Is salvation waiting in the printed paper? The opera “From the House of the Dead” by Leoš Janáček after Dostoyevsky at the Schiller Theater in Berlin
Image: Picture Alliance
The only way out of the vicious circle of this war is through language: why Putin’s regime, like its predecessors, has established itself as an occupier in its own country and the people are silent. A guest post.
VThere are reports from former prisoners of how Russian classics saved their lives. They retold novels by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky to the criminal inmates. The great Russian literature could not prevent the Gulag, but it helped to survive in the Gulag. Is that a lot or a little?
After the Ukraine attack, Russian literature is accused of complicity in this war and the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers; it is imperialist and colonial in nature. This war represents a moral and humanitarian bankruptcy of Russian culture. Some Ukrainian writers call for a boycott of Russian music, films and books, declaring that the world still mistakes this culture as European and humanistic; that the criminals who rape mothers with children were educated in school on Russian classics, that the road to the Bucha massacre also led through Russian literature.