Art under bombs

Russia - Ukraine: fifteenth day of war. More roars, fires, flames. It’s time for air-raid sirens, shelters, terror. There are threats of chemical and nuclear weapons. It would bring total destruction. The West trembles, tries to raise its voice, but seems to stutter instead. It supplies the invaded country with armaments and applies to the invader economic sanctions that cause misery to the nations that inflict them as well as to those that suffer them. Information and misinformation chase each other and deny each other. Peace negotiations follow one another but are punctually avoided; truces are announced and then ignored. In the meantime, under our eyes we can see rubble and atrociously mutilated bodies, while our ears hear the screams of the wounded and the feeble moans of the dying. Those who can run away from the horror, more than 2 million refugees, so far. Women, children and the elderly for the most part. Men between 18 and 60 years old are staying, they must (or want to?) defend their country, called to fight like David against Goliath. Meanwhile, under both flags people continue to die. Another flash. Again. The sinister glow of the missiles ripping through the night sky forces us to choose a side. And by us it is immediately Russophobia. Dismay, anger, impotence and fear obnubilate the conscience, lead to identify an entire culture and its people withitsdictator. Webehave like the Americans against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. We forget that was Fedor Dostoevskij who said “beauty will save the world.” Today, he is rather remembered as an anti-Czarist subversive, forced to 4 years of imprisonment in Siberia. So it is. At the Bicocca University in Milan, a class on the writer was actually prevented: the subsequent apologies of the university to Professor Paolo Nori did not serve to restore it. In Florence, there are also those who propose to eliminate the statue of Dostoevskij at the Cascine. At this rate, what else can we expect: the placing on the index of “War and Peace” by Lev Tolstoy, because better than anyone else he told the atrocities of war and aroused the spirits with the description of Moscow in flames? Episodes of witch hunts increase. Tugan Sokhiev, director of the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, does not intend to succumb to the request of the mayor Beppe Sala to distance himself from Putin and resigns. For the same reason, in Munich, the director of the Philharmonic, Valery Sergiev, was fired. Nothing new even in the West: no abjuration, no bread. But, you know, war is war. In April, the Venice Biennale will be inaugurated.
It will be impressive to find the doors of the Russian pavilion closed.The curator, Raimundas Malasauskas, and the artists Kirili Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva, the day after the attack, promptly communicated that they would renounce the exhibition. They did not wait for someone to ask them for statements against the Kremlin. Were they provident, brave or cowards? To posterity the arduous sentence, to us the feeling of useless of art if it remains silent.