Literature and culture are also becoming a battleground in the course of the current Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
The author:
Dr Matthew Wehowski studied Slavic history and studies in Tübingen and earned his doctorate in modern and contemporary history. He currently works as a research associate at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism on the history of national movements and political transformation in Eastern and Central-Eastern Europe.
According to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, there is a “total war” against the “Russian world” (Russki Mir), and former President Dmitry Medvedev also spoke of “hatred” of Russian culture. A video – rather bizarre – of the Russian representation at UNESCO shows writers like Pushkin and Tolstoy confronting the supposed Western (but also Ukrainian) “non-culture”. In view of the real war Russia is waging against Ukraine and its citizens, these are irritating theses.
What’s behind it? Culture became another battleground. In the occupied regions of eastern Ukraine, curricula are adapted to Russians, Ukrainian literature is taken out of libraries or destroyed, and Pushkin’s face proclaims the great “Russian past” on large banners. That Russia abuses great writers and their language for imperial purposes is not a new phenomenon. The tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, on the other hand, used them as instruments of a hegemonic cultural policy in the areas they considered as “spheres of influence”.
Freedom became popular
The themes of liberty and nation in literature and language, which were (and still are) intrinsically interrelated, gained popularity from the late 18th century onwards, when the Romantic literary movement spread across Europe and also reached Russian Tsarism. He produced the poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) or Adam Mickiewicz (1789-1855), who became “national poets” for their respective nations, Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Meanwhile, the tsarist empire grew into an empire, which now stretched far west (to Warsaw) and south (to the Black Sea). Politically, autocracy took hold against alternative forms of government when, for example, Catherine the Great dissolved the Cossack Hetmanate in Ukraine in 1764 and also crushed the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic in 1795.
However, the ideas of freedom that came with Romanticism challenged the rise of autocracy. In 1825, officials known as “Decembrists” rebelled against the czar’s omnipotence. Though they failed miserably, Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) responded with brutal repression. Pushkin, who was friends with some Decembrists and shared their views, feared imprisonment or exile. The tsar placed him under surveillance, but hoped to be able to use the popular poet for his purposes. The opportunity arose when the Polish national movement rose in 1830 and demanded national self-determination in an uprising. Pushkin opposed the insurgents and wrote the poem To the Slanderers of Russia (1831), directed against France and its supposed influence on the Poles. Education Minister SS Uvarov (1796-1855) was so enthusiastic about the text that he personally translated it into French. Pushkin’s liberal friends such as the poet PA Vyazemsky (1792-1878), on the other hand, were irritated by Pushkin’s “imperial” phrase.