If every quote is sued, then what about Russian classical literature?

On October 25, the Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg was supposed to make a decision on the “case” … of the Nobel Prize winner, French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980).

In February, a member of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, communist Alexei Filippov, was already fined 10,000 rubles for quoting Sartre’s article. But this incident was not exhausted, but even more so, as they once said, it was spoiled.

Five years ago, Aleksey Filippov on his VKontakte page reposted an entry in the public “Communists of Mogilev Region”. There was a photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre and a quote: “Any anti-communist is a bastard.”

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and the prosecutor’s office saw the recording after 3 years (!) And opened a case under Article 20.3.1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses: “Inciting hatred or enmity, as well as humiliation of human dignity.”

We monitored publications with such a quote, as well as searched for these words in the works of the classic, but did not find them. It has not been published in Russian. There was a 1961 article in French in which the famous French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, a Marxist, a moderate communist, but not a member of the party, wrote (quoted from the text of an ordinary translation agency presented by Alexei Filippov’s lawyers): “The last links were broken , my vision has changed: the anti-communist is a dog (dog, faggot), and I will never renounce this point of view again.

According to the academic dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language, one of the synonyms for “paskuda” is “bastard”. This means that both in the post of the “Communists of the Mogilev Region” and in the post of Filippov there is a quote. What to do with her now?

Jean-Paul Sartre is the most famous of the founders of existentialism. Translated from Latin – “existence”.

According to the 1983 Philosophical Dictionary, existentialism is “an irrationalist trend in contemporary bourgeois philosophy. E. seeks to comprehend being as a kind of immediate. undivided integrity of subject and object. Having singled out the experience itself as the original and true being, E. understands it as the experience by the subject of his “being-in-the-world”. Being is interpreted as a directly given human being. existence, as an existence (which, according to E., is unknowable neither by scientific, nor even by rational philosophical means)”.

Everything is clear, right?

And also: “E. reflected the spiritual situation of modern. bourgeois society, exposed its contradictions and illnesses, but he could not offer a way out of this situation.

As a result, Alexei Filippov was fined 10,000 rubles in February of this year. But the story didn’t end there.

The prosecutor’s office found 42 references with a quote from Sartre. And she filed a lawsuit with the Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg for a ban on the distribution of these 42 Internet links in Russia. According to the prosecutor’s office, the phrase incites hatred and harms children.

In the meantime, Filippov alone had to take the rap for all 42 unknown Internet addresses and for the public “Communists of Mogilev Region”. Sorry. Although, of course, I condemn. You can’t publicly call political opponents like that. There are norms and rules of political and everyday life. What if someone finds a bad quote about communists tomorrow?

Again, I will refer to Sartre.

The new trial began on 20 September. And he is no longer considering the Filippov case, but a lawsuit to ban the distribution of this quote from the legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre. That is, the responsible state people involved in the case have been engaged in Sartre’s statement for 3 years now.

Is this our common Russian existence?

And if without irony, then the precedent, in fact, is very, very significant.

What to do with quotes now? Here is the question of questions! In particular, with quotations from the legacy of the classics of Russian literature.

Let’s start in order: Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Ivan Aksakov, Maxim Gorky, the composer Glinka who joined them … they wrote such a thing, there is such horror and a nightmare about Russian life, about mores, about the country in general and in general, that anyone who will cite some of their lines, you can be prosecuted for Russophobia and extremism – Article 282 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. I can, of course, quote, but … But if the classics are fined for every quote, like Filippov, then the annual pension will not be enough … taking into account the payment for housing and communal services, which by December will rise in price for the second time in a year.

On October 25, the Primorsky District Court of St. Petersburg was to deliver a verdict. But he is not. Month from all sides considered – and nothing? Or did you decide to quietly lower the brakes so as not to attract attention? Or maybe it’s just that there are plenty of other “things”, not up to Sartre now, someday his turn will come?

Existentialism…

Sergei Baimukhametov.

Pictured: Nobel Prize winner in literature Jean-Paul Sartre at a student anti-bourgeois rally in Paris, 1968.