Stupidity and The Snow Forest
Tom Rogan
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May you live in stupid times.
After Russia launched its unjustified and brutal war in Ukraine in February 2022, there was a movement by some to punish Russian culture. The thinking behind this buffoonery was that Vladimir Putin’s war meant it was no longer acceptable to read Russian literature or listen to Russian music. Some Western music halls canceled performances of music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, for example.
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We now have another example of similarly idiotic cancel culture.
The novelist Elizabeth Gilbert is delaying the planned publication of her new novel, The Snow Forest. In a video posted to Twitter on Monday, Gilbert explained that she is doing so in response to an “enormous, massive outpouring” from Ukrainians who have shared their “anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain” about The Snow Forest‘s 1930s Russian setting. Gilbert says she is engaging in a “course correction” because she does “not want to add any harm” to Ukrainians who are already suffering due to the war. Gilbert says she now shares the assessment that it is the wrong time to publish “any book, no matter what the subject of it is, that is set in Russia.”
This is ridiculous. Indeed, it is farcical. This book, after all, is hardly a homage to Russian imperialism.
On the contrary, Gilbert says her novel centers on a group of individuals who “remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization.” That narrative isn’t exactly congruent with Putin’s push for a cultural renaissance that justifies the Ukraine war as part of a grand revival of Greater Russian nationalism. If anything, The Snow Forest would appear to advance the viewpoint that Putin, Patrushev, and the rest of the Kremlin’s innermost circle fear most: the diminishing of their Moscow power center to the varied aspirations of the vast Russian nation.
There’s a broader point here. A crucially important one. Namely, that Russian culture and Russian settings for storytelling should not be vanquished alongside the Russian military in Ukraine.
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Russian literature and music, and the setting of Russia as a home for great stories and art, has thrived not because of Putin but because of the merits of its particular creations. We need not endorse the nationalist sympathies of The Five in order to enjoy the haunting beauty of their music. We need not believe in a false notion of Kutuzov’s glory in order to revel in the thunderous power of the 1812 Overture. Nor need The Nutcracker’s vibrant joy be an excuse for the corruption of the Kremlin. And, no, we wouldn’t be endorsing Putin’s war simply by reading a book about Soviet dissidents living in a snowy forest.
To suggest otherwise isn’t just absurd, it’s a repudiation of the very right to think, dream, and live freely for which Ukraine is now fighting.