My mother had read Tolstoy’s ‘Village Tales’ to me when I was a child… He, like Putin, staked everything on getting away with murdering women, who may or may not be personifications of the Goddess Europa.
Source: Twitter (@DecodingTrolls)
The literary culmination of the gender lens. Raskolnikov — Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg law student — murders a woman and believes he can escape justice. Putin — another St Petersburg law student who didn’t study hard — murders women and nations “who may or may not be personifications of the Goddess Europa.” The Goddess Europa: the mythological figure after whom the continent is named, here reimagined as the victim whose murder Putin stakes everything on getting away with. Literature diagnoses what geopolitics cannot.
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