Supposed barbarism of Moscow. This was Phone Number List not new: in 1839 the Marquis de – the French aristocrat who would later be taken up by Aleksandr as the protagonist in his award-winning film The Russian Ark (2003) – had published his book From him which he described the Russians as drunken, intolerant, and promiscuous, with appalling tastes Phone Number List in the arts, and, moreover, with scant and bad manners. Something similar had been written by the diplomat Joseph de in his Saint Petersburg Evenings of 1821, after spending several seasons in Phone Number List the Saint Petersburg of the tsars. Some decades later, some intellectuals who had read Fyodor Dostoevsky and.
Anton Chekhov concluded that the Phone Number List Russians were all "mad, melancholy and suicidal." Even in times before Peter the Great, travelers and diplomats described his time in the Empire in the worst terms. For centuries, then, there has been a European tradition that attributes to Russia those practices that are disapproved Phone Number List in its own territory. The triumph of communism in 1917 and the rise of the Cold War in the 20th century only increased the dose of preconceptions. Thus, a famous French historian had no problem highlighting Lenin's Kalmyk (read: Asian ) origins to explain Phone Number List Bolshevik barbarism . Mass culture was not exempt from representations of the Soviet Union either, and productions soon emerged that placed the Russians as the bad guys in the movie.
This is well known by James Bond Phone Number List and Rocky Balboa from the fourth installment of the saga, but also by Maxwell Smart or the ineffable MacGyver. The list is long but these examples are enough to show how Russia was observed, for centuries, through the lens of prejudice and essentialism. The explanation is complex but simple at the same time Phone Number List from what we call the West, that country was considered as a cultural other . closem Phone Number List but . As such, he was reduced to a position of subordination and stigmatized as the negative mirror of the West that built