What Russia can teach us

From Tolstoy to Shostakovich, Russian culture shaped Europe. We must not lose it.

At the Dressing-Table by Zinaida Serebriakova (1909) (c) Tretyakov Gallery, Russia

We are the willing prisoners of the chances of our lives – upbringings, friendships, lucky (and unlucky) breaks. It happened that I was born into an outsider’s love of Russian culture. The first serious novel my mother pressed on me was War and Peace. Half a century later, reread more times than I can remember, it remains my guide to the tricky business of being a human – an engrossing, irresistible handbook of goodness and wickedness; the interplay between intimate life and public life; and above all, the dazing flicker between intense joy and spasms of grief that we call being alive. I would cast away every book of religion and philosophy for Tolstoy.

Later, as an unhappy adolescent, I discovered Shostakovich for myself. I fell first for his easiest, most accessible music – the Second Piano Concerto, the Fifth Symphony, the famous waltz from the Jazz Suites. It made more sense to me then the Beatles, Stones or even Bob Dylan. Eventually, I was gorging on all the symphonies, and then the sublime string quartets and solo piano music. These still seem to me the authentic sound of modern life.

Other Russian greats then came, sauntering along through my younger adulthood – Pushkin, Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn.

Much later still, at last visiting Moscow’s Tretyakov gallery, I understood that Russian painting is European painting but through a looking-glass. Without an equivalent to the European Renaissance, it is made mysterious by unfamiliar artists who nevertheless follow through classicism, romanticism, impressionism and modernism. The titans of Russian painting, Repin and his pupil Serov, deserve to be as well known in the wider world as Manet or Matisse. No Western collection has a self-portrait as striking as Zinaida Serebriakova’s At the Dressing-Table in 1909 (and the artist’s later personal history is astonishing). The picture is literally impossible to walk past.

So where is this heading? The Russian, taken all in all, is the greatest of European cultures. Music dominates in Germany, painting in France, poetry in Britain; but nowhere else has the variety of achievement and emotional punch of Russia. Without Russian culture, Europe is lesser – shallower, more ignorant, more meagre.

It seems important to say this now because among the more obvious damage inflicted by Vladimir Putin – to Ukrainian citizens and cities, Western pipelines, world peace – is that Russia is being severed from mainstream European culture. Yes, of course, the books are still in bookshops, the music is played – but there is no conversation, no meeting of minds. St Petersburg is off limits. When was the last time you saw a new Russian film? This is a cultural severing.

I completely understand why besieged Ukrainians, with missiles raining down on schools, cultural centres and hospitals, children abducted, and their very identity ridiculed by the Kremlin, don’t much feel like celebrating Pushkin right now.

[See also: The friendship that made Shostakovich]

Indeed, at the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian government called for a complete boycott of Russian culture. Oleksandr Tkachenko, the culture minister, made a vivid and compelling case for it. In 2022 his ministry had already found 800 cases of Russian destruction of Ukrainian culture: “monuments and works of art, museums, valuable historical buildings”. The war, said Tkachenko, was “a civilisational battle over culture and history”. He called for Western cultural institutions to “pause” the performance of music by Russian composers, and refuse to work with Russian performers who declined to denounce the Putin regime. Many did as he asked, though, as in sport, it has been patchy and inconsistent. Earlier this month, the Kyiv fundraising platform United24 doubled down on trying to get Chekhov and Tchaikovsky off public stages from London to Milan. It also argued that we cannot separate Russian culture from the Kremlin’s imperialism, a spokesperson noting that: “Literature was without question the most effective tool of colonisation of the non-Russian outskirts of the Russian empire.”

It is hard to refute this while comfortably sitting in London. Some Russian writers certainly had Slavophile and authoritarian instincts – Dostoyevsky being an obvious case in point, although he was nearly executed and spent periods in grim prison cells. Tolstoy, though he fought in the Crimean War and had some of the Russian prejudices of his time, became one of the most powerful voices in the world for pacifism and for anarchism.

Solzhenitsyn? I don’t have to begin to make the case. Pasternak was hated by the Kremlin, particularly when he won the Nobel Prize. And although I speak and read no Russian – a failure which you may reasonably argue takes my entire argument off at the knees – the great poets of modern Russia were hardly propagandists either. Anna Akhmatova barely survived Stalin’s hostility: his cultural thug Andrei Zhdanov sneered that she was “half-harlot, half-nun”, and her long poem “Requiem” is about the sufferings of the ordinary people under him. Mandelstam died in a labour camp. Yevtushenko, like Shostakovich, struggled all his life to balance conscience and recognition, but he at least protested publicly against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It is perfectly possible to find Russian artists who became propagandists for a Russian imperial world-view. Pushkin – the standard-bearer for Russian culture almost as Shakespeare is for English – who died in 1837, is in a different category from most. In his history of Ukraine, The Gates of Europe, Serhii Plokhy portrays him as a leading and aggressive propagandist for Russian hegemony over Poland and Ukraine, quoting the lines: “Kiev, decrepit, golden-domed/this ancestor of Russian towns…” Pushkin is widely loathed in Ukraine today, his statues vandalised.

In general, however, it makes little sense to connect great historic composers, film-makers, poets or novelists with the views or behaviour of a modern political regime. What would Tchaikovsky or Eisenstein have thought of Putin in 2025? The very question is ridiculous.

War coarsens judgement, but it makes no more sense to shun Russian culture because of Ukraine than it would to stop reading Saul Bellow in protest at Donald Trump. Great writers and artists live far outside Kremlins and presidential offices. Conservative or liberal, they are instinctive dissidents.

So, cultural boycott is an awful weapon. It hurts nothing so much as the imaginations of those doing the boycotting. Does attending The Cherry Orchard or The Nutcracker leave anyone coming out into the night thinking, “Well, Vlad has a point”? This goes beyond Russia, of course. There are many reasons not to see the Disney remake of Snow White, which looks emetic. But boycotting it because of the casting of Gal Gadot, an Israeli actor who has supported Israel in its war against Hamas, is not one of them. Who would see it and come out thinking differently in any way about Netanyahu or Gaza?

Turning our backs on musicians, actors or film-makers is a one-way degradation. Thoughtful people have always understood this. It’s why during the worst of the Blitz in London in the Second World War, the Jewish-born pianist Myra Hess was playing Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann in her National Gallery concerts. It’s why, at one of the worst moments of the Cold War in 1971, Benjamin Britten and Shostakovich gave a joint concert in the British embassy in Moscow. But this argument goes far beyond cultural boycott. The Ukraine war has frozen any real interchange between western Europe and Russia. It’s what war does. But it causes profound damage and grief. Thanks to my mother, and thanks to the chance of discovering Shostakovich, I have always felt that European culture without Russia is missing a wing.

Much better educated people than me have spent lifetimes trying to pin down the difference between Russian and European sensibilities. The most benign explanation would talk of a Russian candour – a clarity, an emotional directness – which comes from living on the edge of such a vast continental space. Other observers see Russia’s geography as its destiny in a more sinister way. Ungovernable space and invasion by the Golden Horde made Russia profoundly autocratic and violent. The game was lost, perhaps, as early as 1471 when mercantile and republican Novgorod was defeated by tsarist Moscow. Since then there has been, the argument runs, an opposition between Russia’s “Asiatic” submission to autocracy and more liberal western Europe.

Martin Sixsmith, once a BBC foreign correspondent in Moscow, quoted the poet Alexander Blok in his history of Russia. Blok suggested to his fellow countrymen that they were holding up a shield between two enemy races, Europeans and Mongols. For Europe, “Rejoicing, grieving and drenched in blood,/Russia is a sphinx that gazes at you/With hatred and with love.” But the Scythian or Asiatic explanation, insisting that Russia is deeply other and outside Europe, collapses before the generous humanism of a Tolstoy or Turgenev or Chekhov. It takes us a long way from the lovable Rostov family, or the sugary bourgeois ambiance of the Nutcracker.

And the traffic was always two-way. Tolstoy kept the novels of George Eliot and Dickens close at hand and was deeply read in English literature. It is impossible to imagine Mandelstam without his beloved Goethe or Dante. Diaghilev brought an alien sound and vigour with the Ballets Russes to Paris and London; but he was quickly collaborating with Debussy, Ravel and Picasso. The intertwinings are endless and intimate.

Today, the fundamental problem is not even boycott; it is that missing conversation between western European and Russian thinking and art. However hard it seems to define an absence, let’s be clear this Easter: many of us feel it. Russian imperialism has cut Russia off from us and cut us off from Russia; and we are both much the worse for the amputation.