THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
THE SECRET SOURCE OF PUTIN’S EVIL
It’s not the K.G.B., or the Cold War. It’s decidedly more Pushkin-esque, or Peter the Great, than that.
BY PETER SAVODNIK
JANUARY 10, 2017
Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president. That’s not entirely surprising. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces—cultural, spiritual, metaphysical—still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky.