Science and education

Tolstoy and art at the time of book burning

19.06.2022

Where you burn books, you end up burning men as well. So wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine. In 2022, after Sheikh Omar in the seventh century with the library of Alexandria, the summa of ancient wisdom, in ideal continuity with the Nazi burnings in 1933, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture (???) ordered the destruction of one hundred million copies of books. These are texts in Russian, or translated from Russian, the (forbidden) mother tongue of millions of Ukrainians. The decree sought by Volodymir Zelensky will not spare Alexsandr Puskin, Leo Tolstoy, Fedor Dostoevsky, and, in the field of art, it will expel Vassili Kandinsky, innovator of 20th-century painting.