Elizabeth Gilbert Is Pulling Her USSR-Set Novel; Why I Won't Be Pulling Mine

A Literal Literary Loser is at Loose Ends

I spent the weekend at the Historical Novel Society North American Conference in San Antonio, Texas. Today, I was planning to answer the question I posed last week: Do Writing Conferences Sell Books?

But that’s going to have to wait. Because I returned home to news that Elizabeth Gilbert, best know for “Eat Pray Love,” had decided to pull from publication her upcoming novel, due, she said, to it’s 1930’s Soviet Union setting upsetting Ukrainians.

On Instagram, the author elaborated, “I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now — any book, no matter what the subject of it is — that is set in Russia.”

Her fiction was to take place in the USSR and focus on a family who, in order to protest Josef Stalin’s despotic rule, remove themselves completely from Soviet society in order to live isolated in the Siberian wilderness.

At the Historical Novel conference, the topic of cultural appropriation inevitably came up. Can you only write from the point of view of your own race/ethnicity/sexual orientation/gender/religion/age/geography?

If so, most historical fiction authors are screwed. Even if we stick to our own personal characteristics, time becomes a problem, since it’s doubtful anyone writing in the 21st century was alive prior to the start of the last one.

Gilbert, as far as I know, is neither Soviet, not born in the 1930s, nor all the members of a family.

But cultural appropriation wasn’t the issue here, like it was for a similarly contested novel, “American Dirt,” back in 2018.

The issue here is that, coming as it would on the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Gilbert’s novel was somehow condoning the atrocity.

Let’s back up a little.

First of all, Russia and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are technically not the same country, in exactly the same way that America post-1776 is not England.

In fact, whenever I tried to suggest that they were - that Vladimir Putin being the ex-head of the KGB meant that his Russia was no different from the former USSR - I was called a delightful cornucopia of names, including brainwashed neo-con, and was sternly reminded that Sting said “the Russians love their children, too.”

Second of all, the present day is not the 1930s. I am quite positive about that. I am extremely well-versed in the 1930s, especially in the Soviet Union. (Even though, for the record, I was only born there in the late 1960s and only lived there during the 1970s.)

My July 2020 novel, “The Nesting Dolls,” is set during Stalin’s Great Terror, where a Jewish family from Odessa, Ukraine is swept up and deported to the prison camps of Siberia.

My November 2022 novel, “My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region,” also takes place during the 1930s, and features a heroine who attempts to escape suffering the same fate by voluntarily fleeing to the border of Russia and China, where that great friend of the Jews, Stalin once again, has established a state just for them.

Finally, if I understand correctly, Gilbert’s now-shelved novel doesn’t praise either the former Soviet government, nor the current Russian one. In fact, it focuses on a clan who are RESISTING their tyrannical leader.

So how is this offensive to the Ukrainian people and their current struggle? Isn’t it, if anything, encouraging present-day readers to SUPPORT the anti-Russian cause by personalizing the issue through the eyes of one family?

I believe in free speech. I believe writers should be able to write what they want, and they should be able to not write what they don’t want.

I don’t know what Gilbert’s contract with her publisher says, but I am going to assume she has the right to pull her book from publication if a certain set of circumstances are met.

I, however, have no intention of doing the same with either of my two, 1930s set Soviet titles. (By the way, my skating mysteries, including “Axel of Evil,” which takes place in Russia in the early 2000s, aren’t too complimentary of the regime, either.)

If anything, I am going to continue pointing to them as examples of what the governments of both Russia and the USSR have historically done to Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish and many, many other people.

And I will continue failing to see how that condones Russia’s modern day actions in any way.

But maybe I’m missing something obvious. Do you understand Elizabeth Gilbert’s logic? (Besides the all-press-is-good-press cynicism?) Feel free to correct me in the comments!