In a previous post, I referred to the years-long pattern of publishing in Russia of “popular” titles undermining Ukrainian sovereignty. I was reminded of the subject in an excellent seminar held yesterday called On the Cultural Front: Ukrainian Publishers in the Time of War, which saw three Ukrainians prominent in the publishing world – Iryna Baturevych, Yulia Kozlovets, and Halyna Lystvak – interviewed by Ksenya Kiebuzinski of the University of Toronto. A recording of the seminar has been put online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTnBj0stpzc
Iryna is the co-founder of Chytomo (literally ‘Let’s read’) which now has its site in English too. Chytomo provides important, useful, and interesting news and information about Ukrainian publishing and more – including advice and suggestions about how Ukrainian material might be made available abroad in the original Ukrainian and in translation. During yesterday’s seminar, Iryna provided a link to a Chytomo piece about the kinds of Russian publications that I had referred to previously, called Fifty anti-Ukrainian propaganda books: How Russian publishers stoke hatred against Ukrainians. The article is topped and tailed with analysis, but its main body provides the quite shocking blurb of each of the 50 books in English and shows each book cover with an image from the Russian war in Ukraine as the backdrop, as the sample screenshots here show.
Of the 50 titles in the Chytomo article, the University holds nearly half – you can see the list here. While these books do not match the main focus of our collecting work (serious academic publications), we do also collect material like these books – as primary texts. These inflammatory books give us an insight into Russia through its publishing output. We can’t know for sure the impact of each title on the Russian reading public without research, but we can at least examine what is being produced in expectation of an audience (and we can also see the desired/predicted size of that audience – Russian books standardly give a print run number). We do buy material that is distasteful and worse, from around the world, giving readers present and future the chance to study the extremes that are, devastatingly, part of reality; acquisition by the UL must not be interpreted as approval.
It is grim for readers and writer alike to spend a blog post looking at books like these, so let’s end on better notes. The work of Chytomo can be supported through donations made here – through Patreon (here), through a bank transfer (details at the bottom of this page), or by card via a little pop-up message that appears if you leave a page open for a while (see the persuasively cat-focused screenshot provided). The next Ukraine-focused blog post will return to Ukrainian material, and I am delighted to be using Chytomo’s new book recommendations to order new titles for our readers.
Mel Bach
Languages across Borders 