By Arlyn Kantz
The historians of Russia and Dixie do write
How their soldiers believed in the glorious fight
Now Bubba and Joe Bob, Boris and Gleb
Are stacked in amongst the magnificent dead
The breath-taking battle they did not survive
But all four fought well with God on their side
I read biographies of dead writers for company. Of late I have been flitting back and forth between Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Flannery O’Connor. An Orthodox survivor of the Soviet Gulag and a Roman Catholic slowly dying from lupus may seem like strange mixed company; but as different as they are, I feel I could have been friends with, or at least mentored by either of them – if they would have had me. I have an Orthodox connection to Solzhenitsyn and a Southern woman connection to O’Connor, but I never imagined their having any connection to each other until I found out I’m not the first Southern writer to keep Russian company.
In her article “Dostoevsky and the Literature of the American South,” Maria Bloshteyn cites more than sixty sources to show the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky on writers of the Southern United States. Dostoevsky, a nineteenth-century Russian novelist, had a profound influence on the likes of William Faulkner of Mississippi (of “As I Lay Dying” fame), Thomas Wolfe of North Carolina (“Look Homeward, Angel”), Flannery O’Connor of Georgia (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”), Carson McCullers of Georgia (“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter”), and Walker Percy of Alabama (“The Moviegoer”). All admit their debt to Dostoevsky. All admired the profoundness of his work.
It is not too surprising that the Russians Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn share similar biographical story arcs, but what does Dostoevsky hold in common with post-Civil War writers in Dixieland? What cultural touchstones could Cossacks possibly share with Confederates? Bloshteyn succinctly points out a string of commonalities.
The American South and Russia both:
- struggled with industrial backwardness in contrast to more industrialized neighbors;
- had a small, educated wealthy leisure class and masses of uneducated poor;
- experienced a devastating military loss in the 1800s (Russia lost the Crimean War just before U.S. Civil War began);
- had their social, economic, and cultural systems turned upside-down by the emancipation of slaves/serfs; and
- were absolutely certain that God was the champion of their cause, catapulting the populace upon defeat into a post-war religious crisis.
Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” (1866) and “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880) were both written in the epoch after the freeing of the serfs and depict a society undergoing a major metamorphosis. Southern writers identify with this. Like Dostoevsky, they have a proclivity to tackle life’s hardest questions like “Does suffering have any meaning?” and “Does God even exist?”
While it is obviously true that not every Southerner is Christian, every Southerner old enough to sprout grey hairs had a childhood immersed in an intensely religious culture. We were soaked in a world in which every physical action had a spiritual implication. This phenomenon caused Flannery O’Connor to call her beloved South “Christ haunted.”
In a letter to Cecil Dawkins, she described the fundamental difference in the worldview of the South and North as follows:
The South … still believes that man has fallen and that he is only perfectible by God’s grace, not by his own unaided efforts. The Liberal [i.e. Northern] approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up.
Southerners knew and still know (for now) that the concept of man is mainly theological. A Southern evangelical would sooner blame the devil when things don’t go his way than to view life through a more secular lens.
Southerners older than fifty might balk at the idea that they have anything in common with damnable Russkies. But before charlatans in leisure suits showed up and sold the South the prosperity gospel, every Southerner knew – as well as any Russian – that suffering was integral to salvation and that the devil brought a man down through pride. Compounding the haze of Cold War propaganda is the fact that the newly resurrected Russian Orthodox Church looks to a Southerner like an aberrant medieval version of Roman Catholicism. (Southerners would be surprised to learn that the Dostoevsky saw the Roman Church as “one grand corrupt organization” and Rome returned the insult by banning many of his writings.)
Last year I took a stab at finding live companionship to supplement the company of dead authors. I attended a writer’s retreat at which most of the attendees were Orthodox Christians. Having not yet read Bloshteyn, I was surprised by the distinct regional bias that came into play. Californians were overjoyed that we could talk about gender without anyone crying and screaming. New Yorkers expressed their shock and dismay that the once-open doors to Manhattan’s publishing houses were now closed. I wondered at both groups’ sense of surprise. Texans have considered both coasts mad for decades.
When I told my fellow writers from the Northeast that Orthodox churches were busting at the seams in my area, they were happy for me but could not share growth stories of their own, and none showed an interest in exploring geographical reasons for why. I confess, regional theories are new to me. I was not very articulate introducing the topic, but I was surprised how quickly the subject was shut down with a joking reminder that our side had lost the war.
Yes, the South did lose. And for that reason, we might be better able to bear up under the crashing change that is coming down upon our country. I sense, having been devastated before, the South is much better prepared to survive upheaval. Only time will tell.
In Solzhenitsyn’s 1975 memoir, “The Oak and the Calf,” he expresses a low opinion of Western culture even as Russia is struggling in the tight grip of Soviet totalitarianism:
I put no hope in the West – indeed, no Russian ever should. If we ever become free it will only be by our own efforts. If the twentieth century has any lesson for mankind, it is we who will teach the West, not the West us. Excessive ease and prosperity have weakened their will and their reason.
Watching my country crumble, how can I argue against Solzhenitsyn’s opinion? Yet I remind myself that Solzhenitsyn, when he was a guest of the U.S., resided in Vermont. I have found no evidence of him spending time south of the Mason-Dixon. Would he have awakened to any of the many commonalities? Would he have seen why so many Southern writers were drawn to his beloved Dostoevsky? We are, after all, the side that lost the war, making us (for now) another country.
Arlyn Kantz came into Orthodoxy from a Bapticostal background in 2011. She lives in Alvarado, Texas, and attends Archangel Gabriel in Weatherford. She has Sunday school curriculum in the works with Ancient Faith Publishing and writes fiction under the pen name A.J. Prufrock.
