Title:Russia's Cultural Heritage Can Be a Bridge to the Future.

• Author: Cox, Robert

Text:

Russia has become Europe's ogre. Beyond the brutality of Moscow's onslaught on Ukraine looms a harsher ideological backdrop. Too many Russian citizens have been enticed into seeing this invasion as a defence of Russia's security, national pride and identity, history, Weltanschauung, international standing, and imperial stature. They eulogise Russia's national church as a defensive shield despite its abuse of spiritual humanity, its soldiers as crusaders. Europeans, in response to this baggage respond with a mixture of fear or unease. Anger, too, along with frustration and ultimately something akin to hatred. With all this comes an inclination in the western world to reject everything Russian. This rejection of a rich culture risks tarnishing our mindset and that of our children.

Russian orchestras, dancers and sopranos have been banned from western stages--largely on the pretext that they have not condemned Putin and his acolytes. Ultimately Russian culture risks being airbrushed out of western European mentalities. It is worth pausing for a moment and just looking at what we are rejecting, perhaps unconsciously.

Hitherto--and for many Europeans still - Russian culture has had an important place in our education and upbringing. Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky Korsakov, Shostakovich and the sublime Prokofiev have delighted our concert audiences for decades. Marc Chagall's imagination has stimulated ours. Ballet in Europe--or the US, for that matter would not be what it is without the great influence of the ballet russe. Nor, in a related world, would we be so intellectually rich without the heritage of Russian scientists, physicists and mathematicians.

Power of the Word

Perhaps more than anything Russian literature, since its great eruption at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries, has taken its prominent place in the galaxy of European writing. The terrible unidentical twins, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, honour our bookshelves. Chekhov's plays resonate on our stages; his lesser-known short stories are jewels reflecting human behaviour. Turgenev and Goncharov have bequeathed us biting depictions of society tearing itself apart. They belong in the same panoply as Dickens and Zola. Then there is Gogol--the Ukrainian who wrote his beautiful sketches of people and places in the Russian language. In Soviet times Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don stands on a podium with Remarque's ImWestenNichstsNeues. All of these Russian authors, often in exile, had...