The rage that Russia inspires is especially painful, because it is also an expression of helplessness. As Russia engages in ever more horrifying atrocities—the kidnapping of thousands of children, the near daily bombing of apartment blocs, the hog-tying and massacring of noncombatants, and perhaps even the calculated flooding of the Dnipro River delta just last week—there’s little that Ukraine’s sympathizers abroad can do beyond pressuring their governments to send more arms, and howling.

These expressions of anger can understandably leap beyond the bounds of reason. Rage against alleged Russian war crimes occasionally and perhaps inevitably veer into rage against Russian culture writ large—a culture that has for centuries nurtured imperialism. This rage latches onto targets that are deserving of opprobrium but also targets that are trivial. And when it attaches itself to unsuspecting bystanders in the conflict, as it did with Elizabeth Gilbert, its expression transgresses the first principles of the Ukrainian cause.

Last week, Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, announced the forthcoming publication of a novel, The Snow Forest, set in Siberia in the middle of the last century, about a family that disappears into the wilderness to resist the Soviet Union and its project of forced industrialization.  

Within the publishing world, a new Gilbert novel is like the release of a Marvel movie, an event that promises boffo box office. But the rollout didn’t go as planned. On the site Goodreads, where readers post reactions and reviews, Gilbert’s unpublished book garnered a slew of one-star reviews, all from commenters who hadn’t seen the text. Even though her book doesn’t seem to remotely venerate Russian nationalism, Gilbert committed the sin of setting her narrative in Russia—and for some of her readers, that was a deeply insensitive, borderline-treacherous act.

This morning, Gilbert released a video on Twitter promising to delay the publication of The Snow Forest, at least for the time being. In some sense, this episode is low-stakes. Gilbert will eventually send her novel into the world, and it will likely find the broad readership her works usually garner. But her response is especially disappointing, because she had a chance to reshape the cultural front lines of this war, to impose a bit of sanity.

Some individuals and artifacts deserve to be treated as representatives of the Russian state—and, therefore, to be shunned as unwelcome presences in our own country. The conductor Valery Gergiev and the soprano Anna Netrebko, to take the most egregious cases, have long been champions of the Putinist regime. Certain Russian athletes, emblems of national greatness, also lack the courage to condemn the war. These figures lend prestige to the Russian government. Sanctions against them stand a chance, however remote, of influencing the government’s behavior, if not in the short term then perhaps down the line.

Russian behavior is so odious that it becomes emotionally hard to swallow any veneration or celebration of Russian culture. And so, the list of verboten Russian subjects keeps growing longer—and now apparently extends to a work of fiction by an American author, set in another century, without any plausible connection to the current conflict.    

I’m struggling to conjure a reason for why the delay of Gilbert’s book benefits anyone. Perhaps it saves some of her fans from having to reconcile the fact that they might enjoy a story set in a country they despise. And by delaying the book, Gilbert and her publisher give the protesters a sense that they have fought for some victory on behalf of Ukraine, when those victories are achingly rare. But that’s a meaningless victory fought in the name of a deeply confused principle; energy would have been better spent pressing Congress to fund Patriot missiles and F-16s. It also only encourages plucking War and Peace from bookshelves and removing Doctor Zhivago from streaming platforms.

In fact, Gilbert had no good reason to cave, and she came close to unintentionally conceding this in the video justifying her decision: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.” She doesn’t—and perhaps can’t—explain who in Ukraine might have been harmed by her book, or how.  

Some writers invite haters and court controversy; Gilbert writes books that want to be loved. Being accused of complicity with a regime accused of genocide can’t have felt very nice. But by withdrawing the book, she has set a terrible precedent. In meekly complying with the angriest voices, she accepted their argument that setting a book in Russia is an act of collusion, even though that’s an entirely nonsensical argument. In effect, she’s allowing the irrational feelings of her readers to set the terms of acceptable discourse. For a group to block a book, it just needs to clog the comments on Instagram with hurt feelings.

The war in Ukraine is one of the great moral struggles of our time, because it is being waged on behalf of the liberal order. To indulge in the spirit of illiberalism in the name of Ukraine is to disrespect the cause itself. Gilbert had a chance to gently explain herself and defend her work, to argue for the importance of literature in a time of war, but she chose to abnegate her responsibilities as a writer and go another way: Eat, pray, pander.