The censorship applied in Russia to Roberto Carnero’s book on Pasolini
It seems that the Russian opposition media is talking about nothing else: the censorship of my book on Pasolini. The title of the essay, Pazolini. Umeret’za idei (published by the Moscow publishing house AST), literally translates that of the Italian edition, Pasolini. Dying for ideas (Bompiani 2022): paradoxical fate, that of being censored, for an author who, even if he had not died for his ideas (his murder still remains mysterious), would certainly have been willing to sacrifice his life for what he believed in.
When Bompiani, in 2022, announced to me that he had sold the translation rights to my book in Russia, I was very happy. But then I didn’t know anything more about it. I imagined that the war in Ukraine had compromised this trade agreement, along with many other much more important things. At the end of last year, however, I received the layout in Russian. The venture seemed to have been successful, all that was left to do was wait for the volume to be put on sale.
Except that a month ago the cold shower arrived. An email from Bompiani informs me that the book will only be able to be released in Russia following some cuts. What’s the problem? Putin’s crusade against the moral corruption of the West, a fig leaf – among other things – to justify the invasion of Ukraine (horrendous fact in itself and particularly painful for my family, which has roots there: my grandmother mother was from Kiev). From 2022, Russian legislation prohibits any reference, even the most subtle, to homosexuality and “non-traditional relationships”. At that point we were at a crossroads: the choice was between cutting and not publishing. It wasn’t an easy decision. The first reaction would have been to reject this “indecent proposal” so as not to risk being complicit with the Putin regime and its attack on culture and freedom of thought. But this way the matter would have ended there and no one would have talked about it. In agreement with Bompiani, I chose what seemed to me to be the lesser evil: to go out with cuts. With the intention of raising the case once the book was published.
But at this point something unexpected happened: the Russian publishing house decided not to hide the cuts, but to highlight them with stripes of black ink. A political gesture (which I am now told could cost you dearly…) to denounce the brutality of censorship. A bit like Bompiani did in 1941 with the anthology American edited by Elio Vittorini, leaving blank the pages that should have contained the stories censored by fascism: I like to think that the courage of my Italian publisher then has been picked up today by my Russian publisher.
