Born: 1961
Quick Study: Oleg Ermakov’s first published fiction – a cycle of stories about Afghanistan for a literary journal – built on drew experiences in Afghanistan and he continues to write fiction that involves distant places he has visited, often adding mystical elements.
The Ermakov File: Although Oleg Ermakov’s first works of fiction – a cycle of short stories in 1989 and the novel Sign of the Beast, a 1993 Russian Booker Prize finalist – as well as The Arithmetic of War, a 2012 cycle of stories, are informed by his experiences in Afghanistan, many of his later writings explore other geographical, historical, and metaphysical territory. Rainbow and Heather, a 2018 Big Book Award finalist, involves a wedding photographer who visits Ermakov’s native Smolensk and finds a mysterious (and historical) portal, and The Tungus’s Song, a 2017 Yasnaya Polyana Award finalist, concerns a young man who goes to work as a forester in Siberia, where he meets an Evenk man who’s accused of arson and is the grandson of a shaman woman. His 2019 Libgerik (the title is an Evenk name given to a girl who is born at the first slushy snow) is about a couple from Petersburg who go to visit Seoul, where they recall their youth and encounter a dose of mysticism.
Psssst………: Ermakov’s job history includes stints as a newspaper employee, guard, forester, and weather service worker…
Ermakov’s Places: Smolensk (birthplace)… nature preserves in the Altai, Baikal, and Barguzin areas, where he worked as a forester after graduating from high school… Afghanistan, where he fulfilled his Soviet army duty…
The Word on Ermakov: Critic and literary observer Klarisa Pulson referred to Ermakov’s The Tungus’s Song as “the original Twin Peaks” in a piece about the 2017 Big Book longlist.
Ermakov recommends: In a 2012 interview with critic Liza Novikova for The Moscow Review of Books, Ermakov mentions two writers that he thinks write very good prose about Afghanistan: Igor Frolov and Igor Afanasyev.
Born: 1973
Quick Study: Mikhail Elizarov’s books have often arrived with a helping of controversy, thanks to a seeming nostalgia for the Soviet years and details like depicting Boris Pasternak as a demon, but they’ve also been popular with readers, critics, and award juries thanks to Elizarov’s imaginativeness, dark humor, and lyricism.
The Elizarov File: Mikhail Elizarov began publishing fiction in the early 2000s and Fingernails, his first collection published in Moscow, by Ad Marginem, contains stories he wrote beginning at the age of nineteen; Fingernails was a finalist for the 2001 Andrei Bely Award. Elizarov followed Fingernails with Pasternak, which earned highly varied reactions (in part thanks to the demon and other objections to Elizarov’s portrayal of the famous poet), and his next novel, The Librarian, won the 2008 Russian Booker Prize with its story of book gangs fighting battling over rare editions of socialist realist novels. He found further success in NOSE Award reader’s choice voting with his story collection We Went Out for a Seventeen-Year Smoke. Elizarov’s Earth, a long novel (which will apparently be followed by a sequel) that came out in 2019 after a long break, won the 2020 National Bestseller Award, and hit the Big Book Award shortlist by telling the stylistically and narratively complex coming-of-age story of a young man who begins learning about death in early childhood and later works with his brother in the funeral industry.
Psssst………: Elizarov studied opera singing in high school and later invented a personal genre for himself: “bard-punk-chanson”… he has also studied film direction and worked as a cameraman…
Elizarov’s Places: Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, where he was born… Hannover, German, where he studied film directing… Kharkov University, where he studied philology...
The Word on Elizarov: Phoebe Taplin’s review for Russia Beyond of Andrew Bromfield’s translation of The Librarian offers a good summary of controversy over the Russian Booker Prize decision to award The Librarian, even noting the resignation of one committee member, who called the novel “worthless, fascist trash.” Taplin concludes her review by writing, “Sorokin has praised The Librarian for its depiction of ‘Soviet power as an endless squabble’; the book’s many battles also represent the struggle to find meaning in a post-ideological society. With its adolescent combination of existential nihilism and video-game violence, Elizarov’s work is easily underestimated. Like the late Terry Pratchett’s exploration of religious belief in Small Gods, The Librarian is a novel that makes profound questions playful and playfulness profound.”
Links to other English-language reviews of Elizarov’s work are archived on Wikipedia.
Elizarov on Elizarov & Writing: When asked in a 2015 interview with Business Online if he considers himself more of a musician or a writer, Elizarov answered by saying he sees himself as “A person who sometimes writes books and sometimes composes songs and sings them. It depends on where my heart is at a specific moment. Right now it’s been more songs, I’ll do up a book sometime. I evaluate my work when it’s ready.”
Elizarov Recommends: When asked in an interview with Svyat Pavlov of Medium to choose Bulgakov or Sholokhov, Elizarov chose Sholokhov. When asked to list the three most interesting contemporary Russian writers, he thrice said “Zakhar Prilepin.”
Born: 1974
Quick Study: After establishing himself as a journalist and adept literary critic, Danilkin has proven himself as a very skilled writer of long-form biographies, too.
The Danilkin File: Lev Danilkin’s long run writing a book review column on the Afisha site established him as a household name among Russian bookworms: he read broadly, published regular reviews, and even collected his thoughts on contemporary fiction for several books. Even so, by the time he departed from Afisha in 2014, Danilkin had already written several biographies, including one about controversial writer Alexander Prokhanov, a book that was a finalist for the 2008 National Bestseller and Big Book awards. He also wrote a life of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (2011). Danilkin fully hit his stride as a biographer with Lenin. Pantocrator of Dust Motes, a very lively and very thick (784 pages) biography of Vladimir Ilich Lenin that won both the Big Book and Prose of the Year awards in 2017.
Psssst………: Beyond being a writer, critic, and journalist, Danilkin has also worked as a translator: his translation of Julian Barnes’s Letters from London was published in 2008… Danilkin told Esquire that he tried translating Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a teenager but got stuck on “all those endless monosyllabic English verbs in the songs.”
Danilkin’s Places: Vinnytsia, Ukraine, where he was born… Moscow State University, where he studied philology in graduate school...
The Word on Danilkin: Writer and critic Dmitry Bykov writes this of Danilkin’s biography of Lenin on Afisha: “any book relays not an idea but a spirit, just as any factory generates, first and foremost, not production but an atmosphere, creating itself. Danilkin’s book relays vivacity, confidence, and common sense to the reader. The book is nourishing, densely written, and businesslike. I wouldn’t call it especially absorbing – or, to be more specific, universally interesting – but, as Yuri Shcheglov used to say, ‘it won’t be boring for those it interests.’ Anyone interested in Russia and Russia’s most vivid characters will need this book.”
Danilkin on Danilkin & Writing: In an interview with Egor Appolonov and Ekaterina Pisareva of Papa Will Call, when asked if it was true that he only finished his book about Lenin because of his publisher’s deadline, Danilkin responded by saying, “Of course it’s true. I could have written it for ten years or fifteen or until I died. It’s just that I understood that if [the book] – which was simply another, hundred millionth biography of Lenin – didn’t come out in ’17, then nobody would need it.”
Danilkin Recommends: When asked in that same Papa Will Call interview for a “Danilkin’s list” of contemporary Russian novels everyone should read, Danilkin first said that “nobody has to do anything,” then mentioned Vladimir Makanin’s Asan, Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Pygmies, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, Zakhar Prilepin’s The Monastery, and Alexei Ivanov’s The Geographer Drank Away His Globe. He added that he also liked Sergei Shikera’s Egyptian Metro very much. Danilkin offers a similar list for a list of “best Russian books of the twenty-first century” for a lengthy, detailed Esquire piece about reading, adding Mikhail Shishkin’s The Taking Izmail, Evgeny Vodolazkin’s Laurus, Vladimir Sorokin’s Tellurium, and Viktor Pelevin’s Buddha’s Little Finger/Clay Machine Gun.
Photo: Sergey Medvedev
Born: 1959
Quick Study: Natalya Gromova’s diverse literary works – novels, biographies, screenplays, and plays – draw on her experiences as a literary and cultural historian working at libraries and literary museums.
The Gromova File: Natalya Gromova became a published book writer in 2000 with a volume that compiles materials that document and tell the life of a high-stakes subject: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Most of her books somehow concern writers and/or literature, focusing, for example, on letters that Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to Natalya Goncharova during 1928-1932, writers during war-time evacuation, and poet Olga Berggolts. Gromova also writes novels that draw on her “regular job” work. The Key (translated by Christopher Culver as Moscow in the 1930s: A Novel from the Archives) and Through and Through were finalists for the Big Book Award in 2014 and 2020, respectively. The importance of archives in The Key demonstrates Gromova’s debt to her work and she herself describes Through and Through in a brief introduction to its publication in the literary journal Znamya as (to paraphrase) a return to the autobiographical novel as it was seen in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a genre where the author’s own life serves as only a foundation upon which the author builds as they see fit, mixing truth and invention. Gromova saw publication of another book in 2020: Index of Names, which offers material – archival research, conversations, and brief “meetings” – with Russian cultural figures including Arseny Tarkovsky and Natan Eidelman.
Psssst………: Gromova’s employers have included Soviet Encylopedia…
Gromova’s Places: The Primorsky Krai (Russian Far East), where she was born… Moscow State University, where she studied philosophy… State Literary Museum, where she works… the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum, where she used to work…
The Word on Gromova: Reviewing for Novye izvestia, Anna Berseneva writes of Gromova’s books, “Why are they so attractive? The tense drama of fates, of the fallen people she writes about – yes. The scale of those people’s personalities – of course. Events that the keenest imagination couldn’t invent but that took place in her characters’ real lives – there’s that, too. But in my opinion, the main secret of Natalya Gromov is the fact that she didn’t just find the afore-mentioned things in archives, she has also made sense of them, felt them. Our society hasn’t been able to fully reflect on our own terrifying experience of the twentieth century and it’s still obscuring our life, not letting us go, not becoming the past. But Natalya Gromova has been able to do that.”
Gromova on Gromova and Writing: When asked in an interview with MK’s Alexander Tregubov about memory and the autofiction element of her Through and Through, Gromova responds, “I’m interested in the mechanisms of human fate. I always see some sort of striking logic of life, experience that can’t be adopted by anyone, only by literature. You suddenly see through five generations and realize that the stories of son-grandfather-son are suddenly beginning to repeat. The novel started at the end.”
Gromova Recommends: In 2015, Gromova told Literaturnaya Rossia that her favorite book is probably The Brothers Karamazov, adding that Dostoevsky is her favorite author. She also mentioned several authors who have heavily incluenced her scholarly and literary interests: Tolstoy, Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova.
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