Culture and War—Between Death and Hope

Reflections on Grzegorz Przebinda’s "Are the Deceased Happy? Journal of the Third Year of War"

Abstract

Culture and War—Between Death and Hope: Reflections on Grzegorz Przebinda’s Are the Deceased Happy? Journal of the Third Year of War

This article discusses Grzegorz Przebinda’s book Are the Deceased Happy? Journal of the Third Year of War, which contains an intellectual reflection on the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war from March 2024 to the end of February 2025. The author has expanded the work to include reflections on the events of spring 2025, describing the dramatic course of the Trump – Zelenskyy summit of 28 February 2025. As in his previous diary, Putin’s Last War: A Philologist’s Treatise on Russia, the events of the war serve as a pretext for intellectual reflection on Russian culture. In his new book, the author focuses on reflections devoted to prominent figures of Russian literature, whose works have been the subject of his research over the course of more than forty years of academic work – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Bulgakov, Joseph Brodsky and other writers. The central idea of the book discussed in this article is the conviction that, in the face of a tragic war, the call for ‘cancel culture’ directed at Russian culture is a mistake. A far more productive alternative is to re-examine it critically, taking into account the current geopolitical situation.