If the characters from famous Russian novels had been killed in the war

Famous Russian novels if their characters had been killed in the war

What would the masterpieces of Russian literature have been, if the main characters had been missing? See The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina, among others.

Russia: a country where some of the world’s greatest masterpieces were written, and at the same time a country where millions of people died in the name of the imperial mindset.

One day I asked myself a question: can you fight Russian imperialism using Russian literature?

What would Anna Karenina have been, if Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky had been killed in the first part? Can you imagine Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous novel without the Master? Which of the Karamazov brothers would you be desperate to protect from going to war?

Can you imagine the state of Russian literature, if the most famous writers were forced to fight in the imperial wars, and died before they could write a single page of their classic masterpieces? What if Mikhail Bulgakov (who, by the way, was born in Kyiv) had died of serious wounds he sustained during the First World War?

Take a look at these made-up book covers of the famous Russian literary classics. Would you miss the fictional characters from Anna Karenina, Fathers and Sons, or War and Peace?

Missing fictional characters, really? Real people are dying every day in Ukraine, Syria, and other wars around the world. Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dying. Ukrainian civilians, innocent women and children among them, are dying.

Imagine that among those who will die of bombs today are brilliant minds that could bring to the world the new Anna Karenina or The Master and Margarita.

I have added some of these visuals to the Stand with Ukraine collection of my artist shop at Redbubble. I am donating my entire artist margin from the sales of these works to a fund helping displaced children from Ukraine.