Russia’s waiting reformation

Putin’s world is not the only take on Russia.

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

Graffiti on a wall, spells out in Russian character the name Navalny.

Anti-Putin pro-Navalny graffiti, Saint Petersburg.

Dor Shabashewitz via Wikimedia Commons.

When I presented the book I Love Russia by Elena Kostyuchenko for purchase at the counter, my only thought was for what the bookseller would think. Was I a Putin sympathiser and apologist for the war in Ukraine? It says a lot about how we have unconsciously embraced Putin’s world as the only take on Russia. There is an indigenous saying that Russia is not Moscow and Moscow is not Russia. By the same token, Putin is not Russia, however much he would like us to think this; it is naïve and prejudiced of us to allow the largest country in the world to be defined by its dictator.

Elena Kostyuchenko, and Alexei Navalny in his posthumously published book Patriot, belong in different generations to Putin and inhabit another moral universe. Navalny has done more than anyone to call out the epic levels of corruption and dark cynicism of the Putin era. This is a Mafia state, as Luke Harding observes. Navalny believes there are twenty people who rule in Russia, with staggering levels of visible and hidden wealth, and a further one thousand who eat from their trough. The rest of the country includes those who are duped by state media, those who don’t want to know or keep their heads down or don’t care, and those who testify to the truth.

This latter cohort shows remarkable courage, because they are being silenced, one by one, through prison or murder. Navalny died in prison after previously being poisoned in Siberia; Kostyuchenko was poisoned while in Germany and has been targeted for assassination elsewhere. Before them lies a sobering roll call of journalists and politicians like Anna Politkovskaya, Boris Nemtsov and Igor Domnikov whose murders are clearly attributable to what they have said about the crimes of Putin and his associates.

Elena Kostyuchenko’s journalism takes her to Russia’s abandoned people and places. Derelict and decaying hospitals where the young, the addicted and the dispossessed gather; the mothers of Beslan who are beaten up and persecuted because they want the truth about that fateful siege; psychiatric hospitals with no resources or patient care; landscapes depleted by corrupt extractive industries. She is inspired by the fearless reportage of Politkovskaya and her writing bears the imprint of Svetlana Alexievich, with its gift for listening and attention to the wonderful ordinariness of human life. Her walk down the dark parade of Russia’s casualties is a tribute to the finest traditions of journalism, which carry the echo of the voice of Christ in their attention to those who lose out in this world.

In prison, Alexei Navalny learned the Sermon on the Mount by heart; his conversion from the routine atheism of his Soviet upbringing being triggered by the birth of his and Yulia’s first child, Dasha. He is wry, sardonic, stubborn, implacable – displaying an other-worldly willpower. It is hard to compute the courage it took to return to Russia after being poisoned with Novichok, knowing it would surely lead to imprisonment, mistreatment and death:

One day I made the decision not to be afraid. I weighed everything up, understood where I stand – and let it go.

Of the pain inflicted on him in prison for speaking the truth about Putin’s Russia, he says:

I have decided that this is my own pared-down version of suffering for the faith, a moment of suffering for being a believer. Happily it does not entail being dismembered, stoned to death, or having the lions set on me.

And yet the totality of his life was not far short of this. He skates over much of the abuse, but references being woken every hour of every night for a personal roll call. When other prisoners were primed to shout at Navalny for long periods from close range, it is deeply moving to visualise him shouting back and not backing down. Over time, his bespoke prison regime became steadily more abusive and isolating, directed in his view from the Kremlin.

There is absurdity at the heart of the system and he confronts those responsible for it, rather than meekly submitting to it. In the late Soviet era, criminal law was so comprehensively drafted that anyone could be picked up for an infringement if this was politically expedient. In Putin’s Russia, we have returned to the Stalinist period where offences are simply made up in a dark Wonderland. It is rule by law, not of law.

The editor of Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry Muratov, uses a particular metaphor. He says that Putin and his Kremlin officials act like priests who mediate a believer’s relationship with God. They have become intermediaries for how Russians are supposed to experience their country, telling them what to think and feel about it. If so, then Russia is ready for a new reformation, where people claim their own organic relationship with a nation that means so much to them. There are already enough martyrs for this new reformation while Putin continues to speak power to truth. Those of us who care about its people and its future do not need Putin’s malign priesthood to interpret Russian life. There is a different Russia, waiting to be discovered.

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Essay

Books

Culture

28 May 2024

5 min read

How C.S. Lewis used myth to supercharge storytelling

Great stories allow ideas to be experienced rather than merely thought about.

Simon Horobin

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University.

Aslan sculpture in Belfast, Lewis' birthplace.

K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash.

‘I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading’. That is how C.S. Lewis described himself to a class of Fifth Grade pupils in Maryland who wrote to him in May 1954. An exhibition this summer at Magdalen College, Oxford, entitled C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds, includes this letter along with a variety of personal objects, letters, books, manuscripts and audio materials relating to one of its most famous fellows.

As well as answering questions about plot details and forthcoming books in the series, Lewis corrects their view that everything in the Narnia books represents something in our own world. As he notes, that is indeed how Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress works – a reference which may have been lost on his ten-year-old correspondents – but that’s not what Lewis intended in the Narnia stories. Instead, Lewis explains that he set out to write a ‘supposal’ rather than an allegory. He began by asking himself the question: ‘Suppose there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, what would happen?’

For Lewis, the great value of stories is the way they allow their readers to experience ideas rather than simply think about them. In an essay called ‘Myth Became Fact’ he notes the impossibility of feeling an emotion such as pleasure and simultaneously studying it. But if you aren’t roaring with laughter, how can you genuinely understand humour? If you are suffering from toothache, you will be unable to write. But once the toothache has subsided, how could you write a book about pain? Lewis explains this paradox using the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus was permitted to lead his beloved wife out of the underworld, but the moment he looks back at her, she disappears. We can draw an abstract truth from this story about the impossibility of simultaneously seeing and experiencing, but it is not the only truth that this myth can communicate. If it were, it would be an allegory.

Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible

As such, an allegory is like a puzzle that must be solved by the reader to reveal its hidden meaning. Its one-dimensional characters straightforwardly signal the qualities they represent, as in Bunyan’s Mr Despondency, held captive in Doubting Castle by a giant called Despair. Unlike allegory, myths are stories from which numerous truths may be abstracted. Instead of presenting the reader with a single message needing to be unlocked, myths instil a sense of longing for something much less tangible – ‘like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can’t quite place’. Lewis considered allegory to be a limited medium, since authors can only insert ideas that they already know, whereas a myth is of a higher order, since authors can fill it with ideas of which they are not yet conscious.

Lewis was fascinated by myths from his first encounter with the stories of Asgard and the Norse deities as a young man. As an atheist, one of his key objections to the Christian faith was that it was just another version of the myth of a dying god who is resurrected, similar to those he found in the stories of the Norse god Baldr, whose death was brought about by Loki, the trickster god. Following entreaties by Baldr’s mother, the goddess Frigg, Hel agrees to release him from the underworld, on the condition that everything on earth weeps for him. But Baldr’s return is ultimately blocked by one creature, a giantess, presumed to be Loki in disguise, who refuses to mourn him.

Why was Christianity different to this myth, or others, like the Egyptian account of Osiris or the Classical story of Adonis? It was a lengthy night-time conversation with his friends Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien in the grounds of Magdalen College in September 1931 that helped him overcome this objection and embrace Christianity. What Lewis came to recognise is that, when he encountered a god dying and being revived in pagan myths, he found it profoundly moving, suggestive of meanings beyond his grasp. But, when he met a similar concept in the Christian gospels, he was unmoved. What he took from his talk with Tolkien and Dyson was an openness to accepting the Christian story as a myth, with all its mystery and suggestive implications, but with one key difference from the Norse, Egyptian and Classical myths: it really happened. But, by becoming fact, he argued, Christianity did not cease to be a myth: ‘that is the miracle’.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world.

In writing the Narnia stories Lewis was engaged in what he and Tolkien called ‘mythopoeia’ – the act of myth-making – communicating Christian truths in ways that would inspire children to grasp something of its mystical and mythical qualities. As he noted in his essay ‘On Stories’, reading about enchanted woods does not make children despise real woods, but instead makes all real woods a little bit enchanted. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the children meet Ramandu, a retired star who is being restored to his former youth so that he can rejoin the great dance in the sky. ‘In our world’, says Eustace Scrubb, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas’. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of’, Ramandu retorts. Eustace, we are told at the beginning of the story, had wasted his time at school reading only books of information about exports and imports, so it is no surprise that he can only comprehend a purely materialist definition. If he’d only read more fairy stories, he might have been able to grasp this reality, as well as being better prepared for his adventure on Dragon Island.

Lewis wrote the Narnia stories to help children like Eustace become open to the possibility of a reality beyond the strictly material world. Since God himself is mythopoeic – after all, isn’t the sky itself a myth? – shouldn’t we therefore be mythopathic, that is, receptive to myths? For Lewis, Christianity offered the marriage of Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact, which should be met not solely by love and obedience, but also by wonder and delight.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language & Literature, Magdalen College, Oxford University. He is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing, 2024) and co-curator of C.S. Lewis: Words and Worlds. The exhibition runs until 11 September 20024, in the Old Library of Magdalen College, Oxford. Check opening times.