Several of my readers and critics have told me that I am a Russian novelist. One reviewer even compared my novel Ambitions to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Flattered as I was, and as egotistical as I am, I would never dream of comparing my abilities with those of Tolstoy. Nevertheless, I had to admit that I am a Russian novelist. I came to that conclusion, not because of what readers said about my books (although that certainly put the idea into my head), but because I realized that my novels have one great attribute in common with the classic Russian novels that were written and published prior to the Bolshevik revolution—or those written under the Communist regime, but available only in the West. That is, they all focus on the subject of doubt. All of my novels are full of characters who constantly ask themselves, “Am I doing the right thing?” “Am I good enough?” “Am I fooling myself?” “Is everyone lying to me?” and so on.
I recently read an article titled “Faith And Russian Literature,” by Gary Saul Morson, in First Things, a magazine that covers news and cultural matters from a Catholic perspective. The following passage in that article confirmed my suspicion that I might be the Russianest American novelist working today:
“Among the words we get from Russian are ‘populism’ and ‘intelligentsia,’ which in Russia meant not intellectuals as a class but adherents of a specific revolutionary ideology. That ideology varied, but it always included some form of anarchism or socialism. Above all, an ‘intelligent’ (a member of the intelligentsia) had to be an atheist and an uncompromising materialist. As Dostoevsky observed, Russians do not become atheists; they believe fervently in atheism.
“Whatever philosophy they might adopt, Russia’s ‘intelligents’ would claim that it solved all complex questions of ethics, meaning, politics, and social life at a stroke. Theories attracted followers most strongly when they totally abolished uncertainty and doubt. Call such thinkers ‘certaintists.’
“The great Russian writers professed the opposite of such certainty. God’s world is too intricate and mysterious for people to understand perfectly, they believed. Whereas ‘intelligents’ proclaimed the simplicity of things, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov revealed their complexity. They were people of wonder who deepened our understanding of questions without providing final answers. They despised the radical intelligentsia. In 1909, the influential critic Michael Gershenson famously observed that the surest gauge of the greatness of a Russian writer was the degree of his hatred of the intelligentsia.”
And, brother, do I despise the intelligentsia! A common misconception, at least in this country, is that “intelligentsia” refers to all educated people. It doesn’t. It refers to educated leftists who consider themselves a sort of priestly élite that, as a group, knows what’s good for all of us and ought to be the boss of us. These are people who can be counted on to be not just wrong, but as wrong as it’s possible to be, on any given issue.
These are the people who advocate depopulation of the planet. The people who insist that the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated. The people who claim that America is “systemically racist.” The people who insist that men who claim to be women, really are women, and vice versa—but that a baby isn’t human life till it’s born. The people who sustain the lie that Donald Trump led an “insurrection” on January 6. 2021. The people who parrot, “diversity is our strength.” I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
I despise the intelligentsia because they hate truth, beauty, and goodness. Invariably, you can expect them to signal their virtue by choosing falsehood over truth, ugliness over beauty, and evil over good. If they ever favor truth, beauty, or good, it’s an aberration, a one-off. Not only that: the intelligentsia wants to eliminate all standards, thus effectively eliminating the very concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness.
Eliminating such standards is, literally, a goal of The Evil One. Yeah, the talking snake. That guy. The intelligentsia are his shock troops. That’s a common theme, in the work of the most eminent Russian novelists. I need to make more of a point of incorporating it in my novels.
