‘If Dostoevsky wrote today, he would be persecuted by Putin’

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“Stopping Russian literature is outrageous,” said Santiago Velázquez, who reviews twenty great authors from that country in ‘Writing in the snow’

By simply listing their names, the reader seems to travel uninterrupted to the opulent palaces of St Petersburg and the frozen Siberian steppes. Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Bulgakov… Perhaps in the 19th and 20th centuries there was no national literature that surpassed or even came close to the Russian one. But behind the works hide the lives of these geniuses, always tortured. Novelist Santiago Velázquez (Madrid, 1977) sketches the biographical portraits of twenty great Russian authors in the dazzling book ‘Writing in the snow’ (Caligram), with a prologue by Juan Bonilla.

“To really know the Russian soul, you have to read its authors, who lived intensely in the world that touched them,” says Velázquez. A soul that is simultaneously divided between the most Europeanist authors and the ‘pure’ Slavs. However, they are all united by different patterns. “Whether they were born into wealthy families or without resources, they were all as poor as rats at some point in their lives. And they were all persecuted, by the tsars, by Lenin or Stalin: prior censorship, withdrawal of economic funds, prison, torture or murder,” the author recalls.

Thus ‘Writing in the snow’ suddenly becomes a compilation of the most improbable tricks that Russian writers had to perform to save their works. Pasternak’s ‘Doctor Zhivago’ left Russia in a suitcase to reach Italy, where it was published; Grossman’s ‘Life and Fate’ was smuggled to Paris in 1975 in the form of microfilms; and the persecuted par excellence, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, recalled up to 12,000 verses that he had written on small scraps of paper in the hope of one day leaving the Ekibastuz concentration camp, a very distant city now belonging to Kazakhstan, where he found inspiration for his Gulag Archipelago.

Among thousands of other consequences, with the invasion of Ukraine, some universities, unable to distinguish the persecutors from the persecuted, Vasily Grossman’s Putin, have decided to cancel their Russian literature courses. This strange wave of punishments “is outrageous,” explains the author of “Writing in the Snow.” “If Dostoevsky were writing today, he would be persecuted by Putin,” Velázquez said.

“Mainly in the 19th century, but also in the 20th, writers had a weight in the collective thinking of society, they were able to influence the people, and the power was aware of this, and more in Russia. That is why they were persecuted. The dictators were afraid of the word, as they may be afraid of social networks today, “explains Velázquez. But what inner fire did they possess to continue writing, even at the certain risk of losing their lives? “Everyone had a tremendous need to express the horror and injustice. They were very brave”, appreciates the author of books such as ‘The Conviction of Salomon Koninck’ (Young and Brilliant Prize), ‘The Strange Illusion’ (Tiflos Prize ), ‘Winter Journey’ or ‘All the Men I Will Never Be’, which he read Dostoevsky as a teenager and became fascinated by his prose.

Exactly on December 23, 1849, the world could have lost Dostoevsky if a strange order from the Tsar had not reached the firing squad that was about to end his life in time. He was charged with “not having charged the dissemination of the writer Belinski’s penal letter against religion and the state.” In reality, an arbitrary decision by the legal system that, paradoxically, triggered the rescue’s desire to live and write. “That traumatic experience was a revelation, and although he spent the next ten years in prison, he returned to St. Petersburg to pursue a literary career, also driven by the need to support his family,” he says. Velazquez.

Stories like Dostoevsky make up a book that allows us to take a look at a world as close and at the same time so far away as Russia. Something like what ‘la García’ must have felt, a Spanish gypsy living in Paris, a ‘little savage’ who fell in love with the poet Iván Turguénev. Married at the age of 19, conveniently, to Louis Viardot, the powerful director of the Italian theaters in Paris, Paulina Viardot, née García, found in Turgenev a follower who was willing to kiss her “toe nails” for hours. In order to be closer to her, the poet did not hesitate to invite the couple to hunt bears in St. Petersburg, although there are doubts that such a relationship was consummated.

Source: La Verdad

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