Reflecting on Shishkin

Mikhail Shishkin’s refusal to take part in Book Expo 2013 and continue to represent “a country in which power has been seized by a corrupt, criminal regime” has thrown Russia’s literary community into a state of turmoil and placed those who shared a table with Shishkin at book fairs past – in New York (in 2012), Paris, London, Frankfurt, and Beijing – in an awkward position.

Shishkin’s fellow writers took his decision as a personal insult – he used to be just like us, received the same awards, and now he’s making it look as if we’re beneath him and support a corrupt, criminal regime. Dmitry Bykov, a true leader of the protest movement in Russia, expressed his hurt feelings in a poem that clearly hinted his own services in the struggle against the regime are every bit as worthy, but go unnoticed or unremembered. There also appeared a somewhat muddled piece by Olga Slavnikova on why she plans to continue attending book fairs.

There has been a lot of talk suggesting that Shishkin’s move was carefully calculated to create a reputation for himself as a dissident and opponent of the regime for the benefit of the Nobel Committee. You would think, “Fine!” – a Nobel Prize for Shishkin would be cause for rejoicing and take both Russian literature and Russia up a notch in the eyes of the international community. But for some reason right now nobody, including government officials, seems to feel the slightest concern for the country’s standing in the world. Instead, too many are bemoaning how easy it is to denounce Russia when you mostly live outside its borders (a point made by the eternal rebel Eduard Limonov) and accusing Shishkin of base ingratitude.

Let’s leave Shishkin in peace, since he is, after all, one of our best writers and did indeed take a brave stand. Just as important, this stand will go down in history, the history of literary mores in Russia of the 2010s, as an indicator of certain processes and phenomena.

The publication of his open letter brought about a number of curious reactions.

First of all, writers, even liberal writers, were not inclined to celebrate the fact that one of their own had mustered the courage to actually do something everyone had long talked about. Instead, the move was misunderstood and provoked envy, which goes to show that we do not have any sort of cohesive literary sphere, or even one that is segmented into groups and blocs. Russian writers are all off in their own separate corners. Last year’s “Walk with Poets and Writers” in Moscow is the one happy exception.

Second, it turned out that, long before Shishkin made his public pronouncement, writers have been refusing to participate in events sponsored by Rosspechat,* among them Olga Sedakova, for example. Others – Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Dmitry Bykov – asked never to be invited to any meetings between Vladimir Putin and writers. The difference is that Sedakova, Ulitskaya, and Bykov took these stands without fanfare and public declarations.

Finally, Shishkin’s actions brought Russian writers back to the painful question of “the State and I.” Just what are the limits of creative freedom today? What kind of literature is needed by the State, the Kremlin? The reexamination of this question brought to light a few things to console us.

After the collapse of the USSR, after the disappearance of the State Prize for Literature designed to encourage realist prose and the generous financial support given to members of the Soviet Writers Union (dachas, apartments, royalties), the State failed to come up with a new approach to contemporary literature. The most prominent State-sponsored post-Soviet literary prize, Big Book («Большая книга»), undertook the task of creating a measuring rod for literary virtues, but ended up with a value system that was aesthetically multidimensional and full of ambiguity. Recipients of the Big Book prize included not only realists like Makanin and Ulitskaya (hardly firebrands), but also post-modernists like Pelevin and Sorokin.

A few years ago the Gorky Prize, usually awarded at a ceremony presided over by Lyudmila Putina, came on the scene. This prize is given to Russian authors working in the tradition of the Russian classics. Its mission included “the revival of national self-awareness, morality, and patriotism.” However its influence over literary life and readers proved so inconsequential as to render it irrelevant. The same can be said for the Government of the Russian Federation Literary Prize, which, although it exists, has no transparent decision-making procedure, nor clear criteria for selecting laureates, and, therefore, has failed to have any impact.

Contemporary literature in Russia occupies a niche where freedom is still enjoyed. The State cannot, and, it seems, does not even wish to put pressure on writers. This may be because their books are not produced in large enough quantities to have a major impact on hearts and minds. Also, very few writers are capable of the sort of gesture Mikhail Shishkin made. Literary rebellion in Russia is timid and therefore innocuous. That is why it is still possible to take Russian writers along to book fairs.

* The government agency in charge of publishing.