26 January, 2012

Vladimir Putin would like you to read a book: Why his proposal for a "Russian canon" is scary as hell | New York Daily News

Vladimir Putin would like you to read a book: Why his proposal for a "Russian canon" is scary as hell | New York Daily News: If this sounds like it might be a literary canon mandated by the Kremlin, Putin wants to assure you that there will not be censorship of any kind. His goal is only “subtle cultural therapy.”

But cultural therapy has never been subtle in Russia; not under Czar Nicholas I, whose “Third Section” of spies was meant to enforce the imperial policy of censorship; nor under Putin, when the Hitlerite youth group “Walking Together” burned copies of the objectionable novel “Blue Lard” in Moscow in 2003.

The obverse to writers’ importance in Russian society is the importance of silencing them, whether it’s Dostoyevsky on the gallows or Solzhenytsin in the Gulag. Putin, the amateur historian, knows all this. And he knows, too, that his “strategy [of] civic patriotism” will require him to promote some books while banning others.