Afterthought: Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich expelled from Russian PEN Center


Svetlana Alexievich’s PEN identification card

Russia’s PEN center has responded to the Belarusian writer’s leaving the organisation.

As reported earlier, the writer and journalist Sergei Parkhomenko was expelled from the Russian PEN Center in late December for ‘provocative activities incompatible with its goals and objectives’. After that, its prominent members – Lev Rubinstein, Boris Akunin and Alexander Ilichevsky – left the organization. So did Svetlana Alexievich. But now Russian PEN states that she has never been its member.

“It is also essential to inform you that the Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich has never been a member of the Russian PEN, so her declaration of leaving it sounds bizarre,” the letter reads.

 

Picture from penrussia.org

By now, Alexievich name has been removed from the list of Russian PEN members.

Sergei Parkhomenko, who was one of the first persons to learn about the ‘countermeasures’, wrote about ‘the lies and dirty acts of people who head the Russian PEN center’.

On his Facebook, Parkhomenko also provides evidence of the fact that Svetlana Alexievich has been a member of the Russian PEN center for a long time:

In 2016, Parkhomenko and other members of the Russian PEN Center addressed an open letter to Vladimir Putin asking him to pardon Ukrainian film director, screenwriter and writer Oleg Sentsov who was sentenced by Russian court on terrorism charges and is now serving his term in a penal colony in Siberia. According to Russian human activists, Sentsov’s case was fabricated.

PEN Center is the worldwide association of professional writers, founded in 1921 in London at the initiative of Catherine Amy Dawson-Scott and John Galsworthy to enhance cooperation of creators and to protect their rights.The name is an abbreviation from the English words ‘poet’, ‘essayist’ and ‘novelist’ — which, in turn, is made of the word ‘pen’.

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