Dictionary

Correlating concepts

Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables :

Le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.

Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, [c'est-à-dire] faits pour l'écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer [de] ce qu'on appelle des professions.

(Baudelaire, p. 90)

(There are only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest consists of day labourers and is made for the stable, that is for what one calls professions).

Frequencies of words have often been studied. Correlations not so often. In Marlène Laruelle's book of 2025 about ideology in contemporary Russia you can see a correlation between the words "colonialism" and "multipolarity" in presidential speeches from 2020 until 2025, with some exceptions (Laruelle, p. 254). This is, however, a rather obvious correlation, although it does prove the mental connexion between those two concepts, at least in the president's mind, the presidential administration's thinking and probably among the Russian population in general. It is more interesting to study correlations which are not immediately obvious. If one looks at today's Russia, the connection between violence, letters, the activities of the mind in general, and religion are striking. The contempt for civil application of technology is also striking. "No other country in the world displays this pattern of intellectual and artistic excellence and technological weakness to the same degree as Russia." (Graham,p. 100) says American historian of science Loren Graham. In a recent report, Kremlin ideologist Karaganov states that there are three essential domains of life, that of the economy, that of the mind and that of physical force, and that it is now time for the first of those to play a secondary role (Le rapport Karaganov : Poutine et la nouvelle doctrine de «l'homme russe» (traduction intégrale commentée) | Le Grand Continent). In a chapter entitled "Nuclear Orthodoxy" Marlène Laruelle writes the following about the bonds between the military and the Russian Orthodox Church:

The church formalized cooperation with the ministries of defense and internal affairs, as well as the Federal Border Service in the mid-1990s. Patriarch Alexy II explained:

Orthodox pastors must understand more than anyone else that the army cannot be spiritless. Service to the Fatherland and selfless performance of military duty presuppose the presence of high moral qualities. And faith is the main source from which a warrior draws moral rules and spiritual health. The need for pastoral care for military personnel is increasingly understood by military leadership.

But it was after 2008, with the enthronement of Kirill as Alexy's successor and the beginning of the Medvedev presidency, that the relationship between church and military became more symbiotic. The ROC recreated the institute of the military priesthood and has since gradually permeated the whole military realm, and especially the nuclear forces.

(Laruelle, p. 195-196).

The apocalyptic features of nuclear weapons also seem to appeal to the Orthodox Church in Russia.

The absence of a middle class in Russia was noticed with some surprise already by the Marquise de Custine in his Russia in 1839 (Custine, p. 181, p. 366). The obsession with the scientist and the writer is striking. This is, among others, an element in the development from status to contract as envisioned by the English jurist Sir Henry Maine in his work Ancient Law. You will always remain the scientist who made this brilliant discovery or the artist who created this brilliant chef-d'oeuvre, you can cease to belong to the middle class for external reasons.

The association of the artistry, violence and strength is foreign to the modern west, but it is normal in traditional, oral societies, as has been noticed by Walter J. Ong: "Ancient oral performances and ancient literature associate oral and physical bravado…"(Ong, p. 107). Historically, the examples are legion. It is enough to quote a few lines from Romain Gary's La promesse de l'aube:

Presque toujours, au retour, un camarade manquait ; une fois, en allant sur Charleroi, nous perdîmes sept avions d'un seul coup en franchissant la côte. Il était difficile, dans ces conditions, de faire de la littérature. Il est vrai que je n'en faisais pas : pour moi, tout cela faisait partie d'un même combat, d'une même œuvre.

(Almost always, when we returned, a comrade was missing; once, when approaching Charleroi, we lost seven airplanes all at once when crossing the shoreline. Under those conditions, it was difficult to dedicate oneself to literature, indeed, I did not do so either. To me all this pertained to one combat, to one œuvre.)

(Gary, p. 436)

In the contemporary Russian context, it is worth mentioning Zakhar Prilepin, who is very often associating the military and the literary.

An example of the opposite would be this review in Svenska Dagbladet of a book about the family of Danish poet Yahya Hassan, where the world of poetry, the library on one side, and that of violence on the other are described as essentially different and mutually exclusive.:

Recension: Familien Hassan av Steffen Stubager | Elisabeth Friis

If one believes a study by the Russian wciom, which one can perhaps do when the theme is not directly political, young people seem to read a lot in Russia, and the tendency seems to be increasing, especially in belles lettres, history and politics. If one looks at the statistical material behind the study, young men seem to read relatively much compared to the West. Usually, young men are the instigators both of ideology and violence.

If one translates the three concepts of Baudelaire quoted above, pretre, guerrier, poete, and runs them through Google Ngram Viewer to search for frequencies and then analyse the correlations in an excel file, one can see that the Russian concepts correlate very high during the 20th century. The French concepts correlate only in the end of the 18th century and until the Napoleonic wars, that is before the bourgeois period which Baudelaire lived in and denounced.

Masha Gessen describes an interesting expression of this in her book The Future is History. She describes a young woman in the 1990s, Masha, and says about her

She sometimes thought of herself as a sort of extraterritorial patriot: given a country, she would be proud, and given a uniform, she would serve. Instead, she was given Russia, which filled her heart with despair and her mind with the idea that life was not worth living.

(Gessen 2017, p. 216)

Now, from the Russian point of view, it is there, the country and the uniform. This was also the generation right before the generation that is now, according to wciom, reading classics and abstract literature, and that was, according to statistics quoted by Masha Gessen, often searching for a higher meaning in life, this having increased from the preceding generation (Gessen 1997, p. 169).

All those elements are important aspects of the explanation of the weakness of the Russian middle class, the possibility of the war against the Ukraine and the popular support for it, as well as the relative indifference to the economy in Russian society.

The middle class is the mind that adapts and that plans for future well-being, not the mind that seeks immediate, externally visible brilliance, neither a vision for the future that goes beyond the individual.

Ways of thinking determine the structure of society. When opposing Russia, we have to understand that this is the most important factor.

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles, Fusées, mon cœur mis à nu et autres fragments posthumes, Edition d'André Guyaux, Folio classique, 2016, p. 90

Custine, Lettres de Russie, Édition et choix de Pierre Nora, Gallimard 1975

Friis, Elisabeth, Yahya Hassans familj vet att poesin inte räddar, Svenska Dagbladet, 15th of January 2025

Gary, La promesse de l'aube, Gallimard 1980

Gessen, Dead again, Verso 1997

Gessen, Masha, The Future is History,Riverhead Books, New York 2017

Graham, Lonely Ideas, Can Russia Compete?, The MIT Press

Karaganov, Sergey, Le rapport Karaganov, Le grand continent, Doctrines de la Russie de Poutine, the 12th of September 2025

Laruelle, Marlène, Ideology and meaning-making under the Putin regime, Stanford University Press 2025

Maine, Henry Sumner, Ancient Law,

Ong, Walter J., Fighting for life, Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness, reprint of Cornell University Press Edition 1981.

The wciom study:

ВЦИОМ. Новости: Чтение в эпоху цифры

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Next entry:

Hoc habeo quodcumque dedi

On Russia's « virtual » economy

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