Mine: Essays on the Russian Literature
“Are we being offered some kind of textbook or anthology? No. This is a polemical book. The polemic is political. Although the author is not a political scientist, but a writer who writes about writers, and does so with empathy and insight. The first word of his message is the title. These people and their written work, Mikhail Shishkin declares, are MINE. For the Russian imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet school, they may be some kind of compulsory material; for the Kremlin authorities, a cultural smokescreen for violence; for the non-Russian world, guides to understanding Russia. For Shishkin, they are comrades-in-arms. Their battle is one: high Russian culture against Russian bondage, uniting despotic power and a low-culture people. And Shishkin's HIS have always been against this institutionalized violence. They have always lost the battle—and yet they start it again.”
Deyan Kyuranov
Mikhail Shishkin
Mikhail Shishkin (born 1961) is one of the most famous contemporary Russian fiction writers and publicists. He breaks the stereotype that “Russian writers can only create in Russia” and has been writing his novels and essays in Switzerland for thirty years. Many of them have won prestigious awards (Russian Booker, Big Book, National Bestseller, Internationaler Literaturpreis) and have been translated into over thirty languages, including Bulgarian. In recent years, the writer has been actively working to unite free Russian culture against the political regime in Russia. Together with Swiss Slavicists, he is the founder of the Dar literary award.
