Every political movement and every historical development has its origins and foundation in the writings and thoughts of those great visionaries and sages who were ahead of their time and their people by as much as a century: Rousseau and the French Revolution, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as the precursors of our current German generation, and the visionaries of Bolshevism and communism:
Tolstoy admired Mozart and Beethoven, and in his long stories, from Family Happiness to The Kreutzer Sonata, which is named after Beethoven’s violin sonata, he portrays how much he admired their music. Even in War and Peace, one senses this admiration. Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, also opposed the emancipation of the muzhiks and supported the old regime, in which a landlord takes care of the land and the souls attached to it. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, in The Devils, warned people against revolutionary nihilism. This novel was a criticism of Bolshevism avant la lettre. In one way, these two great authors opposed the West because they thought the Russian soul was different, more attuned to the spiritual realm, and that the West could never match Russia’s spiritual level. This was a widespread idea in Russia back then, as it is now. However, Bolshevism especially attacked the spiritual being of Russia, and until the Second World War, it continued to do so. I think the author of this piece is understandably hostile towards Russia and its culture, and his hostility has beclouded his judgement.
The opinions on Dostoevsky are interesting when one reads National Socialist texts - while in this one the author is more hostile to him and Tolstoy, the author Dr. Karl Zimmermann in The Intellectual Foundations of National Socialism (1933) remarks that Dostoevsky, “the peculiar spirit of the East, certainly not healthy for Germanic sensibilities, but nevertheless powerful, delves deep into the soul of his people, recognizing its depth and greatness, but even more so its weaknesses and limitations; he suffers with them and affirms what the Russian people alone were able to preserve and lead upward: tsarism, orthodoxy, and nationalism…The correctness of Dostoevsky's worldview for his people has since been proven by recent findings in racial biology.”
I lean more towardsZimmermann’s and Rosenberg’s view on Dostoevsky, but I also don’t blame some of the author’s thoughts as translated here; you’ll also see this difference whenever you read a NS text about Russia, some are more sympathetic to the Russian people, others are straight up anti-Slavic as a whole like Himmler.
Tolstoy admired Mozart and Beethoven, and in his long stories, from Family Happiness to The Kreutzer Sonata, which is named after Beethoven’s violin sonata, he portrays how much he admired their music. Even in War and Peace, one senses this admiration. Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, also opposed the emancipation of the muzhiks and supported the old regime, in which a landlord takes care of the land and the souls attached to it. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, in The Devils, warned people against revolutionary nihilism. This novel was a criticism of Bolshevism avant la lettre. In one way, these two great authors opposed the West because they thought the Russian soul was different, more attuned to the spiritual realm, and that the West could never match Russia’s spiritual level. This was a widespread idea in Russia back then, as it is now. However, Bolshevism especially attacked the spiritual being of Russia, and until the Second World War, it continued to do so. I think the author of this piece is understandably hostile towards Russia and its culture, and his hostility has beclouded his judgement.
The opinions on Dostoevsky are interesting when one reads National Socialist texts - while in this one the author is more hostile to him and Tolstoy, the author Dr. Karl Zimmermann in The Intellectual Foundations of National Socialism (1933) remarks that Dostoevsky, “the peculiar spirit of the East, certainly not healthy for Germanic sensibilities, but nevertheless powerful, delves deep into the soul of his people, recognizing its depth and greatness, but even more so its weaknesses and limitations; he suffers with them and affirms what the Russian people alone were able to preserve and lead upward: tsarism, orthodoxy, and nationalism…The correctness of Dostoevsky's worldview for his people has since been proven by recent findings in racial biology.”
I lean more towardsZimmermann’s and Rosenberg’s view on Dostoevsky, but I also don’t blame some of the author’s thoughts as translated here; you’ll also see this difference whenever you read a NS text about Russia, some are more sympathetic to the Russian people, others are straight up anti-Slavic as a whole like Himmler.