Ukrainian writer about Russian culture

This opinion may be a little extreme but is nevertheless worth considering - Maxim Omelchenko, Faktor, Oct 1:

"Khviloviy instead of Dostoevsky

... Despite the heroism of Ukrainian soldiers on the front and the endurance of the people in the rear, in the fourth year of the great war, there are still politicians in the West who are trying to ignore the very existence of the Ukrainian nation. Suffice it to mention the statements of the US President’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who in April of this year said that Ukraine could hand over to Russia “the regions where Russian is spoken” because they were “less important” to it. On the other hand, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico [and also Orban in Hungary - M. M.] recently stated that Ukraine was not a sovereign state. Such ignorance may be the result of Russian propaganda but also of Ukraine’s virtual absence in the world cultural field. Simply put, while on the shelves of bookstores in Rome or London there are Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but not a single Ukrainian author – Ukraine will continue to be subconsciously considered “less valuable”, secondary...

On September 1 of this year, the popular German newspaper Berliner Zeitung published an interview with Ukrainian director Taras Tomenko under the telltale title "Russian culture brings nothing good."... Tomenko talks about his feature film The House of the Word. Unfinished Novel, dedicated to the fate of Ukrainian artists from the so-called “Shooted Revival”, whose work has gained new popularity in recent years both in Ukraine and abroad... 

At the very beginning of the interview, the Ukrainian intrigued the German reader by stating that his film, which has been shown in Ukrainian cinemas for a year and a half, “gives an answer to the question of why this war started.” Taras Tomenko further explains: “It didn’t start in 2014, but much earlier. Even before the emergence of the USSR, Russia wanted to destroy Ukraine, to kill Ukrainians, and above all, to destroy culture. In the film, I show how they killed people with the Holodomor, how they exterminated the intelligentsia. My hero is the real-life writer Mykola Khviloviy. He saw the Holodomor with his own eyes and two weeks later, in protest against Stalin’s policies, he committed suicide.” 

The Ukrainian expressed the bold and quite unexpected for the German audience idea that the Russian-Ukrainian war is essentially the clash of two civilizations. “This is a struggle between two ways of life. Russian culture does not bring anything good: first comes the Russian ballet, and then the Russian tanks,” he stated. Tomenko criticized European tolerance of Russian culture and advised the audience to be aware of its influence. When asked by the journalist whether he really advises to abandon the so-called “classics” such as Dostoevsky or Chekhov, Tomenko answers categorically: “You better not read this if you want to stay alive. After the Russians arrived in the occupied territories, all Ukrainian books were destroyed, and they brought Dostoevsky and Pushkin. Russian culture does not bring anything good. The murderers grew up from the generation of people who read Dostoevsky.”

For decades, Russian art has been the Kremlin’s “soft power,” creating an aura of “great culture” and concealing the reality of repression, war, and occupation. To break out of this mindset, the West must not only support Ukraine, but also show courage and admit its own mistakes: not only the procrastination after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donbas in 2014, but also the indifference to the Russian occupation of part of Georgia in 2008. This was also addressed by President Volodymyr Zelensky in his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 24, when he recalled: “The world ignored Russia’s attack on Georgia… We Georgia is already lost to Europe, it is dependent on Russia. Europe cannot afford to lose Moldova as well.”..."