One year after the declaration of the occupation of Ukraine, the perpetrator, Russiasuffered a rout that deprived the country of its best artists and writers. The forced exile of a large number of Russian intellectuals may not be one of the co-damages that most disturbed Vladimir Putin’s sleep, but uncovering who these writers are offers a full X-ray of what is going on in a country left behind. without public discussion in the field of ideasto reduce the citizen discourse to a monolithic and censorship model.
It is difficult to determine what percentage of Russian writers have decided to leave in recent months. Critic and translator from Cuban origin and Russian Jorge Ferrer, head of the ‘Other Voices, Other Russias’ cycle, which brought some of the most prominent Russian dissident writers to Barcelona within the framework of the CCCB, it is impossible to quantify them. “It wasn’t long before the flight started. Some did it a few days after the declaration of war, others allowed two or three months for the climate to become unsustainable, he explains. The reality is that the majority of Russian intellectuals have been able to adapt to Putin’s demands and Although they have been able to adapt themselves to them, it is also a fact that the best left, the most prestigious”.
a hundred years ago
As happened a hundred years ago, after the Russian revolution, and later with the Stalinist purges, Paris and especially Berlinwith their own ideas, they once again became the epicenter of an alternative Russian culture.. It was Vladimir Nabokov or Isaak Bábel who settled there a century ago, in a context of cultural enthusiasm that witnessed the birth of editorials and new publications. Today they are Vladimir Sorokin (Bikovo, Moscow, 1955) and Ludmila Ulitskaya (Dablekánovo, 1943), two of the oldest members of that club of exiles. Sorokin was already spending long periods in the German capital, where he had an apartment. In the case of Ulítskaya, a Formentor laureate and one of the most vocal voices in opposition to Putin in the past, she had to pack her entire life into a seven-pound suitcase just days after the Ukraine invasion. and there she continues to follow him, almost 80 years old, not knowing if he will ever be able to return to Moscow from his new home in Berlin.
Another reluctant Berliner is María Stepánova (Moscow, 1972), who has recently published an emotional book ‘In Memory of Memory’, which also talks about exiles and exiles. Jewish-born Stepanova decided to escape from Moscow with her husband, essayist Gleb Morev, when “Colta”, which described the digital magazine ‘Colta’-Ferrer, which she directed, as “a kind of New Yorker or Notepad”, was closed in two. weeks after the start of the conflict. “Right now Any literary or artistic activity is prohibited in Russia.. War cannot be called war, it is a special operation”, he explained during his last visit to Barcelona. Another writer described as a living legend by the Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich is Maxim Osipov, who could not save himself from the wrath of the environment, although he lived far from the literary circles because his profession was a doctor. Russian leader. Today he lives halfway between Paris and Berlin.
reader orphans
Other writers, such as the brilliant science fiction writer and screenwriter Anna Starobinets (Moscow, 1978), decided to follow another of their usual places of exile, Tbilisi in Georgia, where the poet and novelist Andrei Filimonov was also located. not yet translated into Catalan or Spanish. The fate of the rare cartoonist and graphic activist Victoria Lomasko (Moscow, 1978), radical author of two cult books ‘The Other Russias’ and ‘The Last Soviet Artist’ and a member of the LGTBI community 20 days after the invasion. known target of the regime because of its important activities social networks and went to Brussels, where he currently resides.
“They all – explains Ferrer – live in great instability. I’m looking for new universities to recruit them. American universities are gravitating towards Ukrainian writers and that’s great, but remember that dissident Russian writers have lost their natural audience. Stepanova, for example, won’t be published in Russia because the law forbids it. He is writing an LGTBI-themed novel he knows. Another stone in the drama of all intellectual exiles”.