Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 3 – The burning of
books is an outrage that recalls one of the horrific features of Hitler’s Third
Reich, and consequently, both Russian children at a patriotic camp near
Novosibirsk and their parents were upset when camp organizers proposed that
they take part in a book burning at the end of their stay in the camp.
Fortunately, the details of this
case may be somewhat less horrific than one might expect from some news reports
and opposition to what happened greater, but it is nonetheless a dangerous
breaking of a powerful taboo against such actions and thus opens the way to
copycat crimes of a similar type elsewhere in the Russian Federation.
The fullest account so far of what happened
has been provided by Novosibirsk television (nsktv.ru/news/proisshestviya/v_novosibirskom_sportivnom_lagere_ustroili_koster_iz_knig_o_podvigakh_na_voyne_030720151150/).
The station reports that at the end
of their time in the camp, “it was proposed to the young sportsmen that they
take part in the burning of books, including some about the war.” One young man said the leaders had “decided
to organize a farewell fire” in which old books would be burned and asked the
children to bring tree branches to make the fire go faster.
The youngster, raised to have the
greatest respect for books, “was in shock at the actions of the adults,” the
television station says. He “decided to
save the most valuable things – stories about the war.”
His mother was upset too: “We make
every May 9th with the children [who] are the great grandchildren of
those who fought in the war a family holiday.” Consequently, she said, her son reacted to the
burning of such books in a very sharp way.
This “anti-patriotic action took
place where one would least expect it – in a camp which proudly bears the name
of the glorious Russian Admiral Nakhimov,” the station continued. Burning “about
60 old books,” many of them about naval explorers, was thus something extremely
shocking.
No one at the camp denies that books
were burned, but “they assert that the intention was other” than what some
thing. “After a recent small fire in a neighboring camp, the directive came to
immediately get rid” of old books that no one needed and whose content
supposedly caused “more harm than good.”
Among the books, however, were some
in the series of “Lives of Remarkable People,” including biographies of Gorky
and Dobrolyubov, according to the camp nurse.
The camp director said that her
staff had “assembled the books to be backed and carried oaway. But they lost
control over the process,” and someone, as yet unidentified, had taken them and
burned them. She said that for her, as a philologist and teacher of Russian
language and literature, “this was a sacrilege.”
She pledged to find out “who gave
the order to burn the books. Recycling them is fine; burning them is not.”
No comments:
Post a Comment