By adhering to a rapid collection of signatures, 201 Italian cultural operators, including journalists, writers, entrepreneurs engaged in patronage, students, teachers, musicians but also press offices and communication operators, as well as subscribers of cultural associations, ask the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, guarantor of constitutional rights, and to the Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini “to put a stop to that phenomenon that increasingly seems to assume the characteristics of a pressing discrimination against Russian culture”.
The collection of signatures, explain the promoters, “arises from the pressure of increasingly serious events such as the affair involving the scholar Paolo Nori and the University of Bicocca, the request for the demolition of the statue of Dostoevsky in Florence, the social campaign against the Russian writer in Italy Nicolai Lilin, while the voices of wisdom of some Italian theaters or the Paris Opera remain mostly isolated, asking for distinction and serenity of judgment. Behind each signature there are hundreds silent or silenced by the promoters for avoid putting imminent public events on important stages at risk, given the irrational climate of these days, which sees only very few brave voices out of the chorus “.
And they conclude: “201 are the signatures as 201 are the years that separate us from the birth of Fedor Dostoevskij (1821), the Russian writer who became the involuntary symbol of this situation, as so many intellectuals rightly pointed out, including Claudio Magris today” .