? Imagine the Tsar of all the Russias summoned all of Russia’s great writers together for a banquet.

Why, there is Pushkin, the jewel in Russia’s crown, charming all the ladies, both young and old, pretty and plain. And there go Chekhov and Gogol, deep in intellectual arguments that would grace Versailles. And here comes Count Tolstoy, jousting with Turgenev, as they cross swords on Russia’s endless social textures.

And there, alone and sullenly growling in a dark corner, seethes Dostoyevsky, dead broke after another high-stakes cards’ game, giving you that unnerving glare that penetrates into the darkest recesses of your soul where it unpicks your most secret thoughts, as if they were an infant’s first babblings.

What a heavenly soirée that would be, with Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Chekhov, Bunin, Gogol and Tolstoy ???

And all of them, even Dostoyevsky whose Notes from the Underground understands the Ukrainians even better than they understand themselves, castigated by Zelensky’s foul mouthed caste, as if they were Peeping Toms and not the giants of world literature that they are.

? Declan Hayes writes

#dostoyevsky #zelensky

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