Article: "Literature is born from the depths of people's souls". Adam Mickiewicz.

Статья на английском языке

«Литература рождается из глубины души народной» Адам Мицкевич

Literature is born from the depths of people's souls. Adam Mickiewicz.

The term Russian soul appeared in literature to describe Russian spirituality. The idea was crystallized and then propounded by the19th century. The writers such as Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky offered descriptions of the Russian soul.

In Russia a person's soul is the key to a person's identity and behavior and the cultural understanding that equates the person with his soul is what is described as the Russian soul. Depth, strength, and compassion are general characteristics of the Russian soul.  

 The Russian soul can be described as a cultural tendency of Russians to describe life and events from a religious and philosophically symbolic perspective.

“Anna Karenina” and “Crime and Punishment” can be used as examples to show how the Russian soul is exposed through the society and its flaws. The main characters of both books have difficulties relating to the society, but it is the internal struggle of them that makes these books entertaining, as the reader is cast in a world where he is forced to listen to the tormented, bleak voices and deal with the way the soul confronts itself with the difficulties of life. The result is a fatalism that one has always felt coming from the plot, and which reaches its climax in the most acute moments of drama, where the outcome of the struggle leads to further dilemmas.

The great thing in Russian literature is a theme, there’s the twist of events and a great study of the society and historical approaches just as in other countries, but in comparison to other literatures, the Russian one is not just a train journey where you watch outside the window. It is the one where you see your own reflection in it, where you try to see pieces of you in there, a projection, and it makes you ask yourself questions, it makes you define your personality in the end. It makes you come face to face with the unknown and, despite knowing it’s just a novel, you cannot escape the fundamental questions arising from it.