The Elizabeth Gilbert Book Controversy
Was It Censorship?
Note: If you already know the background, you might choose to skip ahead to the section, “the Second Backlash.”
On June 6, Elizabeth Gilbert posted a video to her Instagram to celebrate the upcoming release of her new novel, The Snow Forest. Its inspiration: a Russian family that hid deep in the Siberian wilderness for half a century in an act of resistance to the Soviet government and to the industrialization of Nature. The book, she said, would take readers deep into the Siberian Taiga, “and into the heart and mind of an extraordinary girl of great spiritual wealth and talent, raised far from everything that we call normal.”
Thus began a massive backlash, driven primarily by her considerable Ukrainian following.
And on June 12, Liz announced that she was pulling the book from publication.
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In a second video, she said,
“I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now—any book, no matter the subject—that is set in Russia.”
An even greater backlash then ensued on the part of non-Ukrainian readers, as well as writers and media people.
Her decision to pull the book from publication sparked a massive debate about whether “liberal wokeness” was unduly influencing art, about whether art and politics should be kept separate, and whether a fear of “getting canceled” led Liz to make this decision.
If this sounds familiar, it should. These arguments—the perils of “wokeness,” the separation of art and politics, the wrongness of cancel culture—also mirror the rhetoric of the GOP (the political right) in the U.S. which aim to erode equality.
Sometimes, these tropes can be wielded by ideologically liberal people as well.
Today, I’d like to turn a lens on the second wave of backlash.
But first, a word about Goodreads.
The Goodreads Fiasco: Censorship?
Within hours of the video announcing The Snow Forest, there were over 530 one-star reviews of the book on Goodreads, a popular website for readers. (They have since removed it from their listing.)
I don’t agree with what the (mostly Ukrainian) reviewers did. I’m dead set against readers reviewing books they haven’t read, or giving one-star reviews for emotional reasons, or for reasons other than the content or writing of the book. (Goodness knows I have a couple of these one-star reviews myself from angry readers on Amazon.)
That said, it’s clear to me that the reviews stemmed from a trauma response on the part of Ukrainian reviewers.
But was this a form of censorship, as some of the articles contend?
The American Civil Liberties Union defines censorship as “the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are “offensive.” (This clearly did not happen here.)
The ACLU adds, “When private individuals or groups organize boycotts against stores that sell magazines of which they disapprove, their actions are protected by the First Amendment, though they can become dangerous in the extreme.” (This sounds more like it.)
The Goodreads reviews (and the messages and comments Liz received on her Instagram) seem neither extreme nor dangerous, and do not meet the definition of censorship.
The Second Backlash
Countless media outlets covered the fracas, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, CNN, CBS, The New York Post, The Today Show, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Cut.
Many writers and opinionators felt that Gilbert’s decision posed a danger to other writers, who could be pressured to remove their own books in similar situations—and who, presumably, would not have the financial means (that Gilbert had) to do so.
None of the pieces stopped to deliberate on one of the most important elements in her announcement.
In her second video, Liz stated,
“Over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now—any book, no matter what the subject of it is—that is set in Russia… I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”
The point of contention in many of these articles is the phrase “any book, no matter what the subject of it is, that is set in Russia.”
Francine Pose of The Guardian had this to say:
Should survivors of domestic abuse band together to prevent any future productions of Othello? Should we quit reading Anne Frank’s diary because it takes place in a country that was hospitable to Jewish refugees—until it wasn’t? Should animal rights activists campaign to have Moby-Dick banned for its portrayal of the horrors of the whaling industry?
And countless people questioned whether any novel should be set in the United States, which has itself committed crimes against humanity—or, by extension, any other colonial empire who has done so.
I’m wondering whether “a book, any book, set in Russia” was the intended message on the part of Ukrainian fans. We’ll likely never know whether that was communicated, not communicated but heard, or some combination thereof.
But it seems to me that the setting of the book is not the point. For instance, there have been many books and films released about Russia (though as far as I know, non-fiction) since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Among these is the documentary film Navalny, which won an Oscar this year.
The key thing: Russia has perpetrated a war that is happening now. In contrast, The Diary of Anne Frank was published in 1947, two years after World War II had ended. More importantly, however, the book did not center a (non-Jewish) German character.
What, then, was the nexus of the outpouring of grief and distress?
Several Instagram commenters offered a more nuanced point: Liz’s choice to center and romanticize a Russian protagonist at a time when the Russian State is actively invading, perpetrating war crimes against, trying to erode the identity of, and committing genocide against Ukrainians.
But in my opinion, the point has to do with Siberia itself, with its meaning for many groups of people, and for the role that cultural memory plays in our present.
The Significance of Siberia
Growing up I learned that many American and European parents used the threat “I’ll send you to Siberia” to get their children to behave. (Needless to say, my parents were not among them.)
What lies behind the reference?
The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established in the 1920’s. The camps reached their peak during Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union.
According to estimates, a staggering 18 million people were incarcerated in these camps; nearly 4.5 million of them never returned. And 6 million more were exiled.
At its “peak,” the Gulag network included hundreds of labor camps across Siberia, each comprised of between 2,000 and 10,000 people. Many prisoners were worked to death in the extreme cold; countless were summarily executed. Women and children were raped. Others died of starvation, disease, or exhaustion.
When my mother was just seven years old, the Soviet army invaded Poland from the East, while Hitler and Germany did so from the West. My family was forcibly deported to a prison camp in the Ural Mountains, the westernmost edge of Siberia, where they remained for two years. (I wrote about her experience in the Gulag, and then in Africa where many Poles were relocated, in this column on epigenetic trauma and Russia’s war on Ukraine.)
I recently found this brief film clip of my aunt Genowefa Czepiel (my mother’s older sister, who’s still alive and in her 90s), talking about their deportation. [To see the clip but not lose your place in the article, simply right-click on the link, and select “open in a new window.”]
For more about the mass deportation of Poles in World War II, and how my mother and so many others ended up in Africa, check out the film Memory Is Our Homeland.
The Poles were the largest group of people forcibly deported to Siberia in World War II, but they were not the only ones.
The Soviets also arrested and deported many other groups, among them:
Ukrainians
Byelorussians
Finnish people
Estonians
Latvians
Lithuanians
Germans
Karachays, a Turkish-speaking people from the North Caucasus
Kalmyks, a Buddhist people living in Southern Russia (93,000 people in three days)
The Chechens and Ingush, two Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus
Balkars, a small Turkish people living near the Elbruz Mountain in Northern Caucasus
The Crimean Tatars, a Muslim Turkish-speaking people originating from the peninsula of Crimea located on the borders of Black Sea (close to 200,000 in two days)
Greeks
Armenians
Georgians
Following the war, more than 180,000 Ukrainians from western Ukraine were arrested and deported to gulags in Siberia and the Soviet interior for real or alleged collaboration with the Nazis and the Ukrainian nationalist underground. An additional 76,000 Ukrainians were deported in October of 1947, after the war had ended.
And, I’ll add, millions of Soviet citizens were also sent to the Gulag in the primary years of its operation.
The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population both informally and formally continues many practices endemic to the Gulag system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation. (So does the United States—but we’re focusing on Russia today.)
This history is by and large forgotten, not only in the West but in Russia itself.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum explores the question of why the Gulag has remained relatively obscure in the historical memories of both the Soviet Union and the West. This is part of an organized campaign on the part of the Russian State.
In my previous column, I wrote about the importance of the war on history, one that we are fighting in this moment in the United States where I live:
At the close of 2021, Putin shuttered Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization which has worked ceaselessly to document and honor victims of the Great Terror and Soviet oppression. He is working to erase the epigenetic record of past, present, and likely future atrocities. Nearly half of young Russians do not know that Stalin murdered between 3.5 and 7 million Ukrainians, or of the Great Purge, in which he killed 750,000 of his own people. In fact, a 2019 poll found that 70% of Russians actually approve of Stalin’s role in history.
For Putin, who consistently rewritten the events of World War II in published essays, memory is one of the weapons in his arsenal. This is true for most autocrats; it’s certainly true in the U.S., as I pointed out in my previous column. (Linked above.)
Is It Wrong to Write a Novel Set in Siberia?
Liz Gilbert can set a novel anywhere she likes.
And people are free to read it or take a pass.
That said: For many people, the idea of a Russian protagonist and Siberian setting of The Snow Forest connotes something entirely different than mystery and spirituality to her international audience. It connotes pain, suffering, and epigenetic trauma.
The book had a release date of February 13, 2024—just nine days before the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For Polish people, like my family, the release date would have been two days removed from the anniversary of the mass deportation of Poles to Siberia on February 10, 1940.
This makes me wonder whether Gilbert’s publicity team took this into account. (Surely they did?) Or whether for them it felt as far removed as Siberia itself.
Those of us for whom the atrocities of Siberia remain close at hand, and those for whom the atrocities are happening now, will feel some pain. (It’s a shadow of the pain that people of color feel when dominant culture tries to erase the history of colonialism while it is happening in the present moment… except that pain also bears the added weight of historical and present-day racism.)
It may be possible that these issues were addressed in the book, that she’d written a container around the subject and the setting that would “hold” readers whose histories include the unromantic version of Siberia. We’ll likely never know.
Again: her choice.
The Backlash to the Backlash
The complete absence of curiosity or deep reflection in many of the articles written about the decision surprised me. (This is what happens when history is no longer alive.)
Take this piece, by Franklin Foer of The Atlantic.
Foer writes, “And so, the list of verboten Russian subjects keeps growing longer—and now apparently extends to a work of fiction by an American author, set in another century, without any plausible connection to the current conflict.”
The key phrase here is “set in another century, without any plausible connection to the current conflict.”
This sentiment was echoed by many others.
For people who are Polish, Ukrainian, Jewish, or any of the other ethnicities sent to the Gulag, the events of the last century remain indelibly present.
I can’t help but ask why these events were not top of mind for Franklin Foer, too, and here’s why.
Foer’s mother, Esther Safran Foer, is the child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland who met at the war’s end in 1945. His mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany, where she lived the first few years of her life. Her father, Franklin Foer’s grandfather, was born in Ukraine and hidden by a Ukrainian family during the war. Esther Safran Foer’s book I want you to Know We’re Still Here recounts her journey to Ukraine with Frank, in 2009 to locate the family who hid her father during the Holocaust.
This doesn’t mean that Foer should agree with anyone who objects to the romanticizing of Russians or of the Siberian experience. But one might think that Foer could understand the connection between Siberia of the 19th century (just a little over 70 years ago) and Russia’s attempted genocide of the Ukrainian people today.
Foer accuses Gilbert of “indulging in the spirit of illiberalism,” which incorrectly equates her action with the ideology of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. far-right groups.
He ends his piece by saying that Gilbert has “abnegated her responsibilities as a writer.” She has, he accuses, gone another way—one he dubs “Eat, Pray, Pander.”
And here we can see the misogyny present this and other critiques of Gilbert.
Should Art + Politics Remain Separate?
I’ll keep this brief, because I’m way over my self-imposed limit for this piece. I’ll simply say that the argument about art remaining separate from politics reminds me of the desire, in the yoga and mindfulness worlds, to keep the practice separate from social justice and equity issues.
I’ll also say that any colonial-imperial effort, such as Russia’s current genocide against Ukraine or the American enslavement of African people, is predicated on the notion that these people are “not citizens” or “civilized people,” and do not exist as a culture.
Therefore, colonial efforts include the theft of art, artifacts, literature, and bodily remains as a way of insisting those people do not exist. Russia has shelled churches and museums. Stolen priceless artifacts.
Recently, the Russian army journeyed into a crypt inside St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Ukraine and stole the bones of Gregory Potemkin, the lover of St. Catherine the Great, who persuaded her to annex Crimea in the late 1700s.
And they steal books and ideas, too: Witness the appropriation of Tucker Carlson and Trump for their own propaganda machine.
Art is never separate from politics. Art is always art… and sometimes it is appropriated as propaganda.
In an article last week, the New York Times wrote,
The Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative and the Met Museum have teamed up with the Army to help soldiers understand the role that art plays in the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. (Last year, The New York Times identified 339 buildings, monuments and other cultural sites that had been heavily damaged or destroyed in the fighting. A notorious example was the destruction by a deadly Russian airstrike of Mariupol’s Drama Theater, a landmark where hundreds of people were sheltering. And recently, the destruction of a dam in southern Ukraine appears to have flooded the house museum of the self-taught artist, Polina Rayko, according to the foundation managing the artist’s legacy.)
Liz Gilbert Is a Grown-Ass, Sovereign Woman
Liz is a strong, vulnerable woman and an inveterate artist.
Did Ukrainian objections coerce Liz into removing her book from publication?
Most of us don’t and won’t know; we’re not privy to her process.
Liz Gilbert could easily have released another video differentiating her work from one that glorified the “Russian soul.” She could have talked her readers through her decision to publish.
She did neither.
I don’t for a moment believe she simply caved to social pressure, or allowed herself to be “threatened” by cancellation.
Liz Gilbert is her own sovereign being, capable of making difficult decisions and living into them. She has the means and the hutzpah to make her own choices and stand by them.
She’s also someone who makes art from her life experiences. And I look forward to seeing what she decides to create with this one.
Yesterday, there she was on Instagram in a new video: luminous. Conveying joy. Sporting a new tattoo. And promoting Rachel Cargyle’s new book, A Renaissance of Our Own.
Personally, I’m behind her all the way.
Sources:
On June 6, Elizabeth Gilbert posted a video to her Instagram to celebrate the upcoming release:
And on June 12, Liz announced that she was pulling the book:
The American Civil Liberties Union defines censorship as: https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
Francine Pose of The Guardian had this to say:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/15/elizabeth-gilbert-the-snow-forest-russia
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum: https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum-ebook/dp/B0012SCJ9Y?ref_=ast_author_dp,
But the Poles were not the only ones: The Soviet Massive Deportations—A Chronology | Sciences Po Violence de masse et Résistance—Réseau de recherche. (2019, April 18). https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/soviet-massive-deportations-chronology.html. See also: Bacon, E. (1992). Glasnost’ and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labour around World War II. Soviet Studies, 44(6), 1069-1086.
The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population: Conquest, R. (1997). Victims of Stalinism: A Comment. Europe-Asia Studies, 49(7), 1317–1319.
At the close of 2021, Putin shuttered Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization: In Closing Memorial, Russia Heralds a New, Grimmer Era of Repression. (2021, December 30). Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/30/closing-memorial-russia-heralds-new-grimmer-era-repression
In fact, a 2019 poll found that 70% of Russians actually approve of Stalin’s role: Times, T. M. (2019, April 16). Stalin’s Approval Rating Among Russians Hits Record High – Poll. The Moscow Times. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245
Foer’s mother, Esther Safran Foer, is the child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland: https://jewishinsider.com/2020/03/esther-safran-foer-wants-you-to-know-shes-still-here/
Recently, the Russian army journeyed into a crypt: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/world/europe/ukraine-russia-potemkin-bones.html
In an article last week, the New York Times wrote: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/arts/design/met-museum-trains-monuments-men-ukraine.html
This is the best article I have seen on this subject. Someone with some actual historical knowledge to put the reaction of readers into context. Thank you.
Wonderfully written Bo. I can’t pertain to understand everything about the politics behind this. It does however leave me wondering if a man had written a book, and it had been a story about soldiers and war in Russia / Ukraine would there have been the same rebuttal? It seems that the country wants to be completely seperate from the world, and yet, this outpouring from the release of a story book shows that indeed they are very interested in the rest of the world? Anyway - just my thoughts and observations .