On April 10, Moscow police arrested Konstantin Goldman for brandishing a book in public. Mr Goldman had posted an image on social media in which he posed holding a copy of Tolstoy's War and Peace next to a section of a World War II monument that commemorates Kyiv's status as a Soviet "hero-city" -- a distinction given to cities that endured some of the harshest moments of the Nazi invasion. He was charged with violating Russia's prohibition against discrediting the military, a new law that carries a punishment of up to 15 years in jail.
Literature has long occupied a key role in Russian culture. A popular adage describes poet Alexander Pushkin as "our everything". The novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky are lauded the world over as some of the greatest exemplars of realist literature. The famous Soviet-Russian poet Evgeny Evtushenko famously noted that "in Russia, a poet is more than a poet", commenting on the central social role that writers have played.
