“Until the war ends,” he wrote to me, “a soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.’” “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.Ĭhapeye said he couldn’t make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians in this case. It was simply that their presence was incompatible with his. He didn’t see himself as having boycotted the Russians. 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. 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. No other explanation was offered and any trace of the event disappeared from PEN’s program online.Ī 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.
But a day before the event, ticket holders received an email saying that because of “unforeseen circumstances” the panel had been canceled. 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.
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. 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. Such boycotts 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. Moscow’s famous Bolshoi Ballet was disinvited from touring abroad. Russian literature was kept high on the shelf. Since the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, much of the Western world has become squeamish about Russian art.
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