Famous author cancels book set in Russia to appease Ukrainians
Celebrated author Elizabeth Gilbert Monday canceled the publication of her latest book after receiving backlash from Ukrainians over the novel being set in Russia.
Gilbert is best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love which sold 10 million copies worldwide and was turned into a Hollywood blockbuster.
Her latest book, The Snow Forest, is about an isolated family in Siberia secluded from society who “escapes the threats of early 20th century Russia”.
“Untethered from human progress, unaware even of the events of WWII, their knowledge and beliefs have remained frozen in time, their lives devoted wholly to their faith and the hard work of survival,” explained a now-deleted summary of the book on publisher Penguin Random House’s website.
When announcing the book last week, Gilbert said: “This is a novel that is going to take you into the deepest realms of the Siberian taiga and into the heart and mind of an extraordinary girl born into that world.
“A girl of great spiritual and creative talent, raised far, far, far from everything that we call normal.”
But despite the novel’s criticism of the Soviet Union, the mere fact that it was set within Russia’s borders triggered outrage from Ukrainian internet users, and Penguin Random House subsidiary Riverhead Books agreed to withdraw the book from publication.
“Over the course of this weekend I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reaction 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,” said Gilbert in a video posted to social media Monday.
“I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced—and who are continuing to experience—grievous and extreme harm,” she added.
“I want to say that I have heard these messages, and read these messages and respect them, and as a result I am making a course correction and I am removing the book from its publication schedule,” she said. “It is not the time for this book to be published.”
The decision raises concern for those who see it as the latest “soft book burning” in Ukraine, whose repressive laws are seen as a threat to cultural diversity in the war-torn country.
In February, a Ukraine official confirmed that the Ukraine government pulled from its libraries 19 million books that were either in Russian or were written in the Soviet era as of November 2022. Eleven million of those books were in Russian.
Ukrainian parliament’s Humanitarian and Information Policy Committee Deputy Chair Yevheniya Kravchuk said that some books in Ukrainian from the Soviet era have been withdrawn as well, and the government is also now considering banning books by writers who did not support Ukraine in the war.
It is unclear what was done with the books that were withdrawn.
The move came after Ukraine decided in mid-2022 to halt the distribution of Russian books after Russia’s invasion. Books by Russian authors may only be printed if the writers defect to Ukraine. Russian literature, such as that written by Alexander Pushkin or Leo Tolstoy, may enter Ukraine if they were printed in a country other than Russia or Belarus.
But still, not all such literature is permitted. Last year, Ukraine First Deputy Education Minister Andrey Vitrenko announced that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” will no longer be studied in schools because it depicts the Russian military in a positive light.
It is also forbidden to play Russian music in public, on television and on the radio.
Ukraine’s purge of Russian culture comes despite the country’s citizens having strong ties and roots to the culture.
