Jonathan Littell fortunately has the prudence to specify at the very beginning [of his column published by Le Monde on May 2] that “separating the Ukrainians from the Russians” in literature would be a “frankly” political process. Indeed. Because in his desire to constitute “Ukrainian literature” by himself, he who is neither Russian nor Ukrainian, he finds himself enlisting in his cause authors who cannot but would have been very surprised to find themselves in “Ukrainian literature”.
Isaac Babel, a Jew writing in Russian who describes in one of his short stories a pogrom by Ukrainians in Odessa? Wassili Grossman, another Jew writing in Russian? Would they have been happy to find themselves Ukrainians in a country which erects statues to national heroes like Bogdan Khmelnitsky (who gives his name to the current presidential guard), whose memory is branded in the memory of the Jews of Ukraine?
To speak of Odessa as a Ukrainian city at the time of these authors is historically abusive for a territory wrested from the Ottomans by Tsarina Catherine and whose attachment to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was undertaken for partly administrative reasons by Krutchev ( himself of Ukrainian origin).
And Jonathan Littell continues with unconvincing reasons (a mother of vaguely Ukrainian origin) to “naturalize” Russian-speaking writers like Akhmatova or Mayakovki. The pinnacle is reached with the Russian Bulgakov, under the pretext that he was born where he was born. Dead writers obviously can’t defend themselves.
In his perfectly honorable desire to attempt to pay homage to a culture, he shamelessly practices what some across the Atlantic would call “cultural appropriation.” Responding to an attempted territorial annexation with a cultural annexation seems both crazy and disrespectful to me. Ultimately what is its legitimacy to practice this memory thrashing? None. But as Walter Benjamin said, if lies win, “even the dead will no longer be safe.”
Catherine G. Legna, Marseille
