Authors

Discussion

The war in Ukraine has shattered the "moral authority" once attached to Russian classical literature. Long regarded as a literature of conscience and compassion, it now appears bound to a culture of violence. This polarization echoes a deeper binary structure within Russian thought from Berdiaev’s idea of the new man born from total negation to the semioticians’ fascination with oppositional systems, where creation demands destruction, and meaning emerges only through radical rupture.

 This paper examines how the ethical and aesthetic foundations of Russian literature, its cult of suffering, redemption, and moral grandeur, intersect with a latent nihilism that transforms moral feeling into an instrument of power. From Dostoevsky’s exaltation of pain as a path to salvation to Tolstoy’s universal moralism, the Russian canon constructs an ethical cosmos where the individual must be annihilated or transfigured. This tension between moral absolutism and ethical erasure becomes strikingly visible today, as the rhetoric of spiritual mission and redemptive sacrifice resurfaces in political discourse.

The paper approaches this question through Georges Bataille’s reflections on literature and evil. For Bataille, literature is not the negation of violence but its transfiguration, an exploration of the sacred through excess, sacrifice, and the breach of moral law. Russian literature, read through this lens, reveals both its ethical ambition and its proximity to the sacred violence it claims to overcome. The ecstatic intensity of Dostoevsky or the visionary totality of Tolstoy can thus be read as moments where literature touches the forbidden, where compassion and cruelty coincide.

In contrast, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales emerge from the space where such metaphysical violence collapses. The Gulag, as Shalamov presents it, is the end of literature understood as redemption or testimony. His anti-aesthetic minimalism and refusal of meaning expose a world in which evil is no longer a moral category but a material condition. In this sense, Shalamov does not continue the Russian tradition; he “cancels” it. The experience of the camps destroys the ethical illusions of realism and confronts literature with its own complicity in aestheticizing suffering.

By juxtaposing classical and post-Gulag writing, this paper explores how the current war reopens the question of literature’s relation to evil. Can literature still be ethical when its very medium, language, bears the marks of domination? The proposed answer is neither rejection nor redemption, but a practice of counter-reading: to read against the moral pathos of the canon, attentive to its fractures, silences, and failures. In the light of the war, such reading becomes an ethical confrontation with nihilism itself, the void that emerges when moral language is exhausted, when literature’s will to meaning meets the inhuman.