Resident Scholar Leon Aron

Keith Gessen, in his fine essay on Tom Stoppard’s play “The Coast of Utopia” and its protagonist, Alexander Herzen, describes Herzen’s “Who Is to Blame?” as being “about a love triangle” (A Critic at Large, October 30th).   This seems something like calling Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” a story of a deadly quarrel between two friends, or Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time” a record of the amorous adventures of a junior Russian officer in the Caucasus.  Like Onegin and Lermontov’s Pechorin, the main character of “Who Is to Blame”, Vladimir Belotov, is one of the “superfluous men”--the literary, social, and, in the end, political category whose portrayal has resonated with every generation of Russians in the past century and a half, spurring them toward engagement with their long-suffering nation and their fellow-citizens by depicting self-destruction, despair, or dissipation as the price of resignation.  In the words of the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, Herzen’s book was about “human dignity which is being denigrated by prejudice and ignorance--denigrated now by the injustice perpetrated by man toward his fellow men, now by his own [moral] distortion of self.”

Leon Aron is a resident scholar at AEI.