Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Thursday morning that at least two people had been killed and 34 injured, including five children, in Russian attacks affecting 12 Ukrainian regions. The capital sustained extensive damage, with strikes reported against railway and metro infrastructure, shopping centres, industrial premises and a monastery.
The bombardment followed a three-hour meeting between Witkoff and Putin on Wednesday, during which the Russian president indicated his willingness to resume trilateral negotiations involving Moscow, Washington and Kyiv. The Russian attacks continued despite the diplomatic initiative, prompting Zelenskyy to call for renewed international pressure on the Kremlin.
In a statement published on Telegram, Zelenskyy said Russian forces had launched three waves of ballistic missiles against the Ukrainian capital, causing numerous direct hits and widespread destruction.
The Ukrainian president referred sarcastically to Russia’s supposed humanitarian intentions, an apparent reference to Witkoff’s description of Putin as a humanitarian during their meeting the previous day.
Emergency services were deployed across several districts of Kyiv, where residential and commercial buildings suffered damage. Part of the capital’s metro infrastructure on the Southern Bridge was affected, disrupting traffic, while a strike on an ambulance station in the Pecherskyi district damaged six emergency vehicles. No medical personnel were injured at that location.
According to Ukrainian military and emergency service reports, the overnight assault also involved 210 attack drones and several types of missiles, including Iskander-M, S-400, Zircon and Oniks weapons.
By Thursday morning, Ukrainian air defences had intercepted or suppressed 181 drones. Russian weapons struck 32 locations, while debris from intercepted drones fell at eight others.
The assault followed several consecutive days of Russian attacks against Kyiv, including earlier strikes on hospitals, residential buildings and the capital’s transport network.
The timing of the latest bombardment placed renewed scrutiny on Washington’s diplomatic engagement with Moscow.
On 21 October, Witkoff met Putin at the Konstantin Palace in St Petersburg, accompanied by Russian officials, including Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s representative for international economic cooperation. The discussions lasted approximately three hours.
The meeting followed talks in Oslo on 20 October, where Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Zelenskyy alongside Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb.
Following the St Petersburg meeting, Witkoff described the discussions as constructive and indicated that negotiations would continue at the technical level between representatives of the United States, Russia and Ukraine.
Putin reportedly expressed agreement in principle to restarting trilateral negotiations, potentially during the first half of November. However, no agreement on a ceasefire or suspension of Russian attacks was announced.
The meeting also attracted controversy after Witkoff praised Putin as a humanitarian following the release of Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American citizen who had been detained in Russia for more than four years.
The remarks prompted criticism from Republican lawmakers in Washington, who questioned the characterisation of the Russian president while Moscow continued its military campaign against Ukraine.
Zelenskyy characterised the overnight missile attack as evidence that Russia’s participation in negotiations had not produced any substantive change in its conduct.
He argued that diplomatic efforts to end the war should continue but must be accompanied by measures capable of altering Moscow’s military calculations.
Those measures, according to the Ukrainian president, include stronger air defence capabilities, faster deliveries of interceptor missiles, the ability to destroy Russian ballistic missile launchers and continued economic sanctions.
The latest attacks also place Ukraine’s air defence requirements firmly within the ongoing negotiations with Washington. Kyiv has repeatedly sought additional Patriot missiles and more reliable advance warning of Russian ballistic launches, particularly as repeated strikes place increasing demands on its interception capabilities.
For the Trump administration, the immediate question is whether Russia’s stated willingness to negotiate can produce verifiable commitments to reduce hostilities.
The Kremlin has offered the prospect of further talks without announcing a halt to its offensive operations. Kyiv, meanwhile, continues to face missile and drone attacks against civilian infrastructure even as discussions concerning a possible settlement proceed.
The events of 21–22 October leave Washington’s diplomatic initiative moving forward against the background of an expanding Russian aerial campaign, with no indication that Moscow intends to suspend its attacks while negotiations continue.
The riots in France and subsequent return to peace show that the road to civil war is paved with restored order, leaving a more combustible environment for the next crisis, say David Betz and Michael Rainsborough.
The post The Road to Civil War is Paved with Restored Order appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
China’s development of specialized naval auxiliaries designed to transport, launch and recover submarine-sized uncrewed vessels signals an assertive push to project autonomous undersea power beyond the First Island Chain and systematically challenge US submarine dominance in the Western Pacific. This month, multiple media outlets reported visual evidence showing that China has constructed a second dedicated […]
The post China’s new drone mothership targets US undersea edge appeared first on Asia Times.
Editor's note: Most of the Ukrainian soldiers and commanders interviewed are identified by their callsigns, in accordance with military protocols.
KHARKIV OBLAST — Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr had already narrowly survived crossing a mine-strewn field and a river in the crosshairs of Russian artillery when the swarm of first-person-view
Missiles struck Kyiv in the early hours of Thursday, a Reuters witness said, and Ukraine sent hundreds of drones towards Moscow overnight, as the two sides kept up a barrage of attacks despite the latest US mediation attempts to end the war.
The Russian strikes wounded 15 people and damaged subway infrastructure on the Southern Bridge over the Dnipro River in the Ukrainian capital while also restricting traffic there, Kyiv authorities said. The strikes followed another attack on the city on Wednesday evening that wounded six people.
A Russian strike killed a woman and injured another four people in the Kharkiv region in Ukraine’s northeast, Regional Governor Oleh Syniehubov said on Telegram.
A drone also hit energy infrastructure in the Kremenchuk area in the Poltava region, a local official said on Telegram, without giving details.
Located on the Dnipro River, Kremenchuk is a major industrial hub and home to one of Ukraine’s biggest oil refineries. The area has been repeatedly hit by Russian strikes, including a 2022 attack on a crowded shopping mall that killed at least 21 people.
In Russia, two people were wounded near Moscow after 630 drones were sent towards the capital during the night, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Telegram. Most of the drones were downed at long range, he added.
In the city of Lipetsk – home to a major steel plant some 400 km (250 miles) south of Moscow – a man was injured as drones hit apartment buildings and a medical facility, Governor Igor Artamonov said on the Telegram app.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 after annexing the Crimea peninsula from its southern neighbour eight years earlier, locking the two nations into the deadliest conflict on the European continent since World War Two.
The latest strikes come after US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff held talks this week with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to mediate an end to the conflict.
Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Ukraine supported a US proposal for three-way talks with Russia and the United States at the level of negotiators to be held as soon as possible, and the Kremlin said Putin has agreed to resume US-mediated peace talks with Kyiv as soon as next month.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel said he's skeptical of the US war with Iran and does not believe the United States should have launched it, putting the major Republican donor at odds with President Donald Trump over one of the administration's defining foreign policy decisions, POLITICO reported.
Thiel's remarks, delivered on October 12 at a private event, are his most explicit statements to be revealed publicly about the war with Iran and come less than two weeks before the midterm elections in which Trump's party is grasping to maintain power in Congress. The audio of Thiel's comments was obtained by Decoded by POLITICO from a lecture earlier this month.
"I'm skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it," Thiel said. "There were a lot of mistakes that were made."
Thiel added, "Maybe we don't have the hard power. Maybe we're going to lose the soft power war."
In the full lecture, Thiel made clear his strong opposition to neoconservatives and Middle East wars. Despite his criticism of the Iran war, Thiel highlighted his continued support of Trump and suggested he wanted to protect the president.
Still, Thiel's break over the war represents one of the most important examples to date of a fierce Trump ally sharing deep concerns about the conflict.
The comments were part of Thiel's lecture series in Nashville, which Decoded has documented since their start this fall. In the latest lecture, Thiel issued extensive warnings about what he described as the unchecked power of the International Criminal Court, drawing on comments from Bush-era figures Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
"I read the Cheney family's Trump derangement syndrome as an attempt to buy favor with the [International Criminal Court] and avoid prosecution. Probably too late," Thiel said. "And I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran."
Thiel also discusses meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in early 2024, after the October 7 attack, where he said he asked the president about his plans in Gaza. Thiel said Netanyahu told him, "I can't just Dresdenize it," referring to the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden during World War II that killed roughly 25,000 people.
The first big tech investor to back Trump in 2016, and then have a high-profile speaking role at the Republican National Convention that year, Thiel was also the biggest financial backer of super PACs supporting Vice President JD Vance's Senate campaign in 2022. POLITICO reported in March that Vance was "skeptical" of the U.S. striking Iran in the lead-up to the beginning of the war.
Representatives for Thiel and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
This story originally appeared on POLITICO and is courtesy of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which harnesses the resources of the company's newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces, and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, Onet, and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms.
The latest period in Russian literature, which evidently began on February 24, 2022, just as it did in education and science, has so far received little systematic study. There are, of course, more and more conference papers and articles on individual authors and phenomena, and conferences now bring together dozens of specialists. Clearly, systematic book-length studies of this period’s literature can only be published outside Russia, and foreign scholars are helping make them possible. Some of them have taken on the painstaking work of tracking every significant new release and translating and analyzing these texts. One of them, French literary scholar Antoine Nicolle, recently defended his doctoral dissertation, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. It is effectively the first attempt to systematically map the part of Russian literature usually described as anti-war or oppositional. T-invariant asked Nicolle how a scholar who started out as a Rimbaud specialist got hooked on contemporary Russian literature, how that literature has responded to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the suffering it has brought to that country, and what “being Russian” means for Russian writers today.
Participant Observation
T-invariant: How did your dissertation get started? As I understand it, you were collecting the material in real time, right alongside the research.
Antoine Nicolle: Circumstances made the decision for me. I started out in French literature — I was a specialist in Rimbaud and the nineteenth century. For three years, back before COVID, I worked in Moscow at the French University College. That’s when I picked up a new subject: Russian rock, and especially Yegor Letov, the frontman and voice of the Siberian punk band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) and a cult figure in Russian rock. Around 2021, I started a project on how Letov had been politicized in Russia. After my job in Moscow ended, I planned to go back to collect interviews and other material. But after February 24, all of that suddenly became impossible: I couldn’t go back, and many of the cultural figures I wanted to talk to had taken an openly pro-war stance. In March 2022, I read on Facebook that Linor Goralik was launching the ROAR project and gathering texts by the contemporary literary opposition (ROAR, the Russian Oppositional Arts Review, is an online magazine of anti-war literature founded by Linor Goralik in 2022. — T-invariant). We knew each other, and she was looking for translators, so I wrote to say I wanted to translate from Russian into French. That was the first time I seriously engaged with the most recent Russian literature, and my dissertation advisor in Paris told me: “Drop your old topic and work on this. It’s important, and it’s happening right now.”
T-INVARIANT BACKGROUND
Antoine Nicolle (b. 1992) is a French literary scholar, Slavicist, and translator. He studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris (ENS Ulm) and at the Sorbonne, and studied Russian at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO). In November 2025, he defended his doctoral dissertation at INALCO, Facing the War, Facing Oneself: Russian Literary Dissidence after February 2022. He has taught French and comparative literature at the French University College in Moscow (2018–2021) and Paris Nanterre University (2021–2022), and Russian literature at Clermont Auvergne University (2023–2025) and Bordeaux Montaigne University (since 2025). He has published scholarly work on Rimbaud, ancient poetry, and contemporary Russian literature, in journals including Rimbaud Vivant, Parade sauvage, and Savoirs en prisme. His writing has also appeared in Le Monde. In 2021, together with Sylvia Chassaing, he founded the independent publishing house Sampizdat Éditions. He has translated into French works by Yegor Letov, Alexander Brener, Svetlana Petriychuk, Pavel Pryazhko, and other contemporary authors. In 2022, he headed ROAR’s French translation team. He is a member of ArtAtWar, an international research project on Russian and Ukrainian literature in wartime.
T-i: So before that, you hadn’t worked on contemporary Russian literature at all?
AN: Not at all. I’d read a few things, but it wasn’t my research field. I worked on Rimbaud until I was about twenty-five. Then I moved to Russia and became a Slavicist. I’ve only been speaking Russian for nine years; before that, I didn’t know a word. Everything was new: not just the library work, but also working with living people.
T-i: In your dissertation, you describe your position as a researcher as “embedded.” What do you mean by that?
AN: Many Russianists in France have either Russian roots or personal ties to the country. I have neither, and nearly all my friends there have left. My personal history with Russia comes down to three years of living there, from 2017 to 2020. When I arrived, I knew almost nothing about the country. I lived through everything that happened after February 2022 both personally and through the eyes of other people, some close to me and some less so.
Being embedded is the particular position of a researcher who studies what is happening right now, before our eyes. You don’t have the historical distance that would let you tell what will turn out to matter, and you don’t have an established body of scholarship to lean on. Still, you can always get something out of this shaky position: it frees you from hierarchies of importance and lets you place “great” authors and complete unknowns on an equal footing, and likewise texts written for the moment and those that will eventually end up in history textbooks about this period. All the authors are just as caught up in what’s happening as you are.
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T-i: And why do these Russian debates strike such a nerve with people in France today?
AN: We’re having our own conversations about what would happen if our country swung to the right as well. How would the history textbooks be rewritten? What would be allowed and what wouldn’t? For now, it’s hypothetical, but we know it could become reality. I think people in the US get that now, too. It mattered to me to measure my own position, as a Frenchman anxiously bracing for a “right turn,” against what people in Russia are going through. At the same time, I never forgot that I was looking at all this from the outside. I lived in Russia during the last prewar years, starting in 2017, but I lived in my expat bubble and didn’t really see what was going on. A lot of it I only understood later, sitting at my laptop and reading texts. That’s why it’s so important to me to talk to people who lived through all this from the inside, and why I wanted someone who is part of Russian literary life on my dissertation committee. That person was Larissa Muravieva, a literary scholar who studies contemporary Russian prose and autofiction.
The New Geography of Russian Literature
T-i: How much interest is there in France in Russian literature of the past few years, both as a subject of scholarship and as something for literary critics to write about?
AN: I’m not the only one working on this in France. Fellow researchers of mine are writing about contemporary Russian-language literature right now, and I often draw on their work. I’m also part of ArtAtWar, a large project led by Victoire Feuillebois that looks at what has happened to the literary canon in Russia and Ukraine during the current war, and at new ways of studying literature in this context.
Bella Delacroix-Ostromooukhova studies Russian books and publishers for children and teenagers. Kateryna Tarasiuk wrote her dissertation on women’s writing by the younger generation. Sylvia Chassaing is now studying contemporary Russian creative writing schools. And Victoire herself has published a book on “Pushkinfall” [the removal of Pushkin monuments across Ukraine, by analogy with the earlier “Leninfall,” the toppling of Lenin statues there — T-invariant]: Faut-il brûler Pouchkine? (Must We Burn Pushkin?). Those are just a few examples. For several years, the Sorbonne also hosted a seminar, L’Observatoire du sensible (“The Observatory of the Sensible”), which brought in contemporary Russian-language authors and their French translators. Overall, it’s a fairly active community, and a lot of young researchers are involved.
T-i: What makes Russian literature from this particular period interesting? Why is it worth studying?
AN: I don’t think this period is more important than any other. But as someone who lived through it, I felt that nothing mattered more to me. And I wasn’t the only one. French Slavic studies went through a serious crisis after the war began, for exactly the same reasons Russian intellectuals did: the sense that we hadn’t seen any of it coming, that we’d failed to understand something about Putinism, that post-Soviet Russia had turned out to be something other than what we thought. On top of that, there was a political split: just as among Russians, some people are pro-Putin and some are against him. In that context, what was happening in literature, both in Russia and among émigrés, became very important. Many older colleagues who had spent their whole careers on “old” topics suddenly started reading contemporary texts.
T-i: But why literature, and not political commentary, television, film, or social media?
AN: Today’s political polarization is reflected on social media and in political commentary, and the polarization itself creates an expectation that everyone will take a clear political stand. Literature reflects that polarization, but it is also a space for a kind of “candor,” where a person, alone with themselves, faces the unknown: things about themselves that even they don’t yet understand.
At the same time, it was important to me not to shut myself away in literature, and instead to compare what people were writing, even in poems, with what was happening in the country and what people were arguing about. Honestly, I even feel a bit guilty about working on literature at a time like this. I tried, on the one hand, to do what I know how to do, and on the other, to say something meaningful and useful for people other than literary scholars.
T-i: Did it work?
AN: A little, I hope. My dissertation committee included Gilles Favarel-Garrigues, a political scientist from Sciences Po. When I asked him to join, he said he knew nothing about literature and couldn’t serve as an expert. But after reading the dissertation, he told me it had helped him understand some things about contemporary Russia and its politics, which is exactly his field. Something comes through in contemporary Russian literature that is easier to see there than anywhere else.
T-i: Is there a specific example where literature turns out to be more powerful than other media?
AN: Yes, I write about it in the chapter “Where Were We for Eight Years” [a reference to the pro-war catchphrase “Where were you for eight years?” aimed at critics of the invasion, who were supposedly silent about the war in Donbas after 2014 — T-invariant]. It’s about the prose of Elena Kostyuchenko, a Novaya Gazeta journalist and writer, who in 2023 published an autobiographical book, My Beloved Country [published in English as I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country — T-invariant].
Asking whether “the people” as a single collective entity is guilty gets you nowhere if you want to understand anything or change anything. Kostyuchenko, like other writers, writes instead about the responsibility of specific segments of post-Soviet society: generations and social groups. There’s no self-flagellation here, and she doesn’t strike a holier-than-thou pose. There’s only a careful examination of the question, based on an analysis of herself and her own history. There isn’t a word about some abstract “people,” only about a specific habitus, shaped, for example, by specific social circumstances and upbringing.
T-i: How did you choose your texts and authors? And what does the term “anti-war” actually mean in your book?
AN: That was very hard, and to be honest, I don’t have a definitive answer. But I didn’t want to work on Z-literature [pro-war writing, named after the “Z” symbol of Russia’s invasion — T-invariant]. That subject interests me now, but back then I decided it would be too much. The anti-war segment of literature is almost impossible to define strictly. One option was to write only about émigré literature, since so many people had left. But what was happening inside Russia mattered to me, too. And unlike in earlier waves of emigration, the internet plays a huge role: texts from inside Russia and from émigrés are published side by side, often anonymously.
T-i: Does anonymity also create an ethical problem?
AN: Yes. It gets complicated when you write about authors who you know for a fact are against the war and don’t support Putin’s regime but can’t say so openly. You can’t just sit in France and casually announce that so-and-so is “actually” anti-war. For a while, I thought you couldn’t write about these authors at all. In the end, I decided you could, as long as I don’t speak for them or say more than they say themselves.
T-i: Where does this literature even exist, given the censorship in Russia?
AN: The literary field has become transnational and torn apart. Inside the country, censorship at first only banned certain topics, but now it increasingly prescribes a new mandatory patriotic canon, forcing even pro-war authors to adapt. Some authors publish anonymously; some don’t publish at all and withdraw into “internal emigration.” Meanwhile, something is taking shape alongside all this that people are already calling the “new tamizdat” [literally “published over there”: in Soviet times, banned works published abroad and smuggled back into the USSR — T-invariant]: ROAR magazine, publishers like Freedom Letters, and bookstores, all of them outside Russia. Some institutions, like the annual Lyubimovka festival of new plays, have emigrated. The field is split along two fault lines: the first runs between those for and against the war, the second between those who left and those who stayed. And in between lies a huge “gray zone” of people who take no clear position at all.
T-i: You write about “the curse of literature-centrism.” What do you mean by that?
AN: Conversations about Russian identity and the imperial legacy almost always come down to literature and the great writers, as if it were books, and not the concrete decisions of citizens, that make the world go round.
It’s a very old idea that goes back to the nineteenth century, and as a former specialist in that era, I’ve been caught up in it myself. These days, though, I find it rather foreign, which is why I deliberately included people from outside literature in the scope of my analysis — rappers, for example.
What I ended up with is a study not of literature but of the verbal culture of this period, covering literature, theater, and music (pop, rap, and rock).
T-i: So how accurate is the term “anti-war literature” in the first place?
AN: Terminology is a big problem in general right now. “Dissidence” is an old word, and so is inakomyslie, “thinking otherwise.” Not all émigré writers are anti-war, and not all anti-war writers are émigrés. I had a whole range of options, and none of them fit perfectly. In the end, I took a negative approach: I’m interested not in people who hold particular ideas or take up particular themes, but in those who are affected by the situation in some way and don’t pretend nothing is happening. What interests me is precisely how different that can look. There are openly anti-war writers; there are those who don’t support the war but “write through the war”; there are those who turn to distant subjects and periods; and there are those who make a point of leaving things unsaid. Within this “community of those who care,” which looks unified at first glance, you can see many dividing lines, some of which surface, for example, in old disputes between liberals and leftists.
The Problem of Identity
T-i: Why is your dissertation called Facing the War, Facing Oneself?
AN: There’s “war” in the narrow sense: the fighting on Ukrainian soil, which inevitably makes literature look at the other. But there’s also the “catastrophe”: everything the war has done to Russian society itself, including repression, emigration, broken family ties and friendships, and the collapse of any sense of the future. That means looking at yourself. I take the word “catastrophe” from postwar German thought, from the German historian Friedrich Meinecke and from Karl Jaspers. The war turns out to be a kind of mirror: you look at it, and you’re forced to look at yourself.
But this also raises ethical problems, which I examine specifically in several chapters of the dissertation. At a time like this, looking at yourself is inevitable, but in doing so, you turn away from the suffering of the people living under the bombs. As if the war were a catastrophe only for Russia.
T-i: What is the central question of your work?
AN: What it means to be Russian now. For me, that’s the most important thing. The three chapters on the role of media and testimony stand somewhat apart. The questions there are more traditional, about the relationship between image and writing, but in the end they, too, come down to the same thing: how you look at what your country is doing, and whether it’s still your country.
T-i: Which works of contemporary Russian literature best capture this identity crisis?
AN: There’s a whole spectrum. There’s the attempt to save the “real Russia” by separating it from the state. I examine the old idea of “two Russias” (in Rozanov, Lermontov, and Zaitsev) and compare it with Thomas Mann’s argument that “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one.” There’s a subtler move by philosopher and writer Oxana Timofeeva: the warm “homeland” versus the cold “fatherland” [rodina and otechestvo in Russian — T-invariant]. There’s homeland as language, in the poetry of Vera Polozkova and in producer Roma Liberov’s poetry-and-music project After Russia (2023), in which émigré musicians such as Noize MC and Monetochka set to music poems by writers of the first wave of Russian emigration. The project’s title was deliberately borrowed from a collection by Marina Tsvetaeva. And then there’s radical rupture, “symbolic suicide,” the renunciation of Russianness: in the book I Wish Ashes Upon My Home by poet and feminist activist Daria Serenko, and in the work of artist Sveta Eitik (she filmed a video of her Russian passport burning in the snow, a gesture renouncing Russianness).
Finally, there’s a way of redefining one’s identity that I call decolonial re-rooting: members of non-Russian peoples returning to their ancestral languages and roots. Take the Berlin-based Tatar poet Dinara Rasuleva, who is returning to Tatar, a language that seemed embarrassing and “backwoods” to her as a child. In the zine Cyclicity, in its 2024 issue Roots, authors from Russia who belong to non-Russian ethnic groups write about going back to their origins, for example to the Karelian language. Or the documentary play Vepsian Women: A Charm for Life by Ksenia Savelyeva and Nastasya Fedorova, presented at Lyubimovka in 2023, which is performed in the Veps language [the language of a small Finnic people in northwestern Russia — T-invariant] in the voices of Vepsian women themselves. A separate strand in this reworking of identity is the image of a dead, “unburied” Russia, a “zombie state.” Drawing on the work of cultural historian Alexander Etkind and literary scholar Oleg Lekmanov, I show how the invasion of Ukraine appears as the latest in a long series of symptoms of a chronic disease in society.
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T-i: Is the decolonial turn in Russian literature something new?
AN: It’s more that it has sped up. Back in the 2010s, various writers and performers were already feeling their way toward it, bringing their native languages and the theme of national identity into Russian-language songs. There’s the duo AIGEL, fronted by Tatar poet and singer Aigel Gaisina, whose hit “Tatarin” (“The Tatar”) was all over Russia back in 2017. It had elements of self-exoticization and played on stereotypes, but in the years that followed, the duo took a much more explicitly decolonial line. There’s Manizha, a singer with Tajik roots, who represented Russia at Eurovision 2021 with the song “Russian Woman.” And the phenomenon has even deeper roots: the Soviet policy of korenizatsiya (“indigenization”) in the 1920s, which promoted national languages before giving way to Stalinist Russification, and the national revivals of the late 1980s and early 1990s…
The Problem of the Witness
T-i: A significant part of your work is devoted to describing and distinguishing between the positions of the spectator and the witness. Why does that matter?
AN: As a rule, a Russian anti-war author doesn’t experience the war physically. The image of the war created by the media can be a window onto someone else’s reality, but also a screen that shuts it out. In an age when conflicts are so heavily mediatized, anyone can feel like a witness. But of course, that isn’t so. Even in Ukraine, the positions of witness and spectator are problematic. To explore this question, I turn to the prose of the Ukrainian-Israeli writer Karine Arutyunova. She plays with the back-and-forth between the “frame” and what lies outside it, asks “what percentage of war is in each of us,” and shows that even under the bombs, people still follow the war through the media.
T-i: And how do Russian writers reflect on the role of the media?
AN: The first thing I look at is the generational conflict over media: the portrayal of an older generation zombified by propaganda and a younger one that turns to alternative sources of information. Take, for example, Pussy Riot’s song “Mama, Don’t Watch TV” or Natalya Lizorkina’s play Vanya Is Alive, in which the mother’s “zombie box” [Russian slang for a TV set pumping out state propaganda — T-invariant] is pitted against her son’s smartphone. In both cases, a conversation between the generations turns out to be impossible. Essentially, it isn’t people who are arguing but the TV and YouTube, propaganda and counterpropaganda, and “here” and “there” correspond to incompatible media regimes.
T-i: And this analysis of how writers reflect on the media ultimately leads you to the voices of Ukraine?
AN: Yes. Galina Rymbu told Russian poets point-blank: you are not witnesses, so make a decolonial effort and just listen to the voices from here. I have chapters in which a Russian author tries to bear witness to something they haven’t lived through themselves, and it often ends up being a conversation about themselves.
Berlin-based poet and performer Alexander Delfinov offers a kind of “meta-testimony” that directly echoes Akhmatova’s Requiem. Dmitry Bykov sees and depicts refugees as if from a “drone’s-eye view,” almost a God’s-eye view. Personally, I find a different strategy more productive, a kind of “creative listening.” That means translation (Rymbu, for one, translates Ukrainian poets) and mediation, as in the work of Polina Barskova, a poet and historian of the Siege of Leningrad, who approaches someone else’s catastrophe through the catastrophe of Babyn Yar and the poems about it by the Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska.
Three Roles of the Russian Writer
T-i: So the very status of the Russian writer is being called into question?
AN: Of course, there’s a crisis going on right now. But it’s happening because the writer’s role had already changed profoundly over the previous decades. This applies specifically to highbrow literature, which is rooted in the old notion of the writer as the voice of the people, an indispensable political and social force.
Solzhenitsyn, Grossman, the voices of people who survived the Siege of Leningrad: these were necessary, irreplaceable voices and testimonies. Ours is a different era, and those great examples can’t be repeated, for several reasons.
First, the testimony about the war in Ukraine belongs to Ukrainians. Russia is not the main victim of this war, as many people have pointed out in recent years. Second, in our era the writer no longer has a monopoly on bearing witness. When the media were liberalized in the 1990s, new kinds of writers emerged who took on that mission, above all investigative journalists. As early as the 2000s, Anna Politkovskaya sharply condemned Russian writers who wrote about the Chechen wars while sitting comfortably in Moscow or St. Petersburg. The rethinking of that role began back then.
But tradition, habit, and the literary ethos still carry a lot of weight. I have a sense that some authors aren’t ready to give up their monopoly and their special role. I’m thinking, for instance, of the prophecies Dmitry Bykov has made in recent years. In an interview with Radio Liberty in January 2023, he said, “2023 will be more interesting than 2022. Mark my words. I can name the key points: March, April, November,” and he kept on prophesying like that all the way to the late 2040s. Is he being ironic? I hope so, but I’m afraid not. True, when writers set out to rethink their role, they often hit a dead end. But reflecting on mistakes and dead ends is one of the functions of literature that I study in the dissertation.
What’s really being tested is how far a writer can resist narcissism. Russian authors are being asked to give things up: their own “I,” their central place in the conversation, sometimes even literature itself. They’re asked to become translators, mediators, mere vessels for someone else’s voice. There are two main dangers here. One is “vampirism,” when someone else’s voice is swallowed up by your own writing. The other is reducing the encounter to silence, when it serves only as an occasion for the author to declare that they can’t share someone else’s pain.
T-i: Why is the backstory, what happened before 2022, so important for a study of the present? And which chronological milestones turned out to matter most for you?
AN: You can’t understand the present outside its context, especially when almost everyone says they didn’t see any of it coming.
In general, I’m fascinated by how people change their views. That’s why I took on Letov, a man who radically changed his position several times, going from anarchist and anti-fascist to almost the opposite extreme. For most of the authors I write about, the Putin era is the backdrop against which they grew up and went through major changes.
What interests me is how a community that looked unified from the outside splits apart under the strain of war and emigration, and how people change along the way. To see that, you have to take the broader context into account: the entire post-Soviet period.
Different traditions and ideas about the writer’s role coexist today, and they took shape along different historical and social trajectories. There are writers who embody the old image of the writer as a member of the intelligentsia who believes in the power of words, like Dmitry Bykov, whom I’ve already mentioned. There are authors of more intellectual popular fiction who nonetheless took a firm public stance as early as the 1990s or 2000s, like Boris Akunin. And there are new politically engaged and left-wing authors for whom feminist, decolonial, and new social issues matter more than the old debates. All these traditions and generations coexist in today’s literary field. They lived through the crises of 2011–2012 and 2014 differently, and they understand their role differently. How they reacted to the events of 2022 and the years since was shaped by the positions they had formed over the preceding decades.
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T-i: But why, when it comes to the literary field, do you treat 2011–2012 and the Bolotnaya protests [the mass protests against electoral fraud, named after Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square — T-invariant] as more important than 2014? It seems to me that 2014 was the moment of truth for many people: the divisions that emerged then were reproduced almost unchanged in 2022, and many people’s decisions to emigrate date back to the period right after Crimea. And what about the 2008 war with Georgia? That was a very important moment, a kind of dress rehearsal for 2022: the same provocation, the same escalation, the same unprovoked aggression, the same imperial motives, just compressed into a matter of weeks and, fortunately, with fewer casualties.
AN: I probably focused on 2011–2012 because that’s when protest was at its most vivid and visible, including in cultural circles, before people started looking for new ways to resist or gave up resisting altogether. But you’re right: I don’t say enough about 2014. I felt that myself when I reread that chapter. For the book, by the way, it’s a great question to ask the people who left: when did they realize they would have to leave?
T-i: Another big subject is how literature deals with guilt and responsibility. What’s the best way to approach that problem?
AN: In the first weeks after the invasion, everyone was talking about it. And in those discussions, I recognized echoes of conversations in France: What if we, too, end up like the people who later say, “I didn’t see anything, I didn’t do anything”? I started reading Arendt and Jaspers, like everybody else. But I realized that the question of responsibility often leads nowhere. Fine, we’ve answered “yes” or “no.” Now what?
T-i: So that theoretical framework itself, Jaspers and Arendt, is no longer enough?
AN: That’s exactly how I felt.
There’s something too simple about those works for the world we live in now. It’s either back to the USSR or back to the Third Reich. Sometimes it seems these conversations just give people an excuse to do nothing, since nothing changes anyway. We need to come up with some alternative to break out of this loop, and stop putting so much weight on the category of “the people.” But I’m not a philosopher, and I can’t offer that alternative myself.
T-i: And this is where literature helps again?
AN: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m betting on. I’m interested in how different authors talk about responsibility and how they define what it consists of. In My Beloved Country, Elena Kostyuchenko bitterly describes the “golden chains” of the generation that got rich under the “petrostate.” Here I also bring in the band IC3PEAK, whose protest song “Death No More” is about a generation shackled by the “golden chains” of comfort. And I work with the stance of “false naivety”: these writers show us how the comfort of the “petrostate” lulled the political conscience to sleep, so that a generation’s responsibility grows out of its very inaction. I examine the escapist stance through the prose of Evgenia Nekrasova, Noize MC’s song “Cryochambers,” and Monetochka’s work, and the justification of emigration through Boris Akunin’s The Demon’s Advocate and Noize MC’s song “Land of Rain.”
T-i: What roles does the Russian author try on in this situation?
AN: Mainly three. The indirect victim: someone whose life has been wrecked by repression and exile. The presumed culprit: a bearer of “imperial consciousness” and heir to a “guilty” culture. And the powerless spectator: someone who watches other people’s pain on a screen. Essentially, my whole dissertation is about how these three figures collide within a single person.
T-i: You write a lot about a new literary movement, or genre: autofiction, prose in which authors write about themselves, mixing fact and fiction. Is it an attempt to break out of the closed loop of literature-centrism, or an attempt to renew literature?
AN: I think we need to go back to how autofiction is defined in the first place. I sometimes count as autofiction autobiographical texts that contain very little invention. Larissa Muravieva writes a lot about exactly this. But in the dissertation, genre boundaries didn’t concern me much. When your main point of reference is an ethical question, it often doesn’t matter what in a book is real and what’s made up.
T-i: In discussing autofiction, you introduce the concept of “scriptotherapy” (healing and consolation through writing) and argue that Russian authors’ autofiction often slides back into narcissistic self-admiration. But are there cases where scriptotherapy is useful and productive?
AN: It can always be useful. In fact, it’s very important to distinguish between writing as a creative act and publication, that is, addressing an audience.
Why do people write? In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, that became the central question. People write for themselves, and if someone needs to, they need to, end of story. People write for their own circle: friends, acquaintances, kindred spirits. In that case, writing, or creative work in general, becomes a place where people recognize each other and connect. People write for everyone, and become “writers.” And people write for likes.
But the line between all these practices is sometimes very blurry, and it’s an interesting thing to study. Galina Rymbu wrote a very important text about this in the first days of the war. I study some examples that I find significant — Vera Pavlova’s poems, for instance. “Morning in the gazette, evening in a sonnet,” she said of her war poems [a play on the Soviet-era saying about topical satire: “Morning in the paper, evening in a couplet” — T-invariant]. And I’d add: “straight on the internet,” because in her case the “sonnet” isn’t the end of the process. A person who writes draws on certain traditions, on ideas about what writing is and what it’s supposed to do, and also on their own sense of how they want to come across to others. I don’t believe in one hundred percent candor, but I do believe in the sincerity of the attempts to achieve it, and that the different functions of writing are closely intertwined.
T-i: What do you see as the main result of your work, and what does it offer readers outside Slavic studies?
AN: Confronted with the events of the war, Russian anti-war literature finds itself face to face, above all, with itself. It is living through the collapse of the writer’s old poses, the breakdown of the idea of “Russianness,” and a crisis of testimony, and it is agonizing over the problem of responsibility. And in this inward-looking, “hot” writing, with its silences and masks, I think the scale of the catastrophe comes through more honestly than in direct ideological debates. And the questions of guilt, exile, and responsibility for what your country does are, sadly, not uniquely Russian.
The post The questions of guilt and of responsibility for what your country does are, sadly, not uniquely Russian.” French Slavicist Antoine Nicolle on Russian Literature after 2022 appeared first on Т-инвариант / T-invariant.
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