Editor’s note: Lev Dodin, the artistic director of the Maly Drama Theatre in St Petersburg, is among Europe’s greatest dramaturgs. He was born in 1944 to a Jewish family which had been evacuated from Leningrad to Siberia; in 2018 The Economist wrote about his work, which includes stagings of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” and Vasily Grossman’s “Life and Fate”. Mr Dodin has been preoccupied by a single theme throughout his career: the terrible human price that creeds and ideology can exact. This is a lightly edited English version of his recent open letter to Vladimir Putin.

To say i’m shocked is an understatement. As a child of the second world war, even in my nightmares I could not imagine Russian missiles aimed at Ukrainian towns and villages, driving Kyiv’s citizens into bomb shelters and forcing them to flee their country. As children we played at defending Moscow, Stalingrad, Leningrad and Kyiv. It is impossible even to imagine that today Kyiv is defending itself or surrendering to Russian soldiers and officers. My brain sticks to my skull and it refuses to see, hear or paint such scenes.

The last two years of death across the globe should have reminded all of us, living on either side of any border, how fragile and vulnerable human life is, and how our world collapses in a moment when we lose our loved ones. But they didn’t. These days, both the world of those whose loved ones die, and the world of those who kill someone else's loved ones, is collapsing.

Mercy, pity, empathy do not yield to the will of states and politicians. It is impossible to dictate to people when and for whom they should fear, when and whom they should pity. Not a single state has yet learned how to control people’s feelings. The mission of art and culture has always been, especially after all the horrors of the 20th century, to teach people to perceive other people’s pain as their own, to understand that no idea, even the greatest and most beautiful, is worth a human life. Now it can be said: culture and art have once again failed in this mission.

I am 77 years old, it is not difficult for me to imagine what will happen next everywhere: a division into right and wrong, a search for enemies within, a search for external enemies, attempts to reconstruct the past, to come to terms with the present and to rewrite the future. All this has already happened in the 20th century.

These days we have lived to see the future. It was during these days that the 21st century began. Together we have allowed this age to dawn. To dawn as it has dawned. The 21st century has turned out to be scarier than the 20th. What is left to do? Pray, repent, hope, plead, demand, protest, yearn? Probably all that we have not done up until now: love another, forgive another as we forgive ourselves, not to believe in Evil and not to mistake Evil for Good.

I am 77 years old and in my life I have lost so many people whom I loved. Today, when rockets of hatred and death are flying over our heads instead of doves of peace, I can only say one thing: stop! Let’s do the impossible: let’s make the 21st century what we dreamed it would be, not what we made it. I’m doing the only thing I can: I’m begging you to stop! Stop.

I’m begging you.

Lev Dodin

The Economist’s recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis can be found here