Égalité! The Legacy of the Soviets

The 2nd ideal of the French Revolution reconsidered in conversation and music. Can Marx remain a fount of inspiration?

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Information

Date and time Friday 19 January 2018 20:55 tot 21:45 uur
Location Theater aan het Spui - Zaal 1

Equality reconsidered: in the 20th century, the Soviet Union added a strange flavour to the second ideal of the French Revolution. Equality reduced to the repression and monotony of state socialism and the dullness of old Ladas.

Writers Unlimited investigates the value of equality as a European ideal in the framework of the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx*. What can we learn from the socialist era in Central and Eastern Europe? Can Marx remain a fount of inspiration after the Soviet debacle?

In his revolutionary pamphlet Resist! (Querido, 2017), novelist Gustaaf Peek proposes that, after thirty years of capitalist domination, it is high time to aim for equality and to reconsider and reevaluate a communist-style redistribution of wealth.

He discussed this subject with the Georgian-German writer Nino Haratischwili and the Romanian poet and essayist Magda Carneci. Professor and essayist Paul Scheffer moderated the conversation. Classical accordionist Oleg Lysenko and his trio provided music.

*More Marx? During Saturday Night Unlimited, Winternachten festival screened the Dutch premiere of The Young Karl Marx by Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, whose earlier successful documentary I Am Not Your Negro focused on writer James Baldwin. His feature film is an intense reimagination of the birth of communism and the meeting of Marx and Engels.

Line-up

Paul Scheffer

(1954) worked as a correspondent in Paris and Warsaw before becoming a research assistant at the Wiardi Beckman Foundation. Since 1978 he has written about 200 essays for NRC Handelsblad and Volkskrant newspapers and De Groene Amsterdammer magazine, gaining particular notice in 2000 for The Multicultural Fiasco. In 2007 he published Het land van aankomst (Immigrant Nations), a book that seeks out what really goes on under the surface of multiculturalism. He held the position of Professor of Metropolitan Issues at the University of Amsterdam from 2003 to 2011. Since 2011 he has been professor of European Studies at the Universities of Tilburg and Amsterdam. In 2013 he published Alles doet mee aan de werkelijkheid. Herman de Wolf (1893-1942), his grandfather's biography followed by the essay De grens van de vrijheid (The border's freedom, 2016) in which he states that an open society can only exist by a certain spatial demarcation.
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Nino Haratischwili

(Tbilisi, 1983) had her breakthrough in 2014 with The Eight Life. In this award-winning, 1300-page family epic, the Hamburg-based Georgian writer tells the story of the fictitious Georgian Jasji family. She takes the reader to the Soviet Union, in particular during the dramatic years when Georgian-born tyrant Stalin was in power. She also takes the reader to the Swinging London of the 1960s and '70s, to the Prague Rebellion of 1968 and to the Caucasus, the area where she is from. Despite all the horrors she describes, it is not a terrible book but rather a tragicomic fairy tale with malicious traits. The main theme is the question of whether destiny still matters, even here and now in the West. Haratischwili made her debut in 2010 with Juja, followed by Mein sanfter Zwilling (My Gentle Twin) in 2011. She studied film directing in Tbilisi and theatre directing in Hamburg. Her plays have won many awards.
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Magda Cârneci

(Romania, 1955) wants to connect people and ideas with her poetry and work. Her volume Chaosmos, translated into Dutch, is about a chaotic world that is highly ordered in a larger cosmic sense: thus, a chaosmos. Cârneci studied art history in Paris and is one of the leading members of the Romanian 1980s Generation. After the 1989 revolution that finished off Ceaușescu's communist reign, she became active in Romanian political and cultural life. She later moved to Paris, where she became Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute and a member of the European Cultural Parliament. Cârneci is chair of the Grupul pentru Dialog Social (GDS), a Romanian NGO that aims to protect democracy, human rights and civil rights. She is also the chair of PEN-Romania and editor-in-chief of Revista ARTA. Her work has been translated into French and English.
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Gustaaf Peek

(The Netherlands, 1975) is a writer of novels, poems, stories, essays, and screenplays. His work is characterized by the compelling way in which he brings characters involved in historical injustices to life. His debut novel Armin (2008) is about children adrift after World War II. In Ik was Amerika (I Was America, 2010), a Dutch prisoner of war in World War II befriends a farm worker in a camp in the US. Decades later, he seeks him out again. Peek received the BNG Literature Prize and the F. Bordewijk Prize for this work. Godin, held (Goddess, Hero, 2014) is a candid novel about the mysterious and all-too-human nature of love. In his pamphlet Verzet! Pleidooi voor communisme (Resistance! A Plea for Communism, 2015), he undermines decades of capitalist indoctrination. His novel A.D. (2021) tells about the events and hardships aboard one of the first seaships in the 16th century to present-day Indonesia and the arrival there. In 2025, his poetry collection Orang/oetan was published.
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Oleg Lysenko

(Ukraine, 1974) studied at the music academies in Poltava, Kiew and Enschede. In 1999 he released his first CD, Awakening featuring works by a.o. Vivaldi, Bach, Pachelbel and Piazolla. He specialized in Argentine tango on bayan and bandoneon at Codarts Rotterdam. As a soloist, he won the 2005 National Accordion Competition in The Netherlands with his rendition of Victor Vlasov's "Five Views of the Land of the Gulag Archipelago", also the title piece of his 2012 CD Gulag. He prefers genre-transcending projects in which visual art, literature and music enhance and flow into one another. He developed such projects with writer and visual artist Armando, sculptor and illustrator Koenraad Tinel, and with writers, journalists and filmmakers, including Stefan Hertmans, Cherry Duyns and Peter d'Hamecourt, among others. For his double-CD De sneeuwstorm (The Snowstorm, 2022), Lysenko arranged and played on bayan Georgi Sviridov's music to Alexander Pushkin's story of the same name, recited by Martinus Nijhoff Prize-winning Pushkin translator Hans Boland. With fundraising events and benefit performances, Oleg raises money to pay for an ambulance for the Ukrainian region of Poltava, where his family comes from.
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Gerda Dendooven

(Kortrijk, Belgium, 1962) won the 2017 Woutertje Pieterse Prize for her picture book Stella. In it, a drowning person is fished out of the sea and taken in by a foster family. She has been teaching graphic design at the Hoger St.-Lucas Institute in Ghent since 1992. Dendooven is famous for and has won many awards for her children's book illustrations. She received the Gouden Penseel (Golden Brush) in 2000 for her work in De verliefde prins (The Prince in Love) by Ron Langenus. She also writes plays and children's books and illustrates adult books and newspaper columns.
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