Dmitry Bykov’s anti-Putin Russia. With Poland not only in the background

Abstract

Dmitry Bykov’s anti-Putin Russia. With Poland not only in the background

The article is an attempt to describe the anti-Putin stance of contemporary Russian writer and thinker Dmitry Lvovich Bykov (b. 1967), from his first novel Justification (2020) to his most recent pro-freedom and anti-imperialist statements from July 2023, when he was already in exile in the USA. The author’s key text here is the 2019 article 20 Years of Putin – 20 Years in Reverse Gear, in which the author reaffirms his negative attitude toward Putinism as “archaic imperialism”, the cause of Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and now Russia’s February 24, 2022 attack on Ukraine. The article also discusses Bykov’s negative attitude toward historical and contemporary Russian fascism, of which the writer also considers Fyodor Dostoevsky to be largely representative. An important part of the article is also a general description of Bykov’s very positive attitude to contemporary Polish culture and literature – mainly to the works of Leszek Kolakowski, Stanislaw Lem, Wislawa Szymborska, Agnieszka Osiecka, Czeslaw Milosz. The text ends by recalling Dmitry Bykov’s dramatic and compassionate statement of July 6, 2023, on the death of the 37-year-old Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died of wounds sustained under Russian bombs in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.

At the same time, the article is a kind of extensive introduction to the reading of Grzegorz Przebinda’s interview with Dmitry Bykov, published immediately below in “Studia Pigoniana”, recorded in Krakow in October 2019 on the occasion of the Russian writer’s stay at the Conrad Festival.