I’m reading Rene Girard’s great book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and came to this:

Dostoyevsky [was] convinced [. . .] that Russian forms of experience were in advance of those in the West. Russia has passed, without any transitional period, from traditional and feudal structures to the most modern society. She has not known any bourgeois interregnum. Stendhal and Proust are the novelists of this interregnum. They occupy the upper regions of internal mediation, while Dostoyevsky occupies its lowest {Girard “Deceit”@44}.

By 1961, it was pretty damn obvious that Stalin had murdered millions of his own citizens in the 1920s and 1930s. It was pretty damn obvious that Russia was a totalitarian country, which I don’t really buy as a form of “the most modern society.” The political reality is simpler: Russian hasn’t really passed “from traditional and feudal structures.” It’s still a dictatorship, only this time it’s softer: Vladimir Putin doesn’t rule with an iron fist and direct gulags, but by co-opting putatively democratic institutions and controlling TV stations. Except for a period in the 1990s and perhaps the early 2000s, before Putin had completely solidified control, Russia was something other an autocracy or something close to it.

So a sentence like “Russia has passed, without any transitional period, from traditional and feudal structures to the most modern society” is about as wrong as one can get outside of the hard sciences, if a phrase like “most modern society” is to have any meaning at all. Given the choice between Russia and countries with “bourgeois interregnums” that manage not to murder their citizens, I’ll choose the latter any time. Most of the analysis in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel is so good that I pass over the occasional gaffe like the one above, but it’s symptomatic of where literary criticism goes wrong, which most often happens when it touches politics or economics in a naive or uninformed way.

If you’re interested in this sort of criticism, read Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

Edit: On the subject of Russia’s slide into autocracy, see also Russia’s Economy: Putin and the KGB State.