Sergei Samsonov
Born: 1980
Quick Study: Sergei Samsonov made a name for himself by writing novels portraying psychological drama and social issues in contemporary Russia but he’s broadened his temporal horizons by writing books set against the backdrop of historical events including World War 2 and the Civil War.
The Samsonov File: Sergei Samsonov’s writerly career advanced pretty quickly: he followed his 2007 debut novel, Legs, about a soccer player, with The Kamlaev Anomaly, a book about a composer that brought him wide recognition when it made the National Bestseller Award shortlist in 2009. Those two books, as well as his Oxygen Limit, which takes place after a terrorist act in Moscow, and Hold on to the Earth, which depicts coal miners and geopolitical conflict in the Donbass region and won the 2019 Yasnaya Polyana Award, focus on contemporary events. Samsonov has also proven himself with historical settings. His The Falcon’s Line is a long novel about World War 2 air battles; the book won Samsonov a Debut Prize in 2015 (in manuscript form, under the alias Gorshkovozov) and went on to become a Big Book Award finalist two years later. High Blood, another large (640 pages) novel, is set in the Don steppes in 1920, during the Civil War, and features characters from both sides.
Samsonov’s Places: Podolsk, the city in the Moscow region where he was born… Moscow, where he graduated from the Literary Institute…
The Word on Samsonov: Yasnaya Polyana Award jury member Vladislav Otroshenko said this when Hold Onto the Earth won the award in 2019: “This book elicits highly varied, sometimes contradictory, opinions. There are many truths in our time but the primary truth in this book is artistic truth. We, the jury, think everyone should read it.”
Samsonov on Samsonov & Writing: When asked in an interview, by Egor Appolonov, how he writes, Samsonov responded, “I sit down and I write. Four, six, eight, ten hours a day…” He mentioned factors that might account for the variations – from intensity to the atmospheric pressure in the Moscow region – and added that he has no set schedule and does take breaks.
Samsonov Recommends: After Samsonov mentioned, in an interview, that Ivan Bunin and Andrei Platonov are writers to learn from, interviewer Egor Appolonov asked for “Samsonov’s list” of other writers “without whom your language wouldn’t have become [what it is],” prompting Samsonov to say there are too many to name and the list grows. He did, however name a few: “Nabokov definitely. Bitov definitely. The Iliad in Gnedich’s translation is absolutely a cornerstone for me, just like the clicking of wheels on the railroad as a child. Well and Russian classics, at least that half I’ve managed to get to know fairly closely.” In another interview, with Klarisa Pul’son, Samsonov said Homer’s Iliad and Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood: His Odyssey are his two most “significant” books.
Photo: Alexei Kiselev