A book, indeed a juvenile novel, is creating serious problems for the Russian establishment. More or less as happened to the Habsburg clan with My prisons by Silvio Pellico.
He's creating it because the book sold more than 200 copies in its first six months and is causing an unimaginable buzz on social media. On the solo tik tok, the social media par excellence for teenagers, posts about the book have totaled 250 million views. The sequel is already out. Очём молчит Ласточка (What the swallow is silent about). A third is in preparation.
To understand the dimension of the phenomenon it is necessary to consider that a bestsellers in Russia does not exceed 5000-7000 copies, which gives the book an unprecedented impact on the public, particularly on the young, millennials and generation Z.
The novel we are talking about is Let's talk about the story (Summer with the pioneer handkerchiefe) by two debuting authors, Elena Malisova and Katerina Silvanova. It was published in 2021 by a publishing house specializing in queer drama, Popcorn Books.
History, set in the Soviet Union of the 80s, precisely in 1986, tells the story of the birth of a queer love between Yuri, a shy 16-year-old, and Volodya, 19, who both came to a summer camp set up by the Organization of Pioneers from all over the world. "Vladimir I. Lenin" Union. Prepare for a summer of boredom, the two young men discover their sexuality, but then have to separate at the end of the camp. There is a beautiful early Bergman film from 1950 called A summer of love which the authors may have been inspired by.
The furious anti-LGBTQ reaction of the Russian ruling class
The success of the novel gave way to a robust tightening of the anti-LGBTQ legislation. Last month, the Duma almost simultaneously with the withdrawal from Kherson in Ukraine passed a very strict law that bans "LGBTQ propaganda" among all adults: the representation and conversation about LGBTQ issues in public and online, in books , in films, in print and in advertising becomes a criminal act.
The first petitioner explained that the intent of the law is to prevent the novel from spreading in question and similar books.
“It is astonishing that, in the midst of a disastrous war, Russian lawmakers focus their ire on a young adult coming-of-age novel,” they write in the New York Times, where we get this information from, Elisabeth Schimpfössl and Felix Sandalov, two people who are very knowledgeable about what is happening in Russia.
The innocent depiction of a blossoming love between two young men, however, appears to jeopardize the Kremlin's sustained efforts to eradicate all forms of LGBTQ culture in Russia. The book's success threw the Russian establishment into a panic.
Lgbtq: the war of cultures
Zakhar Prilepin, an ultra-nationalist writer, has proposed to burn down the headquarters of the publishing house in Moscow. Nikita Mikhalkov, one of the most important Russian filmmakers (Oci Ciorni, Urga, Deceiving sun, 12) awarded in Cannes, Venice and winner of an Oscar, called the book a conspiracy concocted by an increasingly degenerate West.
The MP Vitaly Milano he would like to hand over Popcorn's staff to the Ukrainian army where, according to him, he could go to keep company with other degenerates and perverts.
Aleksandr Khinshtein, prominent member of the party United Russia of Vladimir Putin, took matters into his own hands.
Considering LGBTQ culture "a hybrid weapon of war hurled against Russian civilization as a bulwark of traditional values", he has prepared a bill that would protect all age groups from cultural pollution through the identification of a wide range of offenses such as the representation of "non-traditional sexual relationships", the questioning of "traditional family values" and the suspicion of "inducing paedophilic stimuli".
The deputy declared that “a novel like Summer with the pioneer handkerchief falls fully within the restrictions set by the bill, because it has nothing to do with literature”.
Anti-Lgbtq law: a drastic crackdown
The bill was approved by the Duma unanimously, without even an abstention. This astonishing unanimity has its own precise reason Schimpfössl and Sandalov write: “For the generation that now governs Russia who grew up in the Soviet Union, it is almost a personal matter. Many remember Pioneer summer camps with poignant nostalgia and see the book as an attempt to blacken their past.”
This crackdown is part of an atmosphere of growing repression. The Kremlin tightens its grip on dissent. In July the law on “foreign agents” – passed in 2012 and, since the beginning of 2021, systematically used to gag independent media and journalists – has been revised to include anyone “under foreign influence”.
Book publishers have already received a small taste of the great deal that awaits them. In late October, the Kremlin blacklisted Alexey Dokuchaev and Andrey Baev, the founders of Popcorn Books. To continue to survive, Popcorn had to disassociate herself from them to avoid being declared a foreign agent.
On the eve of the entry into force of the law, representatives of the publishing house wrote on their social network: “Today we say goodbye to our queer books. Not forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future… We love you and embrace all those who have supported us and our “uncomfortable” books for all these four years. See you in the back."
An interesting appointment.
A reset of the rights of the LGBTQ community
The law effectively represents a zeroing of those few rights of the LGBTQ community remained in the country. Organizations deemed to be operating in violation of the new rules must cease operations within 90 days.
The measure could force some bookshops and film and entertainment venues to close their doors. The publishers who have in their catalog and publish content associated with LGBTQ propaganda can be labeled as foreign agents.
The formulations of the law to define what is attributable to LGBTQ propaganda they are generic and ambiguous enough to leave publishers dumbfounded as to which content to censor and which to let pass. According to some observers almost 50% of fiction and non-fiction publications in circulation could be considered in violation of the law.
It seems that the classics, however, are not interested. Even the biographies of Tchaikovsky, openly queer, they should be safe.
One of the major Russian publishers said it was undergoing a linguistic and content review of all new publications. Макс Фальк's debut novel “Вдребезги” (In pieces), published by Like Book, the largest Russian publisher of young adult books, came out with black bars on the censored parts, about 3% of the content. The novel tells a story of love and friendship between two young people from different social backgrounds.
See you at the back
In Khabarovsk, a city of 660 inhabitants in the Vladivostok region, activists from an organization called the "Council of Fathers" bought, filmed by a video camera, the entire stock of copies in the bookshops of the city of Summer with the pioneer handkerchief need What the swallow is silent about tore up the pages of some books and sent all the copies to the shredder. The police will also participate in the next raid.
“What is happening is chilling and, according to critics, erases one of the last forms of queer visibility in Russia,” writes the NYT.
However, it will be difficult for the Kremlin to be able to eliminate the LGBTQ literary production. After all, Russia is the homeland of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, where censorship has given prestige and authority to dissent literature. The prohibition, as they think two authors of the books in question, it could increase the interest of readers and, as has already happened in the past, they will find ways to continue reading what they want to read and authors to write what they want to write. That it really is the beginning of a movement friendly of the 21st century?
As for Yury and Volodya, their story continues. There is already a sequel and a third book is in the works.
The circulation of ideas cannot be stopped.
Sources:
Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Felix Sandalov, The Teen Romance Novel That Russia's Politicians Just Can't Bear, The New York Times, December 4, 2022
Russia passes law banning 'LGBT propaganda' among adults, The Guardian, 24 November 2022
The publishers of Summer in a Pioneer Tie said they were “not allowed” to participate in the Non/Fiction book fair, Russia Posts English, December 1, 2022
