Oleksandr Krasovitsky is 58 years old, born in Kharkiv, 40 kilometers from the northeastern border with Russia, and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Folio, one of Ukraine’s leading publishing houses. I meet him in the provisional peace of a Milan apartment, at the home of a mutual friend, the translator Elena Kostioukovitch. He shows me on his phone images of the Kyiv metro, crowded with people: “These are days of raids on the capital too, people are looking for shelter.” A chat about literature is followed by a conversation that quickly sheds its initial caution: Oleksandr, can you make culture in a country at war? “With certain limitations, yes. Mostly practical ones, as you can imagine. But from a certain point of view, the conflict is a catalyst: there’s a desire for escape. Interest in fantasy and love stories has grown, you know.”
As a young man Krasovitsky distributed underground books in what was then the Soviet Union, then came Folio: “The publishing house was founded in the last year of the USSR, in 1990. At that time there was a single market and books were mostly in Russian. For distribution reasons, only 10 percent of the catalog was in Ukrainian. Readers had no choice, and we wanted to change that. But don’t think we only published national authors. From the very beginning we spread the great classics of world literature: Dante, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, Umberto Eco. We made them available in our language too.” I look for a non-jarring way to move from culture to politics, and what comes out is a hybrid question, about publishing priorities from 2014 onward, the year of the forced annexation of Crimea. “Before publishing priorities, consumer taste changed in several stages. From 2014, a segment of well-educated readers began to reject Russian-language reading. These were mostly intellectuals. The real shift, though, came in 2023, when most of the population understood the war would be long. From that moment, many people came to feel that Russia wanted to erase us, as a state but also as a culture in our own right. That’s when the rejection of Russian became more common and more radical.”
In 2021, Vladimir Putin published an essay in which Ukrainians and Belarusians were denied any historical autonomy of their own: does a Ukrainian identity separate from the Russian one exist? Krasovitsky grows less composed: “That a Ukrainian identity exists is obvious to everyone by now. Nor is this a recent matter, just as the will to suppress it isn’t: you can already trace it to the 19th century, with tsarist decrees that banned the use of Ukrainian in public documents, while in Ukrainian territories under the Habsburgs it could be used. That drive continued afterward. Between 1934 and 1938, in Ukraine as in Georgia, about 80 percent of writers who wrote in their own language were executed or sent to Siberia. They know something about this in Poland too, where a scholar of the caliber of Jerzy Giedroyc coined a phrase for that attempted genocide: the executed renaissance. Now, the aim is to achieve the same result by corrupting intellectuals instead.”
That last sentence lets in a little light on current events and allows us to shift toward Italian affairs. I ask him what he thinks of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and of the cancellation of Valery Gergiev’s concert at the Royal Palace of Caserta in 2025. His expression turns thoughtful again: “In principle, culture must be free. The problem is its instrumentalization, the fact that it gets infiltrated and used as a propaganda channel. Putin’s regime is very active on this front. You see it in literary translation too, a field I know well. In Russia there’s the Institut Perevoda (the Translation Institute, ed.), a body meant to promote Russian culture abroad and which specializes in this kind of influence work. It operates in India, Japan, South Korea, but also in Germany, France, Italy. It sponsors book translations into every language and has become a factory for influence networks, built on an exchange of favors.” I risk a personal curiosity, asking him whether he knows of a Russian publication of General Vannacci’s book, “The World Upside Down,” but he has no information on that. We stay on politics, probing his predictable unease about the sympathy Russia enjoys in Italy, on both right and left. He doesn’t dodge the subject, though he widens the frame. “What worries me is knowing how generous Russia is with foreign parties that support it. Until 2014, banks in the Czech Republic and Cyprus had perfected ways of channeling funds to friendly political forces. After 2014, with the EU sanctions, it became harder. But other channels developed: from cryptocurrencies to the leverage exerted by European companies bought up by figures close to Putin. These aren’t, moreover, the only ways Russian influence operates: in other cases, the aim is to act directly on citizens. There are armies of programmers flooding the web with fake news, to cast Russia’s sympathizers in a good light and delegitimize everyone else. Often exploiting noble causes, like pacifism.”
We end on Ukraine’s possible entry into NATO and the EU; Krasovitsky’s answer is unequivocal: “As for NATO, a lot will depend on what it becomes in the future. As for the Union, I’ll answer with my heart: the sooner this marriage happens, the better. For Ukraine, but for the rest of Europe too.”
