Some of my father’s readers (who are Russian ethnically and in terms of their citizenship) wrote to him to say that they were burning his books because he trashed the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and because he was a beast from hell.
It is always incredibly cute when book – burning Russians lecture Jews on how to honor the victims of the Holocaust. It is especially curious that the book – burning frenzy erupted among the Russians after my father shared a couple of mildly pro-Ukrainian articles.
Clarissa's Blog 
Artists and creators cannot be understood in a politically correct climate. If you receive your doctrine from some ideologue who bestows rigidity, almost anything in a book will be too much for one, because the real observers of humanity deal in complexity and nuance.
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The saddest part is that the fellow who burned the books works as a publisher. So you can imagine what gets on the market after passing through him.
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I’ve had literati and academic types who couldn’t understand the way I wrote either. It’s a great surprise when someone crashes in my esteem from so high.
Everything with intellectuals seems so fucked up right now. They want to produce this politically correct stuff to keep their jobs or something.
Did that guy really burn his books or just threaten to?
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Yeah, scares me too…and the two of us are almost perfect opposites ;-D
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Yes, your projection of me seems to be a perfect opposite of you. Let us call it your shadow side.
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Fair enough, but I meant in life experiences.
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Well if you tell me what your experiences are, we will be able to compare them and see which ones match up. It can be very difficult to interpret someone’s experiences when they come from an entirely different culture from yours. Lots of assumptions can lead to completely false conclusions.
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Weirdly enough, perhaps coincidentally, I had a dream about a Jewish couple last night. I was drowsing on my chair when Mike had a documentary on TV about a writer who escaped Hitler’s Germany. I have forgotten the name of the writer but Mike will remember.
Then I had a very vivid dream in black and white. What was so strange was the period detail of all the clothing and the doors to the houses and the hair and attitudes.
In the dream, Mike and I came to the door of the Jewish guy’s house and he called out to us, “Have you come to tell me good news about my book?” and he seemed very keen to greet Mike. I, however, wanted to steal his coffee beans from him. He had a whole bag and I said, “Let me take these and I will take care of them for you.” But he didn’t trust me. I’m really not sure what my motive was in this instance either. It was ambiguous.
There was another part of the dream where his wife had written a cryptic poem to her husband to seduce him, and it was written on a lyre, but it was really quite an obvious message of robust sexual proportions. I noticed the message, which on one level was subtle, but on another level not at all.
Then I tried to enter their house again, the following night, for dinner, but the wife had other plans and became haughty and aggressive.
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I would like to know if you have any understanding of why you dreamt in black and white on this occassion?
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Because the footage I saw on TV was not in color.
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For many Russians the primary importance of the Holocaust is that talking about it is a tool for creating and/or bolstering the image of ultimate anti-fascists for the Russians themselves. It does not really matter who the saved ones were, the main thing is the self-image of the savior. A Jew not agreeing to view Ukraine war within the “Russians as ultimate anti-fascists forever, regardless of context” paradigm (which automatically makes everyone opposing Russia “a fascist”) must be particularly annoying. It is really difficult to accuse somebody of fascism, nazism or antisemitism as long as the Jews disagree. Because so far the Jews are considered the primary authority on these subjects… But the Russians, of course, wish to be this authority themselves.
For the record – I am not denying that the Soviets (including Russians, Ukrainians and many others) contributed the most to the victory over Nazis (after 1941, once Stalin stopped being a de facto Nazi ally) or that they saved a huge number of Jews. I am talking about the use of the Holocaust concept in modern Russian official propaganda.
Good somewhat related link (in Russian): http://taki-net.livejournal.com/2000455.html
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Great comment, thank you! And a great link. Although I’m not that sure about the part where the loser mythology is doomed.
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“Did you perchance purchase those books you’re burning, or should some booksellers be notified about who they should prosecute?”
Either way, the author wins. 🙂
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I don’t think any country is as obsessed with WWII as Russia is. I understand that the Soviet Union essentially won WWII in Europe (all the other allies put together were basically a little help).
A lot of the obsession seems to be that other European countries aren’t grateful enough. I’m assuming that Soviet (and now Russian) edcuation doesn’t actually include any of the abundant reasons that any gratitude felt in Eastern Europe for the achievements of the Soviet army was more than overshadowed by Soviet behavior after WII (and sometimes before).
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That’s true. It was never ever ever discussed what the Soviet soldiers did to the civilians after liberating them. I actually only found out a couple of years ago.
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“A lot of the obsession seems to be that other European countries aren’t grateful enough.”
Indeed. There’s a book written by a woman who was gang-raped by Soviet soldiers every day throughout months in Transylvania at the age of 19 at the end of the WW2. I want to read it for ages, but I just don’t dare to begin it. The author considered herself lucky as there were much younger girls in the same situation (usually up from 12 years old). The Russians also threw many smaller kids out of the windows from the 4-5+ floors, beat old people to death, forced younger and middle-aged men to work for free in their Gulags in Siberia, stole and damaged everything, and drank water from the toilet because they’d never seen a modern toilet before. And took away my great-grand-aunt’s sausage-filler, because they thought it was a rifle.
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Even though the history is tragic, I couldn’t help laughing about the sausage filler.
But now I don’t feel bad for the Soviet soldiers who were sent to concentration camps after the war.
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“Even though the history is tragic, I couldn’t help laughing about the sausage filler.”
Yeah, it’s very funny indeed, however she was lucky because she was old and didn’t have children, and also was dirt poor, so the sausage filler was the only thing that made the Soviet soldiers interested.
Btw I don’t hate Russians, so my above comment is not about currently living Russians. I dream regularly about Russia (I’ve never been there though), in my dreams I’m usually either on a train in Russia or in St Petersburg (I don’t know why). Once I wanted to learn Russian so that I could read Russian literature natively, I even bought Russian character stickers for my laptop and a Russian grammar book. Finally I didn’t have enough time and brought the grammar book to sell in a second-hand shop in Budapest and the shopkeeper said this: “Pfej, ruski”, and looked at me as if I were a creep. No second-hand bookshop wanted to buy it, but a homeless man who begged in front of one the shops told me I could give it to him for free which I did. It seems Eastern Europe needs much more time to forget the past.
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And of course many of those soldiers were Soviet but not Russian. It is unfair that Russians should get either all of the credit or all of the blame.
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This is both hilarious and terrifying.
Though, the sheer lack of self-awareness is comforting, in a way. If they ever start showing any creativity and develop more original methods of destroying books, that’ll be the time to truly worry.
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The books were written before the current events in Ukraine and contain no mention of Putin or anything of the kind. It would have made more sense to burn the computers because my father published the offending statements online. But somehow that idea didn’t look attractive.
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