On April 26 the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize was awarded to writer Oleg Pavlov “for confessionary prose permeated with poetic power and compassion; for the artistic and philosophic quest of the meaning of human life under border circumstances.”
Oleg Pavlov has authored The Diary of a Hospital Security Guard, Asystolia, At Godless Lanes, A Perfunctory Fairy-Tale and Ninth-Day Requiem in Karaganda or The Story of the Last Days (Russian Booker 2002). He is described as a “brutal realist,” but the writer is confident: if you are eager to know the full truth about a person, be prepared for any pain and discomfort.
– Did the news about the award surprise you?
– Yes, sure, like any other decision that has caught me unaware… I am a solitary worker by choice.
– Is it important for you that your works might have a strong effect on people and change them from within?
– If a person needs any particular book he or she will certainly find and read it. The books that changed my destiny somehow found me. I surely want to help people for my reader is my neighbor, but like any artist, I pursue more egotistic goals. There is an idea and my personal attitude towards it, but the reader’s attitude is different.
– But feedback is important for you, isn’t it?
– Frankly, no. I think the book is a silent friend. I am silent when I write it and the reader is silent reading it. Reading is silence and any intermediaries between the reader and the book are superfluous. It is for this reason that I refuse to meet with my readers, never present my books, and do not like critics. This interview of mine is only a tribute to the event, to people whom I hold in the highest esteem, and to the award, which I appreciate. By nature I am a shy person, shunning any publicity, and a reticent one, at that.
– But do you have any mental picture of your reader?
– I am an Orthodox Christian and I feel more sympathy for believers. I know this may repel some other people from my books. Yet such values as the language, images, symbols, and cultural and ethical codes are very significant in my eyes. Pragmatics and cynics have aversion to me.
– And to whom do you have aversion?
– To cynics and pragmatics – I am an idealist concerned over the gist of Russian idealism because the latter implies the need for faith.
– In what historical epoch would it be more comfortable for you to live? And would you then write about in your books?
– I love the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Northern Germany, but, I am afraid, living there would not be comfortable. I truly sympathize with the 1970s and Tvardovsky’s New World. I am a writer of one idea – truth as a uniting element, when the need for truth is most important for both the writer and reader. I highly appreciate Tvardovsky and Solzhenitsyn and it is this epoch that I’d have chosen for living. I can imagine my conduct in those days and I have that sum of human qualities in my soul, but nowadays many of them are unnecessary. Nobody needs self-sacrifice nowadays – this is a meaningless trait that would rather lead a person to solitude.
– Would you have signed letters in defense of the dissidents in the 1970s? And would you have criticized the Soviet regime?
– I’d have struggled; this would not be ridiculous in those times. Struggling with today’s regime is ridiculous, for there are no occasions and opposition leaders are the most high-paid individuals. This is rather a struggle for being popular.
– What is a test of success for you?
– The test of success is obvious: big print-runs, money, demand for your books. If a novel author, say, gives on money for the sake of his convictions, or follows the voice of his conscience to the detriment of his career everybody decides nowadays that such a person is a loser. Regrettably, our ideas of a human being are now miserable. Even in the Soviet paradigm the human being was better and wider understood and appreciated.
– What are your joys and sorrows today?
– I feel pity for people. Everything is tangled in Russian life today and nobody wants to untangle the knots. The mounting mutual hatred is very hard on my soul. The people of Russia deserve a better fate and now it pains me to see the degraded and undignified conditions in which many people in Russia have landed.
– And what are the joys?
– Art, inner freedom, the ability to think and the very opportunity to live; I feel joy when good triumphs over evil. It’s strange that good and evil have become just abstract notions. Good is stronger – this is humaneness and evil is inhumanity.
– What do you dream about?
– I live for the sake of the last minute in my life and the chance to experience it. I want to be composed at that moment, surrounded by loved ones and my family. I want to feel content about the work of my life and have confidence that I did everything I could. And I want to leave this world without feeling any pain, just as I came into this world.
Valeria Kudryavtseva
Newspaper Kultura
