Edward Snowden, NSA leaker, fugitive under the Espionage Act, trapped in limbo at a Moscow airport, has homework.
His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has given him a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, along with a book by Anton Chekhov "for dessert". The most wanted man in the world is studying Russian lit – this is music to the ears of Russian majors everywhere. After all those years of being asked "So what're you going to do with that?" as if we had extra limbs, we finally have an excuse to talk about Dostoevsky.
Crime and Punishment, briefly: A young man named Rod Raskolnikov wonders why he ought to follow the rules like everybody else. He drops out of school. Suddenly, he murders a sleazy pawnbroker, and then her sister, too, when she walks in on the crime. He stumbles around, sleeps on his sofa, freaks out, and becomes alienated from his family and friends. There are funny, painfully awkward conversations. He meets a prostitute named Sonya and a sinister rapscallion named Arkady; she tells him to find Christ and he tells him that none of it matters – you might as well make the best of it. A clever detective almost corners Rod. Eventually, Sonya convinces him to confess and go to jail. Years later, in prison and with Sonya at his side, he finally breaks down and presumably find peace. To be overly reductive, Dostoevsky's moral of the story is that sacrifice and submission – to God, and each other – can save your life.
What on earth is Snowden supposed to take from this?
He can at least identify with Raskolnikov a little, as Kucherena has pointed out. First off, the name Raskolnikov derives from the word "dissenter" by way of the verb "to split". He's a man who commits a "crime" he's not sure is actually a crime, and who struggles with the idea of personal freedom. He spends a lot of time by himself in a little room. That's about where the similarities end.
Raskolnikov is a rebel unsure of a cause. Besides a vague impulse to test the limits of freedom and to prove himself special, it's never wholly clear why he murders; much of the novel consists of his own desperate search for a reason. Eventually, he chooses to make Sonya his cause, and for her he gives in and accepts Siberia. Kucherena – a pro-Kremlin stalwart – seems to think Snowden would also do well to submit to the powers that be, whether Putin's Russia or the NSA's America.
But unlike poor old Rod, Snowden is already close to Dostoevsky's moral message: he's knowingly sacrificed "the good life" because he refused to pay the ethical price, and because he believes in something bigger than himself. Snowden has put faith in American society – our notion of civil liberties, at least – where Dostoevsky put faith in God. He didn't want the NSA's sticky stain on his conscience, and he wanted Americans to know and confront their government's misdeeds. For that he gave up a family, a relationship, a well-paid job and a home on Hawaii. He's chosen this course, and except for the bizarre flight that trapped him in Moscow, he seems to have carefully considered each step.
Snowden's mission isn't like Raskolnikov's quest for redemption, it's more like Dostoevsky's attempt to make people confront difficult, uncomfortable questions, and to make them choose what they believe in. In this light, Crime and Punishment ought to give Snowden strength. The novel won't prepare him for the depressing Russian winter, but it'll boost his conviction that we have to draw the lines between right and wrong, and that secret police – of the tsar or the spy-tsar – don't have the right to make up the rules.
Chekhov doesn't bother with all this philosophy, at least not explicitly. He tells short stories about everyone you've ever known. There's your grade school teacher, your college roommate, your boss, the cab driver from last weekend, and you, and his stories are charming, heartbreaking and funny. Characters commute to work, worry about impressing the opposite sex, and go to happy hour. Chekhov doesn't judge his characters, because they go about with the same hopes and disappointments that we do.
His stories are often called "grey" for their simple language and seemingly boring protagonists, but they're full of colors and insight into the countless ways hope springs eternal. In one of his most famous stories, a man and woman slowly fall in love, over years, despite spouses and life in different cities. When they finally realize what's happened, they've grown old and come to feel that they have double lives: a public, false life and a secret, true life together. They're trapped in a bind, and yet there's hope:
It seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
Chekhov refuses to sugarcoat reality just as he refuses to give up on humanity. It might be bittersweet, but it's the same hope you find in Pushkin a hundred years before and Solzenitsyn 50 years later; in Walt Whitman during the Civil War and John Steinbeck during the Great Depression.
Kucherena says that Snowden will learn about Russian life – "our reality" as he puts it – from these books. Julia Ioffe, usually astute about Putin's Russia, demurs:
The reality that lies before Snowden … is not that of [Dostoevsky's] Petersburg slum or [Chekhov's] cherry orchard. More likely, he will be given an apartment somewhere in the endless, soulless highrises with filthy stairwells that spread like fields around Moscow's periphery.
In the immediate sense, she's right: these writers' world is nothing like Russia today (pun intended); Snowden won't learn a thing about Moscow life from reading 19th century novels, and Snowden probably does not have a bright future if he ends up in Russia.
In the more important sense, she and Kucherena have glibly missed the point. After all, Snowden wouldn't learn about living in contemporary America by reading Melville, Faulkner or (God forbid) Pynchon, either. By definition, fiction isn't literal, and it's completely impractical – hence all those questions to Russian majors about what we're going to do with our lives. Fiction is an odd beast: it's a guide to life that's completely made up, an elaborate lie strung together to tell a truth. If you take it literally, you'll end up like Don Quixote, charging into windmills, yet Cervantes' "reality" is also Kucherena's, and Chekhov's, Snowden's and ours.
Russian literature can give Snowden exactly it gives the rest of us, except that his situation is more extreme. Facing extradition, jail, or eternal airport limbo, Snowden has to decide what really matters to him, and he has to hold on to hope with his fate on the line. Every so often, we should face the tough questions that Dostoevsky flings at us: what do we really care about; what do we consider right and wrong; and what about our leaders, whom we elect to confront tough decisions, and who largely refuse to make any choices at all?
And it's OK that we spend most of our time thinking about little problems, wasting time on Twitter, getting annoyed at train delays and thinking about dinner. Chekhov reminds us that we've got lives to attend to, and that they're often difficult, often fun. He reminds us that there's always hope somewhere, so long as we're looking for it. (But Pushkin really is the best.)
