![]() ![]() Nor are writers and artists confined by national boundaries but are always part of a wider conversation. Some of the sharpest dissections of Russian mores come from Russian thinkers. Yet every culture comprises many, often conflicting, strands. Peoples of one culture, Herder believed, could not truly appreciate the language and art of another. It is a vision of cultures as homogenous, gated communities, a vision that draws upon the work of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder for whom the essence of every people was carried by its unique culture, language and history. That is to accept a Putinesque view of the relationship between culture and nation, of Russian culture as belonging to the Russian nation and of defining its soul. It is quite another to argue that The Nutcracker or War and Peace should be banned because their creators were Russian. ![]() ![]() It is one thing to call for the boycott of state institutions or of those acting in an official capacity. An open letter from Ukrainian cultural organisations demanded “ a total boycott of books from Russia”, because “Russian propaganda is woven into many books which indeed turns them into weapons and pretexts for the war”. Last year, Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko called for a cultural ban on all things Russian, because the war was “ a civilisational battle over culture and history”. ![]() If Gilbert’s decision to cancel herself reveals something of the new landscape of literary restraint, the broader debate over the Ukraine war and cultural boycotts draws also upon older themes of culture, nation and state. What, Kureishi wondered, would today’s sensitivity readers have made of his own early novels and “what butchery would have gone on”. Increasingly, though, there has developed “an atmosphere of fear and inhibition where writers are afraid of expressing their true selves for fear of offending someone or other”. “Art should not be safe or complacent,” he wrote “it should frighten, alarm and make us want to throw the book across the room”. It is a development that novelist Hanif Kureishi fears is reshaping the very character of art. What often drives self-censorship today is, rather, a sense of moral obligation not to upset one’s audience, a sensibility that Gilbert expressed so fulsomely in her Instagram video.įrom Kosoko Jackson (himself a “sensitivity reader”, and so highly attuned to the etiquettes about identity and offence within publishing) withdrawing his debut novel, A Place for Wolves, after online criticism that his Kosovo-based gay love story was too “centred” on Americans and trivialised genocide, to Alexandra Duncan cancelling her novel Ember Days after another author, who had not read the manuscript, denounced the idea of a white woman writing about a character from the Gullah Geechee, a southern African American culture, publishing today often seems to be shaped as much by social media commentators as by authors or publishers. Such considerations have, however, become almost irrelevant when discussing the moral worth of a work of art. It is, if anything, a laceration of Soviet tyranny and of modernity. It seems obvious, though, that it is neither a propaganda piece nor a celebration of Russian nationalism, let alone of Vladimir Putin. Some of the sharpest dissections of Russian mores come from Russian thinkersįew have read even a draft of The Snow Forest. In response, she suspended publication so as not “to add any harm” to people already experiencing “grievous and extreme harm”. In an Instagram post, Gilbert acknowledged that she had received an “outpouring of reaction and responses” from Ukrainian readers “expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain” that she had set a novel in Russia. Based on a true story, it tells of a family of religious Russian fundamentalists who in the 1930s retreated from Stalin’s terror, isolating themselves in a remote part of Siberia for almost half a century. Last week, the novelist Elizabeth Gilbert paused publication of her forthcoming work The Snow Forest. Even to portray an “enemy” landscape seems to many to be morally abhorrent. Today, there seems far less tolerance of that sentiment that, even in conflict, it is possible to appreciate the culture of an enemy country as one strand in a more universal civilisation. ![]()
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