Russia, censored biography of Pasolini for... homosexual propaganda

In Russia , the biography of Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 1922 - Ostia, 1975) written by scholar Roberto Carnero, an associate of Contemporary Italian Literature, which had come out in Italy in 2022, published by Bompiani, and was translated into Russian and published by the AST publishing house, has been heavily censored. Russian censorship affected large parts of the text, publishing the book with many parts deleted: flipping through the pages it is possible to see large black strokes covering the words. The reason? Pasolini’s private affairs and in particular his homosexuality. Every passage on the subject was removed from the book in compliance with the legislation of the Russian Federation, which, in Article 6.21 of its Civil Code, does not allow the “Propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations and/or preferences,” and this following a recent federal law, passed in 2022, which introduced measures against what is called LGBT “propaganda.”

Denouncing what happened to the book, titled Pasolini. Dying for Ideas, is journalist Ivan Davydov who, on his Instagram accoutn, posted a photograph of the pages of the book with the lines erased. The erasures, moreover, would affect as much as one-fifth of the text. According to reports by TASS, one of Russia’s leading news agencies, the choice to release the book with the erasures and not with cuts to the text was reportedly a decision by the AST publishing house itself, which felt it was more honest to show the text covered rather than to release a mutilated volume. “As a rule,” reads an AST quote quoted by TASS, “foreign non-fiction publishers do not accept abbreviations and changes to the original text of the manuscript, however, in this case, the copyright holder approved the proposal of the AST publishing house. The current version in Russia was published with his permission. Roberto Carnero’s work has thus become interactive: it is the reader himself who decides whether to use any sources of information to find out what is hidden from him in this version of the publication. Thanks to the presence of hidden fragments, an overlap between the original text and the modern context in which we live here and now. Moreover, the book becomes an artifact of the era, an attribute of performance, of artistic expression.”

Incidentally, upon entering the publisher’s site, you are asked to confirm your age: if you state that you are over eighteen years old, you can continue browsing. Kind of like what happens with pornographic sites. Only in this case it is a publisher’s site trying to sell a book about Pasolini.

Russia, censored biography of Pasolini for... homosexual propaganda

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