Lessons from Russian literature for Edward Snowden?
Today Edward Snowden‘s Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, brought him not only documents allowing him to leave the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport but clean clothes and a copy of Crime and Punishment.
He was quick to say there was no similarity between Snowden and Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky’s classic work. That’s good news, as Raskolnikov axes an old lady to death, experiences mental agony, and, despite his remorse, ends up in Siberia. 
I was moved, nonetheless, to check a few “great quotes” websites and and found that several of Dostoyevsky’s “bons mots” (“бонмо” as they say in Russian) might be helpful to the fugitive whistle-blower.
“It is necessary that every man have at least somewhere to go. For there are times when one absolutely must go at least somewhere!” writes Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment. How true, how very true…
President Putin has said that Mr Snowden may only stay in Russia if he desists from revealing intelligence secrets that embarrass the US government.
“He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering,” says Dostoyevsky of Raskolnikov.
But Mr Snowden might quote the great master back at the US government, (and, incidentally, the British) as it continues to spy on its own citizens:
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
And he could defend his own actions in literary style:
“To go wrong in one’s own way is better then to go right in someone else’s.” (Better, maybe, than “You can be sincere and still be stupid.”)
Mr Snowden is expected to leave the airport in the next 24 hours, and might stay in Russia for up to a year. The presidents of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia have offered him asylum after that, but he will need a new travel document, and a way of getting to Latin America without flying over the airspace of countries which, at US bidding, might force his plane to land.
“But that,” writes Dostoyevsky, “is the beginning of a new story — the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.”
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