13 – 19 January 2026
by Boris Akunin
Source: Facebook
13 January 2026
‘Speak not in sorrow. They are gone, but we are grateful they were’.
Two years without Lev Rubinshtein.
Anyone who was lucky enough to meet him knows that friendship with Lev was akin to an addiction—if you hadn’t seen him for a long time, withdrawal set in. After I found myself in emigration, I treated my craving with correspondence.
Here is an excerpt from Lev’s very last letter.
‘As for reading the news, I’ve come to notice that I’ve gradually wearied somehow of reacting emotionally to the unremitting stream of horrors. I’ve started to see it all as something more akin to nightmares.
My psyche itself is blocking my imagination and strong feelings like empathy or, its opposite, righteous indignation. This is very bad, I know. But it’s also inevitable given the prospect of going mad.
As to “going mad”. From social media and isolated quotations from different statements by different people, it’s easy to notice that insanity (the real thing, clinical) has been overtaking a wider and wider circle of the people speaking and writing. Sometimes you simply cannot believe your own eyes.
Especially when it comes to public figures. You get the feeling that a great many have simply lost their footing, their bearing. And so they snatch at whatever comes to hand. And snatching at the skirts of the regime is the first thing unconditioned reflex suggests.
What else can I tell you? Winter has come here. In earnest and for a long time, apparently. It’s Saturday now. Morning. I’m looking out the window. I see a nearly deserted street splattered with classic Moscow slush and a fat ginger cat lazily making its way across, in no hurry. No cars, fortunately. Yet. There, it’s crossed, thank god. I don’t have to follow its treacherous trajectory nervously and anxiously’.
As far as I can tell, the ginger cat crossed the street in the same place where a car would hit Lev.
Source: Facebook
15 January 2026
‘I felt it was time for me to write a book cut not according to one of the standard prêt-à-porter templates, that is, not belonging to some existing genre, but one sewn to my own present-day measurements that won’t be too tight or too loose anywhere. To write any way my soul moved me. A soul can be sad and it can be cheerful, it can be serious and playful, misanthropic and philanthropic. My book is a journey toward myself. It will be exactly like I myself am’.
This is from the foreword to Ego-Prose, my new work. It continues the Genres series, in which I experiment with genre literature. Twenty years ago, I began with traditional genres, trying to derive a formula ideally agreeable to me for each: ‘children’s book’, ‘spy novel’, ‘fantasy’. Then I began inventing my own genres: a computer game novel Quest; an Octopus novel Sulazhin; a literary erector set novel LEGO; and a wiki-prose Two Taos. Basically, a writer is an overgrown child. Just what won’t he do to entertain himself to keep from being bored.
Now I’ve invented a genre for me personally. It’s an arbitrary combination of essay, fiction, and documentary prose. I’ve tried something similar before (for example, A Russian in England) but have never before turned inward to such a degree.
In other words, I’m warning you so you don’t complain later: it’s not especially entertaining reading. You see, even the cover corresponds.
More than likely, this is just the first book in the ego-prose genre, which I like very much. I don’t know whether my self-scrutiny will be useful to readers, but it is very much so to me. The writer is a being that makes sense of everything that exists (and even has never been) using little letters.
And we do have something to make sense of. If only life lasts long enough.
(By the way, those who follow my ‘Main Questions’ survey will discover a few of them in this book.)
The book happened to come out in print before it did as an e-book or audiobook. This is because our printer is very good and works fast.
Paldies, dārgā tipogrāfija. Jūsu grāmatas ir patīkami turēt rokās.
Source: Facebook
15 January 2026
Today’s post is from Lilyana, the widow of my institute friend Revaz Uturgari, an Iranist by education. Rezo spent his adult years flying in the sky. He was a balloon pilot. Two years ago, he crashed. This is not about him, though, but about Iran, which Rezo knew well and loved.
I’m posting it here so that Iran can be a little closer to you.
Source: Facebook
16 January 2026
I am anxiously following Iranian events as well because this is a highly likely scenario for the Russian future.
The Russian Federation has two paths left: either ‘Western China’ (turning into a Chinese dominion); or ‘Northern Iran’ (an Orthodox juche). Under the latter option, the rot might linger for years and even decades (although in Russia the latter is highly improbable), but ultimately collapse is inevitable. The ‘arestocratic’ country, which lives by prohibitions alone, is gradually rotting away.
Here is my question.
Has it ever happened that a regime maintained on violence collapsed from mass protests without a schism in the security structures? We’re not seeing that in Iran—just as we didn’t during the mass Belarussian protests. The security structures stood firmly behind Lukashenko, and he held on.
In Iran, in 1979, the Shah’s regime fell only when battles between the guard and armed forces units began.
Has it ever happened in not-too-ancient world history that a dictatorship was brought down simply by an unarmed people? Is that even possible?
(The East European revolutions of 1989 are something different, anticolonial. Maidan, too—there was no years-long police dictatorship in Ukraine.)
Source: Facebook
17 January 2026
Yesterday, I, like many people, was stunned to see the photograph of Trump with someone else’s medal, and I thought how ashamed Americans must be of their president’s ridiculous acts.
And suddenly I understood that I had never felt ashamed of Putin’s much more disgraceful acts. Just as in days of old I had not been ashamed of Brezhnev or Chernenko. I hadn’t elected those monsters. No one had. To be ashamed of a ruler who was foisted on you by force or crookery is rather strange. Wince—yes, but be ashamed of him? What on earth for? I don’t think even the Belarussians are ashamed of their ‘old man’, just repulsed.
I was ashamed of the 1990-1991 version of Gorbachev, when he started getting all fidgety and restless. Because before that I was ‘high on perestroika’ and was very pro-Gorby.
I was very ashamed of Yeltsin when he danced, conducted, and counted snipers. In the beginning, he was definitely my president. Then he became what he became.
It seems to me that you can only be genuinely ashamed of yourself—of something you yourself had a part in.
But Donald Trump is a leader democratically elected by Americans. America’s choice. And that is reason for a national face-palm, of course.
Source: Facebook
19 January 2026
19 January
GENIUS AND PIGGERY
These two things are actually quite compatible. Among geniuses you often encounter monsters, chosen ones that can only be loved at a great distance and preferably many years after their death.
Today is the anniversary of all the geniuses who outraged their contemporaries and delighted their descendants, the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). Compared to him, even Byron and Esenin were restrained men with a highly developed sense of social responsibility.
Edgar repaid the family that had taken in and raised the poor orphan and loved him like their own son with rank ingratitude.
The disgraced youth was expelled from university for his card debts.
From military service for violating discipline.
From his newspaper job for alcoholism.
He swore to his fiancée that he would stop drinking—and the night before their wedding got hammered. The wedding did not happen.
When a good man who believed in Mr. Poe’s talent promised to satisfy all his desires—carte-blanche for any creative work, material sufficiency, and a room—and sent him travel money, the writer took the money but never did come. He died during yet another bout of drinking, with the DTs.
This would have been an extremely bad, even shameful fate in the spirit of ‘he lived in sin and died laughing’, had utterly captivating words not been born in Edgar’s dissolute head and through his alcohol-soaked brain. Time passes, and only this magic is important.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!
For the genius it shall be lifted. Because he is a genius and everything else is a chimera.
(A page from My Calendar)
[The author quotes from a translation of The Raven by Konstantin Balmont – ed.]
Source: Facebook
Translated by Marian Schwartz
