The Russian mind

by Ronald Hingley

Book Overview

Description: viii, 307 p. ; 24 cm. Includes index. Bibliography: p. 282-287. Subjects: National characteristics, Russian. Soviet Union --Social life and customs. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0370104676
• ISBN13: 9780370104676
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Bodley Head
• Length: 247 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Book review

A riddle; THE RUSSIAN MIND; By Ronald Hingley. The Economist May 27, 1978 Ronald Hingley is the author of some dozen books on Russia and both editor and translator of the excellent Oxford edition of Chekhov. But few experts can combine, as he does, insight and empathy with a witty and often abrasive style, and very few indeed are so refreshingly open-minded. This book is a model of its kind because Mr Hingley asks far more questions, and those the right ones, than he supplies answers. Every cliche has its mirror image. Are the Russians open-handed, generous and expansive - or secretive, evasive, untruthful? Are they congenitally idle and irresponsible, the comsumption of vodka rating as the number one national sport, or given to the robot-like pursuit of norms and the dialectic? Vocabulary can help: the panache, the emotionalism on which Russian pride themselves, razmakh , is a semantically loaded term. But then so are the gradations of untruthfulness, to which Mr Hingley devotes a splendid section, running the gamut from vranyo , the national cult of the tall story personified by Krushchev, to lozh , the more sinister manipulation of untruth exemplified by Stalin. History adds a second dimension. Is the Russian acceptance of authority, even of the horrifyingly arbitrary authority of an Ivan the Terrible or a Stalin, an historically conditioned reflex? In what way does Soviet man differ from his pre-revolutionary equivalent? There is the even more important problem of Russia's relation to the west, in particular the way which this problem has so obsessed the Russians themselves. Western observers of Russia, the author notes, wanted information about the country. The Russians, by contrast, wanted recognition. Which leads Mr Hingley to what is perhaps the central insight of this admirable book, the histrionic aspect of the Russian character. A nation of role-players, one might think, and here again vocabulary is relevant, for Mr Hingley argues - as he has argues elsewhere - that the Russians possess two different languages to express two polarised forms of behaviour, depending on whether private or public affairs are concerned. No wonder Dostoevsky, one of the many literary sources Mr Hingley uses as elegantly as he does unobtrusively, was to preoccupied by the theme of the "double".Alongside every fat man . . .?