1 -14 May 2026
by Boris Akunin
Source: Facebook
1 May 2026
Today, Dmitry Bykov will be answering readers’ questions in our BAbook book club.
I’ve already asked him my question there. You can too.
Source: Facebook
2 May 2026
Meanwhile, as oil prices are fluctuating wildly in response to news about the Strait of Hormuz, and someone is making billions from both price rises and falls, in Iran they are hanging those who took part in the winter mass protests, which foundered without support. The war began when the movement had already been crushed.
“For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it… Now you have a President who is giving you what you want,” said Trump, addressing the Iranian people.
Since then, over the past two months, more than twenty executions have taken place.
This is 17-year-old Matin Mohammadi (photo from The Times). It is reported that a confession to terrorism was extracted from him, and his court-appointed defence lawyer cooperated with the investigative authorities. The young man is to be hanged any day now.
Among the demands made by Trump’s representatives to Tehran, there is no mention of the fate of those sentenced. The Strait is incomparably more important.
Source: Facebook
3 May 2026
Let’s arrange another exhibition. Participants include those (I know there are many of us) who have come to enjoy experimenting with AI art.
The theme is ‘Lost Masterpieces’.
For my novel, I needed to create a painting by a world-famous master that never actually existed. I spent quite a long time on this task and really got into it. I really enjoyed being a world-famous master.
Are there any of you here who, like me, enjoy working in the style of the great artists?
Let’s create a museum of unknown masterpieces.
And if you’ve never played this game before, give it a go. You’ll love it.
Here, for example, is a lost Magritte painting. I’m returning it to humanity.
Source: Facebook
4 May 2026
Firefighters’ Day
(From ‘My Calendar’)
Not in the sense that you’ll catch fire today and have to call the fire brigade, but because today is quite officially International Firefighters’ Day.
It’s a special profession, and even more than a profession. It always has been and remains so to this day.
As a child, all the lads around me wanted to be cosmonauts, but I had retro dreams. Like the children of the nineteenth century, I dreamed of becoming a firefighter. No, I wasn’t planning on writing novels about the age of top hats and duels back then. It was simply that the Usachevskaya fire station was not far from my home, and I often walked past it. In the warmer months, grown men would sit in the yard playing dominoes non-stop, whilst a golden helmet gleamed with incredible brilliance on the table. Sometimes they’d climb the ladder to the watchtower and shout merrily. I wanted a job like that too.
Now, in Western Europe, where I live, firefighters do not merely extinguish ‘spontaneous combustions’ and arson attacks; rather, they arrive at the scene of any dangerous incident to provide emergency medical assistance, pull people out of the water, rescue a kitten stuck in a tree – in short, they save people from all manner of misfortunes. All the firefighters are tall, slender and very handsome. You look at them and think of noble knights emerging from the waters in a procession.
I suppose, if I were a child, I would dream of becoming a firefighter again.
A noble, pure and honourable calling: to save everyone.
Today we honour firefighters and pray that we will never need their help. Let them save someone else.
Source: Facebook
5 May 2026
My Art Discovery
The day before yesterday I launched the exhibition ‘Lost Masterpieces’. Everyone sent me AI-generated works by famous artists – the sort not found in museums, and I wanted to rectify this omission.
And so, happily browsing the comments on the exhibition (highly recommended, there’s plenty of interesting stuff there), I made an important discovery, a real breakthrough in art history.
Do you know what’s missing from the legacy of the great masters of the brush?
Cats!
And the demand for them is huge. And the exhibition participants have filled this gap. I’m only showcasing a fraction of this vast collection of cat art.
If there are any real (not AI) artists in my audience, take note. Don’t forget to paint cats! Otherwise, your descendants will paint them for you.
Source: Facebook
6 May 2026
A Question to Dmitry Bykov
The other day, Dmitry Lvovich Bykov answered questions from readers on our website. The first one was from me. I asked: ‘Which of your pursuits do you yourself consider to be the most important? Who do you feel you are, first and foremost? A prose writer, a poet, an essayist, a teacher? Or something else?’
D.B. replied:
“I like the word ‘writer’ — it encompasses all other definitions, including, incidentally, teaching. Of all writers, I respect poets most of all, because they do not create the work themselves, but merely relay it (‘I am merely a mouthpiece,’ as Brodsky said). But poets are either very good or utterly worthless, so this is a flattering yet dangerous identification. I can, however, say with full justification that my best works were written as a poet. It is as a poet I have accomplished the most significant work and made the most correct choices. And the rest of the time, I am all sorts of things — a driver, a parent, a person answering questions.”
I must say that I, too, value D.B. most of all as a poet. But the reason why you, Dmitry Lvovich, elevate poets to the highest category of writers raises a question for me. You will soon be coming to London; you will have performances and interactions with the public. Imagine that you have received a note from the audience.
‘Do you like (or find it flattering) to feel that you are not a composer, but a performer? Or even this: not a violinist, but a violin?’
Incidentally, we have quite a few creative people here [on this Facebook page]. How would you answer this question for yourself?
Source: Facebook
7 May 2026
It’s 25 years since Boris Ryzhy passed away. The other day, the internet delivered this poem to me – I started reading others and couldn’t stop for a long time. Like Lermontov, he lived to be just 26.
The little town I dreamed up and filled with people,
the little town over which I personally loosed the clouds,
is falling apart, for I lived by certain
notions, as if life were short.
The music cuts out, no matter how the musician tries.
The streetlights don’t come on, no matter how
the electrician's mate swears. Before our eyes
Standing in front of the mirror, beauty grows old.
The little town falls apart. My bad, guys,
I hadn't reckoned with that, but life goes on,
everything going to hell,
and what’s called ‘me’ is walking down
an autumn avenue, the wind whistling and howling,
and leaves swirling behind my back.
Городок, что я выдумал и заселил человеками, городок, над которым я лично пустил облака, барахлит, ибо жил, руководствуясь некими соображениями, якобы жизнь коротка. Вырубается музыка, как музыкант ни старается. Фонари не горят, как ни кроет их матом электрик-браток. На глазах, перед зеркалом стоя, дурнеет красавица. Барахлит городок. Виноват, господа, не учел, но она продолжается, все к чертям полетело, а что называется мной, то идет по осенней аллее, и ветер свистит-надрывается, и клубится листва за моею спиной.
Source: Facebook
8 May 2026
How interesting. I’m on the subject of AI again.
I’ve found another useful application for it. Or rather, a clever person taught me.
‘Upload,’ he says, ‘a long YouTube video of you speaking or being interviewed into the programme. Then ask it to list the speaker’s shortcomings, flaws and weak points – in other words, my weak points.’
I did so, feeling rather sceptical. I sent a link to a video lasting an hour and a half (a recent conversation with Katya Gordeeva).
The verdict came back a second later.
• Not a ‘practitioner’, but a ‘theorist’. A processor of ‘ideas, not people’ [Anyone can offend an artist].
• Underestimates emotional dynamics [It is what it is]
• Prone to generalisations that sound harsher than intended [Guilty as charged]
• A detachment that can be perceived as coldness [Interesting]
• avoids direct expression [I didn’t quite get that]
• low physical energy [Age is taking its toll]
• few sharp changes in intonation [Really?]
• limited gesticulation [So?]
Because of this, part of the audience may “disengage” emotionally. [Feeling a bit down]
All in all, there’s plenty to think about and work on. From now on, I’ll gesticulate freely and express myself as directly as possible, whatever that means.
If you have, for example, a long piece of writing you’ve done (an article, diary, correspondence or something else), I strongly recommend doing the same. Set a simple prompt such as: ‘List the author’s weaknesses. No flattery’ (the last bit is essential, otherwise it might start patting you on the back). You’ll get an unemotional, objective opinion.
Source: Facebook
9 May 2026
When I was a child, all my parents’ friends were veterans of the War. Although, it seems, that term hadn’t yet become commonplace. And no special honours were bestowed upon former front-line soldiers. There were simply too many of them. Victory Day was first celebrated with great pomp only in 1965; before that, it wasn’t even a public holiday.
I remember that 9 May well, because lots of guests came to our house to celebrate the new holiday – it was unusual. My parents and their friends were in their early forties. They laughed loudly, talked over one another, made jokes that weren’t very clear, and sang ‘La Cucaracha’ and ‘How Do You Do, Mr Brown’. They had all fought in the war, but, to my disappointment, they didn’t talk about their exploits or even mention the war at all; they only spoke of the pre-war days – all sorts of funny things. True, they took turns drinking a toast to all their friends who hadn’t returned, and this went on for a long time; I even got bored with it. I wanted them to start laughing and singing again. It was then that I first heard the strange expression ‘missing in action’. Some of them got drunk; it was interesting.
It was also back in ’65 that my parents split up, and after that we never had those noisy gatherings on 9 May again. That’s another reason why I remember that day so well. It’s stayed in my memory just like that – as The Victory Day. All the others have somehow blurred together.
I’m now much older than anyone who was there. And none of them are left now, not a single one. My mother’s last friend, a war nurse, died four years ago. She was a paediatrician and worked until she was in her eighties. She used to say: ‘You get such a burst of vitality from babies that I’m sure to live to be a hundred.’ And she did..
Source: Facebook
10 May 2026
Home Life Day
(From ‘My Calendar’)
On 10 May, we pay tribute to a wonderful phenomenon – home life – which in Russia has often come under attack from an overzealous state. Family cosiness and the simple joys of the table – these natural, human attributes of a happy everyday life – time and again proved to be an elusive luxury, or were even condemned as shameful mundanity, ‘philistinism’.
On 10 May 1831, the inspired and unforgettable poetess of domestic well-being, Countess Molokhovets, was born; she was the author of the great book A Gift to Young Housewives, or A Means of Reducing Household Expenses (1861), which, before the revolution, was owned by every self-respecting housewife. Elena Ivanovna was by no means a countess (that was a title invented by the marketers of the time to lend her greater respectability), but simply a talented practitioner, possessing incredible culinary ingenuity and a tireless work ethic. The latest editions of the famous book contained four and a half thousand recipes for ‘all manner of dishes’ and advice on ‘managing a varied supply of provisions’.
I remember how, in Soviet times, when there were difficulties with a variety of provisions, we would read aloud from a tattered copy of the pre-revolutionary book with a laugh: that unlike the ‘master’s table’, for ‘the people’ (that is, the servants) it was quite sufficient to make cabbage soup from ‘the foreshank or brisket’, even though neither could be found in Moscow shops.
The very name ‘Molokhovets’ evoked some sort of phantom pain in the homo sovieticus. The countess was meant to be despised. Even the remarkable poet Arseny Tarkovsky has an irritated, very weak poem:
Where are you, you writer, hardly salted, Molokhovets, you pathetic lackey? Где ты, писательница малосольная, Молоховец, холуйка малахольная?
Ah, Arseny Aleksandrovich, she remained in that fragile world for which you yearned all your life.
Elena Ivanovna died in December 1918, in Petrograd, of a heart attack – when the fragile world of domesticity was shattered to pieces.
Here’s to normality! Here’s to Countess Molokhovets! Be sure to cook something from her recipe book today.
Source: Facebook
11 May 2026
About Hobbies
I collect old books and have mentioned before that I really enjoy playing the amateur book detective: examining the coats of arms and bookplates of former owners, deciphering marginalia, and my favourite pastime – determining the year of publication if it is not specified (or if the title page is missing). My investigations are purely amateurish, but they give me immense pleasure. Especially when I get results.
This time the task turned out to be quite straightforward, but still enjoyable.
The seller, a professional by the way, couldn’t date the book – it’s the Omnium max pontificum, a directory of all the Roman pontiffs, with engraved portraits.
I put my thinking cap on. I deduced that whichever pope was depicted last in the book was the one under whose reign it was published. What a brain, eh?
The portrait of Aleksander VII (third image) is the last one, so the book must have been published between 1655 and 1667.
Moving on. The engraving is based on a portrait painted by Pierre Mignard in 1661 (this is easily verified via a standard Google image search). Therefore, the chronological range can be narrowed down: 1661–1667.
That is the date I have given, having had a lovely time doing so.
Source: Facebook
12 May 2026
Like everyone else, Facebook sends me what I posted on this day however many years ago. Since, as a writer, I love making predictions, some of these posts from the past fall into the ‘prediction’ category. It can be strange, or even frustrating, to read how you so confidently predicted something — and were wrong.
Here’s a post from 12 May 2017. I read it now and nod, thinking, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right.’ Until I get to the second-to-last paragraph.
The Forest for the Trees
Uvarov’s tripartite motto, ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality’, as we know, was developed as a sort of Russian response to the triad of the French revolution, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ (‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’). Nicholas I believed that the Russian triad would bring stability to the country and protect it from turmoil and revolt.
Putin’s Russia is taking the exact same approach as Nicholas’s, right before our eyes. Today’s societal ‘bonds’ sound no more ridiculous than the ‘buttresses’ of back then. The idea is the same: they hold up society and keep it from falling apart.
Circumstances and terminology have changed over the course of what is now nearly two centuries, but not the core meaning.
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ in today’s understanding means the three sacred values of Western civilization: freedom of thought and speech + democracy + empathy.
The triad ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ has undergone far less of a transformation, simply because of the fundamentally conservative nature of this ideological system.
Russia has gone back in time — and not to yesterday, but to the day before yesterday. In the Soviet Union, communism took on the role of ‘orthodoxy’; instead of ‘autocracy’ there was the supreme power of the Leader; and instead of ‘nationality’ there was chatter about the working class and collective-farm peasants as the ‘true masters of the country’. But now we’re back to the times of ‘Nicholas the Stick’ (Nicholas I).
‘Orthodoxy’ basically means what it meant in 1834: not faith or adherence to Christian commandments, but ideological conformity strictly enforced by the state and the Church. (In 2017, a Russian Court had just designated ‘denying Christ’ a criminal offence.)
‘Autocracy’ again means a ruler’s personal power, which is not limited by institutions.
As for ‘nationality’, the split between a docile, ‘people’ of folk art prints and troublesome ‘Chaadaevs’ has reappeared as a populism dividing the hypothetical patriotic workers of Uralvagonzavod and the ‘fifth column’. But the methods have remained the same: exploitation of base instincts, extremely vulgarized propaganda rhetoric, and distrust of enlightenment and education.
The moral argument for reactionary policies remains exactly the same, too: all the sacrifices are made in the name of stability, and to avoid a ‘Maidan’.
It’s interesting to note that none of the three components of the Russian motto can be replaced with any component of the other, newer motto.
‘Free thought, Autocracy, and Nationality’ wouldn’t work; everyone would immediately exclaim that the emperor has no clothes.
‘Orthodoxy, Democracy, and Nationality’ wouldn’t work, because fair elections and regular transfer of government power would quickly put an end to ideological conformity and an official party line.
And ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Fraternity’ doesn’t work either. In a state with forced ideological conformity, where the hierarchy reigns supreme, you won’t find any empathy. Every kind act is thwarted by bureaucracy, corruption of government officials, and suspicion of any unregulated initiative. That’s why anything such a state undertakes ends up being inhumane.
Clearly, an ultra-conservative structure can’t last long, because it hampers all progress — in thought, society, and education.
Even in the 19th century, when time passed much more slowly, Uvarov’s ideology lasted only twenty years, and we remember how it ended: with the Crimean disaster.
…Sure, it hasn’t been 20 years yet. But the traditional consolation of ‘One must live a long time in Russia’ is somehow not comforting.
I don’t even live in Russia, it’s true.
But for those who do, I can only re-share the picture from that post.
Source: Facebook
Translated by Nina dePalma, Oscar Seecharan and Simon Cosgrove
