Did This Author Really Cancel The Release of Her Book Because It’s Set in Russia?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | June 14, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | June 14, 2023 |

Novelist Elizabeth Gilbert made headlines this week when she announced that she planned to withdraw her own forthcoming novel from publication. Gilbert, who is best known for her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, has asked her publishers at Penguin Random House to pull the book from their release schedule. In a statement, she said that The Snow Forest, a historical novel set in Russia, had received ‘an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment, and pain.’ She added that ‘It is not the time for this book to be published,’ citing the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. ‘I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.’

This decision felt very weird, to say the least. The Snow Forest is not about the current war or modern Russia. Rather, it’s set in the 1930s and was inspired by the true story of a religious family who moved to Siberia, only to be discovered decades later by Soviet geologists. Gilbert described the characters as choosing to ‘remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialization.’ It actually sounds pretty interesting, and hardly pro-Putin given its narrative about opposing the USSR. The criticism that this novel would romanticize Russia seems to have come from a number of one-star reviews on Goodreads, none of which appear to have read the book (it was set for a February 2024 release.) PEN America, which promotes free expression around the world, said Gilbert’s decision was ‘well-intended’ but ‘wrong-headed’, suggesting that it would be more negative than positive to curtail one’s artistic choices because of military conflict.

It is completely within an author’s right to pull their own book from publication. It’s not common but it’s less unusual than you’d think. In 2021, bestselling children’s author Dav Pilkey, creator of Captain Underpants, asked that his 2010 novel The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future be pulled from shelves because of racist stereotypes. The estate of Dr. Seuss recently let a number of books go out of print because of their own outdated depictions of racialized characters. Both instances inspired the usual ire from faux-culture war toddlers who positioned the decision as akin to state-wide censorship (said people seldom seem so vocal about actual book bans in schools and libraries, weirdly enough.) But sometimes, the controversy is a little more complicated.

Publishing is but one of many industries grappling with the repercussions of the war on Ukraine. Russia is a major market for commerce and art, and capitalism has a bad habit of ignoring ethical issues for as long as the big bucks keep rolling in. Some remain in the country, hindered by an inability to find a buyer and the Russian tax decrees that require Western companies to sell their shares in Russian assets at a 50% discount and also pay a 10% ‘voluntary exit tax’ to the Russian budget. The Guardian reported this month how high demand for translated fiction in Russia from Western authors has led authors to make tough choices. Many, including Neil Gaiman, decided to decline Russian editions of their work for the duration of the war. Others see continued access to non-Russian works in the country as a helpful move in the face of Putin’s growing crackdowns on freedom of expression. Given how paltry annual earnings are for the vast majority of authors — in the UK, it’s well below the breadline — one can understand the temptation to take increased translation rights deals, even with the moral questions looming overhead. We also know that literature can have a major impact as an oppositional force to governmental censorship. Dr. Zhivago was initially banned in the USSR and snuck back into the country by the CIA because it was seen as so powerful a tool against that government (not to endorse the CIA of all groups or anything!)

While Gilbert’s decision is entirely her own, I do worry that the decision to bestow so much power on Goodreads, of all places, can only harm writers. The site has been on a downward spiral for several years since Amazon acquired it then all but left it to rot. Moderation is non-existent, its user interface often impenetrable, and the system all too easy to game. Review-bombing is often a minor act of protest, a way for readers to call out an especially egregious novel or author of low repute. That’s gotten far messier in recent years, with marginalized authors heavily targeted by the usual hate mobs in the same way that films are targeted on IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes. I imagine it’s tough to be accused of sympathising with a warmongering regime, but to equate telling a story set in 1930s Russia with such behaviour is surely the stuff of astonishing false equivalence. Even if Gilbert wrote a novel about a Soviet autocrat, it would not immediately be an endorsement of that. This seems to be a problem many perennially online scolds have, separating the goals of fiction from the notion of a strident political and moral endorsement.

I’m just not sure who this move benefits. It’s not much of a political stand, it’s divided opinion among the publishing world, and nobody seems happy with the final results. I also can’t find any evidence that the book was ever going to be published in Russia itself. Perhaps it’s only for Gilbert’s piece of mind. There are worse reasons to try and avoid potential controversy, bad-faith or otherwise.