Rust Cohle: a hero of our time?

Rust Cohle, the character played by Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, has found a special place in the hearts of young Russians.

At first glance, it might seem strange — why would Russian twentysomethings sympathise so much with a haunted, cynical detective from the Deep South? In fact, Rust Cohle has a closer affinity with Russian cultural history than most of the characters currently written for Russian TV.

It’s no secret that the Russian television audience likes its heroes dark, philosophical and well-spoken. Rust Cohle is all of those things. Some may even claim that his bitterness reflects that of young Russians, with their constant awareness of new restrictions imposed by the government. The Russian blogger Duran even photoshopped an election flyer, in time for the country-wide municipal elections in Russia, with actual quotes from the show posing as election promises:

A lot has been written about Matthew McConaughey’s transformation from romcom sweetheart into brooding antihero. Russian fans of The Wedding Planner were suddenly faced with a rural American noir detective. But as long as they hadn’t skipped literature classes in high school, McConaughey’s new incarnation would have been familiar to them.

The “superfluous man” is one of the most important archetypes in 19th-century Russian literature. This type of character, which takes its name from Ivan Turgenev’s 1850 novella The Diary of a Superfluous Man, might also be described as a Byronic or Romantic hero. The superfluous man is talented (Cohle is an extremely gifted detective), has a disregard for social values, is cynical, and exhibits a lack of sympathy and an existential boredom. Cohle’s monologues could have belonged to Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the Byronic anti-hero of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (1840) — if he happened to find himself in Louisiana in the 21st century working for the State Homicide Unit and with a penchant for exquisite swearing, that is.

Russians on Twitter went insane after the show aired. “Rust Cohle is my spirit animal” tweeted a popular blogger from Moscow. “Rust Cohle makes smoking look so sexy,” someone else tweeted, posting a picture of Cohle with a cigarette. “Rust Cohle and BBC’s Sherlock — sociopaths — are the new sweethearts for modern girls.” “Rust Cohle is very cool. I agree with all of his opinions.” “In Rust Cohle we trust.” Another tweet obviously referred to Lermontov’s novel: “Rust Cohle is a hero of our time.”

When the actor and the show missed out at 2014 Emmys, Facebook and Twitter filled up with bitter posts from Russians wondering why the show received only five awards out of the 12 nominations, with only one of them being a major win (Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series to the show’s director, Cary Fukunaga). The Emmys aren’t exactly closely followed in Russia, so this response was definitely unexpected. Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, for which McConaughey was nominated, was bagged by Bryan Cranston for the last season of Breaking Bad, causing a lot of cognitive dissonance on social media given the overlap between the two shows’ fan bases.

If endless literature classes in high school taught young Russians anything, it would be to sympathise with the fatalist and to value a character’s intellectual burden despite his unpleasant qualities. These ideas are repeated over and over in the context of different authors (most of them from the same period) to classrooms of impressionable teenagers. Sooner or later, they plant themselves in the subconscious. The superfluous hero is designed to be unlikeable, but he is loved by the audience for daring to say the things that others, for different reasons, can’t afford to say. Especially if they, like Pechorin and Cohle do, say them in a darkly poetic way, taking their appeal to Russian teenagers and ex-teenagers sky-high.

How did a thoroughly Russian superfluous hero end up on HBO? It seems European romanticism travelled a long road before ending up in what is essentially a cop show. True Detective was heavily influenced by A King In Yellow, a short story collection by the American author Robert W Chambers first published in 1895. They say Chambers, in turn, might have been influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. So perhaps the superfluous hero slowly crawled his way into the American noir genre along these literary veins, bringing his haunted dark philosophy and long cynical rants with him. Like a 19th-century Kanye West, instead of loving himself, he hates himself to an extreme degree. After all, in Russia, overanalysing is still a virtue.

Can you tell Pechorin’s angst-ridden musings apart from Cohle’s? Take our quiz.