Från The Times
In a vast, chilly warehouse on the outskirts of Kyiv, men in padded jackets and thick gloves stand on the edge of a lorry, cutting open bundles of Russian books and throwing them on to a conveyor belt. A thick copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace chugs its way up towards the pulping machine, followed by a leather-bound Russian-English dictionary.
Russian classics from Pushkin to Turgenev come after, along with Russian-language translations of western fiction from Sidney Sheldon to Cecilia Ahern. On top of a vast square of pulped literatures lies, still visible, a copy of Dostoevsky’s The Insulted and Humiliated.
Much of the de-Russification has come from the bottom up, including the book-pulping project started by the Syayvo bookstore in response to customers asking, when it reopened three months after the invasion, whether it was still selling Russian-language books.
Now it collects them from customers, schools and libraries and sends them to the recycling plant in return for payment that is channelled to civilian and military charities for the war effort. Some 72 tonnes of Russian-language books have raised more than 250,000 hryvnia (£5,630) on their journey to be remade into egg cartons and toilet paper. The money has also funded Ukrainian lessons for Russian-speaking refugees relocating from the east. The first class drew 250 students.
Jan Szczepański
F.d Förste bibliotekarie och chef för f.d Avdelningen för humaniora,
vid f.d. Centralbiblioteket, Göteborgs universitetsbibliotek
E-post:
Jan.Szczepanski63@gmail.com