In March 2022, just days after the start of Russia\u2019s 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: \u201cThis ridiculous affair confirms something you Russians know very well: that literature, when it is powerful, as in Dostoevsky\u2019s case, is stronger than any censorship and any dictatorship.\u201d\nThe 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\u2014though also censored. Russian law prohibits the publication of books that fail to call the war in Ukraine a \u201cspecial operation,\u201d and as a result his Russian publisher was forced to cut passages from the original texts in order to bring them out. The outcome\u2014perhaps not without its irony\u2014is that Nori is now a censored writer both in Italy and in Russia.\nIn this new book, the self-declared \u201cpro-Russian criminal\u201d Paolo Nori reflects on the instinct\u2014common not only to authoritarian governments or blind bureaucracies\u2014to 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, \u201cIt is not the mirror\u2019s fault if faces are crooked.\u201d\nAnd 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\u2014and to feel\u2014without 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.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nel marzo del 2022, pochi giorni dopo l\u2019inizio dell\u2019invasione dell\u2019Ucraina da parte delle forze armate russe, Paolo Nori si vide cancellare alcune lezioni su Dostoevskij […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1486,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-libri"],"meta_box":{"seleziona_logo":"Standard","colore":"Prefedinito","autore":"Paolo Nori","citazione":"","titolo_2":"","releasedate":"","publisher":"","pages":"","translation_rights_sold_to":"","group_info_progetto":[],"immagini":[],"galleria_video":[],"autori-libri_to":["518"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1485"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1487,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1485\/revisions\/1487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alferj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}