Free Public Enemies by Bernard-Henri Lévy

parents’ youth.
    I’m sorry to take all of my examples from popular music (but you know how much it mattered to people my age). An overview of the literary situation would, I think, lead quickly to radical conclusions. When a country is strong, self-confident, it is prepared to accept any amount of pessimism from its writers without turning a hair. The France of the 1950s accepted people like Camus, Sartre, Ionesco, Beckett. The France of the 2000s has trouble putting up with people like me.
    So, well … I’m getting old now, I’m getting weaker, I would like to be happy before I die. So I think I’ll go back to Russia.
    * Jean-Claude Killy (born 1943) is a former alpine ski racer who was a triple champion at the 1968 Winter Olympics.
    * Antoine Riboud (1918–2002) was a French businessman, the founder and president of Groupe Danone.
    *
Liberterien
, which denotes political as opposed to individual libertarianism, is a term that first entered French political discourse in the 1970s; it was coined by the economist Henri Lepage.

March 12, 2008
    Dear Michel, you’re the
depressionist
but I’m about to be the obligatory killjoy.
    Unlike you, I have absolutely no desire to be Russian or to return to Russia.
    I used to love a certain idea of Russia.
    I loved and defended this idea of Russian culture, which in the 1970s and ’80s conjured up a whole hodgepodge, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Slavophiles and Europhiles, the disciples of Pushkin and those of Dostoyevsky, the dissidents on the right and the left and those who, in the words of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch, * belonged to neither of these camps but to the concentration camp and whose defense I was taking up while my father, in the episode I told you about, was signing (or rather, was not signing,
deciding
not to sign) his contracts with Gosplan’s † wood branch.
    Then there’s what Russia has become, what appearedwhen the breakdown of communism, its debacle—what a mountaineer like your father would call its “thaw” or “collapsing ice” (the real meaning of debacle)—revealed to it and the world the Russia of Putin, of the war in Chechnya, the Russia that assassinated Anna Politkovskaya * on the stairway in her building and that the same Anna Politkovskaya described in her wonderful book
A Russian Diary
, just before she was assassinated. It’s the Russia of the racist packs who, right in the center of Moscow, track down “nonethnic” Russians, the Russia that chased out the Chinese at Irkutsk, the Dagestanis at Rostov, the same Russia that persecutes those it called the
Chernye
, meaning the “swarthy” ones, the Russia that has the nerve to explain to the world that it has nothing to do with democracy and human rights since it has its own democracy, a special, local democracy that is quite unrelated to Western canons and rights. It’s the country of such specialties as its party, the Nashi, meaning “our own,” which, to call a spade a spade, is a Stalin-Hitler combo, the Russia that, incidentally, is giving new life to the anti-Semitic European pamphlets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the same Russia that made a best seller out of a stupid
List of Masked Jews
, which lumps together Sakharov, Trotsky, de Gaulle, Sarkozy, and Yulia Tymoshenko, the mastermind behind the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. It’s the Russia that—since you mentioned music—put on the cover of one of its popular magazines the singer Irina Allegrova dressed up as an SS camp guard, holding a ferocious hound on a lead. This Russia, which, apart from this kind of idiocy, believes in nothing at all, absolutely nothing, just the religion of the marketplace, consumption and brands. This Russia,which, the last time I went there, struck me as having had its culture erased and its brain washed, this Russia, whose most discouraging side, according to Anna Politkovskaya, to mention her yet again, was its amorphousness and passivity, the way it accepts,