Igort (Cagliari, 1958) could not yet read or write when his grandmother and father read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to him. There was no Russian ancestry in the family, but the passion for Soviet literature was passed down from generation to generation. So much so that, despite being Italian by heart, the cartoonist and comic book writer had a divided heart from an early age, as he felt he had two homelands, culturally speaking. Therefore, in his works he added a t to his original name, Igor, to Russify it.
With these precedents, it is not difficult to understand that the Sardinian author feels very closely the conflict that has been brewing between Russia and Ukraine for some time and that just over a year ago triggered the war. A cruel resolution that led him to write the graphic novel Cuadernos ucranianos. Diario de una invasión (Salamanca Graphic), which he presented this weekend at the Còmic Barcelona show.
“When the Kremlin opened fire on Ukraine on February 24, I shuddered. What we had feared so much was happening before our eyes. There were many naive people who believed that Putin would not take the step, and I don’t understand why. Boris Yeltsin’s crusade in Chechnya continued with a second war that destroyed the territory. Then, he entered the Crimea. How did the intellectuals not see that the next step would be to invade Ukraine? It’s likely that they didn’t want to see it”, reflects the author during an interview with La Vanguardia.
The cartoonist has many friends in Ukraine. As ironic as it may seem, he met them during a trip he made years ago to see the houses of a Russian writer, Chekhov. “He had many, but his favorite was the one he had in Yalta, Crimea,” he explains. And he went there. He followed his unwritten rule of avoiding hotels and lived with Ukrainian families for several months. The experience was such that he left aside the literary project that had brought him there and ended up creating the famous Cuadernos rusos y ucranianos, a graphic report that earned him the applause of the public and opened his doors of the publishing market in different countries.
“What I didn’t expect was to have to talk again about the relationship between the two countries because of a war. Without a doubt, this is the most difficult book I have faced”, he admits.
It wasn’t premeditated. “The phone kept ringing. My friends were calling to report what was happening. At first I didn’t know how to assimilate all the information, but I thought it would be a good idea to dump it on Facebook. A good journalist friend asked me why I didn’t make a new graphic novel about this; but I didn’t think I was capable of it. I was too attached to that story and had many good friendships in both countries. But the calls continued and the networks were short, so I started little by little and, after five drawn pages, I couldn’t stop anymore”, he explains.
Although it was an arduous task, the cartoonist did his best to distance himself from it and see everything with more perspective. “Then I understood that this is not a war of Russia against Ukraine, but of the Kremlin, in which two ways of seeing the world face off. One is that of the autocrat who does what he likes and if you disagree, he sends you to Siberia or poisons you. The other is us, the West, where we vote to elect presidents; something that hasn’t quite crossed Putin’s mind, since he exposed himself a few years ago during an official speech in which he dared to assert that the Slavic man is not made for democracy.”
Told from a purely human perspective, the book reflects some curiosities, such as the salvation of the palianÃtsia, a bread that allows the camouflaged invaders to be identified. “It’s a word that Russians pronounce differently and that lets Ukrainians know who’s hiding under a hidden identity.” Also the experiences of those who are in occupied territory. “My friend Anatoli, who lives in Donbass, has ten more TV channels, all in Russian, but he gets depressed when, on talk shows, he hears the presenter saying that it is impossible to re-educate the Ukrainians and that the only way to defeat – them is by exterminating them; a phrase that, as surprising as it may seem, is repeated more and more”. Faced with this scenario, the puppeteer makes a wish: “Not having to write a third book. This will mean that it will all be over. But for now, China holds the key to peace”, he concludes.
