Groundhog Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: The perils of teaching Russian literature in today's Russia

I was chatting online with some former students about how books by Metropolitan Tikhon had appeared on our syllabus, and one girl told me she’d had a nightmare about the state exam – she had to write an end-of-year essay and was required to use a certain number of novoyaz [Newspeak] terms. She tried, but couldn’t remember enough of them.

What really made me angry was the short story “Levsha”^[1] – that Levsha was a drunkard who is being presented as a Russian genius. Look how great he is, better than anyone. He may have a terrible life, and he drinks, but what a jack of all trades! When he wants to he can work wonders, and he doesn’t want to live in that nice, clean Europe of yours.

We had a situation just like in Mozart and Salieri.^[2]In Pushkin’s version, Mozart seems to realize that he’s going to be poisoned, but he guesses he can give Salieri a chance to preserve his humanity. And when I was deciding what I would say during the lesson, I realized that someone could complain about me, and I even knew who. But still, I didn’t want to believe that the children who’ve been in your homeroom for four years, and with whom you’ve had good relations, would go and inform to the cops. I gave them the opportunity to stay human, but they didn’t take it.