Paul Goble
Staunton, May 20 – Every year, the Catalonian newspaper La Vanguardia marks the Day of the Book with a listing of the favorite books of various leaders. This year, for the first time, it includes a listing of the four favorite books of Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s long-serving foreign minister.
Lavrov’s favorites, it reports, are Nikolay Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard and Vasily Aksyonov’s The Island of Crimea (lavanguardia.com/cultura/20240423/9601566/personalidades-recomiendan-libros-vanguardia-sant-jordi.html).
New Times columnist Andrey Kolesnikov in his latest article discusses what likely led Lavrov to identify these books rather than any others as his favorite and suggests what that says about the minister’s views concerning Russia and appropriate service to Russia’s rulers (newtimes.ru/articles/detail/247277).
Taras Bulba, the columnist says, is “an ideologically correct choice” given that the novel presents Russians and Ukraine as a single whole, exactly what Lavrov and his bosses believe. Crime and Punishment is a Russian classic from school days. And The White Guard is a brutal portrayal of chaos in Ukraine of a century ago.
Lavrov’s choice of Island of Crimea is at one level somewhat strange, Kolesnikov suggests, because the novel posits that the anti-Bolshevik Whites hold out on Crimea much as the Kuomintang did on Taiwan against the Chinese Communist advance. But at another level, Aksyonov’s novel is completely understandable.
One of its heroes, Marlen Kuzenkov, is ready to “carry out any order from his superiors” but dresses like an English gentleman, a combination that perfectly corresponds to Lavrov’s approach.
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