Having experienced violence perpetrated by Russia in 2014 in the east of the country and then wholesale in 2022, the vast majority of Ukrainians now feel an existential need to emancipate themselves from Russia in most forms. The Pushkin statue debate reveals different understandings of what ‘freedom’ means to different readers in Russia and its former imperial lands.įor Ukrainians the word ‘freedom’ now means a life-and-death struggle. That makes him a synecdoche for Russian culture as a whole: take down Pushkin’s statue and you are challenging Russia as a whole. A few decades after he died in 1837 aged only 37, he was elevated to the status of ‘Russia’s national writer’. But even more so because of what he is seen to represent – because of his statues. Partly because of his work because, in a pure literary sense, all modern Russian literature flows from him. Pushkin stands in the middle of this debate. In a recent New Yorker article, Elif Batuman writes, ‘Literature, in short, looks different depending on where you read it,’ saying, more or less, that a nineteenth-century Russian text read in twenty-first century Georgia or Ukraine carries a menace that she had previously missed. Others have argued that Russian literature is part of an alternative narrative to that of the authorities. Ukrainians and others have called for the ‘de-colonisation’ of Russian literature as part of the fabric of the imperial state. The Ukraine war has sparked a debate about the relationship of Russia’s literature and culture to its neo-imperial war. He was the man who had written ‘I lauded freedom in a cruel age,’ a line which is inscribed on the pedestal of his statue in Moscow. Their Pushkin was the one who was sent to southern Ukraine as a political exile and who was, in the nineteenth century, called ‘the bard of freedom’. Many Russian liberals who opposed the war in Ukraine were aghast at such actions. In early 2022, Russia’s invading forces in Ukraine, also invoked an imperial Pushkin, putting up placards with his portrait in towns they had captured, such as Kherson, where the poet had lived. They cited one of Pushkin’s poems in particular, ‘To the Slanderers of Russia,’ a jingoistic text, in which he castigates Europeans for opposing the Russian army’s suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830. Ukrainians say they are dethroning a Russian imperialist. On April 30 Ukrainian soldiers took down a bust of Pushkin which had stood in the centre of the liberated town since 1900 and removed it to the local museum.Īcross Ukraine at least two dozen Pushkin statues have been removed from their pedestals since the war began. A Russian air strike had killed 47 civilians, a war crime that Amnesty International termed ‘a merciless, indiscriminate attack’. By rallying next to the monument to the curly-haired poet, they were perpetuating a tradition dating back to Soviet times.įive weeks later, Ukrainian forces recaptured the town of Chernihiv north of Kyiv, which had suffered grievously from a month of Russian occupation and where hundreds had died. They stood around the statue of Alexander Pushkin, holding placards saying ‘No to War’ for a few minutes before their protest was dispersed by the police. On the evening of February 24, 2022, a few hours after Vladimir Putin ordered his army into Ukraine, thousands of Russians, most of them young, came out onto Pushkin Square in central Moscow.
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