Russia is made of literature – but for the longest time the poets were persecuted or even killed

Russia is a country fixated on literature. Monuments to writers of the past are everywhere, usually on streets and squares named after them. Universities, schools and even cities proudly bear their names.

How did literature in Russia literally become a force of its own? The thing is that in Russia - both the tsarist and the communist, and also the current Putinist - free political thought has always been forbidden. And not just political thought. Before the revolution, religious thought that stood apart from Orthodoxy and the separatism of national provinces were suppressed, and sociology and philosophy were practically abolished.

After the revolution, things got even worse. There was a ban on everything that was considered anti-Soviet. The punishments were draconian, everyone knows what the Gulag is. And in Putin's Russia, we now have a whole range of forbidden things to deal with - from defending same-sex love to sympathy for Ukraine, the latter of which can be punished as high treason. And only literature, with its artistic text and its sometimes Aesopian language, even self-published or published abroad, is able to articulate itself further.

This does not mean that the writer is in a safety bubble. On the contrary, being a radical wordsmith who does not care about prohibitions is dangerous and threatening. But once you have decided to become a Russian writer, you should put your fears aside or look for something else to do.

The Russian state was often merciless towards writers, starting in the 18th century, when Russian secular literature was emerging and growing stronger. Its first victim was Radishchev, the author of the novel "Journey from Petersburg to Moscow", in which he sharply criticized serfdom and advocated the French libertinage of the time. He was exiled.

Many other writers were exiled after him, including Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev. Dostoyevsky even spent four years in a Siberian penal camp. Just for reading a letter from the critic Belinsky at a gathering of liberal friends, in which Belinsky criticized Gogol's book "Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends." But that was not all. First, Tsar Nikolai I had sentenced Dostoyevsky to death.

The struggle with writers, opponents of Soviet power, began immediately after the revolution. The great poet Nikolai Gumilyov was arrested for involvement in a conspiracy against the regime. He was shot despite Gorky's efforts. The Soviet Union under Stalin became a real hell for writers. We lost many prose writers, poets, and playwrights. Some were forced to remain silent, others were killed.

The Khrushchev thaw gave us back a little bit of creative freedom, enough to bring back the names of forgotten writers like Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov. The movement of the "sixties" was born, which exchanged love of communism for love "tout court".

I was able to experience the sixties myself: Akhmadulina and Voznesensky, Aksyonov and Okudzhava - so different, almost all of them extremely naive politically, but sincere and romantic. Joseph Brodsky belonged to the same generation, but was completely different. He is now particularly well-known in the West for his imperial poem about Ukraine, which has also provoked outrage in liberal circles in today's Russia.

I would particularly like to highlight the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, who became known to a wide readership during the Thaw. Solzhenitsyn demonstrated the possibilities of literature in a very concrete way: he wrote the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", which was published in the Soviet Union in the liberal magazine "Novy Mir" and addressed the subject of the Gulag. However, the state authorities then sent him into exile for his journalistic work "The Gulag Archipelago". As for Shalamov, his volume of stories about the Gulag was too radical for publication in Russia and was published abroad.

In Russia, a tradition of two literatures developed. One was supported by the Soviet government in one way or another. The authors of the other literature, free in their creative dreams, found themselves in a victim position depending on their mistakes, talent, popularity or the personal sympathies of the rulers of the time.

The most important writers of the first group include Lenin's friend Gorky and the poet Mayakovsky. Gorky was incredibly popular in pre-revolutionary Russia, even more so than Chekhov, and he supported the Bolsheviks financially. But when Lenin came to power, he fell out with him and went abroad, to Italy. Stalin later lured him back from there. He wanted to make Gorky the author of his political biography. Gorky returned, did not write a biography of the leader, but published many vile, conformist things. He died in 1936. Perhaps they had poisoned him.

Mayakovsky was the true poet of the revolution, he believed in communism, wrote satirical verses against corruption and bureaucracy, but in his work he had his own mind when choosing themes and opinions, which is why in the late 1930s the newspaper Pravda called him a Trotskyist, which even then sounded like a terrible political judgement. He took his own life that same year. Stalin proclaimed the dead man the best poet in the Soviet Union.

Emigrant literature began long before the revolution of 1917. The most important and best-known publicist of the Russian emigration in Russia was Alexander Herzen, who supported the Polish anti-colonial uprising against Russia in 1863. In fact, the second Russian literature, the free, European and nostalgic literature, began with him.

The revolution of 1917 provoked a flight of culture and literature from Russia on a colossal scale. At times this flight took on tragic aspects. In 1922, Lenin forced more than 120 representatives of Russian culture into European exile by ship, among them philosophers, sociologists and literary critics.

From the first years of the revolution, outstanding personalities turned their backs on Russia, among them writers such as Ivan Bunin, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, cultural scientists such as Dmitri Merezhkovsky, poets such as Vladislav Khodasevich and Georgi Ivanov, and literary scholars. They organized literary associations, founded magazines, and published in Russian-language newspapers.

From the newspaper poetry he began writing for the émigré press in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov gradually emerged as a shining star. There was also a stream of cultural emigration from Soviet Russia during World War II, but the second real emigration of writers only occurred after 1974, when Brezhnev allowed Jews to leave the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Maximov and Andrei Sinyavsky - two opposing landmarks of the Russian idea, one conservative, the other liberal, pro-European - founded the magazines "Continent" and "Sintaxis". I published a modest article in the latter, while still living in the Soviet Union. The former couldn't stand me because of my so-called postmodernism.

Under Gorbachev, it seemed for a while as if there were no longer two geographically separate literatures. Some writers, such as Yuri Mamleev, returned from exile. Conflicts only took place again on Russian soil, but they were no less bitter for that.

In the mid-1990s, when everything was still possible, a certain part of literature began to nostalgically return to the communist era. At first, this return sounded like a protest against the mistakes of perestroika, of which there were many, but eventually the old pattern resurfaced: Russian literature was, as always, divided into Westerners and Slavophiles. This time, however, the Slavophiles relied on the secret service employees and set out to create a dictatorship.

Alexander Prokhanov wrote his famous novel "Mr. Hexogen," in which FSB officers are the real heroes who want a chosen one to appear in Russia. And lo and behold, he appeared: Putin. Prokhanov recognized him. With Prokhanov, a nationalist literature of the younger generation also emerged. There are talented names there too. Zakhar Prilepin, today an ardent admirer of Putin and supporter of the war he started, author of the shrill novel "Home" about the Gulag on the Solovetsky Islands in the 1920s. There is a nationalist subtext in it, but Prilepin still succeeds in developing a social and love drama.

With the coming to power of Putin, the chosen one of the nationalists, a new stream of emigration of intellectuals and writers began. Little by little, pillars of contemporary Russian literature found their way to the West: Vladimir Sorokin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Boris Akunin, Dmitri Bykov, Mikhail Shishkin and others. One could say that the tree of literature has become so bent that all the golden apples have ended up in the West.

A new generation of émigré writers is also growing up, a second literature is gaining strength. Sergei Lebedev's novels are already available in various languages, and the novel "The Perfect Poison" about state poisoners is particularly good. In poetry, the talent of Alexander Delfinov stands out, who recently declared that the Russian language has turned into a language of murder. Incidentally, he made this statement in Russian.

In Russia, literature did not die even during the war. Either it has degenerated into the Z-poetry of the president's fanatics, in which there is little that is interesting, or it revolves around neutral themes. In Russia today there is no clearly defined ideology other than Putin's dream of his own immortality, imperial-political and physical. Therefore, writers deal with a lot of existential themes.

Those who expose themselves, like the poet Zhenya Berkovich, who wrote harshly about the war, or who suffer in silence from the situation, are in a terrible situation. Zhenya Berkovich is in prison. The pianist Pavel Kushnir and author of the astonishing novel "Russkaya Nareska" (roughly "Russian Cut-up") died at the age of 39 under unclear circumstances in a prison in the far eastern city of Birobidzhan.

One day, many years later, there will be new monuments and new street names, there will be a Russian literature once again united in its eternal Westerner-Slavophile debate, and God (if He wills) will bestow on Russia a new free love poetry, similar to that of the "sixties". Who knows how long we will have to wait for that?

The Russian writer Viktor Yerofeev has lived in exile in Germany since the beginning of the Ukraine war. – Translated from Russian by Beate Rausch.