Culture war against “Putin's world war”

Far from the theater of war, the mass graves and the territory of pain that is shaping a new warlike mythology in Europe in Ukraine, the echoes of the conflict are generating their own shock wave in the universe of culture.

The historical struggle between pro- and anti-Western groups that has marked Russia for centuries, the nationalist drive against the more European ambition, is renewed these days after the dramatic aggression against Ukraine.

A cultural war is born, this time against Vladimir Putin and Russian expansionism, in which literature is the battlefield.

The Formentor forum has become one of the thermometers where new and old disputes have become visible.

The award of the Formentor Prize to the Russian author Liudmila Ulítskaya caused the cancellation of some assistance, such as that of the Ukrainian translator Iuri Lech, who considered it a "gesture of complicity with the aggressor power", according to the message read by the organization.

While the Union of Ukrainian Writers appealed to close the house museum of Mikhail Bulgakov in kyiv, where he was born, and thus cancel this author considered Russian.

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The voice of democracy in Russia only resides in literature, says Marta Rebón, one of the great specialists in Russian and Slavic literature.

The post-Soviet literary map is, in fact, a scenario of fusion, mixture and coexistence that had been consolidated as such in a way far removed from the new Russian nationalism, and that forms a parallel reality to the universe defended by Putin and the most anti-Western exclusive.

There are many examples of this: the Nobel Prize for Literature Svetlana Alexievich was born in Soviet Ukraine, writes in Russian and lives in Belarus.

The recently awarded Ulítskaya was born in distant Bashkortostan, in the Urals, she has written a novel about Crimea and has gone into exile in Berlin at the start of the war in Ukraine.

Vitali Grossman was also from the Ukraine and is considered Russian, or like Chekhov,

who spent long periods in Ukraine, where his grandmother was from and where he even supported the first Tatar newspaper.

And the “political” movement of the Union of Ukrainian Writers, maintains the agent and translator Yulia Dobrovolskaya, contrasts with an audience that does not cancel culture, but rather promotes it, as evidenced by the great reception right now in the country of a biography by Bulgakov written in Russian by Marietta Chudakova and translated into Ukrainian.

"We should remove the weight of nationalities because not everything we believe to be Russian is Russian, a very homogenizing word that does not respond to the real plurality that exists," says Rebón.

In the new pulse between anti-Western Russian nationalism and the plurality open to Europe, writers from all over the post-Soviet space are clearly positioning themselves against Putin's ambitions, as followers of that dissident spirit that has existed since the Russian and later Soviet empire. .

"Many have been forced into internal exile," adds Rebón.

The Nobel Aleksievich emphasizes that the warmongering message has been unifying.

Ulítskaya defends tolerance and, in the words of Jorge Ferrer, a Russian translator, "is devastated by imperialist barbarism."

The Romanian Mircea Cartarescu, in Barcelona in 2021.Joan Sánchez

But the battle jumps out of the Slavic space and has reached the entire post-Soviet universe, where the writers position themselves with great concern about what is happening.

The Romanian Mircea Cartarescu, winner of the FIL Prize for Literature in Romance Languages, assures that we are living in “apocalyptic times, dark times”.

"The aggression against our bodies and minds in the last three years has been terrible and has changed us," he replies to EL PAÍS.

“We have never experienced anything like this in our lives.

We only knew this kind of fear, despair, pain and horror in history books and novels but now we are in the middle of hell.

The pandemic followed by this war madness is more than we can bear.”

After the deaths, isolation and depression due to covid, the war against Ukraine “is a trauma for humanity, a disgrace, a

and cynical act of a serial killer.”

"It's like if someone came up to a woman in a crowded subway station and started cutting her with knives, doing terrible things and no one could react because the assailant was screaming that he had a suicide vest and was going to kill everyone.

And he goes on and on harassing the victim in front of the police and all of us.

As we witness the crime we feel our brains burning with shame and impotent fear.

And so there is not just one victim, but we are all victims, all abused, injured and dispossessed of humanity.

—And what has changed for you as a writer?

Do you feel literature as a battlefield against war?

—To be a writer in these sinister times is to feel responsible for everything that happens.

It is taking the weight of humanity on your shoulders, with its beauty and its horror.

The writer's job is empathy.

You have to scream with the victim.

You must look to the future and show people the hell they face.

And even if you can't prevent the crime, you can at least raise your voice against it, condemn it in front of the people.

Russian writers should feel this responsibility right now and stop supporting the Kremlin's policy.

And every writer in the international community should accompany them with his voice, calling for an end to this war before the suicide vest explodes.

Ulitskaya has done so.

Yesterday in Las Palmas, the author described Putin as a "hooligan, a person with few talents, little grace and little humanity, like a hooligan on a slum street at night" who she sees as capable of pressing the nuclear button although, for Fortunately, there are many between him and the bomb who can stop him.

She explained his departure from Russia in February at the outbreak of the war and said she was convinced that "the third world war has begun," she told journalists from agencies gathered at the Formentor Forum, as reported by Efe.

In her award acceptance speech, the Russian author recalled last night that even Dostoevsky was censored in his childhood, he was an author under suspicion.

The books were read clandestinely and when they were finally allowed after 1990 they aroused no interest.

by outlaw Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, did not find readers as he had in the West.

“The book has not been read,” Ulitskaya maintains, “because, a few years after the Soviet collapse, the people clearly voted for a character trained in the old traditions of the KGB.

From there grow the roots of Stalinism that is reborn in our country.

“Today”, she concludes, in Russia “no one is arrested for a book”.

Tatiana Tibuleac, author of

(Impedimenta), speaks these days of the fear in her country, Moldova, of being the next after Ukraine.

And she also acknowledges that the war has changed her as a writer.

“This war that we talk about more and more as if it had happened, as if people had stopped dying, is changing everything, it is a cancer in progress.

For me, the change is painful and destructive because she has made me review things that for years I considered part of me: the Russian language and its literature.

Now I find it more and more difficult to separate, as I should, culture from politics, art from death.

Hate is the most accessible feeling and I'm afraid I'm abusing it."

"And is culture a battlefield?"

“I don't have high hopes for culture.

If culture were a superpower or a miraculous force, wars would not have happened.

As humanity we use culture as a drug, we glorify it, but unfortunately we do not learn.

No evil is new, all the tragedies could have been avoided.

And I fear that we will not learn from this war either.

As many of them conclude, the clamor does not change the war, but at least it does the consciences.

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