I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin, and Shoigu.
I take a very long time to write my books - from five to ten years.
For money, I can buy one thing: I buy freedom.
All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.
My wish is to humanize history.
I name the genre that I write in as 'novel of voices.'
Hatred, I think, is an organism that penetrates our skin in a mythic fashion and does not leave.
We are all prisoners of the ideas of the times we live in.
I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.
Putin has mobilized and gathered the desires of millions upon millions of people who have been lied to, cheated, who lost out in the new order of things - and in each of these people is a bit of Putin. They have come together to make the image we know as Putin. Putin himself is just the tip of an iceberg.
Communism has not died. We naively thought in the '90s we had buried communism, but this is not true. It is not dead, and it will be coming back.
Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.
To be in conflict with the authorities is one thing. We Russian writers have got used to that. But to be in conflict with your own people - that is truly terrible.
There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.
I love to sit on my own and think, not to be photographed all the time.
I'm not a public person.
My Ukrainian grandmother would tell amazing stories. She lost her father, and as children, we would always listen to her stories.
I was always meant to study the humanities; I was no good at math or sciences. When it came time for me to work, it was Soviet times, and journalism wasn't that free or interesting of a space. There was a lot of censorship; it was difficult.
I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.
You might say that my work is just simply lying on the ground, and I go and I gather it, and I pick it up, and I put it together.
