By Katya KazbekIt’s hard to imagine a time when Russia was not in a state of political tempest. And it’s even harder to imagine a time when the tumult was not creating exquisite lite

Source: Katya Kazbek: Discourse in Danger – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics

When asked about his attempts at publishing books that would not be welcome by the nomenclature, Ilya Danishevsky only managed to give an example of an upcoming work: a book on Petr Pavlensky, the Russian artist who gained prominence by nailing his scrotum to the ground in the Red Square. Pavlensky is currently detained at a criminal psychiatric ward after he set fire to a door leading to the FSB (formerly KGB) headquarters. This publication is an admirable pursuit. The main problem in Russian publishing, however, is not the impossibility of putting out more books that challenge this paradigm. It’s more likely the fact that there are not many of such books at all. And with all due respect to the panelists who do their best to create the new Russian avant-garde, it may be up to the new generation of millennials, born with Putin already in power, to actually change the literary dialogue on a larger scale.