Bringing Putin to the Blue Met
Russian democracy is shrinking, but Western intellectuals seem to be more alarmed about it than the Russians themselves, according to three writers at the Blue Metropolis literary festival.
Writer and Concordia English professor Mikhail Iossel was on a panel discussing dissident Russian writers with poet Bakhyt Kenjeev and Toronto writer David Bezmozgis.
Iossel called the increasing limits on press freedom and murders of muckraking journalists “a creeping rollback, payback for the era of the robber barons and the unbridled freedom” that followed the dismantling of the Soviet system in 1989.
The panelists’ attitudes to Vladimir Putin’s Russia were nuanced according to their ages. Kenjeev, the oldest, was philosophical about the increasing signs of repression because the Soviet era he remembers was so much worse. He told the kind of amusingly cynical anecdotes Eastern European émigrés have always exchanged.
Bezmozgis, a young Latvian-Canadian novelist, said that for many years, his Russia was “four square blocks of Toronto” filled with immigrants like his parents. Many of these people did well in the 1990s and often return to Russia for visits. Their materialism, unclouded as it is by political doubts, worried and repelled him.
Iossel agreed, and found it “depressing,” but said the saturation point of their tolerance may soon be reached. He founded a flourishing summer literary institute in Russia and visits the country regularly.
“It’s scary, almost humiliating,” he said of the apparent apathy of his countrymen. “Most people do not have access to the Internet, and they have no free media, so we don’t know how many are opposed. Russia has no friends, and could become belligerent. [We could see] increased murders and instability, and Putin could become an international pariah.”
Literature is still not censored in Russia, Iossel said, although the press certainly is. As freedom of expression increased in the 1990s, paradoxically, literary activity became less prestigious, but “it’s still cooler to be a writer in Russia than it is here.”
All the panelists agreed on at least two things. Putin unfairly gets the credit for Russia’s improved standard of living, but it’s none of his doing — it’s because of the skyrocketing price of oil. And Russian television is simply awful.
The ninth annual Blue Met took place April 25 to 29 at the Delta Centre-Ville Hotel. Linda Leith, who has taught in Concordia’s English Department, is the founder of what is now billed as the world’s first multilingual literary festival.
Alumnus Peter Behrens, who won the 2006 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction for his re-imagining of the 1848 Irish famine (The Law of Dreams), was part of a Blue Met panel that discussed how far fiction writers can go in appropriating real people and events.
Other Concordia writers and translators at the festival included Jason Camlot and Todd Swift (Language Acts), Peter Dubé (At the Bottom of the Sky, Hovering World), Hugh Hazelton (Antimatter), Sherry Simon (Translating Montreal), Mary Di Michele (Tenor of Love) and Jean-Philippe Warren.