Mixed reactions have met the decision by the US novelist Elizabeth Gilbert to withdraw her forthcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication after receiving criticism for its Russian setting in various forums.
The author best known for the bestselling 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love has asked her publishers at Penguin Random House to withdraw her new book. In statement, Gilbert said that “an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain” about her choice of location had informed her decision to remove it from publication scheduled for next year.
But the decision has re-ignited a wide-ranging debate over the place that Russian – or Russian-set – culture should have in the contemporary sphere of creative production.
PEN America, which promotes free expression around the world, said Gilbert’s decision was “well-intended” but that it was “wrong-headed” to believe that artistic work should be curtailed because of military conflict.
Writing in the Atlantic, Franklin Foer said he was “struggling to conjure a reason for why the delay of Gilbert’s book benefits anyone”.
He added: “Gilbert had a chance to gently explain herself and defend her work, to argue for the importance of literature in a time of war, but she chose to abnegate her responsibilities as a writer and go another way: eat, pray, pander.”
But the comments section of Goodreads, where The Snow Forest received a one-star rating, revealed intense opposition to the author’s decision to romanticize a Russian setting.
“Really? ‘Perfect’ time to promote ‘mystic Russian soul’, Russia and church when its are committing genocide,” said one commentator.
“It’s time to forget about all imperialistic shit that Russia doing over the centuries,” said another. “Maybe, Elizabeth, you should’ve spent your pandemic time reading about all the Russian terror. Sad that after 15 months of invasion you still think that book about poor Russian family is a great choice.”
Others took a more nuanced position.
The novelist and critic Lincoln Michel said on Twitter: “Putin’s Russia is a far right imperialist and terrorist state that deserves all the opprobrium directed at it. But this seems very weird to me. I mean the author’s decision but … no book should be set in historical Russia now? A novel about people resisting the USSR no less? Huh?”
Gilbert announced her decision in a video posted to her Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts, adding that she didn’t want to further harm “a group of people who have already experienced and who are continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm” after Russia invaded Ukraine more than a year ago.
The publisher’s preview of the anti-industrialization novel states that it is set in “a remote, high-altitude corner of Siberia”, where “a lone family of religious fundamentalists lives isolated and undetected”.
The protagonists have “scrounged off the cold and unforgiving land, refusing all contact” since the 1930s, according to the publisher.
In a message to her fans before she unveiled her decision to withdraw the book, Gilbert said: “This is a book that is going to take you into the deepest realms of the Siberian taiga, and into the heart and mind of an extraordinary girl born into that world, a girl of great spiritual and creative talent, raised far, far, far from everything that we call normal.”
