Non è colpa dello specchio se le facce sono storte. Diario di un filorusso

It’s Not the Mirror’s Fault if Faces Are Crooked: Diary of a Pro-Russian

In March 2022, just days after the Russian armed forces began their invasion of Ukraine, Paolo Nori had some lectures on Dostoevsky canceled at a university in Milan. The incident sparked international attention, and Nori suddenly found himself at the center of notoriety, with invitations to give talks multiplying. A Russian director even approached him, wanting to make a documentary about him. Declining the offer, Nori wrote to him: “This ridiculous story of mine confirms something you Russians know very well: that literature, when powerful — as in the case of Dostoevsky — is stronger than any censorship and any dictatorship.”
The Russian invasion soon turned into a prolonged war, and in the meantime, Nori has published other books, not only in Italy but also in Russia, where some of his titles were translated for the first time — and also censored. Russian law prohibits the publication of books in which the war in Ukraine is not called a “special operation,” and as a result, the Russian publisher had to make cuts to the original texts in order to release them. The perhaps not insignificant outcome is that Nori is now a censored writer both in Italy and in Russia.

In this new book, the self-confessed pro-Russian Paolo Nori reflects on the reasons behind an instinct that is not only found in authoritarian governments or blind bureaucracies: the instinct to indulge in simplifications that equate politics with literature, war with poetry; the instinct to feel on the side of reason to the point of having the right to silence and erase differing opinions; the instinct to stubbornly ignore that, as Gogol wrote, “it’s not the mirror’s fault if faces are crooked.”
It is precisely the mirror of literature that Nori holds up to his readers — through the stories of his beloved Russian authors, and through his own unique and unmistakable writing — so that everyone may exercise their capacity to think (and feel) freely, without being trapped by mental cages that confuse people with their governments, books written in a language with war proclamations and orders spoken in the same language, and the defense of freedom with censorship.