Russian Literature Goes Strong. Now Imagine It Being Cancelled And Forbidden
© Photo : Leo Tolstoy museum
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You have to be a Russian to write such a crazy book. Imagine yourself reading about Russia being totally defeated by the West in 2022. The cost of defeat is terrible.
One hundred years of total international quarantine, as in no foreign travels, no airplanes, no Internet (and no coffee). Population shrinks by two thirds, fields are overgrown by weeds, and the local government is trying to exorcise everything Russian from the nation. That is, that government bans literature (and, hence, the national movies, and the rest). The big idea is, it’s that horrible Russian literature that makes us Russian, militarist and imperial. So it has to go.
Chess is a replacement. Streets and subway stations are being renamed after famous grand masters (from the former names of writers and poets), people study chess from childhood. All the conversations, even the drunk banter, use chess as a source of wisdom or mirth. Books and periodicals are mostly about that, too.
Here I probably have to explain that I have a contract for a weekly column with a respectable website. At first I was writing about next to everything, but then the guys there said: hey, you are at your best when you write about books. So, you are our literary critic from now on.
The best a critic may do is to discover a genius by his/hers first book. Well, in this particular case it did not happen exactly as I wished. I went to my favorite bookstore in Moscow, looked around the heaps of bestsellers (I know most of them and like very few) and asked a nice blond lady: how about a fresh young genius worth writing about? Yes, she said after some hesitation, there is such a man, but you may not like that book, since three quarters of it is about chess.
Which is only too natural. The author is writing about the cancelled Russian culture enduring three generations, so that in 2082 chess is the only thing left to discuss. So all the characters are doing just that, on every page.
But if you read the rest, that is about a quarter of the text, you happily discover a truly wonderful young writer, previously unknown. Only thing is, he is very well known by now, that book of his has been named a sensation of 2024, etc. The entrenched bestseller-mongering industry is not happy about it and tries not to mention his name, but who cares. It was only my personal problem that I missed that sensation.
So, meet Mr. Alexei Konakov, 39, and his debut novel called Tabia Thirty Two. He was known previously as a poet from St. Petersburg, also an engineer, critic and explorer of the Soviet lifestyle of 1970-s. Yes, he is mad about chess, but that’s not exactly a crime.
What we have here is an absolutely new name springing up in Russian literature. Regardless of the bold basic idea of the novel, you can immediately see, from the first couple of pages, that we are dealing with a brilliant intellectual, raised in that hi-brow atmosphere of Russia’s Northern Capital City.
We read books for pleasure, and pleasure is in their style. So, Konakov is coy and playful with words, he knows how to make his text musical and elegant, and – in spite of horrors he describes – he is absolutely optimistic in every paragraph. All in all, this is Russian literature is in its best shape.
In fact, the mad idea of that literature’s cancellation is probably the best testimony of its brilliance. You have to lose something to really comprehend the value of what you used to own. Konakov’s description of Russia perishing without its literature is a shocking, but powerful tribute to the value of our books that make us what we are.
Now, speaking about his preposterous idea of a forced and total reset of Russia as a nation and a culture, you can easily see that he did not have to go far for precedents. There is a country where part of the elites tried, artificially, to form a nation, basing its identity on hatred to its own origins. That failed nation is Ukraine.
I’m not sure if anybody outside East Europe is even aware of that gradual reset or rather strangling of culture in Ukraine, that started about 20 years ago. They do not burn books, maybe, but with every passing year there was less and less of Russian writers sold and discussed locally. At first, though, Ukrainians tried to appropriate every poet and novelist, born in the territory of modern Ukraine, passing them for Ukrainians. But these were people of one nation, one culture, and all of them were writing in Russian, which only stresses the fact that there never was Ukraine as a separate nation, but only a South-Western edge of Russia, with its own peculiarities and dialects. By cancelling everything Russian these people have cancelled themselves, having not much of culture to back them up.
That Ukrainian attempts of cultural suicide ended with a civil war between its own East and West, since the East was totally Russian. That war has overgrown into an international conflict that would not end even now, though its results are obvious for everyone to see. That’s what may happen when you try to cancel your own cultural heritage. You simply cannot stop on the road to self-ruination.
But why don’t we have a look outside East Europe. How about these mad campaigns in Europe and the US, boiling down to change of lifestyles, values and, generally, culture to something new and woke? Is it not the same attempt to tear out the very essence of nations? We see there just the things that we get from Alexey Konakov’s book, maybe not in that concentrated and bizarre way.
Or how about that infamous decade in China, called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (mid-sixties to mid-seventies of the last century)? Wasn’t that a similar attempt to cancel all the nation’s culture, literature and philosophy without replacement, the same as what happened in Ukraine and what was attempted in the West?
Not to mention the fact that the demise of the woke revolution is still not assured, these mad new values are still around, with no chess to replace them. We cannot even rule out that the Republicans will be squeezed out of power in the US in a couple of years, and then we’ll see more attempts of cultural murder of America and Europe that we used to know and respect.
While Russia has, once again, demonstrated in that confrontation with the West not only the might of its weapons and ingenuity of the military brains, but also the strength of its culture that binds the nation together. It will probably be the task of today’s writers to describe the typically Russian mix of outrage at injustice and the sense of humility and compassion that helps us to pass the hardest tests, again and again. Alexey Konakov may, too, participate in that future brainstorm – in his own unexpected way.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
