In March 2022, just days after the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Paolo Nori had a series of lectures on Dostoevsky cancelled at a university in Milan. The case quickly gained international attention, and Nori suddenly found himself in the spotlight, with invitations to give lectures multiplying. A Russian film director even approached him with the idea of making a documentary about him. In declining the offer, Nori wrote: “This ridiculous affair confirms something you Russians know very well: that literature, when it is powerful, as in Dostoevsky’s case, is stronger than any censorship and any dictatorship.” The Russian invasion has since turned into a war dragging on for years, during which Nori has published more books, not only in Italy but also in Russia, where some of his works have been translated for the first time—though also censored. Russian law prohibits the publication of books that fail to call the war in Ukraine a “special operation,” and as a result his Russian publisher was forced to cut passages from the original texts in order to bring them out. The outcome—perhaps not without its irony—is that Nori is now a censored writer both in Italy and in Russia. In this new book, the self-declared “pro-Russian criminal” Paolo Nori reflects on the instinct—common not only to authoritarian governments or blind bureaucracies—to give in to simplifications that equate politics with literature, war with poetry; to feel so certain of being right as to claim the right to silence and erase dissenting opinions; to ignore, stubbornly, that, as Gogol wrote, “It is not the mirror’s fault if faces are crooked.” And it is precisely this mirror of literature that Nori, through the stories of his beloved Russian authors and through his unmistakable, unique style, holds up to his readers: so that each may exercise their own ability to think—and to feel—without being imprisoned by the mental cages that confuse people with their governments, books written in a language with proclamations and war orders issued in that same language, the defense of freedom with censorship.