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Tag: russia

  • On the novel Laurus

    Medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin is the author of Laurus, a new novel set in plague-ridden 15th century Russia. Here, he writes on using the language of the past to construct new meaning for the present, and how both the medieval and the postmodern influence his writing.

    Translated from the Russian by Caz Hattam.

    The novel Laurus plays out in 15th century Russia and at the centre of the narrative is the fate of the healer Arseny (the protagonist’s name changes according to circumstance, and the last of these is his monastic name, Laurus). Arseny’s one true love, Ustina, dies in childbirth after he fails to help her. As a result, he resolves to live on her behalf. From this moment on, his life turns to legend and the narrative is constructed in the style of a canonical saint’s biography, or vita.

    Arseny nurses plague victims back to health, treats the wounded and tirelessly works to heal people. In the Middle Ages, successful treatment was determined not so much by the quality of medicine (which was poor) as by the skill of the doctor. The more Arseny sacrifices himself, the more clearly his gift develops. Mastery of his craft becomes something monumental, as treatment gives way to healing. Travelling far and wide healing people, Arseny tells Ustina of all that happens. Although Ustina does not answer, Arseny regards what passes between them as conversation, convinced that silence does not mean absence. This dialogue stretches throughout the entire novel.

    In the novel Laurus I wanted to write about a man capable of sacrifice. I felt compelled to counter the prevailing cult of success in today’s society with something quite different. Despite this ‘moral’ challenge, my desire was not to preach; that is not the place of literature and besides, nobody has given me the right to do so. I likely asked more questions than I answered. Sometimes it is more important to ask a question correctly than to answer it. In actual fact, in an ideal world it is the readers who answer the questions, each in their own way. It is precisely this that creates the subtext intrinsic to good writing.

    Every era presents voids that need filling in. This is where the author pours his sculptor’s plaster – much like archaeologists did in Pompeii, into the spaces where bodies had been buried under ash – and figures take shape as a result – literary ones, in our case. If the work is well-written, the plaster turns to flesh and blood. And the more the literary figure (such as Laurus) clashes with our contemporary world, the more clearly we need them. You can describe your own era and everything in it. But you can describe what it lacks by escaping into another age. This is exactly what I chose to do.

    In Laurus I was not so much interested in the historical narrative but rather, to use Lermontov’s expression, in ‘the narrative of the soul’. Calling the novel ‘ahistorical’ is a cue for the reader, a suggestion that they should not search the book for something that is not there. The novel contains barely any historical facts in the conventional sense. On top of that, there is very little artistic invention either. My protagonist embodies traits common to a great many people depicted in ancient Russian texts. He is an inquirer, full of doubt. For the most part, his defencelessness is precisely what makes him charming. In order to embrace the protagonist, the reader must identify with him. But how could they identify with a depersonalised ideal? Contrary to popular opinion, there are never any such saints. Read the vita of any saint and you will find him in perpetual inner turmoil. My protagonist lives part of his life as a holy fool[1]. Holy foolery is an exceptionally noble feat as the holy fool makes himself blind not only to the world, but also to his own sense of self. This he loses, denying himself absolutely in order to become one with God.

    Writing a novel like this was a risky business. The challenge of depicting a ‘positively magnificent man’ (Dostoevsky) is extremely problematic; by and large, entirely sympathetic characters are a weak spot in literature. It is almost impossible for the contemporary author to resolve this, and, if it is at all possible, you need to be the author of The Idiot in order to pull it off. I came to the realisation that, if taken from the streets of the present, a protagonist such as Dostoevsky describes would be unconvincing, not to mention downright contrived. And so I turned to an ancient form, to the vita of a saint, which is intended for this kind of narrative. I simply wrote that vita using contemporary literary devices.

    For almost 30 years I have engaged with the world of the Middle Ages – it is very different from the world of today. That other culture has become a part of me and I – strange as it might seem – am a part of it, because I continue to reconstruct it in a time when it has already become history. If you take all that I have read over the course of my lifetime, you find more ancient Russian texts than contemporary ones. This is simply because I spend many an hour each day reading ancient Russian writings. But when somebody dedicates decades to something which appears – to put it mildly – exotic to today’s society, they acquire a special kind of perspective. You could call it a professional deformity. It was this perspective that I resolved to share with the modern day reader.

    I am lucky that my personal experience is in keeping with the current literary trend. I used several ancient Russian techniques that even 40 years ago would have been deemed unacceptable and discounted as unliterary. But now they are in vogue; postmodernism paved the way for them. Literature has wound its way to confronting things that were once the foundations of medieval poetics. I approached these things not via postmodernism, however, but directly from the Middle Ages.

    Laurus is a novel about love in the deepest sense of the word, but it is equally a novel about time. More precisely, it is about the absence of time, the way it dissolves upon touching eternity. Time in the novel shimmers; its flow is constantly disturbed by ripples and surges from other eras. This ‘destruction’ of time is also brought about by the conflation of ancient Russian and contemporary linguistic elements. Language is one of the novel’s main protagonists. I envisioned a text that was to be read not only with the eyes, but also with the soul; a text that would lay bare the beauty of language in its distinct layers (historical, social and so on); a text that would ultimately attest to the absence of time. This leads us to a third way in which we can define the text: it is a novel about language.

    [1] The ‘holy fool’ has particular significance in Russian literary and Orthodox tradition; see Vodolazkin’s exploration of the term.

  • Maidan: one year on

    Andrey Kurkov, author of ‘Death and the Penguin’ and Vice-President of Ukrainian PEN, reports back on his country’s revolution and counter-revolution, and how despite diplomatic stalemate and all-out war, the people do not regret attempting to take their fate into their own hands

    Translated from the Russian by Amanda Love Darragh

    The first anniversary of the Maidan protests fell shortly after the declaration of the ‘second’ Minsk ceasefire, on 12 February. This ceasefire, like the previous one, was ushered in to the roar of exploding missiles. Not along the entire frontline this time, admittedly, but at certain points where the separatists had planned their advance. President Poroshenko made a brief but significant appearance on a dark, damp evening in Kiev – on Institutskaya Street, which is still closed to traffic, and which not so long ago ran with the blood of protestors killed by snipers – and then a symphony orchestra played Mozart’s Requiem. The whole country seemed to be standing still, with tears running down her face.

    A year has passed. Those who were killed during the Maidan protest became Heroes of Ukraine (posthumously). Many of those who survived went to Donbass as volunteers, to defend the country’s territorial integrity. Many are still fighting. During the course of the conflict some even decided to become professional soldiers or police officers. Just as military operations began in Eastern Ukraine the country began to implement a programme of reforms, starting with the police force. The police reforms are being spearheaded by a young Georgian woman, Eka Zguladze, who has been appointed First Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs. She is the one credited with successfully tackling corruption in the Georgian police force at the beginning of Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. Saakashvili, now the former President of Georgia, is also here in Ukraine, tasked with overseeing reforms. But progress is slow and subtle, while the ‘eastern front’ endures continual military operations day and night, with scant regard for the ceasefire. The fighting, the bombing raids and the funerals of those killed in the conflict make it all but impossible for many Ukrainians who took part in Maidan or sympathised with protestors to look back and see things clearly: how far has Ukraine come this past year? What has been achieved?

    If you ask people during the course of a conversation what they think about Maidan now, it usually takes them a while to reply. ‘Maidan’ is history. It has been ‘pushed back’ – first by the annexation of Crimea, then by the unsuccessful attempt to incite armed uprisings against the government in Kiev throughout the south-east of the country, from Donetsk to Odessa and Pridnestrovie, and finally by the gradual deterioration of the situation in Donbass to a state of war – a war that wouldn’t be happening were it not for the tens of thousands of tons of Russian missiles and mines making their way into Ukraine, were it not for the volunteers, the mercenaries, the regular and reserve army officers, coming from all over Russia to fight in Ukraine.

    It’s impossible to predict how and when Putin’s war against Ukraine will end. Every now and then European leaders promise not to ‘abandon’ Ukraine, but they don’t want to ‘abandon’ Russia either; they are already suffering from the economic sanctions they themselves have imposed. At the same time European politicians understand that if Putin manages to destroy Ukraine – both economically and politically – he won’t stop there.

    Today, when I ask people in Kiev if they would have gone to Maidan in 2013 if they had known where it would lead, they pause before answering, but most of them say yes. ‘We had no alternative!’ they explain. ‘Yanukovych had already sold Ukraine to Putin, and that’s why he turned his back on Europe! Yanukovych used the threat of rapprochement with Europe to blackmail Putin. If Maidan hadn’t happened, then we would no longer have an independent Ukraine.’

    I have my own vivid memories of Euromaidan. Not of the tragedy it became and on account of which it ultimately succeeded, but rather of the spirit of the Ukrainian people, their desire to influence the fate of their own country and their readiness to take action.

    Now the word ‘Maidan’ has acquired new relevance – there have been calls for a third Maidan protest, with the aim of overthrowing the new government. Next there will be calls to take direct action against the war, against mobilisation, against everything that the new President and Cabinet of Ministers are doing. The new government is responding to this threat by attempting to introduce internet censorship and stricter control over the content of political talk shows on TV. But even Yanukovych was unable to subject Ukraine to the Russian model of total control over society through censorship and the judicial system. The majority of Ukrainians know perfectly well who stands to benefit most from a third Maidan; on this basis a third Maidan seems considerably less likely than a third ‘Minsk ceasefire’.

    The fact of the matter is that a third ‘Minsk ceasefire’, which will be possible only after the second ceasefire is officially acknowledged to be defunct and the country suffers several more months of bloody and devastating warfare, will say less about Ukraine than about her Western comrades-in-arms – the European Union and the United States. It will be a verdict on their indecision, on their reluctance to take more effective economic, financial and diplomatic steps to stop the Russian Federation sending arms, men and machinery to Donbass, without which military operations would never have begun.

    Andrey Kurkov’s book Ukraine Diaries, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our bookseller partner Foyles.

    Amanda Love Darragh’s translation of The Diary of Lena Mukhina is also available through Foyles.

  • The Red Terror and Maximilian Voloshin

    Maximilian Voloshin was for many decades seen as a rather minor poet. During the last twenty years, however, his reputation has been steadily growing. And the Russian annexation of the Crimea, a region with which Voloshin is closely identified, has made his poetry seem startlingly relevant to the present day. Voloshin’s concern with questions of Russia’s historical destiny, together with his own political ambivalence, makes his poetry appealing to liberals and to Russian nationalists alike. Some elements of this appeal, such as the faith he often professes in Russia’s purification through suffering, can seem facile, but we should not allow this to obscure his real greatness, both as a poet and as a defender of freedom.

    Part of Voloshin’s appeal lies in his steadfast refusal to accept any ideology as absolute truth. One of the slogans most often repeated by Putinites today is ‘Whoever is not with us is against us’. Such thinking was anathema to Voloshin. A famous poem titled ‘Civil War’ ends:

    And from the ranks of both armies
    I hear one and the same voice:
    ‘He who is not with us is against us.
    You must take sides. Justice is ours.’

    And I stand alone in the midst of them,
    amidst the roar of fire and smoke,
    and pray with all my strength for those
    who fight on this side, and on that side.

    Born in Kiev, Voloshin spent much of his childhood in the Crimea.  In the early 1900s he moved between Paris, Moscow and St Petersburg, but from 1907 he again spent much of his time in the Crimea, finally settling there in 1916. For over a decade his large house in Koktebel, where he both wrote and painted, was a refuge for writers and artists of all political and artistic persuasions. Among his hundreds of guests were Maxim Gorky, Nikolay Gumilyov, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. In 1924 the house became a ‘House of Creativity’ for Soviet writers, the first of the many such closed-access hotels that became a central part of the Soviet cultural world.

    Voloshin published five books of poems. The last, Poems on the Terror (1923), was published only in Berlin, but these and other post-1917 poems circulated widely in hand-typed copies, loved by both the Reds and the anti-Bolshevik Whites, within and outside Russia’s borders.  The poems are uneven, but there is much that is incisive and moving.

    Nadezhda Teffi’s Memories (an account of her last journey across Russia, before emigrating) includes this portrait of Voloshin in Odessa in 1919: ‘Wherever I went, I would glimpse his picturesque silhouette: dense, square beard, tight curls crowned with a round beret, a light cloak, knickerbockers and gaiters. Reciting his poems, he was doing the rounds of government institutions and people with the right connections. There was more to this than was at first apparent. The poems served as keys. To help those who were in trouble Voloshin needed to pass through certain doors – and his poems opened these doors. He’d walk into some office and, while people were still wondering whether or not to announce his presence to their superiors, he would begin to recite. His meditations on the False Dmitry  and other Russian tragedies were dense and powerful; lines evoking the fateful burden of history alternated with flights of prophecy. An ecstatic crowd of young typists would gather around him, ooh-ing and ah-ing; in blissful horror they would let out little nasal squeals. Next you would hear the clatter of typewriter keys – Voloshin had begun to dictate some of his longer poems. Someone in a position of authority would poke his head around the door, his curiosity piqued, and then lead the poet into his office. The dense, even hum of bardic declamation would then start up again, audible even through the closed door.’

    After an account of Voloshin saving a woman poet from execution, Teffi ends: ‘In Novorossiisk, in Yekaterinodar, in Rostov-on-Don I would again encounter the light cloak, the gaiters and the round beret crowning the tight curls. On each occasion I heard sonorous verse being declaimed to the accompaniment of little squeals from women with flushed, excited faces. Wherever he went, Voloshin was using the hum – or boom – of his verse to rescue someone whose life was endangered.’

    During the Red Terror following the evacuation of the White Army from the Crimea, Voloshin showed still greater courage. His belief in the power of his words – what Marianna Landa, in her article ‘Symbolism and Revolution: on Contradictions in Voloshin’s Poems on Russia and Terror in the Crimea (1917–1920s)’ (SEEJ, Summer 2014), refers to as ‘his Dostoevskian faith in the divine spark in the soul of the abominable criminal, and his Symbolist belief in the magic of the poetic word’ – seems to have been unshakeable; his personal appeals to Red and White officials and commanders, on behalf of individuals, and his verse-prayers addressed to God, on behalf of his country, have much in common. Voloshin believed he could affect the course of events – and sometimes he did. That he escaped arrest and execution is astonishing.

     

    Terror

    The working day started at night.
    Denunciations, papers, certificates.
    Death sentences signed in a hurry.
    Yawning, drinking of wine.

    Vodka, all day, for the soldiers.
    Come evening, by candlelight,
    time to read out lists, herd
    men and women into a dark yard,

    remove shoes, clothes, underwear,
    tie the stuff in bundles, pile
    it up in carts, take the carts away,
    share out rings and watches.

    Nightfall, men and women forced
    barefoot, naked, over ice-covered stones,
    into waste ground outside town,
    in wind from the north east.

    Rifle-butted to the edge of a gully.
    The lantern light wavering.
    Machine-gunned for half a minute;
    finished off with bayonets.

    Into a pit, some not quite dead.
    A covering of soil, in a hurry.
    And, with a broad-flowing Russian song –
    back into town, back home.

    At dawn wives; mothers; dogs
    made their way to the same gullies;
    dug the ground; fought over bones;
    kissed the flesh they held dear.

    (26 April 1921, Simferopol)
    tr. Robert Chandler

  • You speak such good German

    Alina Bronsky, Russian-born but writing in German, charts the challenges and opportunities faced by the multilingual author, and how well-meaning condescension can get in the way of literary appraisal.

    Translated from the German by Tim Mohr

    It’s not exactly the height of elegance to quote from your own book. But I will do it here anyway.

    ‘You speak such good German,’ said a boy to Sascha, the heroine of my first novel, Broken Glass Park, whom he had just met. ‘Thanks,’ she answered angrily, ‘so do you.’ She was born in Russia and lives in a Russian ghetto in a German city. The boy she’s talking to is German by birth and lives in a fancy villa; he’s actually trying to say something nice to her.

    This little exchange isn’t made up. It happened to me in reality on many occasions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. Like my protagonist I moved from Russia to Germany at thirteen. Ever since I was fourteen I’ve been congratulated on my German. I can no longer remember the moment when I stopped feeling pleased by the compliments.

    I belong to the subset of authors who write books in a language that is not their native tongue.  Not long ago that still made me quite exotic in Germany. Now it is hearteningly common – every year you read about gifted debut authors who were born abroad, emigrated as young children or teens, and who published in the language of their new country and are already dusting off all their literary prizes. And yet, the compliments about how well I speak German are still the first thing I hear from audiences at my readings. At 36, I’m still treated as some kind of language wunderkind.

    Unfortunately I’m not one, and never have been. I’m not even particularly good at languages. It’s just that I, like hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated with my family at an age when the infamous ‘language window’ had yet to close. Which is why I sound like a native speaker – with the exception of the occasional linguistic slip-up that only very alert listeners notice, and which those people like to point out to me. The assumption that I must be exceptionally musical – as a result of how well I speak German – is also not true. And how I would love to be able to speak better English than I do, not to mention French and Italian.

    I don’t want my books to be assessed like compositions in a foreign language class. It makes me feel like a dancer with a wooden leg: as if the applauding room isn’t captivated by the show of artistic prowess but rather by the supposed handicap. So I ask you, dear readers and reviewers, please judge the contents and the word choices, the plot and characters, the metaphors and punch-lines. Complain about inconsistencies and slips of the pen that escaped the eyes of the editor and proofreader. But please don’t be any more merciful in those judgments and complaints with an immigrant author than you would be with an author writing in his or her native language. You’re not really anyway, and we wouldn’t have deserved the leniency.

    No reader falls in love with a book out of political correctness or as a sop to a linguistic minority. I’m happy about that. If something in one of my novels doesn’t look right to you, then you can in good conscience toss it in the corner. And if on the other hand my writing intrigues you, it has nothing to do with the fact that I learned the Cyrillic alphabet before I learned the Latin alphabet. All authors want to be valued based on their imagination, their talent, and their perseverance, not because of school vocabulary lessons from some distant past.

    After more than twenty years, I can say that German has become my natural writing language. Even though I love my native language of Russian, I speak a version that’s probably already somewhat outdated and anachronistic. I’m asked time and time again whether I also write in Russian. No, I don’t, at least not beyond emails. I don’t translate my own books, either. I’d prefer to write new ones – in German.

     

     

    Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and just published Just Call me Superhero.  The Daily Beast calls Bronsky ‘an exciting new voice in the literary world.’

    Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.

    You can buy Alina Bronsky’s Just Call Me Superhero via our book partner Foyles.

    Read more about Alina Bronsky at her author profile at Europa Editions.

  • Life and Fate Redux

    Vasily Grossman died just over 50 years ago, on 14 September 1964. I returned recently from a conference in Moscow in commemoration of this anniversary – the first Grossman conference ever held in Russia. It is twenty-five years now since Life and Fate was first published in the Soviet Union, but Grossman’s reputation in the West remains far higher than his reputation in his own country. Many in the West see Grossman as the greatest Russian novelist of the twentieth century; few Russians would make such a claim. Western readers admire his analysis of the parallels between Nazism and Stalinism; many Russians still see such thoughts as almost blasphemous.  Russian nationalists are still more enraged by Grossman’s discussion in his short novel Everything Flows of what he calls ‘the Russian slave soul’.

    Its title and length give Life and Fate a somewhat nineteenth-century air, and Grossman is not a writer who sets out to dazzle the reader with stylistic innovations.  Perhaps for these reasons, or perhaps simply because Grossman was never – like Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn – caught up in international political controversy, literary critics have been slow to give him his due. In the Anglophone world, it has been a historian, Antony Beevor, who has done most to bring him to the attention of readers.  And in this respect, at least, things seem similar in Russia; the best talks at the Moscow conference were those given by historians.

    Oleg Budnitsky (from Moscow), spoke about Grossman’s wartime notebooks.  Historians, he said, are usually trained to make as much use as possible of official documents. Soviet documents, however, can be misleading. Documents relating to medals awarded for bravery often mention the number of Germans killed by an individual Soviet soldier; if one adds together the numbers from all these documents, one arrives at a total far higher than the number of soldiers in the entire German army…  Budnitsky sees Grossman’s notebooks as an important historical resource, and he hopes to bring out a new, and more complete Russian text of them within the next 2-3 years.

    Jürgen Zarusky (from Munich) spoke interestingly about For a Just Cause, the first of Grossman’s two long novels centered on the battle of Stalingrad, saying that this and Life and Fate should be considered as two halves of a dilogy. The fact that Grossman managed to publish For a Just Cause in the Soviet Union has – at least in the eyes of Western readers – counted against it. The only real difference between the two novels – Zarusky argued convincingly – is that in the earlier novel Grossman had to ‘encode’ certain themes. Official Soviet antisemitism made it impossible, in the last five years of Stalin’s life, to mention the Shoah overtly. Grossman, however, has one of his Russian heroes walk into the centre of Kiev – just before the city falls to the Nazis – along precisely the route that the Jews, soon afterwards, would be forced to follow on their way to Babi Yar, the ravine that was the site of one of the worst of the Nazi massacres. Each street of this route is named.

    One of the conference’s several sponsors was the human rights organization Memorial. Irina Sherbakova, the educational director of Memorial, pointed out that, other writers, when begging the authorities to allow their work to be published, often made self-centered statements along the lines of ‘You are destroying me as a writer’; Grossman’s emphasis, however, was different. In his letter to Khrushchev after the confiscation of Life and Fate he wrote, ‘Give my book to the reader!’ He genuinely believed that the collective historical memory embodied in the novel could help people make sense of their lives.

    Grateful though I am to all these historians, I would have liked to hear more about the artistry of Grossman’s very last works, Everything Flows and the short stories he wrote in the three years before his death. I was pleased therefore when Irina Sherbakova, talking to me during a coffee break, mentioned the story ‘Mama’. This is based on the true story of an orphaned girl who was adopted in the mid-1930s by Nikolay Yezhov and his wife. Yezhov was the head of the NKVD between 1936 and 1938, at the height of the Great Terror; Russians often refer to this period as the Yezhovshchina. All the most prominent Soviet politicians of the time used to visit the Yezhov household. These figures, including Stalin himself, appear in ‘Mama’, but the reader sees them only through the eyes of the orphaned girl, or of her good-natured but politically ignorant peasant nanny. Grossman leads us into the darkest of worlds, but with compassion and from a perspective of peculiar innocence – the nanny is described as the only person in the apartment ‘with calm eyes’.

    ‘Mama’ is one of Grossman’s most laconic and perfectly written works. What Sherbakova emphasized, however, was the almost prophetic intuition Grossman had shown by homing in on the first chapters of a life story so painfully emblematic of Russia today. Natalya Khayutina (the real name of Yezhov’s adoptive daughter, who is still alive and living in the region of Kolyma, in the far north east) has remained fiercely loyal to a father she remembers as kind and indulgent. She has petitioned several times, so far unsuccessfully, for his official ‘rehabilitation’. The adoptive daughter of Stalin’s chief executioner, she sees herself as the daughter of one of Stalin’s victims – and there is, of course, truth in her view. Yezhov, like most high-ranking NKVD officers, was eventually executed himself.

    Many, many Russians, if to a less extreme degree than Natalya Khayutina, can be considered the children of both victims and executioners. We should not be surprised that it is proving difficult for the country to come to terms with its recent past.

    Robert & Elizabeth Chandler’s translation of ‘Mama’, along with eleven other of Grossman’s short stories, his 1944 article ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ and much biographical information, is included in The Road (MacLehose Press, 2011).

    You can buy Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert Chandler, through our book partner Foyles.

    For more information about Vasily Grossman, please see his author page at Random House.

  • Soldier No. 9

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Ukrainian by Amanda Love Daragh

    On 26 August, on the day when Petro Poroshenko met with Vladimir Putin in Minsk, the capital of Belarus,  Ukrainian forces captured an armoured personnel carrier and ten Russian paratroopers. The Russian government, which has been denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory on a daily basis, was slow to respond but eventually came up with an explanation: they had taken a wrong turning. The paratroopers were captured 20 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border. In a televised interview the paratroopers themselves said that they had been given orders to advance 70 km into Ukraine territory, which is precisely what they were doing when they were apprehended by Ukrainian armed forces. These paratroopers are lucky, really. They are still alive.

    Other Russian paratroopers are being buried in secret – in the village of Vybuty near Pskov, in Bashkiria and in other towns and cities across the Russian Federation. No official information about these burials has been released, but Russian journalists arriving in Vybuty to find out more were met by men in civilian clothing, who attacked them and damaged their car. The journalists were told to leave the Pskov area immediately, or they would end up in one of the local marshes and their bodies would never be found.

    Russians are gradually coming to realise that it is not only local separatist rebels fighting in Donbass, but also a great many Russian citizens, including conscripts, who have been sent there by military command. The mothers of dead and missing Russian soldiers have compiled a list of 400 names and are demanding answers from the authorities regarding the whereabouts of their sons, who only joined the army in the first place because they had no choice.

    But while the Russian government is trying to find answers – or rather, choosing to remain silent – Ukrainian troops are finding more and more mass and unmarked individual graves in territory reclaimed from separatists. One of the latest burial sites was discovered by Ukrainian guardsmen in the middle of a field in the Luhansk Oblast. There were around twenty graves marked with little signs saying ‘Soldier No.7’, ‘Soldier No.9’ and so on. These signs bore no names, no dates of birth or death, because the Russian soldiers and officers lying in these graves are officially still alive and on active duty at various military bases within Russia. Nothing will be done to investigate these graves while the conflict is still ongoing, which means that those who are buried there might remain on the list of ‘missing’ residents of south-east Ukraine and Russia indefinitely. Incidentally, the list of missing Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers is also growing.

    Several days ago I went with my wife and children to our country house, in a village 90 km outside Kiev. We were filled in on the local news as soon as we arrived, and it was not good. A report had come through from the anti-terrorist operation zone that three local men had died after being drafted into the conflict zone, but only two bodies had been sent home for burial. The wife and relatives of the third dead man had simply been told that he had died during an artillery raid and his remains could not be moved.

    At the same time people there seem to somehow accept what is happening. My old friend Viktor, who used to be the local telephone engineer and lives on the street next to ours, said that he is expecting to be called up to fight any day now, so he wants to finish sorting out the heating at home. We have a cold winter ahead of us. Chances are that it will be a winter without Russian gas. Many people living in rural areas are converting their boilers to run on peat and firewood as well as gas. Viktor has already converted his boiler and is currently insulating his single-storey brick house with foam rubber. He would ideally like to brick up one of the windows before winter too, because it is particularly draughty. Viktor has two children, and his priority at the moment is to provide them and his wife with a decent environment in which to spend the winter.

    I heard from another neighbour that some villagers have already stocked up on antifreeze. Yet there is no sense of panic. Everyone is calm. People are digging up potatoes from their allotments, drying them out and storing them in their cellars. Everyone is thinking and talking about the immediate future, about winter, about the gas supply, which is bound to be cut off or at least severely restricted. Hardly anyone in the Ukrainian countryside even mentions Europe or the prospect of a European future for Ukraine. Right now the prospect of the coming winter is more tangible and significant.

    Another date has recently been occupying the attention of a large sector of the Ukrainian population: 1 September. Apart from updates on the military situation in Donbass and Russia’s latest incursions into Ukrainian territory, the subject most discussed on the radio lately has been the start of the new school year. Due to a combination of the military situation and the economic crisis, which has itself been exacerbated by the military situation, the cost of school uniforms, textbooks, exercise books and other school essentials has increased by as much as 30-50%. Salaries, however, remain the same and in some cases have even decreased. But the parents interviewed on the Ukrainian radio and television try not to complain about their predicament. It would be inappropriate to complain about personal problems when their country – Ukraine – is facing such serious problems of her own. Refugee families in towns and cities across Ukraine spent the month of August frantically filling in school paperwork, trying to secure places for their children. Seventeen new children have already joined School No.92 in Kiev. In total, over a thousand children from the Donbass region started school in Kiev on 1 September. Most are children of the regional elite, whose parents can afford the higher cost of living in the Ukrainian capital. Establishing relationships with their new classmates may present a particular challenge for Kiev’s schoolchildren, since many of the Donbass refugees hold Kiev and its inhabitants to blame for the tragedy currently unfolding in eastern Ukraine.

    The militarisation of life in any country also militarises the way people think, and this applies especially to children. The first lesson of the year in all Ukrainian schools was devoted to patriotism and the territorial integrity of the state . Which meant that the school day began on 1 September with a discussion about war, about a war that, for the immediate and foreseeable future, is going to be part of our lives, day and night.

    Ukraine Diaries by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our book partners Foyles.

    You can read more about the book at the Random House website.

  • Kiev’s Militant Spring

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Russian by Anne Marie Jackson

    In Kiev it’s warm, and this year the chestnuts and lilacs have come into bloom ten days early. Kiev is especially beautiful in May and at this time of year the city brims with tourists. At the moment there are fewer people around than usual; the tourists are wary, concerned about their safety. After all, the east of the country is at war. And although Russian tanks have not crossed the Ukrainian border, the events in Donetsk, Luhansk and to some extent Kharkiv constitute war in every sense, crippling the country’s economy and damaging the people’s psyche.

    The physical consequences of war can be effaced: fortifications dismantled, minefields cleared, cities and industry restored. But the psychological wounds take generations to heal and even then will never completely disappear. The 23 years of Ukraine’s independence were a peaceful time, the break-up of the Soviet Union occurring here without armed conflict. Throughout these years Russia was fighting in the Caucasus – Chechnya, Dagestan and Georgia – and its troops were deployed in civil confrontations in Central Asia and Transnistria. Independent Ukraine is short on war in its history; however it’s also short an army.

    In the early 90s, Ukraine’s army was 700,000 strong; its armaments included 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 2,600 tactical nuclear weapons. By surrendering its nuclear arsenal, Ukraine gained guarantees of its territorial integrity from the United States, Great Britain and Russia. What need does a country have of powerful armed forces when its security is guaranteed by the three biggest nuclear powers in the world? Who would even think of attacking such a country? Over the course of two decades, Ukraine reduced the size of its army nearly tenfold. Its combat-ready weaponry was used chiefly for UN peacekeeping operations in Africa. No one could have imagined that one of its guarantor states would turn into an aggressor and annex part of Ukraine’s territory.

    Ukraine can now confidently be described as a state without an army. The Berkut special police force and Ukrainian security service might have been up to the task of easing the tensions in the country’s eastern provinces. While dismantling the army, the Yanukovych regime had taken care to build up the special services as its mainstay and defence should the country experience an outbreak of discontent. It was the Berkut that Yanukovych sent to put down the Maidan protest during the winter of 2014. But after protesters were fired upon on 18-20 February, after hundreds were killed and thousands injured, the Berkut was disbanded and the remaining services completely demoralised. Consequently, today’s Ukraine is a state without an army and without a police force.

    There may be no forces of law and order in the country, but neither is there chaos. On the outside, Kievans’ daily lives look about the same as usual. The annual marathon was run in late April. Just a few days earlier, Russian PEN and the Khodorkovsky Foundation held a conference that was attended by writers, journalists and human rights activists from both Russia and Ukraine. And there is a major poetry festival coming up in the middle of May – the Kiev Lavry, or Laurels. In the evenings, jazz can be heard on the streets and every seat in the street cafés is taken, even if the café in question is located between the first and second lines of the Maidan barricades. The Maidan could disperse, now that it has achieved its primary objective – the removal of Yanukovych from office – but it hasn’t dispersed. The people aren’t too sure about the new Government; they’re unhappy with its actions in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Maidan, noticeably less peopled, stands as a reminder of whose will the Ukrainian authorities must answer to.

    The warm Kiev evenings and lyrical jazz melodies of the street musicians create an almost perfect illusion of peaceful life. But however much the war may recede into the back of our minds, we’re never completely free of it. It’s always with us. And it’s not just the bad news that comes each day from the east. Putin’s quiet war is depriving each of us of a part of our past. We can no longer go back to the Crimea that used to be, that we are all connected to in some way; and Crimea will never again be what it was. Widespread violence has radically transformed the small towns in the north of Donetsk province, destroying the people’s accustomed way of life and blurring the boundary between the thinkable and the unthinkable. Like a slowly moving conflagration, the war is creeping from east to west, turning to ash the peaceful life of a great people. The war is distancing us from the past, emphasising its unattainability, and making the future insubstantial and surreal. Is it even worth thinking about the future when at any moment it could all disappear? The war leaves us only with the present – the laidback moments of these warm spring evenings and the fluid jazz on the Kiev streets. The evenings linger slow and unhurried, yet passing by swiftly and for ever.

  • The apricot border with Russia, or separatism on Skype

    With the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, poet and dramatist Liubov Iakymchuk writes for PEN Atlas in an exclusive dispatch about saboteurs, families divided, Russia’s exporting of fear, and the new resolve of the people.

    Translated from the Ukrainian by Steve Komarnyckyj

    Here, in Ukraine, we follow the latest forecasts of the provocations from Russia as closely as we used to follow the weather reports. We’ve given up watching TV series and just look at the news, which has become like a dystopian novel. Every day here feels like a year, but we are getting smarter as well as older. We have learned to be vigilant and all our attention is focused on the border. At last we have realised that the boundary between us and Russia exists.

    There is one weird thing in all of this. If you cross the Eastern border of Ukraine, which is brimming with plantations of apricot trees, and enter Russia, you notice that there are far fewer apricot trees in the country that you are entering. The apricot trees define the territory more clearly than any border guards or crossing points, separating our own from foreign ground. It is as if they show us that this border takes us to another world, where there is only a weak connection between people and reality. Where people believe the television when it says that everyone loves Putin. However, in Angela Merkel’s words, the Russian President has lost his grip on reality.

    They don’t let every Ukrainian across this ‘apricot’ border now, especially not journalists. At best, those rash and brave enough to cross might be interrogated for five hours or more and then released, like in the case of the journalists from the Ukrainian TV station 5 Kanal. In the worst case scenario, those who make this crossing might simply disappear. At least that’s the fear spreading throughout these border areas.

    On the other side, where there are no apricots, the Russians have established military encampments and field hospitals, 50 km from the border. A huge Russian military force is gathered there; they reconfigure them occasionally and the numbers of personnel vary, but not by much. There are no exact figures but it’s rumoured that there are hundreds of thousands.

    Ukrainian citizens live on this side of the border with its abundance of budding apricot trees. People are compelled to live with the daily fear of the ‘contagion’ of military personnel on the border, this abscess which grows daily, which might push through the boundary and turn into war. All normal people here want to avoid this, of course. Even here in Donetsk, Kharkiv and Luhansk, where there was always a low level of civic activism, people go to anti-war protests in bigger numbers than during the Euromaidan. The common enemy has compelled a usually passive population to rise up and we probably need to thank our foe for that.

    My mother’s cousin, who lives near the Russian side of the border, asked my parents, who live close to the border on the Ukrainian side, ‘Isn’t it time you fled Ukraine?’ My parents found these words laughable, a consequence of the hatred for Ukrainians that is preached in Russia. The result of this cultivated antipathy is that three quarters of Russians would support the Kremlin in the event of a war breaking out with Ukraine. Perhaps our Russian relatives are ready to support this war too, perhaps they will be delighted when bombs drop on Ukraine where they were born. This cultivated fear is meant to divert the attention of Ukrainians and allow Russia to send troupes of provocateurs into the east of Ukraine. These people arrange skirmishes, support their own self-proclaimed governors, and ultimately try to amputate this part of Ukraine. The Russian army is massing by the border and the men in green who may be Russian intelligence troops or local militia have begun appearing in the streets of east Ukrainian towns.

    A war with Ukraine is supported by 74% of the people in Russia. The awareness of such a statistic is enough to drive you mad, and many people have gone mad, including those on the Ukrainian side, and their symptoms are distinctly Putinesque. The Donetsk separatists, who are instructed by the leading Kremlin political scientist, Aleksandr Dugin, have already noted down what they need to do to make sure Donbass becomes Russian. The key points of their plan are as follows: don’t go to work, disrupt the Ukrainian presidential elections, take up arms, seize power locally, and open the eastern borders. This is so Russians can ‘save’ Ukrainians from themselves and restore the dictator Yanukovych to power. So the Kremlin trains separatists via Skype and, I suspect, terrorists as well. Neither European nor American sanctions will affect the pace of events; they will only reinforce the creation of an image within Russia of America and Europe as foes.

    One of the worst things about this is that family relationships are being ruined on different sides of the ‘apricot’ border. This may be endured and healed over in time. The worst aspect of the situation is that the Russian aggressor, who has for long enough held their fellow citizens in fear, is managing to extend this terror to Ukrainians. Fear and terror, the satellites of the Russian empire, grow like tumours, longing to occupy all the space that can be occupied, and transform everything into a cancerous growth. The most pervasive fears on the Ukrainian border within the Russian-speaking population are the fear that the Russian language may be prohibited, the fear of the mythical ‘banderites’ (Ukrainian nationalists who form a fictitious internal enemy) and the fear that there may be a Maidan tax (but no one really knows what this might be). These fears are ruining people’s ability to consider things right.

    However, fear can affect other people differently, sometimes even positively. It summons up a feeling of unity with one’s people against an external enemy. Even though the east of Ukraine has been relatively passive in the past, it is not without hope and action now. The fear of war provokes not only the usual chat in the kitchen but also draws people out to demonstrate in city streets and squares, becoming visible like the blossoming apricot trees on the Ukrainian border.

     

    .

    Liubov Iakymchuk is a Ukrainian poet and dramatist who was born in Pervomaysk, Luhansk Province in 1985. After graduating from the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy she worked as a radio broadcaster, screenwriter, and independent journalist. She is the author of such collections of poetry as U Chotyrokh Stinakh (Within Four Walls) and ​Yak MODA (How FASHION). She has won several poetry prizes notably the international Slovyanska poetychna premiya (Slavic poetry prize). The Anglo-Ukrainian music project Afrodita was created on the basis of her verses: http://www.olesyazdorovetska.com/index.php/ensembles/78-aphrodite

     

  • World War III: a dress rehearsal

    In another exclusive dispatch from Ukraine, Andrey Kurkov describes the atmosphere of tension and surreality in Kiev and Crimea, the schizophrenia of the political situation, and the ominous absence of birds before the arrival of war 

    At five o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 4 March, I was expecting the start of World War III. Five o’clock was the time that Putin had scheduled for the storming of Ukrainian military units in Crimea. The Ukrainian troops were given a choice: the surrender of their weapons and themselves or the start of military action. I am proud that Ukraine’s soldiers and officers didn’t surrender. In fact, like the participants in EuroMaidan, they were prepared to die. But there’s always one traitor and this one was the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Navy, who had gone over to the Russian Army on the very day he was appointed. There’s no need to worry about him. He’ll get a Russian passport and pursue his career in the Russian Army. He may even become a State Duma deputy or a member of Russia’s upper house Federation Council. Russia needs people like this. Ukraine does not.A little later that same day, at around ten in the morning, there was a report that Yanukovych had died of a heart attack. The report has not been confirmed and so Russia now has two high-ranking traitors: Rear Admiral Berezovskiy and ex-President Yanukovych, who has asked Putin to conquer the Ukraine that kicked him out. For all my love of fantasy and surrealism, I feel helpless in the face of Europe’s most recent history.Meanwhile, it was foggy outside. A thick, milky fog. At seven in the morning, a man of around sixty, too lightly dressed for the weather, entered the little square on the opposite side of the road. He crumbled a bread roll on the edge of the square where there are always dozens of pigeons. This time, he sprinkled the crumbs onto empty ground. There wasn’t a single pigeon anywhere around. I was astonished, checked out the surrounding area from the window and was satisfied there were no pigeons. Just for a moment, I thought this was a very bad sign. After all, I still didn’t know that the war hadn’t started. Another ten minutes, however, and the pigeons turned up, and a normal, peaceful morning in Kiev got under way.I still can’t believe all the troubles are over. And this despite the fact that I’ve always been an optimist. I’m still trying to understand what’s been happening over the past few weeks and is still happening now. I have no questions about anything to do with EuroMaidan. The present reality of Russian-Ukrainian relations, however, is a sad conundrum. While Russian troops were smashing navigation equipment at the Ukrainian airbases they had seized and blockading Ukrainian military units, the Ukrainian government, its legitimacy not recognised by Russia, was transferring payments for gas to Gazprom almost every day. Ukrainian goods passed unimpeded through Russian customs even though, before the start of military action in Crimea, every day had brought new problems for Ukrainian exports to Russia. Perhaps the permutations of politics sometimes resemble both schizophrenia and a sophisticated mind-game at one and the same time. So far, I haven’t a clue. Although, the simplest explanation of what’s happening could be a highly rational and dispassionate policy on the part of Ukraine’s new leaders, carrying on ‘as normal’ while preparing for the worst-case scenario.Still, while the political experts write about politics and politicians, writers write about life. And it’s the little things that make up life. The other day, en route to see my Kiev publisher, who lives, like me, in the centre of Kiev, I noticed two state traffic police cars and several police officers armed with AK assault rifles at a crossroads near Kiev University. And this ‘little thing’ lifted my mood. I’ve only seen police officers in central Kiev a few times in recent days. They were patrolling the streets with People’s Self Defence representatives. No, Kiev has not descended into chaos. Life seems entirely normal and only the appearance of the occasional passerby in a flak jacket suggests that getting back to normal is still some way off.One evening recently, on March 3, I visited my publisher at home. We were eating, drinking and trying to talk but the conversation was constantly being interrupted and a deadly silence would ensue. The publisher, Petr Khazin, kept trying to put the TV on so that we could follow the news but his wife and I wouldn’t let him. The black box of the disconnected TV set psyched us out too. We already knew about the Russian troops’ ultimatum to Ukraine’s military units. We knew about the assault set for five in the morning. That must have been why all our attempts to talk about peaceful topics were doomed to failure. When I took the same route home past Kiev University, the armed police officers and their patrol cars had gone. The streets were dark, damp and quiet. I went to bed at two in the morning and woke again at six to find out whether the war had started. As it turned out, it hadn’t. I rushed to give my children the good news but they already knew. They’d been up earlier than me – to find out whether they had any future in Ukraine.

    About the author

    Andrey Kurkov, Ukrainian writer and novelist was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin. His latest novel, The Gardener from Ochakov was published by Harvill Secker last year.

    About the translator

    Melanie Moore has been translating Russian in all its forms for more than 25 years. Her translation of The Little Man by Liza Alexandrova Zorina was published by Glas earlier this month. She also translates from French.

    Additional information

    To find out more about the situation in Ukraine, and the poetry and literature of the country, English PEN, the Dash Cafe, the British Ukrainian Society present the work of Ukrainian poet Ihor Pavlyuk. Ihor’s work paints an extraordinary and complex picture of Ukraine and we will use it as inspiration to begin a conversation about the country today. Featuring the haunting and soulful music of Olesya Zdorovetska and a panel chaired by Dash Artistic Director Josephine Burton with Journalist Annabelle Chapman, translator Steve Komanyckyj and Ihor himself, this will be a celebration of Ukrainian voices that can gives us a unique perspective on the current political situation. 

     

  • Russian déjà vu at Sochi 2014 – who lost the games?

    Mikhail Shishkin writes our second PEN Atlas dispatch on the Sochi Winter Olympics, a story of billion-dollar corruption, Soviet-style propaganda, and a regime bent on hiding opposition and urban decay behind sports kitsch and a new coat of paint

    In 1980, I was studying linguistics in Moscow. During the Olympics my colleagues and I were expected to work as guides and interpreters. Our training course included a class with a ‘professor’ in plain clothes who drilled us on how to answer provocative questions from Western guests. For example: ‘Why are foreigners allowed to buy everything in special shops with foreign currency while local shops are empty?’ We immediately felt uneasy; this was a good question – why? The right answer was: ‘Yes we still have some shortages, but when we have guests we treat them the best we can, even if we have to deny ourselves.’Today, the Olympics have again turned into a huge Potemkin village: newly painted and front-facing our foreign guests, and showing a dirty backside to its own people.The Games haven’t even started yet and already the moveable ‘Feast of Sport’ has become the immovable feast of embezzlement, the festival of irresponsibility, and the visiting card of the Putin regime.Someone had whispered in Putin’s ear about holding the Winter Olympics in the subtropics of all places – and so here he is, the Father of the Nation, a stone’s throw away from Greece, building his own eternal Olympus! And the cost doesn’t matter. The money is coming from the pockets of pensioners, teachers and doctors. The real Sochi winners will be those Russian officials and oligarchs who populate in their dozens the rich-lists of the world. The cost of constructing these Olympics is twice as much as the world average. Half of the fantastical $50billion now sits in the offshore bank accounts of the officials in charge. This means that more has been stolen in Sochi than the previous cost of all Winter Games combined. Here we should remind ourselves that these multi-billion-dollar efforts are disposable. These monster edifices will fall into decay and end in ruins…The official propaganda, as before, celebrates the Olympics as ‘a Feast of Sport’. And as before, we are being told: ‘Sport is beyond politics!’ In the Soviet Union sport was always politics. Of course, it’s natural to root for sportspeople from your own country. But how can I root for the victory of a country of which I’m ashamed? Does this sound unpatriotic to you? But what does it mean – to be a patriot in Russia?In the past, in our inside-out country, the attitude towards patriotism was also inside-out. We were against the Soviets, and on the side of the Czechoslovakian hockey team, because their democratic ‘spring’ had not so long ago been crushed by the tracks of our tanks. Now those times have indeed returned.I wish I could be proud of my country, root for its sports team. But how can sport be ‘beyond politics’ if when the Russian teams win, the old Stalinist national anthem will be sung worldwide? The anthem that was reintroduced by Putin: the anthem of dictators and slaves.The athletes and politicians now preparing for their journey to Sochi should keep in mind that they will all be playing a part, as ‘backing singers’ for the global PR campaign of the regime, that the Sochi ‘Feast of Sport, Peace and Friendship’ is intended as a personal feast for the Supreme Skier and is being used by his teammates as a way to transfer public money into their already bulging pockets.This gang of criminals falsified the elections and they usurped state power, taking the whole country hostage. To participate in the Olympics means to show solidarity with the dictator, to help him make the Games a triumph and legitimise his regime. In 1980, democratic countries boycotted the Games in Moscow, showing solidarity not with the regime but with its victims. Though we all appreciate that the Olympics are an opportunity for any sportsperson, boycotting the Games means showing solidarity with those who are being held hostage.Do you really believe that the long Olympic torch relay was a celebration for the country? When people were driven together under the threat of punishment to meet the policed cortege carrying the torch with its constantly dying flame, it evoked nothing but feelings of shame and humiliation. In Saratov, manholes were welded shut and rubbish bins were removed from the torchbearer’s route. To prevent people from throwing away rubbish in the usual places, policemen were placed there instead. In accordance with the old Soviet tradition, ruins were covered with colourful facades glorifying sport. As in 1980, only the houses with dirty entrances and holes in their roofs were repaired. It’s all painfully recognisable – again, they’re putting a golden crown on a decaying tooth! And all this useless window-dressing is done by local authorities for a single man in the Kremlin. Again, it is the clammy fear of an official – scared of not satisfying the boss – that governs the country.And now the Games are becoming a real disaster for the population of Sochi. They feel discriminated against and robbed. Some people’s land and property has been seized, some people have been forced out of their homes. Their protests have been brutally suppressed. Just read some of the blogs coming out of Sochi: the local population already execrates the Olympics.One can only get into Sochi with a special permit – the so-called ‘fan-passport’. Human rights activists who apply for one are simply turned down. The city has turned into a ‘zone’: going south by car one sees along the highway, starting soon after Rostov, large banners saying ‘Sochi is closed’. Who are the Olympics for then, if not for the citizens of the country?And who will be responsible for the barbarian destruction of nature in Krasnaya Polyana and the whole unique Mzymty valley? Meanwhile the regime is busy prosecuting protesting ecologists…The clemency that’s been given to other political prisoners before the Games doesn’t exonerate the regime – instead, it anticipates new arrests and new imprisonments once the Games are over. And then the only hope will be for more clemency before the football World Cup, to be held in Russia in 2018. This gang has already spoiled the Olympics. Will they spoil football for us as well?I don’t know who’ll win medals, but the Russian population has already lost the Games. One can sum up the Winter Games even before they have started: the regime, with help from the Olympics, has raped the country yet again: Russian déjà vu.But now there arises one more analogy: after the 1980 Olympics, the USSR lasted only a decade. How long can Putin’s Russia last?I hope that Russia can change. It is such a great feeling not to be ashamed, but proud of one’s country. It is only in a future democratic Russia that sport will, at last, be beyond politics. About the authorBorn in 1961 in Moscow, Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most prominent names in contemporary Russian literature, and is the only author to have won all three major Russian Literary Prizes. He divides his time between Moscow, Switzerland and Germany.Additional informationFor more on Mikhail’s criticism of the Russian government, please see his interview with the New York Times.Read reviews of Mikhail’s novel Maidenhair, available at Good Reads.Mikhail Shishkin’s latest book, The Light and the Dark is published  by Querus and out now.