In his Law & Liberty column, Theodore Dalrymple contrasts the changing form and worsening aesthetic of well-known Russian dissenters from the elegance Turgenev to the unsightliness of the bizarrely named Russian rapper, Face.

Neither Turgenev nor Face may be representative of the protest of their own times; still, the fact remains that the refinement of Turgenev would not be possible now, nor would the deliberate and self-conscious ugliness of Face have been possible, or even thinkable, in Turgenev’s time. Something has changed in human sensibility, and not only in Russia.