Art Spiegelman hopeful after bookstores in Russia pull "Maus"

If it weren't so serious, it might be comical: Russian bookstores literally judging a book by its cover.

Maus is a Pullitzer-prize winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman. It chronicles his father's survival of the Holocaust as a Polish Jew.

Spiegelman recounts the story as it was told to him by his father in a series of conversations. He depicts Nazi Germans as cats and Jews as mice -- hence the title of the book, the German word for mouse.

But none of that matters in the recent withdrawal of copies of Maus from Moscow's major bookstores, and on Russian internet sites. That sweep has everything to do with a law passed in Russia back in December -- which outlaws all forms of "Nazi propaganda". Now, in the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of Victory Day celebrations in Russia, the book has been pulled from stores, because it features an insignia of a cat-like Hitler imposed on a Nazi symbol.

"It didn't make any sense to me", Spiegelman tells As it Happens guest host Dave Seglins, on his reaction to learning of the withdrawal. He believes it wasn't so much the result of a crackdown by authorities, as it was an anticipation by apprehensive booksellers that stocking the book might land them into trouble.

"I realized that this was probably a case of Maus being some kind of collateral damage in a whole other agenda. The point wasn't to remove an anti-fascist work in their fascist sweep of getting rid of all symbols and swastikas...This is a way [to] get the population to police itself overzealously, in order to not have to do anything but tell people, vaguely, 'Just shut up. Don't make any waves.'"

Nevertheless, Spiegelman is hopeful that Maus will be back on Russian bookstore shelves in the near future -- likely sometime after after Victory Day celebrations on May 9th, when, he jokes, "normal censorship" will resume.

In the meantime, he sees an upside to the measures being taken. "From what I'm being told, Maus sales have gone through the roof as a result of getting a new publicist, Vladimir Putin. [So] it will probably be the most-read or one of the most-read books about World War Two by the time Victory Day comes around."

And he cautions against dismissing this kind of clamp-down on free speech as endemic to Russia. It is, he insists, happening "across the board" -- even in America.

"These are not good times for freedom of expression," he says, pointing to Edward Snowden, whom he considers a "hero" for freedom of speech. "[He] alerted us to something genuinely dangerous in our culture as a whistleblower, [and is] now forced to live in exile in a country less-free than ours, like say Russia."