Laureate of the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize and finalist of the Russian Booker Anton Utkin is one of the most interesting prose writers of the 40-year-old generation. His new novel The Fortress of Doubt rhymes two upheavals, the events of 1917 and the 1990s. Written with extraordinary stylistic elegance, the novel is full of serious and deep reflections on the logic of Russian history and human relations.
Anton Utkin: “Time can’t be cut like a ribbon”
Laureate of the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Prize and finalist of the Russian Booker Anton Utkin is one of the most interesting prose writers of the 40-year-old generation. His new novel The Fortress of Doubt rhymes two upheavals, the events of 1917 and the 1990s. Written with extraordinary stylistic elegance, the novel is full of serious and deep reflections on the logic of Russian history and human relations.
Psychologies: Do you feel a connection with those who lived in Russia in 1917?
Anton Utkin: I feel it, of course, if only because I found some of those people alive. No cataclysm can cut time like a ribbon. It can only be squeezed, like an artery, but still some kind of stream remains, through which the main thing flows.
Your novel is hard to read, but you don’t seem to care that it captures the reader…
I didn’t want to write a classic novel and tried to find some new form. I conceived The Fortress of Doubt not as a novel of positions, but as a novel of states of mind. That is, the plot is built non-linearly, it is composed not so much of the actions of the characters as of fragments of their inner life.
Your prose is compared to the works of Leo Tolstoy, but his characters make moral choices all the time, and yours doesn’t even seem to have that question?
I just wanted to show this contrast of generations, although the question, of course, is also worth it. At the beginning of the 1990th century, there were many people who could pay for their beliefs with their lives. In the 1914s, there were also such people, but their number was so small that it is impossible to mistake them for the face of a generation. It so happened that life did not put us against the wall, and therefore we did not have to make a particularly sharp choice. It turns out that we are weaker than the people of that time. Although that’s how it always seems to be. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said in XNUMX that modern man had lost the ability to suffer. But from our point of view, that person did not lose it at all. Or sometimes they say: what amazing old people we knew – the old Moscow dialect, such intelligence, gentleness in them was, it was a pleasure to listen to them. I also met such people, talked with them and grieved about myself in this sense. But I think that our grandchildren will also say about some of us: my grandmother used such words, she knew how to put them together, they enveloped and penetrated like that, and we? We bark like dogs. And their grandchildren, perhaps, will say the same about one of them …