Almost immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, a rift opened up about what to do about

Russian culture. On the one hand, cultural institutions wanted to show that they condemned

Russian aggression. The Munich Philharmonic sacked Valeri Gergiv, probably the best-known

Russian conductor, after he made statements

supporting the war. Opras, including the National Polish Opera, canceled productions by Russian composers.

And all of this seemed to reflect what Ukrainian artists and writers wanted to.

A really short time after February 24th, like a matter of days, a bunch of literary groups

in Ukraine co-signed a letter calling for a total boycott of Russian books in the world. And the

letter, the rationale was these books are containers that have a toxin in them and through

these containers that toxin is spread

throughout the world. The other opinion on this was that artists, especially dead artists,

should not be held accountable for President Vladimir Putin's war. The people who felt that way

tended to be Western culture lovers, often artists and intellectuals themselves,

including groups like Penn Germany.

And in response, Penn Germany put out a press release,

which was the enemy is Putin, not Pushkin.

And these two points were made.

One was that literature and politics must be kept separate.

And the other was Dostoevsky and, you know, to a lesser extent, Pushkin were oppressed and persecuted by the czar and were anti-autocratic.

And, you know, therefore, they were dissident writers and they were good and Putin is

autocratic and bad, and they would have been against Putin now. That's writer Elif Batuman.

Elif and I are talking about this because, in addition to writing best-selling novels,

...