Who produces this poisonous literature? Wearing white T shirts adorned with Putin’s image, the activists of Walking Together have focused on a trio of prominent writers, myself among them. From the newspaper Izvestia, I’ve learned that Walking Together apparently sees me as Cultural Enemy No. 1 in the new Russia. The most concrete expression of that distinction came on April 17, as I was signing my new book in the Moscow bookshop on Tverskaya Street. Eight storm troopers turned up to disrupt the presentation, scuffling with my readers and shouting, “Get out of the country!”
I keep good company, it seems. Early this year the members of Walking Together erected a stack of the books of Victor Pelevin at the door of his apartment. (He’s the author of such novels as “Generation P”–which stands for Pepsi–that are much admired by younger readers.) All bore a stamp, RETURN TO THE AUTHOR. It turns out they had been collected at booths where people could exchange “dangerous” books such as his for a specially produced volume of Russian classics.
Walking Together has also targeted the novelist Vladimir Sorokin. First the good citizens of this neo-fascist organization delivered iron bars for the windows of his house. (Vasily Yakimenko, who quit Putin’s administration to head Walking Together, announced on the group’s official Web site that his followers will not rest until Sorokin is in jail; to start the process, a state tribunal recently held an “independent” expert analysis to demonstrate that Sorokin’s works were pornographic.) Then, in June, they constructed a huge, fake toilet in front of the Bolshoi Theatre and filled it with chlorinated water. They proceeded to dump Sorokin’s books into it, destroying them in protest against his signing a contract to produce an opera at the Bolshoi. A seriously alarmed Sorokin told me that any young idiot could knife him in the street “in the name of the president.” Suddenly, I realized life was becoming reminiscent of what I experienced as a dissident under the communists, when I was thrown out of the Union of Writers, in 1979, for my role in producing the uncensored literary almanac “Metropole.”
I have just published my collected works in 11 volumes, but this–along with the books of Pelevin, Sorokin and others– provides only more ammunition for our opponents. Their attacks on us have, in fact, boosted sales, but none of this is amusing. Publishers are beginning to grow cautious; now they may well wonder whether it’s worth publishing a “dangerous” writer’s new book. The problem is that we represent a new form of Russian literature. The basic premise of traditional Russian writing is best summed up by Bazarov, the central character of Ivan Turgenev’s novel “Father and Sons”: “Man is good, circumstances are bad.” Our new literature has the effrontery to tell us that bad circumstances are created by the Russian people. Apparently, this rude suggestion tarnishes the “clean,” uplifting patriotic image that Walking Together projects.
In early September I wrote an open letter to Putin, published on the front page of the liberal daily Vremya MN. I called on the president to halt the persecution of writers, branding it a “protracted barbarity.” At a press conference two weeks later, Putin replied. He rather testily distanced himself from both the persecuted writers and Walking Together, saying the two sides should sort things out between themselves. This was a sly maneuver: a confrontation between a handful of writers and a well-disciplined mass movement can hardly be called equal.
Will there be another round of this battle? Two weeks ago, Walking Together sent a letter to the government’s publishing ministry demanding that all books with dirty words be pulled from stores across the country. The appeal has been ignored, so far, but in a country as unpredictable as Russia, anything can happen–good, bad or appalling. This unpredictability still offers the hope that Putin’s decisions can be influenced by national and international public opinion. Paradoxically in Russia, which defeated Nazi Germany but lost the cold war, fascist ideas attract a significant section of the young in the very same way they did in the Weimar Republic after the first world war. What draws supporters to Walking Together is a yearning for strong authority, personified by Putin, and widespread nationalist sentiment. God forbid that by persecuting us “dangerous” writers they will make us so famous we shall be obliged, as German writers once were, to seek refuge from our fame abroad.
