In recent weeks, all of Dostoevsky seems to have been taken off the shelves to join the windows of French bookstores. Dostoyevsky, but also Tolstoy, Gogol, Bulgakov, Grossman, Pushkin… alongside their contemporaries, Russians and Ukrainians – Lioudmila Oulitskaïa and Andreï Kurkov are the most visible. If readers’ curiosity about this region of the world does not (yet) translate into numbers – The Dacha in the lists of best sellers could be confusing, but it is a romance in Provence, signed Agnès-Martin Lugand – booksellers speak of a very lively interest of their customers for the conflict between Russia and the ‘Ukraine.
“There are situations where you cannot choose. My country is bombing children, there is no arguing. » Natalia Turine, owner of the Librairie du Globe, specialist in Russia
At the Librairie du Globe, boulevard Beaumarchais, in Paris, they “demand books to understand”, says Natalia Turine, the owner of this business, owned by the Soviet state until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since she rid it, in the mid-1990s, of “Russian dolls and samovars” and an unfortunate tendency to self-censorship, Natalia Turine is committed to highlighting contemporary, sharp and free voices.
No more sloppy books from TV set experts. “To the toilets”, all the work of the media Vladimir Fedorovski, installed in a chamber pot, at the entrance. At the moment, she attaches herself to the seriousness of the recommended works. “I first put forward the ba-ba”, she insists. On the tables of the bookstore, recent books by academics or journalists: Ukraine, the awakening of a nation, by Alain Guillemoles (Les Petits Matins, 2018), or Ukraine, a story between two destinies, by Pierre Lorrain (Bartillat, 2019).
Classics, satirical novel, thriller
More singular, it tends Back to Lemberg (Albin Michel, 2017), bestseller by lawyer Philippe Sands, the story of a family investigation in Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine), a city scarred by Nazism. In addition to the classics, Adelina Frolova, employee at the Librairie du Globe, noted a craze for two titles: The Penguin, by the Ukrainian Andrei Kurkov, a satirical novel published in the mid-1990s, and Donbass, the geopolitical whodunit of Benoît Vitkine (correspondent of World in Moscow).
“There are situations where one cannot not choose, explains Natalia Turine. My country is bombing children, there is no arguing. » She chose to scroll the phrase “Peace to Ukraine. Freedom for Russia. Court for Putin » on the front electrical panel. “Because until Russians have freedom of expression, Ukrainians will live under threat. »
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