You know, my dear F.P., I'm so out of practice with posting that I've actually forgotten how to do quotes from other people's posts. So here I am quoting what most struck me about your last post:
but being a synthesisist at heart I was very struck with how the most popular tales coming out of pre-Revolutionary Russia deals heavily with the same moral issues: Is it always wrong to kill a tyrant, who although not doing anything illegal per se nevertheless is a malevolent, exploiting influence. Or, in other words, does murder being illegal equal murder always being immoral and vice versa? And what about collateral damage? Does the end justify the means or will collateral damage curse the tyrannicide and the murderers?
My approach is from something we discussed in another thread, where you said you were fed up with people looking down on teens dealing with this and other moral Angst and Weltschmerz issues through a fascination with NAOTMAA. These teens are often female, perhaps from more conservative backgrounds. Compare them to the often male, more radical youngsters whose "rite of passage" often is reading "Crime and Punishment". It might seem like there is a huge gap between the romantic emo girl crying over NAOTMAA's fate and the Communist-posing Che Guevara-worshipping young male reading "Crime and Punishment" in a cloud of weed smoke, but if we look more closely they are actually reading about the same moral issues.
You are as always extraordinarily sensitive to the nuances. I think the "collateral damage" does deal, if not a death blow, more than a glancing one, to any revolutionary regime. I would like to say a death blow, after the terrible fates of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their children, and NAOTMAA of course, but the fact of the matter is that the French Revolution which dealt the former their brutalization in captivity and the parents their ultimate deaths by violence is still celebrated every July 14th and isn't their very place of execution (not only of them but of many nobility and peasants as well) now a major thoroughfare and public venue for some of these very same celebrations?
Thanks for bringing up the teen Angst and Weltschmerz issues, as you put it, I do think they are relevant. I have to say that as a little girl in a very liberal (socialist, actually, my father was a big fan of Trotsky) household, NAOTMAA was a sort of crucible for me when I was, say 10 or 11 and first read Massie's book. But Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment was also a major, no doubt much more major, rite of passage, when I was considerably older, 17 or 18 (note, before college, I read it on my own, without any formal intermediaries, which surely accounts for the incredible, unadulterated impact it had on me, because it came as a complete intellectual and emotional shock at the time). When I read C&P I thought, this is everything a novel should be, this is life, this is death, this is violence and evil, it is the truth. I still believe that, for the most part.
So yeah, you've probably hit the nail on the head yet another time, we have been discussing the same moral issues all along, and maybe Dostoevsky even acted as a sort of catharsis for me. As an adult, the more I read Dostoevsky (and I think I've read just about everything of his, except Diary of a Writer and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions), the more I realize that he was absolutely obsessed with the human capacity for evil, which includes every kind of abuse humans are capable of inflicting on each other. "Collateral damage," in fact.
