system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Woah. Is this normal for a rejection letter?

I've only published a couple other things and have definitely never encountered/heard of anything like this level of contempt in a rejection letter... I mean, *you've already rejected it.* 

I feel like the reviewer initially ended the evaluation with KILL YOURSELF before thinking better of it.

Here it is:

  

>This article is *not scholarly at all*, despite its ambitions.   
>  
>It jumps about a great deal, touching on everything from Greek myth to Russian romanticism to Alexandre Dumas to the American TV series *The West Wing*.   
>  
>The author's understanding of literature, and of cultural representation as a whole, is essentially mimetic: i.e. s/he has little or no sense of how literature functions as *literature.* It implies that misrepresentation can simply be “corrected” by *accurate* representation, although what an accurate representation of the Caucasus would be remains unclear.   
>  
>The main point the article makes, which is that Edward Said’s model cannot be applied to Russian literature, given Russia’s historically distinct relationship to the Orient and to itself, has been said before and much more eloquently, by people with a real knowledge of Russian imperial history and of Russian literature. There is a vast scholarly literature on the subject.   
>  
>The author does not reference any Russian sources in Russian, does not seem to know Russian, and offers no close readings of the literary texts which are referenced.   
>  
>At the end of the article, the author states: "Western scholarship has tended to pass over Eastern scholarship with indifference, as Said knew only too well.” In fact the author does not display any knowledge of “Eastern scholarship” either, except via a reference to Vera Tolz. How “Eastern scholarship” would change our understanding of the subject would seem to constitute an important aspect of the conclusion, but we are left none the wiser.   
>  
>There also appears to be a page or a section missing (the transition from pp. 12 to 13).
gpt
Being in a slavic field, this letter reads like the usual frustrations of slavic academics with well-intentioned Americans repeating all the problems and cliches of colonial arrogance while purporting to study it.

Does your essay acknowledge concepts like "internal colonization" and Etkind's seminal book on the same, which basically examines the same argument (how Russian colonialism is different from Western colonialism, being primarily oriented towards the self, rather than an exotic other) or is it literally re-inventing the wheel of Said vis-a-vis Russia?  Why doesn't it involve a single source from Russian?  What is the status of literature here?

These are legit questions and it is outrageous that they even need to ask them. How can a scholar not address these issues before pursuing print?