In his last novel, Anything goesa sort of political and literary testament written in 1961, Vassili Grossman (1905-1964) tells the story of a man coming back to life after spending thirty years in the gulags of the Soviet Union.
During his trip through post-Stalinist Russia, he meets various people and wonders about the existence of the “Russian soul”. Mysterious, elusive, enigmatic? If, for Churchill, Russia was “a riddle shrouded in mystery inside an enigma”, for Grossman—or for his narrator—there is no enigma. Nothing could be clearer: “It is time for the soothsayers who predict the future of Russia to understand that only millennial slavery created the mystique of the Russian soul. »
This is also the point of view of the Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin in Peace or war. Reflections on the “Russian world”a collection of hard-hitting essays written in German in 2019 – since according to him, the Russian language has now become the language of assassins.
From the time of the first tsars, the USSR and the chaos of the 1990s, until the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in February 2022, this “special operation” whose objective was to save Russians, Russian culture and the Russian language from Ukrainian fascists, the writer serves as our guide. In August 1991, in Moscow, as a handful of Communist Party dinosaurs attempted to reestablish the Soviet Union by force, he was already among the crowd ready to defend Russia’s young and frail democracy.
Mixing at times his family and intimate history with that of the Soviet Union and Russia, Shishkin here gives free rein to his anger. “This attitude of the state behaving with its own population as an occupying power goes back to its foundation by the Vikings. »
“This is my interpretation of Russia, its past, its present and its future”, he writes, while “Before our eyes, Russia has emigrated from the 21e century in the Middle Ages”. But paradoxically, the book is also a declaration of love to Russia, “whose nature is so beautiful and whose culture is so grandiose, but which constantly turns into a monster devouring children, those of others like its own”.
Born in Moscow in 1961 — the same year Grossman wrote Anything goes — of Ukrainian mother and Russian father, Mikhail Shishkin has lived in Switzerland since 1995. Well-known novelist (The Capture of Izmail, The coat to martingale), it is as a frank and lucid man that he takes the floor to explain to the West this hermetic and indecipherable “Russian world” from which he comes.
First observation: “Russia has returned to Soviet times of absolute lies. » Very quickly followed by another: « Russian history is eternally biting its own tail. And the mysteries pile up. “Is it a dictatorship and a dictator giving birth to a population of slaves or a population of slaves giving birth to a dictatorship and a dictator? The egg and the hen. How to break this vicious circle? Where can Russia’s new start begin? »
The rest, everything else, is up to date.