The Russian publishing house AST partially shortened and corrected the book by Italian writer Paolo Nori 'The Incredible Life of Anna Akhmatova. We and Anna Akhmatova', reported the project 'System'*, providing a list of edits.
In the fall of 2024, the Russian publishing house AST released the book 'The Incredible Life of Anna Akhmatova. We and Anna Akhmatova', accompanied by a foreword in which Nori informs the Russian reader that the book is not published in Russian in the form in which it was written by the author. Paolo Nori told 'System' that he agreed to the censorship because he sympathizes with Russian publishers.
To avoid problems with Russian law, the publisher had to make a number of cuts and corrections in the book. The word 'war' in the text is everywhere replaced with the words 'special military operation', two mentions of the TV channel 'Dozhd'* were deleted, the chapter titled 'February 24' was renamed to 'Russian Novels', and all fragments where the author talks about his despair in connection with the full-scale invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine were removed from the text.
The Russian publisher also cut a fragment about Vladimir Putin from the book: 'I remembered that Putin, when he was sixteen, went to the Leningrad KGB office on Liteyny Prospekt, near the house where Joseph Brodsky lived, and very close to that first Petersburg house where Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky's 'idiot', goes, the house of General Yepanchin and his three daughters — Alexandra, Adelaide, and Aglaya, — and asked, that sixteen-year-old Putin, what needed to be done to be accepted into the KGB. Some dream of becoming astronauts as children, some want to be football players, some — rock stars. And he wanted to become a KGB agent.'
* Recognized in Russia as a 'foreign agent' and 'undesirable' organization.