In times of clanking guns and political skirmishes between Russia and Europe, we need dialogue, says Russian writer Guzel Jachina. The author of the award-winning novels Zulejka opens her eyes, Children of the Volga and Train to Samarkand likes to chat with readers. She considers preserving the dialogue to be more important today than a few years ago, she said this Tuesday in Prague’s Václav Havel Library.
One of the biggest stars of contemporary Russian literature, a forty-six-year-old author with Tatar roots, will meet Czech readers again at the same place on Tuesday evening. From the Czech Republic, where she arrived as a guest of the international conference in honor of the Václav Havel Prize laureate for human rights, she will then head to Germany and Romania.
“Dialogue is needed and there is a demand for it,” says Jachina. “When I first came to Europe in 1995, French students seriously asked me if there were bears walking around Moscow. It’s impossible for us to know so little about each other. Nowadays, you can’t see from Europe to Russia and vice versa. That is a breeding ground for the renewal of stereotypes,” he adds.
The writer, who lives alternately in Moscow and Kazakhstan’s Almaty, publicly condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine last February. “It is early today to talk about reconciliation when the conflict is not yet over, but it is not early for art. In general, in war, art has more tasks than in peacetime, in addition to the need to process current traumas, it also has to deal with the question of what will happen tomorrow,” he believes.
After the February 24, 2022 invasion, she found it difficult to work. Writing lost its meaning for several months, he recalls. “It was only later that I understood that following the traces of totalitarianism is more important today than in the past, and the meaning of my work partially returned to me. I hope that I can finish writing my fourth historical novel,” she says.
So far, she is the author of three award-winning prose. In his last novel, Train to Samarkand, he returns to the topic of the Volga famine in the 1920s.
In the first book, Zulejka opens her eyes, she drew on her grandmother’s experiences of arrest and exile in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. In the second title, Children of the Volga, she wrote about the tragic fate of the Volga Germans in early Soviet history. All three novels have attracted controversy, ranging from praise to criticism for attempting to “rewrite” history.
“I explain it by the fact that people were not only emotionally debating my book, but were also dealing with their relationship to the Soviet past. The need for dialogue was maturing in society, and the only place where it could take place was art. But that ended a year and a half ago.” states Guzel Jachina.
The native of Kazan perceives that in her country today the legacy of the dictator Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin is accepted more kindly than before. “I’m not justifying it, but I’m trying to explain that behind it is the desire to live in a big, respected country and the desire for social justice. In my books, my relationship with Stalin is clear. It is necessary to label him as a criminal even at the legislative level. In the nineties it was mistake, that de-Stalinization did not take place on a political level, but only in art,” thinks Guzel Jachina.
She graduated from the faculty of foreign languages at the state university, then graduated from the film school in Moscow with a degree in screenwriting, which she completed in 2015. She made her debut as a writer in the literary magazines Něva and Okťabr.
In 2017, her novel Zulejka opens her eyes was published in a Czech translation, which became the model for a television series. The following year, Children of the Volga became the second best-selling book in Russia, won the state prize for the Great Book, among others, and has been translated into 17 languages so far. “Not only do they handle the topic of the German minority in the Soviet Union in a high-quality way, it is a large, original prose with a thorough internal structure, a polished style and an almost endless vocabulary,” Aktuálně.cz wrote about the novel.
Last September, the Prostor publishing house published the author’s third novel, Transport to Samarkand, again translated by Jakub Šedivý, who this time was awarded a creative premium within the Josef Jungmann Prize for his work.
