Culture
ARTS IN ITALY HIT BY RUSSIA'S WAR ON UKRAINE ITALIAN CULTURE HAS BEEN IMPACTED BY THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE
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t is not everyday that a 19th-century Russian novelist becomes a trending topic on Twitter but this is what happened in Italy in early March. When the Bicocca university in Milan chose to drop a course on Fëdor Dostoevsky – against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – all of a sudden the author of Crime and Punishment was the unlikely focus of public debate. Bicocca informed Professor Paolo Nori that it had cancelled his lecture series, the night before it was due to begin, “to avoid any controversy, in a moment of high tension.”
Jorit's giant portrait of Dostoevsky in Naples.
4 | April 2022 • Wanted in Rome
Andy Devane An emotional Nori read out the contents of the email during an Instagram live video in which he slammed the university’s decision as “ridiculous”, saying “even dead Russians” are now the target of censorship in Italy. The university faced such a backlash that it reinstated the course the next day, stressing that it was “open to dialogue and listening even in this very difficult period.” A few weeks later the Neapolitan street artist Jorit reignited the controversy by painting a giant portrait of Dostoevsky on the walls of a high school in Naples. “Only with culture can the
