Summary
Zahar Prilepin: Letters from Donbass
Zahar Prilepin is a Russian writer, a veteran of the war in Chechnya and a member of the National Bolshevik Party. What does Prilepin write about? He writes about the role of good literature in creating and preserving the image of a time, the best example is what Blok, Mayakovsky, and Yesenin did for the Soviet government, in order to shake the truth in the other side's face: "it is good news for my biased taste, that the Maidan side loves not only pathos, but shabby, rusty rhymed pathos". According to some deeper legality, all such sponsored movements are accompanied by bad literature. If they are honest, they want to leave time and the world of books and literature. We saw that on our field as well. He writes about the young generation of Russians who lived in Ukraine and chose the Maidan side. About a generation educated on Ukrainian nationalistic school programs, on fictional history, on emphasizing differences and conflicts with Russia, and which, as its answer to all the difficult questions of the past, finally wants to participate in something that is not marked by the East, backwardness, or misfortune. Writing about it, Prilepin argues with that significant part of Russians who are ready to say that Ukraine does not actually exist, that it was invented in some kind of Western political laboratory. "The fact is that it exists", this is the message he sends from the bloody battlefield, but he distinguishes Ukraine from the loud "zig-heil youth", from the elite who lead the country, but still learn Ukrainian, from the "intelligentsia of confused reason". He tries to keep the Russian-Ukrainian relationship alive, so he repeats "Ukraine is not to blame".
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