Russian Writer Between Freedom and Social Obligations
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The revived Writer's Union of Russia is vital for supporting national culture and protecting writers, Dmitriy Kosyrev says, believing a balanced approach could revitalise Russian literature.
My friend called me, after I got back from a long journey across Asia, and asked if I’m going to join the newly recreated Writer’s Union of Russia. My answer was – yes, now I’m joining. Funny, but I’ve been writing books for twenty years, and saw no reason to be a member of any of numerous writer’s unions that proliferated all over the land. Useless, they were. And I was better off writing and publishing books on my own.
So, what happened today, that we got ourselves a union worth joining? Many things did, boiling down to a new age of culture. I mean – a new age everywhere, in Asia and especially India, also in other parts of the world, not only in Mother Russia.
We have entered the world, where there is less and less of the West, and more and more of the East, and South, and so on.
We are in the middle of a hurricane of emotions, clashes of values, regrets about the past and anticipation of the future, and all that makes great literature. I have that habit of calling all the ongoing things the Third World War (a hybrid version), but you may apply any other name to it.
You want a precedent? Maybe something similar was happening in the age of intercontinental travels of the 16th and the 17thcentury, when the West imagined it was conquering the world, while in fact it was also greedily imbibing new lifestyles, stories, fashion and products of distant lands. What we have now is more or less the same.
I made several visits to my favorite bookstore in Malaysia recently, with most books in English, but the writer’s names were all kinds, be it Indian, Chinese or anything imaginable. These books, mind you, have been published in the US and England. So that revolution happens there, too.
Now for some stories about how does all that affect Russian literature: in the same way it affects you, unnoticeably but surely. It’s just that there are more and more of books everywhere about distant lands and times, all becoming part of your national culture in a creeping way.
Here I have to tell you that I’ve been pursuing a literary critic’s career for the last several months, with a contract to review the books in Russian that have passed almost unnoticed in 1990-s and early 2000-s. And so, I’ve kind of revived, in my audience’s mind, a wonderful five detective novels placed in our age, but in an imaginary land called Hordrus (Golden Horde – Russia). The author’s idea was to imagine an empire of Genghis Khan not split, but kept intact well into the 20th century, so that Russia, and China, and other lands stayed one united superpower.
Wait, how about the Mughal Empire? The authors (two historians from St. Petersburg) thought it would be too complicated to stray there. Anyway, the books proved to be prophetic in many ways, predicting today’s Russia leaning to the East, but, first of all, they are outright funny and exiting.
And then there were three novels, placed in Singapore and Thailand of today, even though main characters happened to be Russian. They were written by Mr. Valerian Skvortsov, a wonderful man whom I used to know as a reporter, and only too late I’ve discovered that he was a master of fiction, too.
Finally, there was a weird and scary fairy tale about a Russian boy-emperor of the early 1700-s, who had sent a diplomatic mission to China, while the European ambassadors at his court were busy to undermine that initiative.
All these books, harbingers of a new era, have been almost lost unnoticed in the flow of all kind of dubious production for the newly-acquired free market of Russian publications. And this is where the idea of the mentioned Russian Writer’s Union becomes very relevant to what happens to our and global culture right now.
Writing is free, and should stay free from governmental regulation, right? While a united writer’s organization smells of the old Soviet idea of imposing ideological control over every book published, is that so?
But then, an all-powerful state has, historically, played its role in promotion and defense of national cultures. It would have been no Taj-Mahal, if the aggrieved monarch had not ordered the building to be created, and did not pay for it. Same relates to European genius of Michelangelo, heavily sponsored by the masters of Rome. Many great men and women of arts would not have succeeded without some kind of support of kings and princes of the past.
Everyone hates the idea of state officials telling writers what’s their social responsibility: namely, to serve their audience, to bring enlightenment to the nation. But how about the state’s responsibility for keeping the flame of culture alive? It looks like a writer’s union, just recreated in Russia, may very well do just that. It’s newly elected leaders, especially Vladimir Medinsky, the presidential advisor for culture and a historian and a writer himself, certainly knows a thing or two about that governmental responsibility.
The thing is, 25 years of writer’s freedom has produced a grim situation. Let me remind you of my column, published at the end of last year. It says: I remember well finding myself between two ages of Russian Enlightenment, the Diamond Age that was the 20th century, and the vague and uncertain era that followed. A writer was a national guru and a minor deity in the first case, and a dubious creature in the second. I was basking in the dying fires of traditional veneration of people of letters, but I also knew well that the Russian public was reading less and less of fiction with every passing year, with circulations going down and down. It looked like I was entertaining the audience that was getting older and older, while the new one lost its interest in books altogether.
So, as a lot of people at the recent Writer’s Union Extraordinary congress have said, a Russian writer has become a lonely and unprotected creature, open to bullying by his publisher. The word “writer” happens to be a self-proclaimed definition, bearing no material guarantees of survival, regardless of how many books that creature has published.
While the Soviet-style writer management looked like another extreme, with the politically correct, but unpopular writers enjoying all kind of benefits from the State, as designated by the cultural officials from the then Writer’s Union.
Surely there has to be a middle ground somewhere, and Mr. Medinsky will have to lay that ground very soon.
There will be a lot of people of our future culture that may benefit from that. Let me quote again my already mentioned column. It says: I met my old friend and mentor Mr. Anatoly Korolev, he was the one to prod me again and again to write my first novel in 2006. Anatoly, while going on writing his own books, has kept his position as a teacher at the famous Literature College in Moscow (with graduates mostly becoming editors or taking other publishing positions). Anatoly tells me that there is a tremendous change in his class this year. Young people are enrolling there in flocks, with more green and wild literary talents revealed than ever before.
That new trend surely merits all kind of State’s support.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
