Art sews us together like a huge patchwork, we humans. On this magic carpet, we cross eras, borders, civilizations. Artists are smugglers, from soul to soul. Some are clairvoyants. They are the first ones that dictators put aside. It is therefore playing the game of dictators to prevent artists from exercising their art.
Yet this is what the OSM is doing by depriving Alexander Malofeev from performing on stage solely because of his Russian nationality. Racism, xenophobia: everything that culture abhors. What should he have done to satisfy his judges? A public self-flagellation session? Denying family and country, as required by ruthless dictatorships with certain artists and intellectuals?
Yet his homeland, Russia, gave the world an immense universal culture. Writers, painters, musicians who lift us to unparalleled heights. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Pasternak, Chagall, Bulgakov, Mayakovsky, Solzhenitsyn, Bakunin, Shostakovich and so many others! Many of them paid a heavy price to the dictators of their fatherland to be able simply to exist!
Pasternak, whom Stalin called at all times to ask him probing questions in his metallic voice, sharp as a blade. Shostakovich, who slept fully clothed at the door of his apartment so that his family would not be disturbed in case he took Stalin’s idea of having his henchmen seek him out to take him to the gulag.
Bulgakov, blind, who dictated this masterpiece to his wife, The Master and Margarita, trembling with fear that he would be prevented from continuing his work. Solzhenitsyn, who, in the gulag, learned by heart the sentences he composed in order to put them on paper once out of this hell.
Cancel culture
Russian culture is not vodka taken off the shelves. For my part, it runs in my veins with other cultures. I have never forgotten my adolescent wonders when reading the Doctor Zhivago, from Karamazov brothers, poems by Mayakovsky, music by Nutcracker, and when each evening, I fell asleep lulled by the first movement of the concerto in D major by Tchaikovsky on disc that my parents had obtained thanks to coupons, like Pinky stamps. I flew away with Tchaikovsky, who gave wings to my heart which wanted to believe in absolute love.
When will the ravages of cancel culture end? Do we need to bring down an iron curtain on Russian culture to demonstrate our opposition to the senseless war in Ukraine? How dare we are led into the maze of repression by cultural censorship? It all started with SLĀV. Censorship is stupid and blind like a steamroller.
A generation of Quebecers will remember the Red Army choir singing Kalinka. It was in the heart of the Cold War where, like today, we were on a volcano. But we understood very well then that these singers of the Red Army had nothing to do with these state excesses, that they were like us, in the gears. They were just there, with their long black boots hammering the rhythm of Kalinka ka kaïa, and we found ourselves among humans, the space of an evening, hoping that the dictators would end up dying.
Art can also serve as a truce to reframe us out of the dark hours of history, provided we let it take us beyond the clouds.