Non-Fiction: Editor’s note on Censorship and its Erasures. Olga Stein

Non-Fiction: Editor’s note on Censorship and its Erasures

Our Summer 2023 issue is finally here, and I, along with all of our editors, wish to thank contributors and readers for their continuing interest and patience. The theme of censorship is an important one, as the news reaching us daily from the United States and Russia makes evident. In both countries, those with the most power want to control history as it unfolds, as it’s recorded, and as it’s recounted. Those who control history, shape society and politics of the present, and its forms in the future. Censorship is therefore a crucial tool for those who hope to maintain such control. In the US, current efforts to censor books and school lessons pertain to historical facts/truths about the capture and enslavement of people from the African continent, and the subsequent oppression of former slaves and their American-born descendants. In Eastern Europe, censorship entails the execrable attempt by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation. Russia is aiming for nothing less than the erasure of Ukraine as a nation, while eliminating any and all voices who oppose this blatant and brute imperialism.

          Russia has always been authoritarian. Its authoritarianism has waxed and waned over the centuries (depending on who controlled the state apparatus), but censorship was always part of the incumbent regime’s playbook. Still, until now, nothing could compare—in degree and scope of iniquity—with Stalin’s regime, and Stalinism as political strategy to maintain total authority by wiping out all dissent, all differences of opinion and approach, in every sphere of professional and private life.

          Nina Kossman’s elegiac memoir, “Lysenko, Enemy of Soviet Science, and a Dissertation Left on a Windowsill,” is a testament to the pernicious effects of censorship in science during Stalin’s era. Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko waged war on Mendelian genetics and science-based agricultural techniques (denouncing them as bourgeois pseudoscience or imperialist genetics), which resulted in the dismissal, imprisonment, or death of thousands of mainstream biologists. This particular form of censorship severely delayed and obstructed scientific work in cellular research, neurophysiology, and many other biological disciplines for decades. For Kossman, however, the tragic consequences of Lysenkoism during the late 1940s still resonate on a personal level. Lysenkoism ended the career of her mother, Maya Borisovna Shternberg, who was a young and promising biologist at the time. Kossman’s writes from the perspective of a daughter who grieves the loss of her mother, and grieves even more her own failure to get past her mother’s reticence and learn about this important part of Maya Shternberg’s life when she was alive and able to share that experience with her daughter.

          Renowned poet and translator, Philip Nikolayev (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-nikolayev) has contributed some translations of poetry by two highly accomplished Ukrainian poets, Arkady Shtypel and Maria Galina (their biographies appear below). Husband and wife, Shtypel and Galina live in Odessa, Ukraine. Each in their own way is grappling with the moral imperative to attest to the devastations of war: to find ways of articulating the scarred psychic and real terrain of a country, their home, under attack. These poems, written in Ukrainian, and Nikolayev’s translations, can be viewed as a countermove; intense, mystical and haunting, they are a challenge to the cultural and linguistic erasure Russia is hoping to perpetrate.

          Finally, I offer here my essay on Mikhail Iossel’s Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (published in 2021), which won the 2021 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. Iossel is the author of another collection of stories, Every Hunter Wants to Know, and is the editor of two anthologies of contemporary Russian writing. Love Like Water, Love Like Fire is an important addition to Canadian literature. It gathers autobiographical stories, which describe Iossel’s life in the former Soviet Union as a child, teenager, and young adult. In singular fashion, Iossel confronts and satirizes the former Soviet Union’s ingrained and pervasive anti-Semitism, its social dysfunctions, as well as the regime’s eerie, insidious propaganda and censorship machine. To understand the workings of Soviet-style censorship, one has to read these insightful, funny, and beautifully crafted stories. The essay will be accompanied by a recorded interview with the author. Thank you for reading WordCity!

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Olga Stein holds a PhD in English, and is a university and college instructor. She has taught writing, communications, modern and contemporary Canadian and American literature. Her research focuses on the sociology of literary prizes. A manuscript of her book, The Scotiabank Giller Prize: How Canadian is now with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Stein is working on her next book, tentatively titled, Wordly Fiction: Literary Transnationalism in Canada. Before embarking on a PhD, Stein served as the chief editor of the literary review magazine, Books in Canada, and from 2001 to 2008 managed the amazon.com-Books in Canada First Novel Award (now administered by Walrus magazine). Stein herself contributed some 150 reviews, 60 editorials, and numerous author interviews to Books in Canada (the online version is available at http://www.booksincanada.com). A literary editor and academic, Stein has relationships with writers and scholars from diverse communities across Canada, as well as in the US. Stein is interested in World Literature, and authors who address the concerns that are now central to this literary category: the plight of migrants, exiles, and the displaced, and the ‘unbelonging’ of Indigenous peoples and immigrants. More specifically, Stein is interested in literary dissidents, and the voices of dissent, those who challenge the current political, social, and economic status quo. Stein is the editor of the memoir, Playing Under The Gun: An Athlete’s Tale of Survival in 1970s Chile by Hernán E. Humaña.

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