country.[9] In some important ways the nineteenth-century Russian debate between Westernizers and Slavophiles mirrors the twentieth-first-century American disagreement about its national identity, role in the world, and what place—if any—the white working class has in the country. Like the Westernizers, the US professional class argues that the white working class needs to modernize itself to be able to compete in this new era of globalization (e.g., Clintons), while others, like the Slavophiles, contend that America’s sovereignty and its citizens, especially the white working class, should come first, over the country’s transnational commitments (e.g., Steve Bannon).[11]

Although the nineteenth-century Russian debate transpired in literature and today’s American debate is explicitly political, in both cases elites drove them. The similarities of the issues in these two examples allow us not only to compare these two countries but also to see what we can learn from the Russian case, as we know its ultimate outcome was, as Solzhenitsyn terrifyingly portrays in The Red Wheel, the 1917 Revolution Thus, after examining each of these debates and comparing them, the chapter concludes with some thoughts about what the United States can learn from nineteenth-century Russia: Are the debates in both countries framed correctly (i.e., identifying and addressing the critical issues of the times), are the solutions offered practical and positive or too theoretical and destructive, and is it possible for both sides to overcome their mutual animosity for the common good of their countries?

 The Westernizers and Turgenev

Like the Slavophiles, the Westernizers were preoccupied with the role of Peter the Great and pre- and postreform Russia.[13] Agreeing with the Slavophiles that prior to Peter the Great the Russian people had been a community centered on faith and custom, the Westernizers perceived this condition as an impediment to the development of rational thought, individuality, and dynamic change that was needed in Russia. The Petrine reforms put Russia onto the path to realize the universal human values of Europe in both the individual and the nation. Critical for this success was the reeducation of the peasantry in reason, science, and liberal ideology.

Ivan Turgenev’s (1818–83) Sportsman’s Sketches appears in the second half of the 1840s and, although sympathetic to their plight, does not romanticize the serfs’ and peasantry’s traditions as the Slavophiles do.[14] For instance, in “Yermolay and the Miller’s Wife,” Zverkov describes the injustice of serfdom, such as Arina’s forced separation from her family members. Another example is “Bailiff,” which portrays how the bailiff, Sofron, steals the peasants’ money, a story that is Turgenev’s direct rebuttal to Nikolai Gogol’s (1809–52) defense of Slavophile ideas. These and other stories, like “Bezhin Lea,” directly address the issue of serfdom and reject the Slavophile’s romanticization of them for a program of reform and reeducation.

Turgenev lays out such a program in Fathers and Sons (1862), which seeks to reform Russia while, at the same time, it preserves a humanness in societal relations. This path of the “fathers,” those Westernizers who came of age in the 1840s, is contrary to the ideas of the “sons” (the Nihilists) of the 1860s, who advocate for completely eliminating the semifeudal institutions of Russia and starting society anew. These “new men”—like Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), Nikolai Doroliubov (1836–61), and Dmitry Pisarev (1840–68)—espouse ideas of materialism, naturalism, and rationalism for Russia.[16] Influenced by Feuerbach, Hegel, and British utilitarianism, the Nihilists develop an ethics of rational egoism, where material pleasure is the highest good for both the individual and the community, and support revolutionary progress rather than incremental reform to transform Russian society.

Of these “sons,” the most important for Turgenev is Dmitry Pisarev, who becomes the model of the character Bazarov in Fathers and Sons (and later an influential figure in Lenin’s own political thought).[17] Pisarev calls for the liberation of individuals from traditional beliefs and behavior and the reestablishing of human relations only on a rationality modeled after the natural sciences. The great enemy of nihilism is the aesthetic and idealist attitudes of the Westernizers, the “fathers,” whose values are superfluous to the hard reality of economics, materialism, and naturalism. The Russian peasantry needs vocational training, not artistic appreciation. It is this ideological and political position to which Turgenev responds in his novel.

The novel presents two “sons,” Bazarov and Arkady, each of whom provides a competing account of how to reform and renew Russia. Bazarov’s nihilism is characterized by its abstract, rational, and scientific features with no positive political program, while Arkady’s is concrete and humane and offers a politics of gradual reform. Bazarov’s self-absorption, disruptive behavior, and preoccupation with science throughout the novel—his dismissal of poetry (84, 88) his scientific experiments on nature (90), his outbursts that cause family disputes, including a duel between himself and Pavel (238)—are dramatic representations of his views of nihilism: it is of one “who recognizes nothing . . . who respects nothing” (94). It is a philosophy that “doesn’t recognize any authorities” and is guided only by “what we recognize as useful. . . . In these days the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate . . . Everything” (123). When challenged as to what will replace society once it has been “repudiated,” Bazarov asserts it is not “our affair. . . . The ground must be cleared first” (124). that rejects all authority and is guided only by practical conduct on a heuristic basis. Its initial task is to destroy everything, and it offers nothing positive past that destruction.

Although Turgenev rejects nihilism, he does recognize that aspects of the philosophy are valid. The “fathers’” and indifference to the plight of the peasantry, as demonstrated by Nikolai and Pavel, is a serious threat to social and political stability. At the beginning of the novel, hat his peasants are not paying their tithes and are instead go to the tavern, that the hired labor are ruining his farm equipment (80), and that their forest will be cut down because it had to be sold for money (82). Nikolai’s impracticalness has bankrupted the family, and their social standing in the community has fallen to such a point where the peasants call their house the “Farm-without-any-land” (85, 106, 223–25). Pavel is more practical than his brother, and even gives him money, but he lacks the ability to sympathize and empathize with the peasantry, as Arkady notes: “It’s true, when he [Pavel] talks to them [peasantry] he screws up his face and sniffs eau-de-cologne” (105).

In spite of Nikolai’s lack of business acumen, his humanness is evident throughout the novel, especially with Fenichka, the servant girl who bears their child. Although their relationship is strained because Nikolai is at times embarrassed by her (81–82, 91) and at other moments treats her more like a servant than a partner (94–95, 132), he does genuinely love her and their child, recognizing that both give him happiness and a purpose in life (110–13). At the end of the novel, Nikolai marries Fenichka and she finally feels the self-respect and dignity that previously was absent (290–91). It is also important to note that Fenichka loves Nikolai, in spite of Bazarov kissing her, (249–50). The genuine bond of affection between the two is also approved by Arkady, showing that his father’s humanness has passed down to his son. By supporting his father’s marriage, Arkady shows an acceptance of gradual reform in the relations between the Russian aristocracy and peasantry (115), and he eventually considers it his duty to help his father by listening to him and learning about farming (225). Arkady wants to question authority to avoid the faults of his father but still wants to retain a sense of community based on humane relationships where people love and accept one another.

Another example of Arkady’s sympathy for the peasantry is his remarks that he hopes the poorest peasant in Russia will one day be able to have a “clean, neat cottage” and that “we must all of us work to that end” (211). By contrast, Bazarov’s reaction is the opposite: hating the poor peasant, for whose sake Bazarov is “to be ready to sacrifice [his] skin and who won’t even thank [him] for it” (211). Other examples of Bazarov’s contempt of the peasantry are when he rejects the peasant commune (128), mocks peasants’ family relations (191), remarks that the Russian peasant will swindle God Himself (116), and says they deserve to be despised (128). Yet Bazarov is the only character who is able to converse with various peasants and even identifies with them at one point, stating, “My grandfather tilled the soil” (124–25).[22] Bazarov’s social ease with and simultaneous disdain for the peasantry is explained by his own peasantry: a mixture of oppression (191, 218) and sincere concern (197, 206). Unlike Nikolai, who eventually marries one of his peasants, Vassily always remains apart from them, both flogging them and seeking medical assistance for them. Just as the “father” Nikolai has passed down his ideas of humanness to his son Arkady, so has Vassily passed down his mixture of contempt and care to his son Bazarov. Thus, Fathers and Sons is not only about the conflict between the “fathers” Nikolai and Pavel and the “sons” Bazarov and Arkady but also about the different types of “parents” (Nikolai, Pavel, Vassily, and Odintsova) and the education they give to their various “children” (Bazarov, Arkady, Katya, and Fenichka).

Bazarov’s philosophy of nihilism with regard to the peasantry is ultimately rebutted by Turgenev when Bazarov is exposed to be a fool. After bantering with the peasants and mocking their religious views (275), Bazarov leaves, the peasants no longer speak in their singsongy voice and criticize the gentry for their lack of understanding (275–76). Bazarov may know how to talk to the peasantry, but his self-confidence never makes him “suspect that he [is] a buffoon in their eyes” (276). It is therefore fitting and perhaps ironic that Bazarov dies from typhus while doing his postmortem on a peasant (277–78). Unlike is unable to see peasants as human beings deserving respect, dignity, and love, and this inability leads to his demise because he believes they are only objects worthy of scientific examination.

The fate of Bazarov—one who suffers from unrequited love, loses friendship, and eventually recognizes that nihilism is unfulfilling—is Turgenev’s repudiation of Pisarev’s program of rationalism and materialism. Instead of the nihilism of Bazarov, Turgenev proposes a path of concrete and gradual reform rooted in humane relations among classes. the peasantry but to despise them. Among the Westernizers, Turgenev offers a middle way between the son’s nihilism derived from European positivism and the fathers’ impractical romanticism sprung from European idealism.[23]

The Slavophiles and Dostoevsky

Whereas the Westernizers emphasized the catastrophic backwardness of Russia and its need to catch up to Europe, the Slavophiles stressed the values and virtues of traditional Russian culture. Neither Asiatic nor European, Russia was unique and developed its own traditions, such as Russian Orthodoxy, that could bring salvation to the West.[24] Like the Westernizers, the Slavophiles were critical of certain aspects of Russian society, particularly serfdom, but they wanted to protect Russia from European rationalism, materialism, and the democratic “impersonalism” of Europe. Critical to their philosophy was the concept of the sobornost (an organic community of people living together for spiritual rather than material concerns), which could be found in the Russian Orthodox Church and found form in the obshchina, the peasant village-commune.[25] For the Slavophiles, the sobornost—not rationality or individualism—would be the organizing principle for a revitalized Russia.

In The Brothers Karamazov Ivan’s ideas are representative of the European civilization’s social atomization, spiritual disintegration, and rational materialism.[26] In the chapter “Rebellion,” Ivan confesses to his younger brother, Alyosha, of his love of children and the horrors that are inflicted upon them in the modern world: a Turk’s pistol blowing the brains out of a Bulgarian baby; a five-year-old girl beaten, birched, and forced to eat her own excrement by her European-educated parents; and a serf boy who is torn apart by his master’s dogs for hurting the paw of one of the hounds His demand for retribution for these crimes “here on earth” makes Ivan rebel against God’s existence, for “if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering which is necessary for the purchase of truth, then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price” (287, 275). Ivan’s “Euclidean” equation—those who commit crimes should suffer appropriate punishment while alive—is given political form in his tale of the Grand Inquisitor, the miracle, mystery, and authority of a despotic church (288–311).[27] For Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor is the Westernizer’s project: the desire for Russia to emulate Europe would only result in an alienated and imperious elite, coercive and unyielding political conformity among the masses, and values based on deception and devoid of any sense of spirituality.[28]

However, Dostoevsky’s rejection of these “European values” does not automatically translate into an unconditional support for the peasantry in The Brothers Karamazov. Peasants are criticized throughout the novel. Like Bazarov, Ivan despises the peasantry, describing to Alyosha how a peasant senselessly flogs a poor, defenseless horse with “gentle eyes” (282), and later, on his way to Smerdyakov, Ivan pushes a peasant into snow and leaves him on the ground to freeze to death (729). Ivan’s father, Fyodor, also scorns the peasantry, calling them swindlers and extoling the virtues of flogging them (154). Dmitry’s encounters with the peasantry are ones where they either indulge in his debauchery or try to swindle him (444–46, 137, 477, 488–89, 509). For instance, the peasant and innkeeper Trifon Plastunov, who hosts Dmitry’s orgy, is portrayed as exploiting his own “cultivated the land for him to pay off their debts which they could never get rid of” (486; also see 600).[30] Another example is Grigory, the morally strict and austere servant of the Karamazovs, who misidentifies as the culprit of Fyodor’s murder at the trial because a glass and a half of spirits at that time (107–9, 463–64, 781–83).[31] And the jury at Dmitry’s trial, which was composed of peasants except for four civil servants, declares him guilty without any extenuating circumstances not because of the evidence but rather because the “old peasants stood up for themselves” against their former masters—just as the white working class had stood up for themselves against coastal elites by electing Donald Trump to the 2016 US presidency (887, 889).[32]

But Dostoevsky’s realism of the faults and foibles of the peasantry is balanced against their values and virtues, which he also portrays. In the “Discourses and Sermons of Father Zossima,” Zossima confesses his great affection for the peasant-priest Anfirm, who is illiterate and humble but teaches Zossima how to love children in their travels around Russia (332–33, 376). During their journey, Zossima eventually discovers the following insight about his country: who does not believe in God, will never believe in God’s people. But he who has faith in God’s people, will also behold his Glory, though he has not believed in it till then. Only the common people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil. And what is Christ’s word without an example? The people will perish without the word of God, for their hearts yearn for the Word and for all that is good and beautiful” (345). The peasantry thus plays the essential role in the formation of the values for Russia. According to Zossima, if one believes in the traditions, customs, and values of the peasantry, then one will be led to believe in God. It is the duty of the elite to understand the “spiritual power” of the peasantry so they can empathize with them, returning to their “native soil,” rather than reeducating the peasantry in European values.

By believing and being with the people, one learns about the goodness and beauty of the universe as a result of God’s love. In his conversations with a young peasant boy, Zossima speaks about the world’s goodness, beauty, and Christ’s role in it (346). Although Zossima acknowledges that sin and corruption exist among the peasantry, their religious beliefs allow them the chance to regenerate themselves by forcing them to recognize their faults, unlike the elites, who lack any criteria outside of themselves for moral judgments (370–71). The peasantry’s values of humility, meekness, and love can transform Russia into a country that is different from and superior to Europe.

These values translate into Zossima’s core teaching that everyone is responsible for everyone and one should love everyone and everything.[33] When Markel teaches his younger brother, Zossima, the lesson of love and the value of life—a lesson that is, in turn, passed down from Zossima to Alyosha—these teachings are learned not as Euclidean logic but through the experiential encounter with the person.[34] Contrary to what the Westernizers believe, Zossima thinks there is a limit to what reason can know and convey. As he tells Madame Khokhlakova, there are certain subjects, like the immortality of the soul, that cannot be proved, but “one can be convinced by the experience of active love” (61). By appealing to the experiential encounter of the person, Zossima’s teachings of active love and responsibility for all reintegrate alienated individuals back into the community. The communal experience of interconnectedness makes everyone responsible for all, and it prompts people to accept that they are complicit in the suffering that exists and therefore need to act in active love to remedy this situation.

The Orthodox sobornost provides the models of how a community can voluntarily organize itself to love and be responsible for everyone in it. But this idea is not a regurgitation of the “official ideology” of the Russian state and Orthodox Church; instead, as Sarah Hudspith points out, it selects those aspects of Orthodoxy that are outside the mainstream but belong to an ancient Orthodox tradition and thus are closer to the origins of Christianity.[35] For example, the explanation of the elder tradition (starchestvo) at the beginning of the novel and the subsequent power struggles over it among the monks highlight a marginalized Orthodox practice (25–34, 383–96).[36] Disciples voluntarily submit themselves to an elder, thus forming a bond transcending any earthy authority, even the church itself, for this practice was found in “the early days of Christianity” (28).

As an elder, Zossima meets the peasant women to address their spiritual needs and thereby participates in the sobornost of Orthodoxy (49–57). Another example of sobornost is the community formed by Alyosha and the schoolboys. The leader of the schoolboys, Kolya, has ideas similar to Ivan’s (648–55) and, like Bazarov, engages in conversation with peasants but also holds them in contempt (617–23, 642). But unlike Ivan and Bazarov, Kolya is still young enough to change his friend Ilyusha—a change he undergoes under Alyosha’s influence. Kolya admits that his vanity and pride prevent him from visiting the dying Ilyusha, in response to which Alyosha asks him to overcome fears by visiting his friend along with Alyosha (654–55). The scene concludes with Kolya, Ilyusha, and the father embracing one another as a community united by love, suffering, and the Christian promise of eternity (657–58).

The conclusion of the novel is the funeral of Ilyusha, when Alyosha calls the schoolboys together to ask them to make a pact to never forget Ilyusha or one another, cherishing the memory:

How we all loved him so much afterwards. He was a nice boy, a good and brave boy. . . . Let us never forget how happy we were here, when we were all of us together, united by such a good and kind feeling, which made us, too, while we loved the poor boy, better men, perhaps, than we are. . . . I’m sure you will remember that there’s nothing higher, stronger, and more wholesome and more useful in life than some good memory, especially when it goes back to the days of your childhood, to the days of your life at home. . . . And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day. (910–11)

The death of Ilyusha allows the schoolboys to form a community based on love, memory, and the Christian hope of the resurrection, for, as Alyosha states, “And may the dead boy’s memory live forever!” (912). Kolya has also become reintegrated into this community by voluntarily accepting Alyosha’s teachings and has the final words in the novel, praising Alyosha, “Hurrah for Karamazov!” (913).

This picture of the schoolboys forming a community of love and rooted in the memory of their friend not only is an example of sobornost but serves as an iconic image to show how one can reintegrate a person into a community of active love and responsibility for all.[38] The image serves, in Zossima’s words, as an example of “Christ’s word” (345). The experiential encounter of the person with God takes place because one sees an example of it and thereby is existentially moved to become a member of the sobornost. This example reminds us as a lasting memory and serves to orient us in our lives. Just as Alyosha remembers the example of Zossima to guide his life, the hope is that the memory of Ilyusha will orient the moral lives of the schoolboys in their future. Filled with such examples, The Brothers Karamazov ultimately is a form of education for the next generation of Russians so they can learn to love their fellow countrymen in the sobornost.

Illuminating Red and Blue America

Dostoevsky consequently believes that the Orthodox sobornost can serve as a model to revitalize Russia. But unlike some Slavophiles, Dostoevsky does not idealize the peasantry: he recognizes and condemns the faults and foibles of this class but, at the same time, upholds and esteems their virtues and values. For , imitate Europe. The Westernization of Russia had resulted only in an elite alienated from its people, leading to class conflict and revolution, which Solzhenitsyn so aptly describes in The Red Wheel.

Turgenev agrees with Dostoevsky to the extent that the wholesale rejection of Russian institutions, values, and traditions does not reform and rescue Russia, as the Nihilists claim. He wants concrete, gradual, and useful reform that preserves the best aspects of the past with the new of the future, a position that differs not only from the Nihilists but also from the fathers’ impractical idealism and romanticism. Like Dostoevsky, Turgenev believes that relations between people should be humane or experiential rather than rational or Euclidean. But Turgenev disagrees with Dostoevsky in asserting that the ultimate path of reform does not reside in the sobornost but in a Europeanization of Russia. For Turgenev, there is only one path forward—toward Europe—whether to proceed quickly or slowly.

This question that confronted nineteenth-century Russia—whether its national identity was European or something else—is similar to the one that twenty-first-century Americans are now facing. The debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles is useful to Americans because it illuminates that the dispute between Red and Blue America is not about institutional arrangements or demographic change but about the cultural, constitutional, and philosophical disagreement about the first principles of the country, like the one between the Westernizers and Slavophiles. Critical to both of these debates is what role the underclass—the peasantry and the white working class—plays in a country’s political identity: are they to be transformed, as Westernizers and Blue Americans desire, or remain true to their tradition and values, as the Slavophiles and Red Americans want.

The specific lessons we can learn from the Westernizers-and-Slavophiles debate is the need to identify the correct issues of     disagreement, the practicality of the solutions proposed, and the possibility of compromise between the two parties for the common good of their countries. The Westernizers and Slavophiles recognized that the peasantry would play the pivotal role in their country’s future: newly liberated, the peasants were now citizens of Russia and had to find place in it. By contrast, American elites, particularly the left, have failed to recognize that the issue of the white working class is not one of identity politics, racism, or misogyny but of citizenship: What does it mean to be an American legally, culturally, and economically in twentieth-first-century America?[40] Until the civil rights movement, the white working class was seen as representative of the American dream of upward mobility, but now they have been neglected or ridiculed by coastal elites up to the 2016 election.[41] Although there have been recent attempts to understand the white working class, these studies have failed to contextualize the issue in terms of citizenship, whereas Westernizers and Slavophiles understood that the peasantry was part of the same national community to which elites also belonged.[42]

Turgenev’s and Dostoevsky’s proposals of gradual reform and a return to tradition also have been neglected in the American debate about the white working class. Since 1994 the United States’ policy of a globalized free trade without adequate investment to reeducate the white working class, all political rhetoric notwithstanding, is a Nihilist’s attempt to destroy everything without a plan to replace it.[43] The election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a reflection of the populist option, a nostalgic attempt to return to the 1950s America.[44] This is similar to Slavophiles’ fetishization of the Russian past and shares some features of Dostoevsky’s call for a return to the sobornost and a sense of national community.[45] Americans’ lack of solidarity, social capital, and community is comparable and requires that they discover a way to recover a sense of shared citizenship rather belonging to ideologically polarized tribes.[46]

Turgenev’s suggestion of gradual reform would translate into the United States continuing to pursue a globalized free trade policy while simultaneously reeducating the white working class and treating them with the respect and dignity that they deserve as fellow citizens. This seems the most sensible solution, as it would maintain the United States’ commitment to a liberal global order, defuse any populist sentiment among the white working class, and possibly create conditions for coastal elites and heartland Americans to find some common ground for their country. Admittedly, this recommendation may fail, as Bazarov may be correct not only about the Russian peasant but the American white working class: “The Russian peasant is mysterious. . . . Does anyone understand him? He does not even understand him” (244). Yet given the other options—the continual Nihilist attempt to pursue globalized free trade at the expense of the white working class or populist rhetoric and programs that exacerbate class tensions and threaten to undermine liberal democracy—Turgenev’s proposal is the best.

Although Turgenev and Dostoevsky disagree with each other about what role the peasantry needs to play in the revitalization of Russia, they both recognize the problems in their respective ideological camps and propose paths that avoid them. From these two writers and the debate in which they engaged, Americans can learn that the political issues confronting them today are about defining what it means to be a citizen in an increasingly pluralist country and globalized world, how to recover a sense of community or shared citizenship, and what role the white working class should play in the future of their country. With the surprise election of Donald Trump, these questions may seem to be new; but, after looking back to the history nineteenth-century Russia, one discovers that they are enduring ones for any people. Whether Americans can learn from novelists like Turgenev and Dostoevsky remains to be seen.

Notes

[1] Evgenii V. Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through Violence in Russia (New York: Routledge, 2015); James Cracraft, The Revolution of Peter the Great (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (New York: Knopf, 1980); Basil Dmytryshyn, Modernization of Russia under Peter I and Catherine II (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1974).

[2] Peter [Pyotr] Chaadayev, Philosophical Letters, in Russian Philosophy, vol. 1, The Beginning of Russian Philosophy; the Slavophiles; the Westernizers, ed. James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin with George L. Kline (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 106–54.

[3] For more about Chaadayev’s influence on the question of Russian national identity, see Robin Aizlewood, “Revisiting Russian Identity in Russian Thought: From Chaadaev to the Early Twentieth Century,” Slavonic and Eastern European Review 78, no. 1 (2000): 20–43; Aizlewood, “‘The Return of the Russian Idea’ in Publications, 1988–91,” Slavonic and Eastern European Review 71, no. 3 (1993): 490–99; Dale E. Peterson, “Civilizing the Race: Chaadaev and the Paradox of Eurocentric Nationalism,” Russian Review 56, no. 4 (1997): 550–63.

[4] By contrast, the United States liberated approximately 4,000,000 slaves in a conflict that costed about 620,000 lives. For more about the emancipation of the Russian serf, see Paul Castañeda Dower, Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, and Steven Nafziger, “Collective Action and Representation in Autocracies: Evidence from Russia’s Great Reforms,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 1 (2018): 125–47; Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace Arbitrators and the Development of Civil Society (New York: Routledge, 2011); Gary M. Hamburg, “Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought: The Case of Boris N. Chicerin,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 (1991): 890–904; Irina Paperno, “The Liberation of the Serf as a Cultural Symbol,” Russian Review 40, no. 4 (1991): 417–36; Wayne Vucinich, ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968); Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia, from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).

[5] Edie et al., Russian Philosophy, vol. 1.

[6] Vissarion Belinsky, quoted in Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1979), 137.

[7] Ivan Kireyevsky (1806–56) and Aleksey Khomvakov (1804–60) created this concept (ibid., 104); also see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 121–237; Peter Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Slavophilism, vol. 1, Khomiakov (Princeton, NJ: Mouton, 1972); Christoff, An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Slavophilism, vol. 2, Kireevsky (Princeton, NJ: Mouton, 1972).

For more about the sobornost, see Kallistos Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology: Aleksei Khomiakov and His Successors,” International Journal for the Study of Christian Churches 11, no. 2–3 (2011): 216–35; Lee Trepanier, Political Symbols in Russian History: Church, State, and the Quest for Order and Justice (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 122–35; Vucinich, Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia; Geroid Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime: A History of the Landlord-Peasant World and a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution of 1917 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

[8] Charles A. Rudd, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Marianna T. Choldin, A Fence around the Empire: Russian Censorship of Western Ideas under Tsars (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1985). For more about what constitutes the intelligentsia, see G. M. Hamburg’s “Russian Intelligentsias,” in A History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44–70.

[9] Examples of the former explanations are Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); E. J. Dionne Jr., Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Trump to Goldwater and Beyond (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal; or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016); Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning in the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016); Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded Americans Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

Examples of the latter explanations are Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review, 2017); Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016); Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016); Stephen Prothero, Why Liberals Always Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lost Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016); J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: Harper, 2016); Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); James Piereson, Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of American Postwar Political Order (New York: Encounter Books, 2015); Robert Putnam, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2012); Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012); Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to American National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

[10] I acknowledge that the analogy between the nineteenth-century newly liberated Russian peasantry and the twentieth-first-century American white working class is not a perfect one: the peasantry was poor with little prospect of upward mobility, whereas the white working class had secured material comfort and social respect after World War II and now currently confronts downward mobility. Perhaps a better analogy would be between the Russian peasantry and disenfranchised communities that were improvised (e.g., African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans). However, I believe the analogy still holds because the elites of both time periods are focused on these two groups: the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia were preoccupied with the peasantry as connected with Russia’s future, and twentieth-first-century American public intellectuals, academics, and journalists have now turned their attention to the white working class, partly to understand how Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. A recent and interesting comparison of the 2016 election of Trump and nineteenth-century Russian literature, specifically Dostoevsky’s Demons, can be found in Ani Kokobobo, “How Dostoevsky Predicted Trump’s America,” The Conversation, August 22, 2016, https://theconversation.com/how-dostoevsky-predicted-trumps-america-63799.

[11] For Clinton, see Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?; Frank, Listen, Liberal; for Bannon, see Joshua Green, “Inside the Secret, Strange Origins of Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Fantasia,” Vanity Fair, July 17, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/the-strange-origins-of-steve-bannons-nationalist-fantasia. For more about the philosophical origin and influences of the alt-right, see Jonathan Ratcliffe, “The Return of the Reactionary (Part I),” VoegelinView, January 14, 2017, https://voegelinview.com/the-rise-of-the-reactionary/.

[12] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 1, August 1914, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 2, November 1916, trans. H. T. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014); Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, knot 3, March 1917,  book 1 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). The novel April 1917 (The Red Wheel, knot 4) has not been translated into English thus far.

[13] Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 136–51. Representative and important thinkers of Westernism include Belinsky, Valerian Maikov (1823–47), Timofey Granovsky (1813–55), Konstantin Kavelin (1818–85), and Boris Chicerin (1828–1904).

[14] The book is a collection of short stories published together in 1852. Some of the stories appeared in the St. Petersburg magazine The Contemporary prior to 1852. Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (New York: Penguin Classics, 1967).

[15] Gogol’s defense of autocracy, serfdom, and Orthodoxy prompted Belinsky’s “Letter to Gogol” to reject these ideas. Turgenev was with Belinsky when the latter wrote this letter, whose influence can be found in Sportsman’s Sketches. Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969). Also see Victor Ripp, “Ideology in Turgenev’s Notes of a Hunter: The First Three Sketches,” Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (1979): 75–88; Richard Freeborn, Turgenev: The Novelist’s Novelist, a Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

[16] Evgenii Lampert, Sons against Fathers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).

[17] Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Classics, 1978), 323–25. For more about Pisarev’s thought, see James M. Edie, James P. Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin with George L. Kline, eds., Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, The Nihilists, The Populists, Critics of Religion and Culture (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 61–108. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s (1828–89) novel, What Is to Be Done?, was written and published in 1863 in response to Turgenev’s novel and influenced Lenin’s political thought. See Michael B. Katz and William G. Wagner’s introduction to What Is to Be Done?, by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 1–36.

[18] This exploration of the competing visions of Bazarov and Arkady differs from previous interpretations, which have examined the conflict between the “fathers” Nikolai and Pavel and the “sons” Bazarov and Arkady: Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev: His Life and Times (New York: Random House, 1978), 187; Peter Henry, “I. S. Turgenev: Fathers and Sons,” in The Monster in the Mirror: Studies in Nineteenth Century Realism, ed. D. A. Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 60; V. S. Pritchett, The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (New York: Random House, 1977), 144; William C. Brumfield, “Bazarov and Rjazanov: The Romantic Archetype in Russian Nihilism,” The Slavic and East European Journal 21, no. 4 (1977): 495–505; H. Gifford, “Turgenev,” in Nineteenth Century Russian Literature: Studies of Ten Russian Writers, ed. John Fennell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 154; Isaiah Berlin, Fathers and Sons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 25; Freeborn, Turgenev, 74; Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Turgenev: The Man, His Art, and His Age (New York: Orion, 1959), 203; Janko Larvin, An Introduction to the Russian Novel (London: Methuen, 1942), 62.

For more about my approach, see Lee Trepanier, “Fathers and Sons: The Principles of Love in Turgenev’s Liberalism,” Anamnesis 2, no. 2 (2013): 117–43.

[19] Turgenev also portrays other ideologies in this novel: Nikolai’s romantic idealism, Pavel’s rationalism, Odinstova’s materialist proto-feminism. Turgenev rejects all of these options as these characters are not willing to leave their domicile (Nikolai, Odinstov) or they undergo voluntary exile (Pavel). For more about these characters, refer to Trepanier, “Fathers and Sons.”

[20] Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (New York: Penguin Classics, 1965), 84, 88. Hereafter cited in the text.

[21] Also see Bazarov’s observations that Nikolai’s estate was suffering mismanagement (115–16).

[22] This social ease with the peasantry ultimately leads Bazarov into trouble when he kisses Fenichka and that action, in turn, prompts a duel between him and Pavel (234–39).

[23] Whether the Russian intelligentsia accurately understood the ideas of European thinkers and writers is beside the point. What matters is how they believed that certain ideas were European regardless of whether they actually were.

[24] Walicki, History of Russian Thought, 92–114. Representative and important thinkers of Slavophilism include Kireyevsky, Khomvakov (see n. 7), Konstantin Aksakov (1817–60), and Yury Samarin (1819–76).

[25] For more about the obshchina and sobornost, see Ware, “Sobornost and Eucharistic Ecclesiology”; Trepanier, Political Symbols in Russian History; Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime.

[26] It is the ideas of Ivan, not necessarily his behavior, that represent these European values for Dostoevsky. Ivan’s actions reveal a person conflicted between his ideas of the Grand Inquisitor and his love of life “regardless of its logic” (Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov [New York: Penguin Classics, 1982], 269 [hereafter cited in parentheses in notes and text]): his confession of patricide at Dimitry’s trial (805–9), his conversation with a devil (746–65), his uneasy relationship with Smerdyakov (311–22, 708–45), and his recognition of his betrayal when he departs Chermashnya (328–29). It is Smerdyakov, who has been influenced by Ivan, whose actions realize Ivan’s European ideas in the novel.

[27] The literature on books 5 (which includes the chapter “The Grand Inquisitor”) and 6 is enormous, although none of it examines the peasantry in any detail. Selected works that connect these chapters with Dostoevsky’s critique of the West and his alternative proposal to regenerate Russia are Lee Trepanier, “The Politics and Experience of Active Love in The Brothers Karamazov,” Perspectives on Political Science 38, no. 4 (2009): 197–205; Steven Cassedy, Dostoevsky’s Religion (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Harriet Murav, “From Skandalon to Scandal: Ivan’s Rebellion Reconsidered,” Slavic Review 63, no. 4 (2004): 756–70; Malcolm V. Jones, “Dostoevskii and Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, ed. W. J. Leatherbarrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 148–74; Diane Oenning Thompson, “Dostoevskii and Science,” in Leatherbarrow, Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, 191–211; Susan Leigh Anderson, On Dostoevsky (Boston: Wadsworth, 2001); George Pattison and Diane Oenning Thompson, Dostoyevsky and the Christian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000); James P. Scanlan, “Dostoevsky’s Arguments for Immortality,” Russian Review 59, no. 2 (2000): 1–20; Bruce K. Ward, “Dostoevsky and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Literature and Theology 11, no. 3 (1997): 270–83; Liza Knapp, The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996); Robert L. Belknap, The Genesis of “The Brothers Karamazov”: The Aesthetics, Ideology, and Psychology of Text Making (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Stewart R. Sutherland, Atheism and the Rejection of God: Contemporary Philosophy and “The Brothers Karamazov” (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977); Edward Wasiolek, Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).

For more about Dostoevsky’s criticisms of Europe, see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impression (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997); Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009); Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Frank, Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

[28] Earlier Dostoevsky tried to navigate a middle course between the Westernizers and Slavophiles in the “native soil” movement but had to abandon this position as further ideological polarization made this option no longer viable. Wayne Dowler, Dostoevsky, Grigor’ev, and Native Soil Conservatism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

[29] However, he later rescues the peasant after he recognizes his responsibility in his father’s patricide. The third conversation between Smerdyakov and Ivan has a profound effect upon the latter, leading him to begin to question some of his ideas (7441–45).

[30] Besides the serf boy torn apart by his master’s dogs (284), the suffering of the peasantry is also heartbreakingly described in the village that Dmitry passes on his way to the prosecutor. A “babby” is crying because it has neither food nor clothing to keep it warm, prompting Dmitry to ask, “Why are people poor? Why’s the babby poor? . . . Why don’t they feed the babby?” (596).

[31] The case of Smerdyakov is an interesting one because his origins are half peasantry (Stinking Lizaveta) and half gentry (Fyodor), with his upbringing overseen by Grigory and Marfa but financially supported by Fyodor. He is technically a servant, but interest in Ivan’s ideas reflects his gentry’s origins. For the sake of this chapter, I exclude him from the peasantry, although I could see how one could make a case otherwise.

[32] For more about Dostoevsky’s views of the nineteenth-century Russian legal system, see Brian Conlon, “Dostoevsky v. the Judicial Reforms of 1864: How and Why One of Nineteenth-Century Russia’s Greatest Writers Criticized the Nation’s Most Successful Reform,” Russian Law Journal 2, no. 4 (2014): 7–62; Gary Rosenshield, Western Law, Russian Justice: Dostoevsky, the Jury Trial, and the Law (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

[33] For more about these teachings, see Trepanier, “Politics and Experience of Active Love.”

[34] David Walsh provides an account of how the experiential encounter of the person transpires in Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016).

[35] Sarah Hudspith, Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness: A New Perspective on Unity and Brotherhood (New York: Routledge, 2003), 139–60. For more about Nicholas I’s “official ideology,” see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, “‘Nationality’ in the State Ideology during the Reign of Nicholas I,” Russian Review 19, no. 1 (1960): 38–46.

[36] For more about the religious influence of the elders on Dostoevsky’s novel, see Leonard J. Stanton, “Zedergol’m’s Life of Elder Leonid of Optina as a Source of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,” Russian Review 49, no. 4 (1990): 443–55.

[37] For more about the role that women play in Dostoevsky’s works, see Richard Avramenko and Jingcai Ying, “Dostoevsky’s Heroines: Or, On the Compassion of Russian Women,” in Dostoevsky’s Political Thought, ed. Richard Avramenko and Lee Trepanier (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 73–90.

[38] Trepanier, “Politics and Experience of Active Love.” For more about Dosteovsky’s use of words and images, see Carol Apollonio, “Dostoevsky’s Religion: Words, Images, and the Seeds of Charity,” Dostoevsky Studies, n.s., 13 (2009): 23–35. For more about the history and importance of icons in Russian Orthodoxy, see Vladimir Ivanov, Russian Icons (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

[39] Eric Voegelin writes about the nature of this experiential encounter with the divine as prompted by myth, philosophy, and revelation: Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Order and History Volume I: Israel and Revelation, The Collected Works of Eric Volume 14 , ed. Maurice P. Hogan (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Order and History Volume 2: The World of the Polis The Collected Works of Eric Volume 15, ed. Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Order and History Volume III: Plato and Aristotle, The Collected Works of Eric Volume 16 , ed. Dante L. Germino (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

[40] Although one may disagree with his proposed solutions, see Huntington, Who Are We?, for a correct diagnosis of the problem. For more about the American left, see Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), and some of the reactions against the book, such as Jonathan Rauch, “Speaking as a . . .” New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/mark-lilla-liberal-speaking/; Pankaj Mishra, “What Is Great about Ourselves,” London Review of Books, September 21, 2017, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/pankaj-mishra/what-is-great-about-ourselves. For more about the question of citizenship in twentieth-first-century America, see Michael S. Merry, “Plural Societies and the Possibility of Shared Citizenship,” Educational Theory 62, no. 4 (2012): 371–80.

[41] Murray, Coming Apart; Putnam, Our Kids; Gest, New Minority; Vance, Hillbilly Elegy. The symbolization of the white working class as American upward mobility came at the expense of people of color, who were marginalized in American society. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2007). For today’s politics, see Kathleen R. Arnold, America’s New Working Class: Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

[42] Again, except for Huntington’s Who Are We? A representative sample of these studies can be found in n. 9.

[43] The literature about the adverse effects of globalized free trade on the working class is enormous. Some examples of the criticism of globalized free trade are Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2017); Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

[44] Trump may not actually implement policies to help the white working class, but he symbolizes their frustrations and aspirations, which is at the core of populism. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 19–20, 23, 29–30, 34; also see Williams, White Working Class; John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics (New York: Columbia Golden Reports, 2016). For more about nostalgia and its role in American politics, see Yuval Levin, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

[45] In fairness to Dostoevsky, he wants to preserve aspects of the past but infuse it with new meaning. His proposal ultimately is not nostalgic but rather looks forward to a time when Russians can reclaim a sense of community.

[46] The seminal study of the collapse of social capital and community in the United States is Robert Putman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); also see Putnam, Our Kids; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).

[47] Of course, the “sensibility” of this solution is presently being debated in the United States. I want the United States to continue to be a leader in the global liberal order and invest in the white working class so they can adapt to this new social and economic reality. I acknowledge that others may have legitimate disagreements with this position, and I may not be correct in this “sensible” option. See the March 2017 issue of Foreign Affairs, What Was the Liberal Order? The World We May Be Losing. For an example of genuine investment in the white working class, see Allison Williams, “The German Model Response to Globalization,” Handelsblatt Global, January 10, 2017, https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/opinion/populist-politics-the-german-model-response-to-globalization/23565144.html?ticket=ST-2013130-yjrxnsrOe67cLyJwXZQV-ap3; Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, and Jens Suedekum, “Adjusting to Globalization: Evidence from Worker-Establishment Matches in Germany,” Centre for Economic Policy Research Discussion Paper DP11045, January 20, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2717594; Tamar Jacoby, “Why Is Germany So Much Better at Training Its Workers?,” Atlantic, October 16, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-germany-is-so-much-better-at-training-its-workers/381550.

This chapter is from Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

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