любовь?

I've been downloading a lot of the "classics" to read lately on my Kindle. This is for three reasons.

1.) I feel there are lots of holes in my education, regardless of all the English classes I took, and I'm one of those people who never wants to stop learning.

2.) Ok, admittedly, they're all from the same time period--the 19th century--because I have a fetish. I have, however, branched out into literature that's not American or English now that I've more or less exhausted the Victorian canon from those two countries.

3.) If it's more than 100 years old, chances are, the copyright's expired, and the book is public domain. This means free or less than $2 Kindle downloads. For a poor person, this cannot be emphasized too much.

I've been working on mid- to late-19th century Russian literature lately. Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Goncharov, Ostrovsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgenev. (Ok, that's who all is in the collection. So far, I've hit Chekhov [Ivanov], Dostoevsky [The Brothers Karamazov], Tolstoy [Anna Karenina], and Turgenev [Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories, a short story collection]. I'll get to the others eventually.)

Allow me a small digression here. The Russians are...interesting. Actually, I don't even say that in a disparaging way. They really are fascinating. Russia is on my list of Top 5 Places I Want To Visit.

The Russian Empire was awfully similar to the antebellum American South. In Britain, for example, serfdom was basically obsolete by the 1600s. In Russia, however, serfdom--which is basically just slavery--persisted until the tsar freed them in 1861, fearing a peasant uprising if they were not freed. 1861.

When the serfs were freed, things went more or less from bad to worse. The former serfs ended up being sharecroppers for the same people who'd owned them before; it was just another form of slavery, basically.

And there you have the history of the 19th century American South as well, from the pre-war slave-owning plantations to Reconstruction, only colder. Much, much colder. The only difference? The Russians eventually had a revolution. The South "found Jesus." In the end, the Communists and the Baptists fucked us both.

Anyway. Back to what I was saying about literature. Russian literature is very different from what you'll see from other places around the same time period. That's pretty much because Russia made the jump from the Middle Ages to modern times in the course of about a decade. Time travel like that is sure to set everything off-kilter.

But when I read things by the authors of the so-called "Golden Age" of Russian literature, I notice something. You see them talking about love in a completely different way than, say, the British or even the Americans. The Brits, especially, wrote these fanciful, idealized love stories, which I like to read, but aren't very realistic. The Russians, though, they write about love being mixed with hatred, about loving someone so much while simultaneously wanting to kill him/her.

The Russians get it.

I've been told over and over that love and hate can't exist together, but that's not true. They aren't mutually exclusive opposites. They're opposite sides of the same coin. The more you love someone, the greater your ability to hate him/her. The Russians embrace it and look at it as a more pure, more real kind of love.

The passion that's contained in that kind of love makes most of the ruminative, almost courtly love written about in British novels of the same time period (the Brontes excepted) look wooden and artificial. The love of British novels is like an actor who's never felt any emotion at all trying to abstractly portray what he thinks love is. Russian love is diving headlong into a freezing ocean, knowing you're going to get hypothermia at best or die at worst, but not giving a shit because it's there and it's real and it's pure, and, goddammit, that ocean means something.

Fuck me. I'm obviously Russian.