Okay, it’s not entirely non-political, to be honest. Still, if you’d like to read about Russian politics and the effect on writers, my essay “The Novel and the Dictator” is out in the new issue of Ekstasis Magazine. A taste:
…we live in search of lost time, longing for it while knowing that we can never recover it fully, no matter what Proust claims. History is elusive, but novels—they know things…
What about all the novels that were never written because the girl who dreamed of writing them lies in an unmarked mass grave somewhere on the edge of what used to be a Ukrainian Jewish settlement where no one even remembers that Jews once lived there? They’ve been gone long enough—since 1941, to be precise.Â
The death of people means the death of novels too. The genocide of people who spoke and wrote in a particular language, now mostly gone, means the destruction of their libraries—not only the ones in the past, but also the ones that should have come but never will.Â
Historians don’t deal with counterfactuals, but how can we not ask this question: What might they have written, had they lived? And now, in the Ukraine of 2024, the same question surfaces, as writers, poets, novelists, and artists are killed in another war, unleashed by another Russian dictator.Â
In an excerpt from her book, the Ukrainian writer Viktoria Amelina reflected on the incongruous nature of “The Shell Hole in the Fairy Tale”—so much death and destruction in places that should have been devoted to life, to children. Her book lay unfinished at the time of her death in 2023, when a missile hit the pizzeria where she was meeting other journalists for lunch. What if she could have finished her book? What if she lived?