Before being the Russian translator of Umberto Eco, the literary agent of Ludmila Ulitskaya and Ruben Gallego, the author of “In the mind of Vladimir Putin”, released this year for The Ship of TheseusElena Kostioukovich – born in Kiev, lived in Moscow, moved to Milan for years – was a girl who got to know the Soviet intelligentsia closely.
Nephew of the artist and writer Leonid Volinsky, very young wife of Sergej Kozlov (himself the son of the most famous Soviet Germanist, Ilya Fradkin), remembers houses frequented by Garcia Marquez and Heinrich Boell, by dissidents and informers, “always in the balance between two chairs”. And before talking about Dugin, the new propaganda and the madness that she has taken over Russia, she wants to tell about the past, to understand.
Elena Kostioukovich, how has the figure of the Russian intellectual changed from the Soviet era to today?
“I lived in an environment where intellectuals were at the same time very opposed to the regime and very cautious to avoid being thrown out of their posts. The opinion of the group was paid much attention to, everyone was afraid of being mistaken for informers, and the informers were then shunned by everyone. I remember people who were beginning to be said to be spies and even if they were “clean” then no one wanted to hang out with them anymore ».
Was the intellectual therefore critical and condescending at the same time?
«In a country like Russia, the intellectual was such on the basis of his political position, from the time of Pushkin, who was the first to experience exclusion for having been too close to power. In Soviet times it was necessary to be critical, clear-cut, it was a sort of disease, but life was easier: if you went into a friend’s house, you generally knew everything about his family, his intellectual history, and even in front of strangers were not afraid to say what we had read or thought, because we felt safe. Then of course we were wrong, there were moles everywhere ».
Has anything changed with perestroika and Yeltsin?
“Yes, the money has arrived. For years I could not understand why my friends – at that point I was already in Italy – were not afraid of flattering the new power of Yeltsin without paying attention to the opinion of the opposition group to which theoretically they should have remained faithful. In particular it was the cinema, which needed the money. I made it easy from Italy: “But how do you hang out with Konstantin Ernst? And do you want to bring him to Italy? ”,“ Eh but you know, he is the one who distributes the films and gives the money to make the series … ”. It was a childish way of courting business: “We are intellectuals, but they have the money and they pay, but we remain intellectuals.” But it is not true. Marat Guelman, for example, who was the spokesperson for the hateful Sergej Kirienko (responsible for the war in Donbass at the Kremlin) organizes a great cultural festival in Montenegro, among the financiers there are oligarchs who are now multi-sanctioned like Pumpyansky, but they also participate all immigrant intellectuals. It does not convince me, it seems to me a betrayal of our principles: why should we forgive these people for being Putin’s wallet? Today there is no intellectual whose photograph you cannot pull out with glasses of champagne and spoons full of Beluga caviar (which is illegal). As in “Mephisto”, step by step, you are no longer able to criticize, because of that caviar … Each of them is not bad, they are weak, if this catastrophe that began twenty years ago hadn’t fallen on their heads, they would have been refined intellectuals, because they have knowledge, readings, languages ».
Is there no intelligentsia without dissidence?
«Let’s take Mayakovsky, a very tall poet who wanted to be” with “the power, also because of the revolution, of the ideals he believed in. In the end he is shot (or killed) because he understands that his being “with” the Cheka and “with” those who were starting to organize the gulags, no longer worked. He tried to be “with”. In the era of Brezhnev no one was “with”, from Pasternak to Brodsky, all expelled and forced into exile “.
How is a Russian intellectual today opposed to power?
“By comparing the facts, where power does nothing but repeat:” Do not observe or reason on the facts. ” An intellectual today, faced with this war, in which Putin argues that the Ukrainians are our brothers and that in order to save them (from Nazism, from the Nazis, from themselves) we must kill them, is the one who simply asks: “But if they are our brothers, why do we have to kill them? ”. And that’s enough to end up in prison: a deputy of the Moscow parliament, Konstantinas Yankauskas, ended up in prison on charges of defamation for posting a prayer from the Pope (the trial began on August 26). The intellectual in Russia is the one who today, in front of the funeral of Darya Dugina, where the deputy Slutsky spoke of “a people, a kingdom, a guide”, says “attention, this is the same sentence of Hitler:” Ein Volk , ein Reich, ein Führer ”…».
Here, what did you think in front of Darya Dugina’s funeral?
“In the coffin was a beautiful woman, impressively reminiscent of the last frame of Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible”. It makes me think of the desire to build a myth around this girl, of which theoretically, if it is true that her car blew up, there shouldn’t be even a fragment left. I’m not even sure if Darya Dugina was killed. A careful analyst like Mark Feygin speculates that there is a story behind it of money, stolen to finance far-right groups. Darya had to disappear to avoid retaliation … “.
Are you thinking of a staging?
«From the dynamics of the attack to the elusive Ukrainian woman who goes to Estonia in Mini, everything seems very unlikely. Perhaps the operation is to build a new Zoya Kosmodemjanskaya, the heroine of the Second World War killed by the Germans and become a sort of martyr, object of worship and protagonist of endless representations throughout Russia, a poor girl who is venerated in all over the country. Darya, who is a very badly formed fascist, who denied Bucha and went to Mariupol to deny her evidence, has all the characteristics to be a new martyr. In 2011 Dugin organized a disgraceful metaphorical “baptism of fire” of Russia, with Darya pretending to burn on a pyre, saying that fire is purifier and stuff. To review those images today we ask ourselves many questions. It is not yet known whether there has been a crime, but it is known how it will be used. We will see Darya on the t-shirts, on the pins, on the tea cups ».
Let’s come to the Dugin case: how close is he to Putin and how popular is he among the Russians?
«Little, hardly anyone knows him. Among those who have studied it best is Michel Eltchaninoff (who will be together with Kostioukovich at the Mantua Literature Festival on 11 September, ed). Dugin appears in the 1990s as a supporter of Aleister Crowley and organizer of conferences on Nazi-Satanism, a marginal subculture, connected to far-right groups in Great Britain, especially young people. Then with Putin and the rebirth of the Orthodox Church, Dugin turns out to be an “old believer” (Russian schismatic movement which in 600 opposed the Orthodox Church, ed). In 2014 he goes from shooting in traditional robes, invoking Satan and chattering about talks with Lucifer to the publication of the “Ideology of the New Russia” ».
Do he and Putin know each other?
“I don’t think he has ever met Putin, also because Putin meets at most six people, but there are those who report to him, and certainly they have told him about him. As an ideologue of the “Russky Mir”, Dugin wrote that “the world without Russia makes no sense”, the same thing that Putin more or less said in an interview with Soloviev: “a world without Russia what world would it be?”“.
How do you explain the fascination of Italians for Dugin? Only with us or also in other countries?
«No, only the Italians. In France he had a moment of notoriety but then Jean Marie Le Pen sent him to that country. In Italy there is a tendency to ignore the European trait of Russian culture, and to exalt the eccentric, mystical, ramshackle one. Even Umberto Eco, of whom I was a young friend, was passionate about the darkest, most mystical stories, he preferred Azef and Blavatsky to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, which he considered “too long and complex” and who confessed to never having read”.
Who is responsible for the incomplete transmission of information between Russia and Italy?
«From publishing and newspapers, so mine and yours too. When I was a literary agent and I brought authors like Ulitskaya and Ruben Gallego, they came to ask me: “Don’t you have Prilepin? Limonov? Dubovitsky, Lilin? ”».
All literary cases, right?
“So, when a sophisticated publishing house like Voland asked me for an opinion on Prilepin, I was very clear: ‘he’s a fascist’. I don’t know how to explain, but just as Italians know each other, and they know who does what, the same thing happens among Russians, I also know everyone personally. Prilepin is one who writes about “a non-Aryan ethnic group that has to lick the Russians’ feet for having spared them”, that is, an anti-Semite through and through, and yet I happened to hear cultured people, and even friends, who didn’t even have understood the reference. Because? Perhaps because he is elegant, he is exotic, he is someone who, before speaking, sucks a cross that he holds around his neck ».
Even Lilin, the writer of “Siberian Education”?
«I remember a festival in Bellinzona with my authors, Ulitskaya, Ruben Gallego, Mikhail Shishkin, Mikhail Aizenberg, and all of a sudden they tell me:“ Lilin is there too ”. Like Lilin? She arrives, she sits down, and begins to tell her story about her, her unhappy childhood in Siberia and her exile in Moldova. Now, anyone who knows Russia asks: but what exile in Moldova? It is as if someone from the Sulcis mines during fascism had been exiled to an apartment in the center of Rome, but what are we talking about? And yet the public wanted him, who was invented by Einaudi out of thin air. I and my authors were followed by about twenty people, but for Lilin there were seventy people. In the end I said, go to hell, and I gave up. Another is Limonov, it was a mistake to extol him in that way, even though Carrère is a great writer ».
What is your opinion of Italian talk shows during the war?
“Even there: they invited me on television with incredible pro-Putin characters, who said absurd things, and with whom it was impossible to entertain a contradiction. A gift to the Kremlin’s propaganda that not even Putin himself could hope for. Once they asked me if it was true that Putin drank the blood of deer. But what is it? ».
Do you believe in Russian interference on the Italian vote?
“I think the Russians try, I don’t know if they can, but they will bear any result “.
What do we not understand about Russia?
“The same things we don’t understand about the West. I think of my neighbors in Milan, who look at me with compassion, who feel they should talk to me, who should care. Every now and then someone says to me “one day we go for a coffee so he explains well what is happening”, but now there is the jeep to wash and the children to take to school. Each says: then I’ll think about it. And the Russians do the same. As they stand there in their homes wondering why their cousin from Donetsk doesn’t call anymore and they don’t even call her because they are afraid to face the conversation, they don’t realize that the war is already in their homes. They too say: I’ll think about it, we’ll think about it tomorrow, maybe things will sort themselves out. But neither of these two things will happen“.
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