“Did you think the Russian people were grateful to Gorbachev? Not even for a dream, and do you know why? Because he wasn't a real Tsar. One with a capital Z ”. With these few words the writer Mikhail Shishkin , fresh winner of the European Witch Prize 2022 with the novel " Vanishing Point " (21lettere, 2022), makes us understand how little the West understands the soul of Russia. Shishkin also adds: “Russia and the West, we have been observing each other carefully for centuries, but we cannot see each other well. Something is wrong with the focus. We see nothing but reflected images ”.
To try to go beyond these reflected images, the Russian writer presents to the Italian public " Russki mir: war or peace? " (21lettere, 2022, pp. 256, also e-book), a collection of in-depth essays on some dynamics of contemporary Russia with a horizon that starts from the origins of the Russian state.
It is an undoubtedly fascinating and well translated volume by Veronica Giurich Pica in which, starting from the first Viking invasions, passing through the Mongolian occupation, Shishkin talks about his Russia up to the present day , with the awareness that one cannot understand a nation and a people if its history is not known, if its past is not reckoned with, even unpleasant ones. In particular, the Russian writer focuses more on the last century in which his motherland tried twice to establish a democratic government. The first for a few months in 1917, after the fall of the tsarist empire; the second for a few years after the collapse of the USSR. Two attempts that have been swept away, the first since the birth of the Soviet empire, the second by the affirmation of Putin's authoritarianism.
Above all, he confronts us with a harsh reality as he writes in his book: “When a foreigner mentions the famous Russian soul, the Russians nod, but shrug their shoulders among themselves. There has never been any mystery to us. Vasily Grossman formulated this precisely in his novel Everything Flows, written in 1961: 'Is the Russian soul still mysterious? No, there is no puzzle. There was? What's mysterious about slavery? Is Russian development law really only Russian? Is the Russian soul, and really only the Russian soul, destined to develop not with increasing freedom but with increasing slavery? Is this really the fate of the Russian soul? … It is time for the interpreters of Russia to understand that only millennial slavery has created the mysticism of the Russian soul '. ”.
That said, there are two futures that the author can imagine for his country . A simple future that is seeing Russia invaded by waste and a decline in medical care that has led a quarter of Russians to an average life of only 55 years, that of a country emptied of its population, which is emigrating to the neighboring Union European. The previous future, on the other hand, is made up of young people who take to the streets without despair or despair , but with self-confidence , and who respond to the interviews in this way: “Up there they took away everything that was in the country. I came so that the future would not be taken away from me. " A phrase that leaves hope for that great nation that is Russia.