Russians take positions to the extreme. As a result, Russian intellectual history shows us where ideas may lead—and in Russia’s case, really did. The English prided themselves on moderation and suspicion of radical abstractions, but Russians regarded anything short of ultimate positions as cowardice or, at least, as uncharacteristic of Russians. Restraint, compromise, prudence—these were for Westerners.
Dostoevsky observed that if a European theory fascinated Russians, they discovered a “Russian aspect” that utterly transformed it. Specifically, Russian intellectuals took European ideas as springboards for radical action. Their extreme conclusions were “drawn only in Russia,” Dostoevsky said with a mix of alarm and admiration. “In Europe . . . the possibility of these conclusions is not even suspected.”
It is no wonder, then, that Russia invented the system we have come to call totalitarianism and that its greatest writers explored totalitarianism and its antecedents. Russia is also where modern terrorism, the focus of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, began. Dostoevsky also invented the prison camp novel with Notes from the House of the Dead. In the early Soviet period, Eugene Zamyatin wrote the first dystopian novel.
