A very interesting article in The Atlantic (Gal Beckerman):
[B]oycotts [of Russian culture] have only increased in intensity, and in ways that demonstrate how wartime assaults on freedom can ripple far outside the conflict zone—where the sound of war is not that of bombs detonating but of piercing silence. Now the impulse to censor anyone Russian has arrived in the United States, at a venue that is designed to—of all things—champion and promote freedom of speech and expression: PEN America’s annual World Voices festival. It has also led, quite precipitously, to the writer Masha Gessen’s decision to resign as the vice president of PEN’s board of directors.
This past Saturday, as part of the festival, Gessen was set to moderate a panel showcasing writers in exile, two of them, like Gessen, Russian-born authors who had left their country in disgust. But a day before the event, ticket holders received an email saying that because of “unforeseen circumstances” the panel had been canceled. Their money would be refunded. No other explanation was offered and any trace of the event disappeared from PEN’s program online.
A small delegation of Ukrainian writers, who participated in a panel planned for the same day as the canceled Gessen event, had declared they could not attend a festival that included Russians. Because two of the writers, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, are active-duty soldiers in the Ukrainian army, they argued that there were legal and ethical restrictions against their participation. Chapeye, a writer whose short story “The Ukraine” was recently published in The New Yorker, texted with me from a bus on his way back to Ukraine. He didn’t see himself as having boycotted the Russians. It was simply that their presence was incompatible with his. “The Russian participants decided to cancel their event themselves because we as active soldiers were not able to participate under the same umbrella,” he wrote.
Chapeye said he didn’t make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians. “Until the war ends,” he wrote to me, “a soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.'”
I don’t fault the Ukrainian writers for simply not wanting to be on the panel; that’s their call. (This having been said, I very much doubt that there’s any “legal” obligation for Ukrainian soldiers to not even speak at a conference, in a foreign country, at which some other speakers are civilian citizens of an enemy country; and I find it hard to see it as an ethical obligation, either.) But I’m inclined to share Gessen’s view that Russian writers shouldn’t be excluded from such events simply because of the writers’ country of citizenship, coupled with a demand by Ukrainian writers. And the organizers’ opposition, which I share, to the war being waged by Russia shouldn’t translate into such exclusion of Russian writers.
(Note that, as I understand the story, the event was canceled by PEN, not by the Russian participants themselves.)
Eugene Volokh
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