I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country - Hardcover

Kostyuchenko, Elena

 
9780593655269: I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593655265 ISBN 13: 9780593655269
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and TIME * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize *

“A haunting book of rare courage.” —Clarissa Ward, CNN chief international correspondent and author of On All Fronts

To be a journalist is to tell the truth. I Love Russia is Elena Kostyuchenko’s unrelenting attempt to document her country as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.

Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it. The result is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a young woman who refuses to be silenced. In March 2022, as a correspondent for Russia’s last free press, Novaya Gazeta, Kostyuchenko crossed the border into Ukraine to cover the war. It was her mission to ensure that Russians witnessed the horrors Putin was committing in their name. She filed her pieces knowing that should she return home, she would likely be prosecuted and sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Yet, driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism, she continues to write.

I Love Russia stitches together reportage from the past fifteen years with personal essays, assembling a kaleidoscopic narrative that Kostyuchenko understands may be the last work from her homeland that she’ll publish for a long time—perhaps ever. It exposes the inner workings of an entire nation as it descends into fascism and, inevitably, war. She writes because the threat of Putin’s Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine. We fail to understand it at our own peril.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elena Kostyuchenko was born in Yaroslavl, Russia in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was fourteen, and spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper until it was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting from Ukraine. She is the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize.

Bela Shayevich is a Soviet American writer and translator. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time,for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize. Her other translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See, which she cotranslated with Ainsley Morse. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Jewish Currents, and Harper’s Magazine.

Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse was born in Soviet Belarus. She has translated three novels by Yuri Rytkheu, including most recently When the Whales Leave, Aleksandr Skorobogatov’s Russian Gothic, and Galina Scherbakova’s short stories for the Dedalus anthology Slav Sisters, as well as The Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva. She lives in London.

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Chapter 1

The Men from TV

I don't remember myself as an infant, my memories begin from the time I am four, maybe three. I remember the silhouettes bending over me, or maybe I just think I do. I remember my grandma, she died when I was five, which must mean I have memories from when I was younger. Babushka would make fun of me and slap my hand and then laugh. She wasn't always all there, she was sick. When madness came over her, she would get shy and searching. She thought she was living with strangers and would become eager to make us like her. When she regained her senses, she'd turn back into the woman who had for many years been-and remained-the head of the household. She was accustomed to being obeyed and demanded obedience.

I was sick all the time, I'd always get colds. I rarely went out. In my memory, it's always twilight. A new building was slowly rising up in front of our windows, rising to block out the light. In the right corner of the room we lived in, there was a piano for me to grow into. Mama hoped I would one day learn how to play. In the left corner, there was the television. It worked, but the picture was fuzzy, shot through with static, making it look black-and-white.

The television was huge, or it seemed huge to me, with a bulging silver-gray screen made of thick glass. Dust adored it. I would pull up a chair, climb onto it, and brush the screen with my fingers. It felt like touching a moth's wings, ever-so-gently. Mama would say: that's the static.

I waited for evening for my allotted pleasure. That's when Good Night, Little Ones! would come on. The puppets, a piglet named Khryusha and a bunny named Stepashka, would talk to each other, and then they would play a cartoon. I loved the hand-drawn animations, but sometimes they'd be stop-motion instead, clay or just dolls. Those seemed like a sad waste of the magic of television. I could play with dolls all by myself.

I noticed that Mama turned on the TV before it was time for Good Night. She came home from work, hung up her trench coat, and sat down on the couch, still in her shoes. She'd wait a few minutes for her feet to "settle" and then she'd get up and plod over to the TV to turn it on. It'd be a show about grown-ups or news.

I hated the news and didn't understand how anybody could voluntarily watch it. The pictures that broke through the grainy broadcast were mystifying. People yelled, went places, there were identical anchors with identical intonations. I couldn't understand what they said. Mama watched them in silence. She was so tired.

Little by little, I was figuring out what was going on. One day, Mama told me our country used to be called the USSR, but now it was Russia. It had been better in the USSR: there was a lot of food, people were kind to each other. Now things were different. Later, I learned that Mama had been a chemist, but the institute where she had worked no longer paid money, so she became a cleaning woman and teacher and also washed diapers at my preschool. This was why she was so tired and didn't play with me and didn't hug me as much as I wanted. I asked her whose fault it was that the USSR had turned into Russia. Mama said Yeltsin. Who's Yeltsin? The president. What is the president? The most important person in the country.

Mama pointed him out to me on the news. The most important person in our country was ugly and old, with a giant head. I didn't understand what he was saying. He mumbled just like my grandma did when she was sick, stretching his words.

I'd watch him and think, It's your fault that my mama is tired. That she drags her feet when she walks like she's old. That she doesn't play with me and doesn't hug me as much as I want. That people used to be kind and live in the USSR, and now we live in Russia, and Russia is worse. When Yeltsin appeared on the screen, I'd furrow my brow and say, Yeltsin is bad. And Mama would smile. I started watching the news with Mama and yelling at Yeltsin just so I could see her smile.

Sometimes Mama's friends from the institute would come over. They'd sit in the kitchen and I would be underfoot. Whenever anyone mentioned Yeltsin, I'd perk up my ears. And then, in the next available pause, I would add, "Yeltsin is bad." The grown-ups laughed. They'd say, "Your little girl is so grown up." The grown-ups told me that Yeltsin was also a drunk. And so I started saying, "Yeltsin is a bad drunk." The grown-ups laughed at this, too.

The older I got, the more I could understand the news. Miners were beating their helmets against a bridge in Moscow. Mama sent the miners money, she said they were starving. Chechens were fighting with Russians. I was afraid of Chechens, I thought they were all scary bad guys with beards, just like pirates. I wished I could see one of them in real life. Then came the criminals. I never saw them but I would hear them. Sometimes, there would be shooting outside. Mama would say, Stay away from the window.

When I was five, I found out that we were all going to die. Even Mama. A little while later, I realized that Mama might not die of old age sometime in the future, she could die any moment because of the criminals. I started being scared of the night. Evil came closer at night, darkness opened the door to it. I would get up on the windowsill and stare into the darkness. I believed that my gaze lit Mama's way home and protected her. Sometimes, the terror would overwhelm me. Then I would take out our tin of old buttons and pore through them all like they were treasure. The buttons protected me from the terror a bit.

When I was in third grade, I finally saw the criminals up close. I was taking a shortcut home, through the courtyards, instead of taking the streets. Mama said never to do that, but I was in a hurry. I came upon three men and another one with them, but somehow apart. I remember them wearing black leather trench coats, but I probably made that up. One of the three men was swearing and then another one got out a gun. It was small and very black. I ducked into the nearest building to wait out the shooting. Two gunshots. I waited a little while longer, then peeked out of the doorway. The man who had been standing apart was curled up on the ground. Behind his ear, there was red. I couldn't see the criminals anymore. I made a wide arc around the man, then ran home. I didn't tell Mama. I knew that worrying could make the heart stop, and, with all of my little body, all I wanted was for Mama to live.

The criminals were because of Yeltsin, and so was the darkness outside the window, and all the long evenings waiting for Mama, and how we never had enough money-I knew what money was now, how much it cost. We didn't always have food. When I was nine, I joined a choir, we'd sing in hospitals and Houses of Culture. They paid choir members 30 rubles a concert, 60 for soloists. I wanted to be a soloist. Sixty rubles could get us seven loaves of bread.

I would ask Mama, If the USSR was such a good country, why didn't you stand up for it? Mama would say, We were deceived. Yeltsin lied to us.

I began watching the news with a voracious rage. I was impatient for Yeltsin to die. They would definitely show that on the news.

But: he kept not dying. Other people were dying. There were constantly funerals, coffins upholstered in red were continually being carried out into our courtyard. I would go up to our neighbors and ask, Why did he die? Why did she die? Alcohol poisoning, hanging, shooting, being murdered during a robbery, dying in a hospital that didn't have any drugs or doctors. My mama lived, my gaze protected her. Sometimes I'd bargain with God. I'd tell him, If Mama dies and I go off to live in the forest, what are You gonna do then?

When I was in seventh grade, here is what Yeltsin did. On New Year's Eve, while Mama and I were having...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593655265
ISBN 13 
9780593655269
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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