Are Russians white trash?

A few idiotic thoughts about Dostoyevsky

These days, your humble Caucasus-cum-Balkan French correspondent of German descent is reading Dostoyevsky.

Of course, I had read quite a bit of it as a teenager, in various translations. But now, I’m finally able to re-read the best pieces in Russian – with a thick dictionary next to my bed (since that’s generally where I am while reading). It’s part of the advantages of spending most of the Covid years in the Caucasus: you will never learn any of the local tribal dialects aka “national languages” of the Caucasus, of course – unless you marry into one of those tribes –, since everybody will instantly and for ever stop uttering one single word of Georgian or Armenian in front of you as soon as they get the slightest suspicion that they might get understood by speaking Russian or English to you. But if you stay long enough in inexpensive villages studying the local shashlik culture and getting drunk with construction migrant workers of the Krasnodar Krai, you will end up speaking some decent colonial marketplace Russian, with not too many genders (since Caucasian languages have none), a much simplified declension (Caucasians are keener on verbs) and a pronunciation that will attract much OMON (SWAT) upon you in Moscow if you’re not blond enough. Then, one day, you might notice that this infamous dialect of marshrutkas and Yandex taxis is not totally unrelated to the literary code used in the 19^th century to write all those dignified novels and plays commented upon ever since by real French Jewish philosophers in real Paris cafes.

So why not try and see what those art monuments look like from the inside?

So here am I reading The Idiot again.

The first thing that should strike any Western reader:

Nothing ever happens.

By the time Dostoyevsky wrote The Idiot, in France, naturalist writers would depict strikes, prostitution, peasant life and the adulterous affairs of some village pharmacist’s wife – while, around Lev Nikolayevich (the Idiot), every single character actually belongs to the same social group: the parasitic gentry. Most of them have some honorary job as public officers of the Despot’s gigantic bureaucracy. But anyway, it’s obviously rather some status necessity, since the wages deriving from such positions are not enough to maintain their expensive lifestyle, mainly financed by passive income as landowners, inheriting village domains and city real estate. They spend all winters in the same Saint-Petersburg buildings, and – since AC hasn’t been invented yet, and the continental summer turns those buildings into ovens for the human flesh – most of all summers in the same posh dacha neighbourhood not too far from the city.

From time to time, somebody becomes richer, after some distant aunt died. Not too often, people divorce, or get married, or commit suicide. Outside the city (with the abovementioned, attached summer department in the outskirts), the world consist in only two, largely abstract places: the province (a continent-sized empire, where you go to die, or as a punishment, or to hide from somebody or from yourself) and “abroad” (za granitsy), i.e. “beyond the border”, as if there were only one border, and, beyond that border, only one country (where decent people speak mostly French).

There’s a weird reality show atmosphere, but the script is boring. Instead of actual narrative twists, soon you start to suspect that many of the few surprises of the plot are surprising only for you, because, though reading in Russian, you’re not part of that culture – so that you don’t really see things coming, since the characters’ behaviour has that strange, permanently outlandish style. We’ll get back to this point a bit later.

No drinks but champagne

Another red light is that everybody’s constantly drinking champagne. Literally all gatherings are soaked in that costly French beverage. My guess is that you would find less champagne bottles opened in the total French literary production of the year 1868 than in its Russian counterpart. And, since none of the drinkers seems to be producing any kind of industrial added value to anything, you just have to imagine the massive stream of exported energy, timber, furs and precious metals that must have left the country to pay for all those expensive French bottles.

This, too, amplifies the reality show atmosphere of most scenes. Why? Because popular reality shows of the first decades of the 21^st century in the West typically exhibit the life and habits of denizens from the white trash, generally obsessed by a few stereotypical trademarks that used to be trendy among rich people of their parents’ generation. Being immune to the differentiating snobbism of holders of old money is, indeed, a specific cultural feature of white trash parvenus (though the reality show characters are often not even bona fide parvenus – it’s just the producers who keep them bathing in cash for the time of the shooting).

What white trash has in common with first generation immigrants is to have been torn away from some frugal (generally agricultural) old, organic culture and thrown as an atomized mass into the maelstrom of Western cities. They just happen – unlike the imported darkies – to share the ethnic and (to some extent) linguistic profile of the dominant national bourgeoisie of such cities.

So is that Russian gentry some kind of white trash? As the locally privileged group, normally, they should by no way fit into the definition.

But this is where Spengler’s concept of pseudomorphosis kicks in: ever since Peter the Great[1], the non-religious culture of Russian elites was made out of largely (if not totally) imported contents: writing and dressing styles, beverages, culinary receipts, phraseology, furnishing, fine arts… The monolingual layer of society was not – as in 19^th century France – the dominant bourgeoisie, but the peasantry, kept on the plantation and treated as war prisoners from some foreign tribes. Ever since, the elites of Russia (or, to be precise: the religiously orthodox part of said elites) have been Slavic the way people, while totally assimilated to Turkic culture, are still “mostly Persian” in Turkmenistan or Azerbaijan: purely by virtue of genetics. Were it not for the risk of jeopardizing their loyalty to the State, there would be no satisfying explanation for the fact that, at the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, people kept speaking mostly Slavic in Russian cities.

Not really white?

So this is the context in which one starts to understand what Dostoyevsky’s characters – the Saint-Petersburg gentry – mean by “beyond the border”: it’s a code, structurally similar to those used by contemporary Western white trash to refer the old money neighbourhoods, where many locals have less cash than they do, but would still not invite them to parties, because having tea with savages makes them uncomfortable.

Thus it’s no real surprise for me anymore to watch the US hip-hop scene’s fascination with Vladimir Putin. In the eyes of black rappers, Putin literally is their comrade Eminem, turned into the ruler of a nuclear world power.