Aleksei Ivanov
Born: 1969
Quick Study: Aleksei Ivanov is well-known for writing absorbing novels – some set centuries ago, others taking place in our time, some utterly realistic, others featuring elements of fantasy – and his fame has broadened through screenplays and a starring role in the 2010 TV miniseries The Ridge of Russia, which combines adventure and Russian history.
The Ivanov File: Aleksei Ivanov’s earliest writings went unpublished for years but his first two published books, which came out in 2003, became two of his best-known works: The Geographer Drank His Globe Away, a novel about a modern-day teacher written in 1995, and Heart of Parma, a historical work about Perm written in 2000. Coming into print relatively late has clearly paid off for Ivanov: he followed those two books with two others that had been sitting in desk drawers plus Riot Gold, a historical action novel that won the 2006 Yasnaya Polyana Award for contemporary fiction and a Big Book Award readers’ choice prize. His Nasty Weather, a suspenseful social novel about Afghan War veterans, was shortlisted for the 2016 Big Book Award and adapted into a miniseries. He has written around two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. Ivanov’s Быть Ивановым (Being Ivanov), released in autumn 2020, collects readers’ questions to Ivanov and his answers, a dialogue that the book’s site says began in 2005, when Ivanov made his Web site. More than four thousand questions have appeared.
Psssst………: The film Tsar, written by Ivanov, directed by Pavel Lungin, and starring Petr Mamonov (as Ivan the Terrible!) and Oleg Yankovsky, competed in the 2009 Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival… Ivanov didn’t allow his books to be nominated for awards for some years after Heart of Parma (2005) was taken out of Russian Booker Prize contention for “lacking signs of a novel”… But Ivanov agreed to having his Nasty Weather nominated for the Big Book and Prose of the Year awards in 2016 and received results: the novel won Prose of the Year and was shortlisted for the Big Book… Ivanov received his first honorarium (three rubles, fifty kopecks) as a writer when he was a schoolboy, in 1986, when he wrote a piece that rebutted an article in Soviet Russia about the shortest letter in the world. He argued that Victor Hugo’s letter to his publisher reading only “!” after the release of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is longer than the blank sheet of paper a general sends to Kutuzov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace… Several years later, when Ivanov participated in a Latvian writers’ workshop, Sergei Lukyanenko was named the main discovery and Ivanov the main flop; Victor Pelevin also participated and apparently avoided those extremes… The Ridge of Russia is a four-episode TV miniseries for which Ivanov, journalist Leonid Parfenov, and producer Yuliya Zaitseva traveled the Urals, covering thousands of kilometers, over 100 cities and towns, and more than four centuries…
Ivanov’s Places: Born in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) but grew up in Perm, has said he lives where he works… studied art history on his second go at university studies (he’d tried earlier, as a journalism major, thinking that was the best course for a writer but realized it wasn’t so took some gap time) at Urals State University…
The Word on Ivanov: The first paragraph of Nadezhda Kazakova’s review of Nasty Weather for “Book Friends Club” ends by saying that in this novel about Afghan War veterans, “ideas that continue the humanistic ideas of great Russian classics including Dostoevsky stand behind a fairly simple plot.” When Ivanov’s Heart of Parma was released, critic Konstantin Milchin called it one of the year’s best, saying “If I tell you what the book is about, you’ll never believe it could be interesting.” After going on to mention that it’s about Russia’s conquest of the Perm region in the late fifteenth century, contains lots of Finno-Ugric words, and includes both real figures as well as immortals and werewolves, not to mention battle scenes more impeccable than those in The Lord of the Rings, Milchin says what’s most annoying is that the book didn’t even make the Russian Booker Prize’s longlist.
Ivanov on Ivanov & Writing: Ivanov has said on his site (answering a question from “Vladimir” on May 24, 2020) that he plans to write a book about the Russian Civil War. In answering another question (from “Dmitry,” June 2, 2020), Ivanov says that he doesn’t currently plan to write additional novels about contemporary Russia, citing aggression and discord he wishes to avoid. (link to this page)
Ivanov Recommends: When asked by a reader (Sergei) on his site (June 12, 2020), for nonfiction recommendations of interesting books that are classics in their genres, Ivanov suggested Peter Ackroyd’s London and Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. When an interviewer for Afisha asked if there were any books he wished he’d written, Ivanov mentioned Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Winston Groom’s Forest Gump. When questioned about the best vampire book, he named Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot.
Photo credit: Yuliya Zaytseva Creative Commons