southern: Dostoyevski's descriptions about Poles
A couple of times, Poles appear in Crime & Punishment, a book I admire and have enjoyed reading more than once. There are a couple of very minor characters who are always described as little Poles. Maybe they were supposed to be Polish and just coincidentally little. At the end of the book, the (anti-) hero of the story witnesses a mix of typical Russian criminals and Polish political prisoners in a Siberian prison camp, neither of whom are looked on particularly favourably although the Russians not quite so unfavourably. This may be based on Dostoevsky's own experience in a Siberian prison. Other foreigners in his work also seem to be portrayed somewhat negatively - Germans and Finns and so on.
I don't remember any references to Poles in the work of Gogol, but I haven't read everything by him. I am the king of Spain, by the way.
Sokrates: There is no russian point of view, there's the goverments view.
It seems all to often that we notice Russian popular opinion following the government line. However, if we look at the literatrure of the past and the country's history, we can see that things haven't always been quite so straightforward, although this does seem to be a recurring theme.
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