TURIN. Read Dostoevsky and find the path of your life. The meeting between Paolo Nori and the Russian writer is casual. But crucial. Nori was fifteen when he reads “Crime and Punishment”. Dostoevsky has been dead for almost a century, we are at the end of the seventies, and in the room on the top floor of a country house the light goes on. On the contrary, the wound that still causes the Emilian writer to bleed, expected tomorrow at the Circolo dei Leggi (at 9 pm) to speak with Armando Buonaiuto about literature and censorship in the meeting entitled “Who is afraid of Dostoevsky?”. That censorship that Paolo Nori suffered personally, from the Bicocca University of Milan precisely because of Dostoevsky and his lessons on the Russian writer, in the midst of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Mr. Nori, why does Dostoevsky still make you bleed?
“Because at fifteen he opened a wound in me, that was the first impression. I identified with the character (Rodion Romanovič Raskol’nikov, ed), he made me understand how much I am worth. He wondered if he was like an insect or like Napoleon. I asked myself that too, he offended me, he set me in motion ».
You speak of injury, therefore something physical. I would have asked her if instead Dostoevsky cannot be a feeling, act on the heart, enter the head, stimulate the soul.
«With“ Crime and punishment ”it was not so. Today this is still not the case. But I answer you, because it is true that Dostoevsky can act sentimentally: the “Idiot” for example went straight to my heart, he wanted to tell a good man, something halfway between Don Quixote and Jesus Christ. He did it well with Prince Myskyn. ‘
So you are a sentimental too?
«Yes … I am selfish, a narcissist, but the birth of my daughter has started a movement, it changes the perspective, for me this little girl is a blessing, she is joy and concern, but still blessed. I am grateful to my daughter’s mother ».
By the way, Dostoevsky wrote: “Have children! There is no greater happiness in the world ”. Confirmation?
“I confirm”.
In his life Dostoevsky faced a captivity in which he was not allowed to read any books, apart from the Gospel. Can you live without reading?
“Yes sure. He succeeded, he can live without reading. But I think of Anna Achmàtovaa, the greatest Russian poet: she wrote a wonderful book which is “Requiem”, which has been censored for a long time. They killed her husband, arrested her son and she queued for months in front of the prison to be able to meet him. She started writing. At the end of her life she expected an award, an award, the Oxford cloak, she received a package with a book made of scratched birch bark sheets: it was the only way prisoners had to express themselves in a gulag . Yes, those men needed poetry. And so I say that one can live without reading, but reading still finds unimaginable ways ».
You have been censored, your college lectures suspended. He was the first to be hit. What do you think?
“That if it hadn’t happened to me it would have happened anyway. I know that I should have given four lessons at the Bicocca, now I will hold 44 throughout Italy, I have received hundreds of invitations that I cannot even answer ».
Is culture stronger than any impediment?
“Yes, as I said, he always finds extraordinary ways to assert himself.”
But what do you think of the war between Russia and Ukraine?
“I know Russia, Russian literature and the Russians. But I have no elements to talk about the war. I say with certainty that Vladimir Putin is not the main expression of Russianness and I claim it ”.
In recent days, you have published a reflection by Viktor Shklovskij on social media: “If instead of trying to make history, we simply tried to be responsible for the individual events that make it up, perhaps we would not make ourselves ridiculous. History must not be told, but a biography ”. Would you write Putin’s biography?
“No, I wouldn’t write it, I’m lucky enough to do the things I like.” –