As reported by The Moscow Times, at the meeting in St. Petersburg Z-writers said that they do not receive support from the state and do not reach a mass readership. According to them, over the years of the war Russian authors have managed to create a body of “magnificent poems”, but the state did not help with their distribution.
Poet Alexander Pelevin said that the “patriotic” poets and writers themselves had been “herded into a pen”, and that “writing about the capture of yet another Malaya Novokhokhlovka is a thankless task”. He also acknowledged the decline of “patriotic” poetry and repeated that after the start of the war in Russia they still had not launched a “special cultural operation”.
Another participant in the discussion, Z-poet and veteran of the “SMO” Axel Kobokki, said that the “special cultural operation” did not begin because the state had created the wrong image of a “patriot”. According to him, pro-government people in Russia are trusted little, and at the meeting they also said that representatives of the liberal public gain authority by standing up for citizens persecuted by the authorities, whereas “patriots” have no such “cases”.
Another participant said that only books from certain publishers that issue Z-writers make it onto the extracurricular reading list for schoolchildren, and called this a way to “skim off money”. He also claimed that the order not to let the “patriotic corps” into schools comes “from the very top”, and also complained that Z-writers and poets who are now at the front and write about it are not being allowed to attend literary events. Earlier, Verstka calculated that since 2022 Russian publishers have released at least 259 books about the war against Ukraine, mostly with print runs of 1,000 to 3,000 copies, and representatives of the book industry told the outlet that Z-literature is of no interest to them because of a lack of demand, so such books more often end up in schools, universities, and libraries.
Sources
