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"This book is my view of Russian writers through the prism of this war... It became shameful to be Russian. Mikhail Shishkin, "Essays on Russian Literature"
Answers to questions from Babook.org readers - Mikhail Shishkin
https://babook.org/posts/1519
November 19, 2024
Mikhail Shishkin, author of the book "MOI. Essays on Russian Literature" answers readers' questions
This book is my view of Russian writers through the prism of this war. My compatriots are now being called to kill and be killed in a neighboring country under the pretext of defending Pushkin, not Dickens or Joyce. And anyway, I did not write this book, it just happened. All my life I have had solid ground under my feet - Russian literature. After the war began - there was emptiness under my feet. This book is an attempt to find solid ground again. And this is also the most important conversation that finally took place. Every person should have one most important conversation - with their parents. More often than not, people live their lives, missing this most important conversation. This is rather normal - after all, it is impossible to suddenly say at breakfast, when everyone is in a hurry, or at dinner, when football is about to start: stop, now we will put everything aside and have the most important and only conversation in our lives.
I had this conversation with my father and mother only after they were no longer alive, in my books. So a writer should have this most important conversation. In this book, I had this conversation with the authors who created Russian literature - and therefore me - for many years. The war exacerbated everything. There has never been such a global crisis in Russian culture as we are experiencing now. Absolutely everything is called into question, all words and concepts need to be given new definitions. What is Russia? What is Russian culture? What does it mean to be Russian? A hundred years ago, in the cities of Europe, emigrants were not embarrassed to speak Russian loudly. They lost the civil war in Russia, but at least they fought. It became shameful to be Russian. I felt very keenly what the German writers who emigrated from the Third Reich were going through. If I were to write about foreign writers now, it would be about Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann.
I can imagine very well what Stefan Zweig was thinking in Brazil before he committed suicide. And I myself experienced what Thomas Mann must have felt when he came to speak at an American university and the students said: “Why should we study the language and culture of a country that is waging a war of conquest?” Just as Thomas Mann fought for the dignity of the German language and German culture, so we must now defend the dignity of our language and our culture, which the Putin regime has exposed to attack all over the world. Russian culture as part of the world culture is those writers, artists, musicians who spoke out against the war and in support of Ukraine, and not those who supported aggression or loudly remained silent.
To be honest, I don’t follow Shlosberg and his “rebirths”. Or Facebook showdowns in general. Very little time and a lot to do. I rarely look at Facebook, it’s amazing how it’s simply bursting with showdowns, especially sickening from the new “opposition inquisition”. Nothing new in the sublunary domestic world, I wrote about this in an essay about Chekhov. He rebelled against imperialism, which lives primarily in the totalitarianism of consciousness. Chekhov couldn’t stand female students who were convinced that they knew the truth and were ready to tear anyone to pieces for it, especially those who were close. They later became Chekists and would have shot Chekhov if he had lived to see the revolution. We are now trying to free ourselves from the “imperial” and “colonialist” heritage in culture, but the hardest thing is to free ourselves from the totalitarianism of consciousness. The new female Chekists, with the fury of the rhinoceroses from Ionesco’s play, rush into battle with “imperialism,” not seeing that they themselves are imperial sledgehammers.
If we want to truly free ourselves from the empire, we need to free ourselves from these rhinoceros Chekists too.
It is difficult to break with yourself at a conscious age. But anything can happen. Especially if someone left our historical country young and was able to build a career here. I personally know several wonderful people who studied there, but then left and achieved success in such fields as physics, computer science, medicine in the West. They do not need to prove anything to anyone about Russia or Russian culture. But if you live by the Russian language, Russian literature, Russian culture, if you are a writer, then you will not cough up the "smoke of the fatherland" until your death.
Where to put the entire history of Russia, the history of its conquests, its crimes against its own people and against others? Leave it in textbooks. Get rid of it, but not forget it. The only question is – how can you get rid of this history if the country has stepped into it like a trap? I often think about my father. He was 18 when he went to fight the Germans. He believed that he was defending the fatherland, in fact, he and millions of people like him were used – he defended the regime that killed his father, my grandfather died in the GULAG. My father was proud all his life that he liberated Europe from fascism. And he could not accept that he brought the liberated peoples simply another fascism. “What do you mean, we are fascists?! We are Russians! They are the fascists!” He, and the whole country, identified themselves with this victory. And what did the “great victory over fascism” bring them? They only became even greater slaves of the regime. People identified themselves with the greatness of the empire, just as slaves feel pride in the wealth and power of their master.
The problem is that the majority of the Russian population still lives by the patriarchal tribal consciousness. "We are Russians, and all around us there are enemies who want to destroy us, so we must protect our homeland, our language, our Pushkin." "We must sacrifice everything to preserve our beloved Fatherland" (read: the current regime). It is necessary to understand that humanity has only made half a step on its path from the animal world to humanity. It is not about computers and spaceships: both can be used for barbaric destruction. It is all about the transition from primitive tribal consciousness to individual, in the development of the personality, which itself bears responsibility for everything, and does not shift it to the authorities. It is not the people or the reigning president who tell you what is good and what is bad, but only you yourself decide what is good and what is evil. If I see that my country and its - according to Dostoevsky - God-bearing people are doing evil, I will be against my country and against my people.
Most of my compatriots are choking on this patriarchal consciousness, but will obediently lay their heads on the chopping block: the tsar knows best, "the motherland calls." The only instrument for developing tribal consciousness into an individual one is education. That is why all regimes in Russia have always been the main enemies of culture, and in schools the main subject has always been thinking in formation and speaking in step. In the endless struggle between culture and barbarism in the territory of the "most well-read" we are constantly losing - force breaks straw. Here we have lost again. Now our task is to preserve culture in the Russian language in emigration. And the "snow monster" - according to Mayakovsky, will continue further, reproduce itself, it cannot be reborn from within (it is impossible to imagine that the Hitler regime would grow from within into a democratic one), and there will be no external defeat.
It’s painful to watch the air being sucked out of the country. Everything in Russia is returning to where we once came from: free literary life only in Facebook kitchens. How will uncensored literature penetrate Russia? Listen, this isn’t the first time we’ve been married to a dictatorship. Even under the Soviet Union, everything leaked through the Iron Curtain. As a young man under Brezhnev, I collected my library: I took photos of banned literature, then printed them out. I was terribly proud of my library – it looked like a shoe store: I put my “books” – stacks of photographs – in shoe boxes. And in the age of the Internet, the curtain will be even more leaky. Literary life in Russian in the countries of the new diaspora now needs to be started practically anew. We need to find tools to help new independent publishers, magazines, authors, translators. I thought that one of the possibilities for such help could be the creation of an independent literary award. This year I founded the “Dar” award.
The prize is neither a "Russian prize" nor a "prize of Russian literature". It is a prize for rethinking the entire experience of literature in the Russian language, a prize for discovering new approaches to literature and literary life outside of archaic statehood, a prize for everyone who writes and reads in Russian, regardless of their passport and country of residence. The Russian language does not belong to dictators, but to world culture. The current discourse on "post-imperialism" and "decolonization" of literature must be translated into practical activities - the "Dar" prize provides an opportunity to move from words to deeds. The prize was established by the Association, which I founded together with professors of Slavic studies at Swiss universities. The Board of Founders includes Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, Dmitry Bykov, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Svetlana Alexievich and other famous writers, musicians, directors, philologists. More information about the prize can be found on the website https://darprize.com/. I like the name - "Dar". Here in a short word live important meanings.
And everyone will recognize the title of Vladimir Nabokov's last novel written in Russian and, in my opinion, the best. Now is the time to create a new type of culture in Russian, which has never existed before, a culture free from the curse of territory and from Russian "patriotism", a time to create a new Russian-language culture that does not belong to the Horde power. It is very important that writers from all over the world, united by the Russian language, including from Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Israel and other countries, participate in our award. It is very important that Ukrainian writers who write in Russian also participate in the award. The literary award "Dar" can become a unifying platform for the disunited Russian-speaking diaspora. This is a chance for the international Russian-speaking civil society outside the state to prove itself, to show that it exists in a world without borders, is capable of development and is worthy of its culture.
All those who take part in the organization and the authors who submit their works to the competition are against war, against dictatorships and support Ukraine in the fight for freedom and independence against aggression. The goal of the prize is to help preserve free Russian-language literature, give it the opportunity for a new beginning, and above all to support the young, for whom access to translations in Western publishing houses is practically closed. The main and only prize is a translation into English, German and French. For me, the goal of the prize is primarily not to search for brilliant novels that visit our planet not every year or every decade, but to help literature in Russian preserve its dignity.
Alas, the task of the school in Russia is to educate not an active participant in civil society, but a state serf. The only subject taught there is "patriotism". Therefore, I would recommend Tolstoy's essay on patriotism to a brave teacher. But for some reason it seems that not a single teacher in hundreds of thousands of Russian schools would hang in their literature classroom under the obligatory portrait of Tolstoy his words: "Patriotism is slavery". The population of my country supports this vile war not because they have read enough Chekhov and listened to enough Rachmaninoff, but because real culture, which is a means of awakening a sense of self-worth, has always been oppressed, and the population has been poured into a trough of patriotic swill. The goal of school education in the country of birch chintz is to keep people in the state of a tribe that relies on the Fuhrer, and this is much easier than raising a free individual who can think critically.
We saw this in Nazi Germany, we see this in a country that, from all the world culture, chose as its inheritance, without really understanding why, only the letter Z.
How can an author recommend his book to a reader? Finding your author and your book is not easy at all. I have long since given up on recommendations. Any book in the world, even the worst one, will find its reader, and vice versa, the most wonderful book will make someone sick. Meeting your book is the same miracle as finding a loved one. And pestering someone with your preferences is like being at someone's wedding and telling the groom: why are you messing with that cow? For you, she is a cow, but for him, she may be the woman of his life. The same with a book. There are no bad or good books. The book must come to you itself. If it hasn't come, then it hasn't come. Thousands of wonderful books do not come to everyone every day. One more, one less, it doesn't matter. But if that very book, yours, finds you, everything important will happen.
The line between "mine" and "not mine" in the book is not drawn by love or dislike. I never liked Dostoevsky, I forced myself to read him, but he was included in the book. "My Dostoevsky" is my view of him, a view through the prism of this war. It is necessary to understand what in our literature belongs to history and should remain in history, but what does not and cannot have a place in new literature in Russian. For example, Dostoevsky's "Russian idea". But world culture is a bridge leading humanity to the future, and the supports of this bridge are literature, music, art. Without Dostoevsky, this bridge will collapse, as it would have collapsed without Homer, Shakespeare or Joyce. Dostoevsky should not be boycotted, but carefully critically read, understood and rethought with all his revelations and delusions, with his "child's tear" and Orthodox crusade against European civilization.
If Fyodor Mikhailovich were to rise again now, I'm afraid he would become a moderator on the Tsargrad channel. You don't have to like him at all, but you do need to read him, just don't forget to wash your hands afterwards.
Only words remain from the era. Things, if not in a museum, disappear, houses are rebuilt. What is left of Pushkin's era, except words? Now his texts are that era. Here we have a feedback loop - the writer creates time with his language. He does not "translate", but creates. It is this - created by words - that will become our time for "readers of the distant future". You are asking about "cultural or philosophical message". You will not find "current politics" in my novels. Today should be written about in newspapers. Writing about today's dictators in a novel is like shooting sparrows with a cannon. Tomorrow the current ghoul will disappear, and the next one will take his place. Art, literature, music fight not with today's evil, but with the eternal. My task as a writer is to write prose that will help the reader feel part of world culture, to awaken human dignity in him. And then the person will decide for himself whether he is ready to be a slave under a dictatorship or to fight for a democratic reorganization of society.
And alas, there is no certainty that the reader of the distant future will not face the same questions that we face. And the main one will always be: what are you willing to sacrifice to preserve your dignity.
I am not writing in this book only about Lermontov. Of course, as a young man I read A Hero of Our Time with great interest, and recently I reread it and it seemed to me somewhat mannered, but I still love it. In this book I am not writing about such “my” writers as, for example, Bunin or Sasha Sokolov or many other authors who have delighted me. Bunin delighted with his carving of the phrase and his absolute pitch for History: Blok was still calling for listening to the “music of the revolution”, and Bunin was already writing The Cursed Days. Sasha Sokolov bewitched me at 16 with his School for Fools, and when this war had already begun – after “Crimea is ours” – he caused a gag reflex by admitting in a film about himself that he loved the group “Lyube”. Maybe someday I will write about them, and about Platonov, and about Nabokov. And in general I must admit that in Russian classics there are no "mute" writers. Chernyshevsky evoked Nabokov's contempt. But I love all of Russian classical literature as a whole. Like in the woman you love, you love everything as a whole, and not just some parts.
I already live in all my texts. And I move more and more into them from here. The last year turned out to be "operational", every now and then they cut something out. Little by little I am freeing myself from the body.
In the beginning, there is always a need to prove something to yourself. I wanted to write a novel to prove something very important to myself. I proved it. Then I wanted to prove something else to myself – I wrote texts about writers who are important to me. I wrote them. And now we are at war. Everyone, even those who are very far from the front line. I need to do what I can, what is within my power, against the war. To prove to myself and the world that the Russian language is not the language of murderers. For years, I have tried to explain to Western readers in my publications and speeches that a bridge to Putin is a bridge to war. It cannot be otherwise, a dictatorship lives by war, it is its daily bread, but here in the West, they turned a blind eye to the obvious. I wanted to explain Russia and its war to my readers around the world, so I wrote a book in German, “Frieden oder Krieg. Russland und der Westen” (“War or Peace. Russia and the West”). I explain Russia through its history and through the history of my family. The last two chapters are about the future, I told you what will happen.
We are now fully immersed in this future, alas, everything is going according to my scenario. Now, after the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine, this book has begun to be published all over the world, it has already been translated into 20 languages. I have not changed a word in it, I only wrote a preface and an afterword, and it is becoming more and more relevant with each day of the war. I receive a flood of responses from different countries: "You have opened our eyes! Why were our politicians so blind?" One reader wrote to me: "Your book helped my love for Russia not to drown in the blood of Ukrainians." It is important for people all over the world to know that there is another, non-Putin Russia, which supports Ukraine in its fight against aggression. My Russia is a country of human dignity. Alas, unfortunately, this country is not on any geographical map.
Literature in Russia is being strangled again. It is no longer possible to publish there for obvious reasons. I have long since informed my Moscow publishing house that I am terminating all contracts. I do not want my books to be published together with books by Z-authors who support the war. The register of individuals - "foreign agents" has been maintained in the Russian Federation since 2020. I was declared a "traitor" back in 2013, even before the annexation of Crimea and the start of this war. In the early 2000s, I was happy that Russia was becoming a civilized country, that the state was beginning to support literature and - just as Pro Helvetia in Switzerland gives money for translations of Swiss writers abroad - so the Institute of Translation and other foundations in Moscow began to allocate funds for translations of books by Russian authors. But it was absolutely obvious that the country was moving in the opposite direction, back to the past. The West listened to the "correct" words from the Kremlin and did not see or did not want to see what was really happening there. And the authorities used writers as the "human face" of the regime.
I remember how, when sending writers' delegations to the main book fairs of the world, we were told: "Scold Putin as much as you want. This will only emphasize that we have a real democracy." I did not want the regime to use my name. In 2013, I published an open letter refusing to represent Putin's Russia at the book fair in New York. Over these years, the country has finally degenerated into a fascist dictatorship. Now one can speak openly and publish only abroad. It is clear that the country is shackled by fear. And when ordinary people are silent, it is difficult to make claims against them. But writers are held accountable, they have a special responsibility for preserving human dignity in people. No one forced you to be a writer, you called yourself one. So, more will be asked of you. I am sure that at the Last Judgment there will be a special line for writers. And they will write in Russian, as they did before - always and everywhere. Sooner or later it will become completely impossible to publish in Russia.
Now new Russian-language publishing houses are appearing all over the world. Those who remained in the Russian Federation will start publishing in the West under pseudonyms. We have all been through this before.
I am an optimist in general. I am convinced that all countries and peoples will sooner or later come to a state governed by the rule of law. Our distant ancestors ate each other on the Volga and in the Alps, the law of force reigned. Democracy will win sooner or later, if only because it is much more pleasant to live in a state where the rights of the weak are protected. Another thing is that this is how it happened historically: some peoples follow this path faster than others, especially if you go in circles. Therefore, I am sure that if in 1917 freedom lasted for several months, in the 90s - several years, then someday, in a generation or ten generations, the next attempt to build a state governed by the rule of law on the banks of the Neva and Kolyma will last even longer. But for now, there is no reason for optimism in the near future. Remember how strong the wave of solidarity with Ukraine was that rose all over the world in the spring of 2022! Now my hopes that Western democracies will help Ukraine win the war seem naive to me.
Unfortunately, it has become obvious that the West is not at all interested in inflicting a military defeat on the Russian Federation. And this is the main condition for the beginning of any changes in Russia. And it is painful to see that the wave of solidarity with Ukraine in the world is waning. This year, the Pope invited me to speak with him and other famous cultural figures and peace activists in Verona at the Arena di Pace. I think I was the only one who spoke in front of 30,000 people about why it is necessary to fight the aggressor country and support Ukraine, first of all, with weapons. I was amazed that there were hundreds of flags, including Palestinian and Israeli ones - and not a single Ukrainian one. This is reality. I said to this sea of people: “Imagine two people fighting with swords. One throws down his sword and holds out his hand. What will happen? The outstretched hand will be cut off. Dictatorships understand only the language of force.” War is inherent in the very nature of a dictatorial state. Democratic countries can always solve all problems through peaceful negotiations.
Wars on earth will continue as long as there is at least one dictatorship left. How will this war end? It will not end, the conflict will be “frozen” and it will remain an unhealed wound for generations to come. I do not see anything good for Russia in the near future. Certain conditions must be met to establish democracy. Russia must be defeated in this war and its national guilt must be acknowledged. But it is impossible to imagine any post-Putin kneeling in Kyiv, as the German Chancellor did in Warsaw. This is not a tsarist matter. A new “Nuremberg” for war criminals is needed. But in post-war Germany, these cleansing processes were carried out by the occupation authorities. Who will judge and imprison war criminals in Russia? The war criminals themselves? Who will hold free elections? Kadyrov? Democracy is impossible without citizens. Millions of potential citizens of a free Russia, who understand the meaning of the rule of law, have emigrated.
Who will the tortured population vote for in the hypothetical freest elections? For the opposition “traitors-foreign agents” who have returned from abroad, or for the “patriots” who promise to restore order with an iron hand and “make Russia great again”? And as for what will happen to Ukraine – I really hope that Ukrainians will be able to build a truly democratic society, no matter how difficult it may be.
I have had problems with reading literature for a long time. I am interested in prose when the author does not remain in the stylistic paddock trampled by generations, but goes "beyond the flags". For me, the incentive to read someone's novel is the lack of understanding of how this prose is made. There cannot be many such discoveries. For example, I was delighted by Sergei Solovyov's novel "Shakti's Smile". The author has a Ukrainian passport, he writes in Russian, lives between India and Germany. This novel was published in UFO in February 2022, and the story of "Finnegans Wake" repeated itself with it. The release of Joyce's main text coincided with the beginning of World War II. "It would be better if the Germans read my book than bombed Poland," Joyce said bitterly. So, of course, no one paid attention to the appearance of "Shakti's Smile".
No one is cursed from birth. We have seen how over the past half century hundreds of thousands of people from the "one sixth" and what is left of it have left and found themselves in another world, having successfully gotten rid of the "stigma", are working for the prosperity of their new countries of residence, are fully integrated into democratic structures and feel like an important active part of civil society. Of course, with the opening of the borders, the bearers of the "tribal consciousness" have also scattered all over the world, who are ready to go to the rites of the "immortal regiment" in Switzerland. Those who carry the "seeds of the Soviet system" will spread and occupy all available space, if they are not limited. On May 9, 2022, the "immortal regiment" was to take place in Geneva. I published an open letter in the main Swiss newspapers, signed by famous cultural figures from Russia living in Switzerland, which contained a clear warning that this action was aimed at supporting the war and was subject to punishment under the laws of the Confederation. The organizers canceled their march.
In the country where I and my children live, there cannot and will not be Putin's "immortal regiments". Everyone's job is to "optimize" their environment.
And who said that there will definitely be retribution? It is only a dream of mankind that evil will always be punished in the end. This is what Hollywood is all about. But in life, good - at least in a large format - has won only a few times, for example, retribution for those who organized the Holocaust. In Russian history, there were almost no examples of retribution. Was there a "Nuremberg" for Stalin's executioners? Of course, everyone who unleashed and supported this monstrous massacre in Ukraine should be punished. But I am very afraid that there will be no retribution here either. Stalin is still being re-erected here and there, and Lenin's imperishable work lies in the main sanctuary of the country. The wrong country, in which the more people you kill, the more your subjects will love you.
Boris Akunin November 19, 2024
Dear Misha, please tell us how the texts nominated for the DAR award are collected? I participated in the project at the discussion stage, but I am very interested in what is happening with the first season.
The submission of works for the competition began on October 1 and ended on November 15. The interest is huge. About 150 publications were sent. Of these, the expert committee (these are famous philologists, critics - all the information can be found on the website) will select 10-12 finalists. The shortlist will be announced in early January and the jury members will have four months to read these books. Reader voting will also begin in January. I think I have come up with a great thing: reader voting in the form of crowdfunding. On the award website, you can vote for your writer or for several at once - the minimum contribution is 10 euros with no upper limit. The winner will be the author who receives the most votes. I have no doubt that writers will be happy with every vote they receive. The winner of the jury vote will be announced in May. Each jury member (and there are many of them, more than 30 people, these are famous writers, musicians, directors, actors) has the right to vote for one, two or three authors.
The winner will be the one who receives the most votes. The prize itself consists of grants for translations into English, German and French. The prize is just beginning. I would like it to have a long life.
