Lock the books in the closet

On November 21, the Stavropol prosecutor's office decided to remove Nabokov's Lolita, Yesenin's poems, foreign children's detective stories, and works of Russian science fiction writers from school libraries.

The criterion for the unsuitability of works for schoolchildren was the presence in them of "mysticism, hooliganism, erotica, horrors."

Broadcasting this scandalous news, for several days the media quoted Kurbangali Sharipov, assistant prosecutor of the region for supervision over the implementation of laws on minors and youth, who explained the actions of his department as follows: “Now, if you look at the reports, children at the age of 9–12 are committing robberies. What do you think they read?

Soon Sharipov received an answer from the Public Chamber. The press service quoted a member of the OP, the editor-in-chief of the Literature magazine, Sergei Volkov, who called the demands of the Stavropol prosecutors "great stupidity and insanity."

And then Vladimir Vladimirov, Acting Governor, stood up for Nabokov, Yesenin and the image of Stavropol with the help of language means available to him. “I don’t understand how Yesenin and Nabokov can have an immoral influence on children. It doesn’t fit in my head, ”he told reporters at a forum in Pyatigorsk and promised that the regional ministry of education, on his orders, would deal with the demand of the prosecutor’s office.

It is obvious that things will not come to the general seizure of dangerous books from the regional school libraries (although, perhaps, some of the especially executive directors will have time to withdraw and report back). The officials will clarify the situation and tell us that, as usual, we misunderstood everything, and they will explain to the assistant prosecutor that he got a little excited.

„

People on the ground - from hooligans to officials and security forces are trying to catch signals from the center

”

But it would be wrong to consider the Stavropol incident the fruit of the morbid fantasies of a particular Sharipov, who did not understand that 9-12-year-old street robbers do not enter libraries in principle. The center of responsibility for such manifestations of obscurantism - and unfortunately, there is no reason to hope that such an initiative is isolated and accidental - is located far north of Stavropol. People on the ground - from hooligans to officials and security forces - are just trying to catch signals from the center and curry favor with it.

And in this case, the request to lock the books in the closet is a completely innocent action compared, for example, with the two-time vandal attack at the beginning of this year on the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg. Unknown people wrote the word “pedophile” on the wall of the writer’s house-museum – and it was in St. Petersburg that the shameful law banning “propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia among minors” was adopted by local deputies before the federal one. The law, which, by the way, some of Sergei Volkov's colleagues in the Public Chamber very much supported.

In a country where the president, speaking at a "literary meeting", confuses Pasternak with either Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky, and a man who presents himself as a descendant of Dostoevsky praises hard labor and recommends it to the "prisoners of Bolotnaya", where a State Duma deputy and chairman of the Duma committee proposes to include in the Constitution of a multinational secular state the special role of Orthodoxy as “the basis of the national and cultural identity of Russia” - in such a country, one does not dare to scold the assistant to the Stavropol prosecutor somehow.

Update from 11/25/2013

On Monday, November 25, the regional prosecutor dismissed his assistant Sharipov from his post and dismissed him from the prosecutor's office. The reason, according to a message on the website of the Stavropol prosecutor's office, was "violations of the requirements of the orders of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation "On the interaction of the prosecutor's office with the media" and "On the organization of prosecutorial supervision over the implementation of laws, observance of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen."