Faithful readers of La Russophobe will remember when she asked whether Russian writer Gary Shteyngart's telling it like it is meant that he was a Russophobe.

Here is what reader REITH said about that then: "You surely cannot be so simple-minded as to not understand the basic fundamentals of fiction. A character is not necessarily the same thing as the author. That is, after all, the point of fiction. So, is Shteyngart a Russophobe? There is no evidence to support this from the extracts included in the NYT piece."

But now, of course, La Russophobe has been proved quite correct, and REITH predictably wrong. The crazed Russophile crowd has got wind of Shteyngart (albeit quite late, as is usual for them), and crazed Russophiles Kirill and Konstantin have denounced him as a russophobe.

Here's the exceedingly apt comment of a Konstantin reader responding to the gibberish put forth by these two slobbering Neo-Soviet simeons:

1. Cry me a fucking river, why downtcha?!
2. I’m a Russian, and I’ve lived here for 17 years. And yet, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Hate Russians? Most Americans have either never met any Russians, or if they have, then only briefly and in passing.
3. Hating Russians is not racism (clearly). So what is it that you’re protesting? Generalizations? Really? Let’s be honest, majority of the Russians (more so, waY, WAY, more so than Americans) are racists. They hate pretty much anyone (which is pretty self-evident in their policies, and daily life).
4. And lastly, what exactly do you disagree with about “Russians chicks” or “Russian rudeness”? As generalizations go, these are among the more correct ones.

The next commenter attempts to rebut this by quoting the analysis of . . . wait for it . . . Anna Kournikova.

The plain and simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Russians live in isolation from the truth because they cannot handle the truth, and when someone like Mr. Shteyngart comes along to tell them, their first impulse is murder. This has been true from the dawn of Russian time, and writers from Pushkin to Dosteovesky to Solzhenitsin to Shteyngart have been targets of blind, crude Russian attacks, even while their predictions regularly prove true and even while the country sinks into oblivion. Russians choose to simply ignore the unmitigated hatred with which they view they outside world and anyone inside Russia unlike themselves, as if that was justified, while at the same time reacting with paranoid frenzy to any questioning of Russia by anyone outside it, as if they only explanation for hostility to Russia is anti-Slavic racism (and hence, as if "Russian" and "Slavic" were the same).

And so it goes in Russia.