Mikhail Shishkin presents his new book "My. Essays on Russian Literature":
“What is the point of literature if it didn’t save us from either the Gulag or the SVO?
The artist has a keen sense of what will be. Malevich's Black Square is the future he saw, in which there was the First World War, the Civil War, the GULAG.
I think I’m not the only one who feels like Russia is a black square right now.
The backbone of Russian culture is being broken, just like a hundred years ago.
Literature will eventually benefit from everything, even a broken back. Without Kolyma there would be no "Kolyma Tales". The fate of writers is indifferent to literature, only texts are important to it. Texts will be born as long as the language is alive.
But why literature?