Imaging Community
Elena TULUSHEVA
Today it’s difficult to understand, that even 200 years ago smart and high-educational people in my country had so many gaps in knowledge of our planet. For example, they didn’t know anything about the existence of Antarctica, the whole large mainland. Our humanity has made a great progress in discovering of theworld during last few centuries. Now you can meet people from your country in any part of the Earth. We learn foreign languages, we travel a lot, we study and work abroad.
But there is another consequence of such intensive globalization. We started to lose our unique national features. Many specific local languages are disappearing.People move mostly from small authentic villages to the big cities, we wear the same clothes in Europe and Asia, listen to the same music, using the same apartment design. Some countries in European Union refused of their national currency: it was good for economy, but national currency is also a cultural symbol of the country – it is amazing to collect coins from all around the world, discovering on each of them some specific pictures.
As for me, cultural exchange is amazing chance to tell about your culture and to learn more about other cultures. We all have stereotypical thinking about other countries. It has been creating by years from generation to generation. And it is so difficult to change this cliché. And sometimes you can find the truth about other nation only when you travel by yourself or when you communicate with foreign people one by one without barriers. But luckily we have an art. Art – is a chance to express your idea, your emotions, your problem or your pain, and to share it in a global space of our world.
Literature is a verbal art, so it is the easiest way to tell your story, to explain it and to save it for future generations. It is easy to burn picture, to ruin sculpture, but thanks for new technologies it is quite impossible to destroy a novel or a poem. So we can use literature as a great material to discover other cultures and nations. We can see the reflection of their mentality, their history and their dreams in national literature.
Writers are people, who also play a huge role in connecting between their own culture and other world. We share our inner world, that shows the reflection of the environment, where we’ve been growing up. And any new experience for the writer will help to create new plots.
It’s a great happiness, that some countries as China are interested not only in developing of their own culture, their literature, but also tries to show it to other world, share it and invite writers from other countries to find out something about their literature too. We definitely need to continue this way of exchange in literature and other cultural fields. Nowadays society pushes on human, imposes economic ideas of earning more money, buying more and more goods, being rich and wealthy. So international literature community needs to create more common projects to attract attention of the world.
Our mission is to remind people about spiritual values, about strength of reading literature. All tools that we have to achieve this goal are our writing skills, our imagination and our experience. And we need to create literature, that will be interesting, that will urge reader to think, to compare, to act and to read more. But in the process of exchange we also need to be careful of saving our nation literature, our specific features.
Some literature markets are very closed, and it’s quite impossible for foreign writers to appear and especially to stay at this market. They prefer to invest only in national authors and publish foreigners not very often. So it makes other literaturesquite unavailable for English-speaking people. But in this situation people get information about other countries just from news our social nets. It makes their view of the world incomplete.
I wish our governments can invest in literature the same amount of effort and support as in sport or cinema. We need to help people, that are not able to travel, to discover other world through different literature.