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Western classics give Russians a bad name.

By Victor Sonkin
Published: March 28, 2008

Packing my suitcase before leaving for a short holiday in Egypt, I took a look at the popular travelers' web site Tripadvisor.com. Not for the first time, I noticed how poorly my countrymen fare in the opinion of Western vacationers. "There was a Russian disco on the beach, and it was boom, boom, bloody boom every night;" "The Russians were very rude and didn't know how to queue for the buffet table;" the examples go on and on. Of course, some of the commentators were the same people who were indignant because of the absence of bacon in Egypt. On the other hand, much of it is true: Taken as a whole, Russian tourists can be rude, demanding and arrogant.

I started wondering: What, apart from these chance encounters and the mass media (also hardly complimentary), might shape the opinions of the Russian nation held by these people from Britain, Holland and Germany? Were they ever more lenient?

Having searched my memory and asked around, I found that Russians have been rather scantily represented in Western literature. In Alexandre Dumas's "The Count of Monte-Cristo" somebody suggests that a Russian has paid off his debt, and the reaction that follows is: "Really? A Russian?" In Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes," he describes the lives of Russian terrorists in early 20th-century Geneva. This topic was also tackled by Oscar Wilde in his play "Vera; or, The Nihilists," where the author did not get a single Russian name right. The English novelist William Gerhardie wrote about his participation in fighting against Bolsheviks in post-Revolutionary Russia. Not very heartwarming for Russians, is it?

And look at more recent examples: Carrie's Russian suitor (played by Mikhail Baryshnkov) in "Sex and the City" is moody and extravagant; the Russians in "Birthday Girl", a 2001 movie, are either cruel con artists or prostitutes (the prostitute, played by Nicole Kidman, has a heart of gold -- another stereotype); not to mention David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises," where every Russian is a mobster.

There are some good, intelligent, civilized Russians in novels by the German author Erich-Maria Remarque and the French science fiction writer Jules Verne; but nobody reads them anymore, at least in the West (in Russia, they are both still popular, though for different reasons, I assume).

Stereotypes don't come into existence without reason; more often than not, they are close to the truth. The bad thing is that anyone who does not fit the type gets pigeonholed into it anyway. And Western classics, alas, contributed to this state of affairs.

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