Litquake Festival Gathering Disaster Relief Services

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

October 14 San Francisco Citywide Literary Festival ends Litquakestarted on October 6. Litquake held in Bay area already 18-th year in a row. The festival included meetings with authors, presentations of new books, discussions, lectures and poetry readings. Especially saturated was the last day of the festival - Lit crawl, called by its organizers "the world's largest event."

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

In 2008 year Lit crawl was organized in New York in Manhattan. The next city was Austin, where a similar festival was first held in 2011. In 2012 year Lit crawls was organized in Brooklyn and Seattle, and in 2013 its geography expanded to Los Angeles, Iowa City and London. In subsequent years, a similar event was held in several cities in the United States and Europe.

This Saturday is one of the events. Lit crawl was organized by the movement Arts Resistanceor "Resistance through art." It is interesting because it appeared soon after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war, as its creators explain, as the embodiment of some alternative space for resistance to the actions of the Kremlin.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

“I came to the conclusion that opposition to the Kremlin regime in the form of an ordinary street protest or rational discussion in the media is currently useless and even dangerous. The fact is that any contact with the system, even confrontation with it unwittingly makes you a part of it, and as a result, the system wins. However, according to the Ukrainian poet Vasily Stus, "in such conditions silence is a crime." The question arose: how to express your protest and at the same time preserve emotional and intellectual integrity? We concluded that this is possible through art. This is how we develop our own cultural space and language outside the Kremlin matrix, ”explained one of the creators of the movement, Zarina Zabriski.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

Zarina emigrated from Russia almost twenty years ago, and during that time she became pretty famous English writer. According to her, it is the experience of participation in numerous literary readings gave her the necessary resource for creating new art projects - this time with political overtones. As part of the movement, several performances were organized over the years, reading poems of Russian and Ukrainian poets, and so on.

Photo: Ksenia Kirillova

True, the current action, according to the organizers, did not carry the political aspect and did not concern the actions of Russia. This time, writers, poets and readers gathered in Clarion alley (a favorite place of artists and writers of San Francisco) to read excerpts from his latest works, as well as from the works of the young writer and journalist Janina Glasova, who had been tragically lost in life. In addition, participants in the readings held a fundraiser for hurricane victims in Puerto Rico and forest fires in California.

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