#17 - JRL 8190 - JRL Home
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 2004
From: Andrew Gentes <a.gentes@uq.edu.au>
Subject: RE: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in JRL 8189
Daniel Rancour-Laferriere writes that the conclusions of his work of some years ago, The Slave Soul of Russia, were recently ratified by the comments of Pavel Gutionov, Secretary of Russia's Journalist Union, who is reported to have said: "We have to do a lot of work in eradicating our inner slave from ourselves, from our editing rooms, from television." Rancour-Laferriere goes on to write that "it seems that Gutionov believes the obvious. His only error is to attribute the problem to 'society.' The 'inner slave' is not a property of 'society,' however. Rather, it is a property of the individual psyche. Individual Russian[s] have to change - including those individuals who 'self-censored' my piece on International Women's Day...."
I haven't read the Women's Day piece, but did recently read Rancour-Laferriere's Slave Soul, which I found provacative and influential. However, in the conclusion to this work the author says something very different than what he claims was "obvious" to him at the time but which still escapes others. To wit:
"Masochists are people. It makes more logical and moral sense to recognize their masochism than to deny their personhood. Whether the masochism is itself 'pathological,' or is a 'disorder' that ought to be 'cured'--is another question. My own inclination is to leave Russians be. I have no practical recommendations or prescriptions to make.... "Russians have to find their own way.... "For me, masochism is part of the very attractiveness and beauty of Russian culture...." (p. 247)
Since writing this, Prof. Rancour-Laferriere has apparently backed away from these conclusions. Perhaps the intervening years have made Russians' masochism less attractive and beautiful for him. Additionally, I find his imperative to JRL that "individual Russians have to change" disappointing in light of his own studies. The notion that Russians' supposed masochism is not a product of society (or, by implication, culture), but is instead "a property of the individual psyche" suggests a disturbing view of Russians as somehow being biologically or genetically predisposed to a masochism that Rancour-Laferriere actually documents using literary sources. For me, The Slave Soul of Russia established that masochism has indeed been a characteristic of Russians generally for some time. But in accepting this as fact, I have gone on to try to identify and describe those state and societal structures and institutions responsible for or conducive to this characteristic--a characteristic, I would add, and which Rancour-Laferriere himself notes in the same work (p. 5), that is not particular to Russians but is an aspect of human nature across the globe and throughout time. For him to reduce his own work to an imperative prescription that Russians need to change highlights the very reason many Russians today are antagonistic towards the West and its value system.
Dr Andrew A. Gentes
Lecturer in Russian and European History
School of History, Philosophy, Classics & Religion
Forgan Smith Building
University of Queensland
Brisbane Qld 4072 Australia
Ph. (+617-intl. prefix) (07) 3365 6355
Fax (+617-intl. prefix) (07) 3365 1968
http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc/profiles/gentes.html.