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From a new generation of writers, the real Russia

Farah Stockman

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

February 21, 2012|By Farah Stockman

A member of the pro-Kremlin youth movement Stal wearing a Darth Vader mask… (Associated Press )

WHEN I was kid, the only Russia I knew existed in books or the movies. It was a 19th-century landscape woven by Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, populated by aristocrats and serfs who had no clue that communism was coming. Or it was the cold headquarters of diabolical spies like the intelligence chief in “From Russia with Love’’ who stabbed James Bond with a knife in her shoe; the home of that boxer in “Rocky IV’’ whose soulless ambition and artificial muscles embodied everything we imagined the Soviet Union to be.

Since the end of the Cold War, I have missed Russia, which seemed to recede even beyond the reaches of my imagination. News reports about oligarchs who gobbled up public companies, journalists who turned up murdered, and elections that got rigged always leave me bewildered and struck by a vague sense of guilt. We were so confident that capitalism would give Russians a bright future. How could everything have gone so wrong?

Recently, I got a chance to meet four young prize-winning Russian authors on a tour of the East Coast. (Tomorrow, they will be at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.) They are the first generation of writers who never knew the Cold War; who feel no nostalgia for the lost Soviet Empire; who grew up with everything possible and nothing guaranteed. Their stories give a glimpse of the real Russia.

Alisa Ganieva, 26, wrote about her native Dagestan, a mountainous region rocked by Islamist insurgency. She told me that religious extremism has become a form of rebellion among the youth, as fashionable as a trendy nightclub.

“In the 1990s, religion became popular in Russia,’’ she said. After the fall of communism, “people finally got an opportunity to pray. Young people went to Egypt to study Islam. When they returned to the motherland, they started teaching their parents. Now girls my age want to wear the hijab and their mothers don’t allow it, so they hide their hijab in their bags.’’

Two other authors — Irina Bogatyreva, 29, and Igor Savelyev, 28 — wrote about hitchhiking, another popular youth subculture in Russia. To them, Siberia is not a gulag, but a vast, adventure-filled expanse waiting to be explored alongside the new Trans-Siberian Highway, which connects Russia to itself for the very first time.

I asked the writers about the most popular book in Russia today. “Steve Jobs’s biography,’’ they said in unison.

I asked about their favorite television show: “Desperate Housewives,’’ Igor replied.

I asked if they have ever seen “Rocky.’’