A free-expression organization can’t be in that business of saying, “We don’t want you to speak because someone else doesn’t want you to speak.” To disinvite them is not just impolite, but it’s also basically saying, “Look, we thought your expression was legitimate and desirable until other people said it wasn’t.” That, I think, violates the principles of free expression. And then, when the Ukrainian writers arrived and said, “We can’t speak at the same festival with Russians,” the Russians were disinvited. What happened was that both Russian and Ukrainian writers were invited.
for them to speak in the same spaces, or for them to speak in different spaces on the same topic, or in different time slots?īut that’s not what happened. The question of whether a festival should feature both Ukrainian and Russian writers is a perfectly legitimate one, and it raises all sorts of other questions: is it O.K. We make decisions about speech and expression all the time, and that’s the job of a free-expression organization.
I think that free expression is a complicated, broad, nuanced field, and I’m not a free-speech absolutist. One had to do with PEN as a free-expression organization, and the other had to do with my personal position in this predicament. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the PEN controversy came about, why Gessen believes that cultural spaces should make more room for Ukrainian voices, and why-despite their decision to resign from PEN-Gessen believes the prominence of Russian culture in the West is problematic. Gessen’s work-including a number of books and many pieces for this magazine-has cast a harsh and critical eye on Vladimir Putin’s reign, and on the problem of autocracy more broadly. community in Russia, they have been living primarily in the U.S. For the past decade, after the Putin regime began harsh crackdowns on the L.G.B.T.Q. Gessen is a citizen of both the United States and Russia. Two days later, at a public gathering, Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s chief executive, admitted, “As a free-speech organization, we must go to the utmost lengths to avoid sidelining speech or being seen to do so.
When PEN tried to move Gessen’s panel off the World Voices slate, Gessen resigned. The controversy began when two Ukrainian writers, both of whom serve in the Ukrainian Army, threatened to bow out of a PEN World Voices panel after hearing that Gessen was hosting a separate panel featuring two Russians. Last week, my colleague Masha Gessen announced their resignation from the board of PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression.
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