18 December 2025 – 5 January 2026
by Boris Akunin
Source: Facebook
18 December 2025
WHEN YOU KNOW
Anyone culturally Russian with even an incomplete elementary education knows what Anna Akhmatova’s poems grow out of.
A less commonly known quotation on the same topic belongs to Marina Tsvetaeva: poems grow, like stars and like roses, like beauty a family doesn’t need.
At base, both poets, who were the antitheses of each other, agree on one thing: poems spring up of their own accord.
A prose work is conceived differently. Because the average statistical prose writer is much smarter than the average statistical poet (and if the poet is smart, sooner or later he starts writing prose).
Literary prose does not spring up of its own accord. You have to plant it in soil and cultivate it long and hard. This isn’t your ‘rose-froze’, or ‘caber-saber’. Here you have to think, don’t you know. If a novel springs up in someone of its own accord, have no doubt that the hands of that Master are not golden and they grow from the same place they do on everyone who isn’t a master.
What prose requires is a trigger. I use that word intentionally. I like it for its unpoetic ring.
I should conduct a survey among writers I know about what cocks the trigger for them.
For me, personally, it all starts with a question that can’t be answered in plain speech. The most important and most difficult questions are all like that. What is love; what is life and death; does God exist and if he doesn’t is everything allowed; wherein lies the truth; which is stronger, a whale or an elephant, and so on.
If you’re going to answer a difficult question, you have to build a set, put characters on it who have undergone painstaking casting, choose your color filtres, install lighting, think through your effects. This isn’t even shooting a film, actually, its simulating an entire world. Because it’s real people acting in it, not actors. And if they don’t feel alive, if they remain actors, you’re not going to get an answer to your question from them.
I’ve just tallied up how many books I’ve written in the last 28 years. Eighty-eight, not counting the plays (which are essentially a self-indulgence). I had a lot of questions!
When they end and I’ve found answers to them all, I can yawn and go night-night. But if I don’t manage to answer them all, there’s samsara for that. Next time.
Source: Facebook
19 December 2025
A BLAST FROM THE PAST
From time immemorial, rulers in Russia could be divided up between those who imprison people and those who release them. When there were those who sometimes imprisoned and then released them (Aleksandr II, Nikolai II), things did not end well for them. Either way.
All history is like that: imprison-release, then imprison all over again.
We liberals like rulers who release. Because ‘liberty’ means freedom. And today we liberals have a gratifying anniversary.
I have an excellent memory, a writer’s memory. As the Soviet song went, ‘I even remember what didn’t happen to me’—and what did, I’ll never forget.
Here’s what happened to me in 1986. At the time, in my circles, endless intellectual discussions were going on about the new ruler, whether things would be even worse under him or things couldn’t get any worse so they would be better.
I’m thirty and I consider myself worldly. I tell everyone I know: nothing good is going to come of it, he’ll sugarcoat everything, don’t listen to him and don’t believe him.
And then all of a sudden my friend in the editorial office calls me and says in a trembling voice: ‘He released him!’ Who released who? I ask.
‘Gorbachev’. ‘Sakharov’.
(The call itself took place a couple of days before this, but it was announced on 19 December.)
This, oh children of the twenty-first century, was one of the happiest days of my life. No, I couldn’t bring myself to believe it, but for the first time, for the first time I allowed that, just maybe, in ‘this country’, something might change for the better someday and I would think about it as ‘my country’.
That was a long time ago.
(From My Calendar)
Source: Facebook
21 December 2025
I read that in Kyiv they decided to take down the monuments to Bulgakov and Akhamtova and rename some streets named after Russian cultural figures. I also read all the lamentations on the subject. I myself, though, experienced no particular emotions in this regard. Not even sadness. For me, that train left the station a long time ago.
What has been going on between Russians and Ukrainians for the last four years is much more terrible than bronze and stone. If they take them down, they take them down. That’s their business. Let the Ukrainians live however they want, let them read or not read whatever authors, just so my fellow Russians stop tormenting and killing them.
And the fact that our ways have parted and aren’t going to converge again, that’s very clear.
In some interview, I said that Russia is the last country on earth I’d like to find myself in. And, you know, Ukraine is the next-to-last. Even after the war ends, I’ll never go there. Because after what’s happened I couldn’t look the Ukrainians in the eye, despite all my antiwar declarations, basically a waste of breath.
And in general. Let’s get upset not over which monuments are being taken down in another country but over which monuments are now being raised in Russia.
Source: Facebook
23 December 2025
Russophilia is a product in rather short supply.
In the context of the general disarray and doldrums that have gripped the entire socium of those who’ve left—the internecine strife among political activists; the sharp drop in views of popular YouTubers; the nervous invective on social media; the gradual realization that people have left not temporarily but for a long time or even forever—there is one sole sphere of our life in which everything is okay and even better than okay. This gives me serious comfort. I’ve even stopped muttering the perpetual émigré mantra:
It’s good there’s no one, Good there’s nothing, So black, so dead, That it couldn’t be deader Couldn’t be blacker, That no one is going to help us And no one should.
Writing, publishing, and tamizdat are experiencing a genuine boom.
The Jews are called the People of the Book. And people of Russian culture (not to be confused with the people of the Russian dictatorship) might well be called the ‘people of books’. Whatever mind-boggling situation they’re in, they start writing books. And never stop reading books. Most important, there are people who publish those books.
I’ve been following this process with great interest. A year ago, only two publishers were represented on the Babook site, BB itself and Freedom Letters, and now there are already TWENTY publishers. All small, but independent and free.
New books are coming out every day. Manuscripts are streaming in spontaneously. A great many people who ‘left’ and who ‘stayed’ (but did not reconcile themselves to it) are now making sense of, or, as they now say, ‘processing’, their experiences through texts. Sometimes something quite brilliant turns up even.
I get the feeling (maybe distorted, I don’t know) that everything around me is rotting and disintegrating except for Russophone literature. Of course, there is also the asphyxiation effect—when the fresh air gets pumped out of the home country, it exits to us through a vent. (Manuscripts are coming in from Russia all the time, with the proviso that they be printed under a pseudonym.)
Here’s something else I like a lot. We book people aren’t at each other’s throat, we aren’t ‘spitting in each other’s soup’. We’re helping each other, publicizing each other, cross-pollinating.
There is at least some outpost of sanity and light among all this χθώνυ, forgive my Greek.
Source: Facebook
3 January 2026
And now Happy New Year for real. We all expected 2026 to be stormy, but it is off to a very brisk start.
I watch the news with a sense of the historic nature of the moment. The old rules of the world order we had grown used to over the last 35 years have been repealed for good. It looks like there’s a global free-for-all under way. For good or ill, I’m not about to predict, but we’re obviously not going to be bored.
Buckle up tight. The plane has entered a pocket of turbulence. It’s going to shake hard. Everywhere.
Source: Facebook
5 January 2026
The moment right now is such that everyone is discussing world politics—and rightly so. There is plenty to worry about. The life of each of us depends directly on these … (I omit the epithet) politics, unfortunately.
Many have written in the comments to my post about how the Venezuela incident completely repeals the old rules of the world order: nothing of the kind, they say, this kind of thing has happened before, and haven’t you (in the sense of I) overlooked the seizure of Crimea, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and so on?
I have not overlooked the seizure of Crimea, but Russia has never set international rules, it is a minor player, and it could be declared a pariah for violating the rules.
You aren’t going to declare the United States a pariah; that country has itself defined the rules of international conduct for an entire century. Now it has officially become like this: whoever is more powerful can do anything.
During its invasion of Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Yugoslavia, the American government garnered at least some international support. Now Trump doesn’t even need the support of his own Congress.
So this is a completely new situation. Its consequences have yet to be fully understood. We forget about the UN that it is clearly going to suffer the same fate as the League of Nations. Okay. Venezuela’s fate is ultimately a local problem. But what is happening in the United States is a problem of global significance. If America has changed, so will the whole world.
Obviously, Trump’s America First slogan should have been understood not as Country America first but as Continent America First: I’m going to do whatever I want on my continent, it’s my land.
This probably implies indulgence for other regional imperialists: you do what you want on your patch, too. We, the strong ones, can reach some kind of agreement.
One gets the general impression of sinking back into the history not even of the twentieth century but of the nineteenth. Not the Monroe Doctrine but the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ (I read it in a newspaper).
But you need to bear something else in mind. Donald Trump blows hot and cold and is incredibly feckless. He could just up and turn in some completely different direction.
And this may be the most important change of all. World politics has become unpredictable. Totally.
Source: Facebook
Translated by Marian Schwartz
