Poet and translator Alexander Nitschberg, recipient of Austria's State Prize, has said that intensifying ideological pressures and the retreat of freedom of expression in Europe prompted him to move to Russia in 2023. Nitschberg made these statements to the Ria Novosti news agency.
Nitschberg explained that the decision to move came after approximately 40 years of residence in the West, including 30 years in Germany and 13 years in Vienna. He indicated that one of the main reasons was his growing sense that a "particular ideology" was spreading across various areas of life.
He said that initially he believed he could continue his work while ignoring this trend. However, he noted that the situation changed gradually, especially after the coronavirus pandemic, when he observed that this ideology began to permeate different aspects of life and affect them, making it difficult to continue living in that environment.
Nitschberg clarified that the problem, in his view, is not necessarily linked to the ideas themselves. He noted that some principles such as human freedom and human dignity can be reasonable, but "new orientations" are constantly being added to them. He added that agreeing with one of these ideas came to mean, in some cases, the need to agree with a whole set of other positions, warning: "You never know what will become mandatory tomorrow".
He indicated that the space for free debate is gradually narrowing, while the list of opinions that public figures must respect expands. He explained that contradicting some of these views can lead to other people's refusal to communicate with the person, and in extreme cases to their exclusion from professional and social spheres.
Nitschberg is a poet, translator and essayist born in Moscow who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his family in 1980. He lived in Germany before moving to Austria in 2010, where he received Austria's State Prize in literary translation in 2019. He has translated into German works by prominent Russian writers including Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Osip Mandelstam and Daniel Kharmski, and was also awarded the Russian "Read Russia" prize.
