Sara Jolly

10 October 2024

by Sara Jolly

Sara Jolly reviews Living No Lie: A Russian Diary: 2021-2024 by Artem Mozgovoy, Paperback £14:58, pp498, September 2024, available from booksellers, including Amazon. NB The author donates all his proceeds from the sale of this book to support for Ukrainian war refugees

The writer of these diary extracts, Artem Mozgovoy, had a difficult start in life. Born in 1986 and growing up gay in a small town in Siberia, he experienced constant verbal and physical abuse, not just from society in general but from his own father. In the introduction to the diary he describes how he made five unsuccessful attempts to ‘get out of my thorny nest to three different countries. Over and over again I was thrown back to Siberia, my point zero (or far below)’. Eventually, spurred on by the passing of new anti-gay laws in 2012, he managed to leave Russia. ‘I shouldered my way into a small European country by joining its free university (my third by then), studied well enough to receive the scholarship, learned the impossible Luxembourgish language …’  Meanwhile he was writing his first novel, Spring in Siberia, commemorating his first romantic love, but also his love for his mother and grandmother. He decided to write it in English: ‘By what better means can a writer denounce his country than by abandoning its language?’ He also wrote the diary under review in English, and at first his slightly laboured language grated on my ear like a violin that is marginally out of tune. However, I quickly got used to it, and even came to appreciate it as an entirely appropriate idiom for reflecting the world ‘as seen by one displaced, non-native English speaker’. He spent two years writing Spring in Siberia, and five years editing it. After receiving 49 publishers’ rejections, he impulsively sent the manuscript to Stephen Fry, who endorsed it. Within a month he was offered a publishing deal in the USA. One of the threads in these diaries is his continuing struggle to see the book through to its eventual publication in April 2023. 

I must admit that I found Going Home, the first 70-page section of the diary, rather hard work. On his first visit to Siberia for three years, Mozgovoy is feeling depressed and more than a little sorry for himself. The entry from 24 June 2021, written in his home town of Kemerovo, sets the unremittingly gloomy tone. ‘Flat, this whole world is flat Asian wasteland. Dirty grey, dust-full and dull …’ He is picked up from the bus station by his friend Yana, in a ‘sparkling white premium Mercedes … Within ten minutes she [is] condemning racism against white people in South Africa. Within twenty … explaining that climate change is a hoax and coronavirus was invented by eco-terrorists. That’s what I call a friend. Here. Here in this hundred-percent monocultural and monolingual country where nearly all vote for Putin and praise Trump, people like Yana are the most liberal kind you can hope to meet’. Yana drops him off at the central department store, where, for the past twenty years his mother, an indigenous Siberian, has rented a stall, selling little ‘Chinese’ trinkets which she makes herself. There she sits, all day, every day, enveloped in a cloud of toxic vapour produced by the burning of incense sticks. Approaching the stall, Mozgovoy tenderly observes his mother’s ‘tiny figure, her Asian features somewhat diminished since her hair turned white – white, since I saw her last time. Mother focuses her nearsighted eyes on me … puts on her glasses … She doesn’t move, doesn’t smile, doesn’t understand … Am I a vision? Am I some other pale and tired little person who looks just like her son? …  Finally we hug and it’s all good’. His reunion with his father does not go so well. ‘Silently we hug but there’s no warmth passing between our two bodies, it’s more like two sacks of bones bumping into each other awkwardly.’ The relentlessly depressing and bitter tone continues. Even an entry that begins promisingly, with ‘The sky is clear and full of swallows … all is well, all is fresh’ is rapidly undercut by the observation that ‘in the distance two red and white pipes stream brownish clouds nonstop … the whole city [of Kemerovo] is being covered with the blanket of cancerous toxins.’    

Nevertheless, I am very glad that I persevered with my reading, as the diary becomes increasingly rewarding as events unfold.

In Part II – Exiles and Returns, Mozgovoy, fresh from his alienating visit to Siberia, meditates on what ‘home’ means to him. Although he will always be grateful to the tiny country of Luxembourg, his gateway to Europe, he has never been as depressed as he was during his time there. In order to achieve EU citizenship he had to spend five years without a break in Luxembourg, take ‘integration’ courses and pass the Luxembourgish language exams. Failing to find his place in the ‘tiny country of bankers, clerks and farmers’ he moved to Brussels with his boyfriend. Not all was plain sailing even there. To serve in cafes or shops, he needed to be able to speak Flemish as well as French. Even in this socially liberal country – one of the first to legalise same-sex marriage – there were other setbacks. Mozgovoy and his boyfriend found a tango class where gay couples were welcomed. Poignantly he writes, ‘At thirty-three I finally danced with the man I loved, for the first time’. But the journey to the class involved running the gauntlet of hostility from young Arab immigrants sitting outside Moroccan cafes on either side of the street.  

It is a bitter irony of fate that this diary really blossoms after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Mozgovoy now throws himself into volunteering activities as two thousand refugees arrive in Brussels daily from Ukraine. He meets Svitlana, a maths teacher from Bucha, whose elderly parents adamantly refused to leave with her. The pair, aged 78 and 82, finally crawled out of the ruins after part of a blown-up tank fell on their house and are now ‘on their way here’. Svitlana and her parents, Maria and Mykola, emerge as  vividly-drawn characters who dominate the remainder of the diary. Mozgovoy is a gentle soul, and a soft touch – no match for the tough and resourceful Svitlana, who soon has him running around like her personal secretary, as he wryly says. Svitlana cajoles Artem into driving the family to Paris, squashed into his small car. ‘ “My parents need something beautiful in life! Life must go on! We must  keep on living!” ’ While the old people doze in the back of the car, Svitlana keeps up a non-stop monologue, brilliantly captured by Mozgovoy. There are comic moments, such as when Maria, sitting on a bench outside the petrol station where they have stopped to refuel, breathes deeply, eyes closed. 

‘ “Is everything alright?” I asked the old woman. “Oh, my dear … The air is so good here! So fresh and sweet!” “Here?” I looked at thousands of cars speeding on the highway. “By the gas station?” ’  

Mozgovoy drops the family off by the Eiffel Tower and picks them up there several hours later. Svitlana opines that the Tower is overrated – “but I took a bus number 30 all the way to a Lidl to buy some real French products. That was great!” 

The elderly parents are as modest and humble as Svitlana is brash and exasperating, and they become a surrogate family for Mozgovoy. While he is taking care of both Ukrainian refugees and Russian friends who have fled after the invasion, preparations continue for the publication of  Spring in Siberia. He makes two promotional trips to America on borrowed money. His adventures there border on the farcical. Sans credit card, sans car, he is regarded as a freak of nature. ‘It’s only me and the mad that do not drive here.’ Sleepless in Seattle, he goes for an early morning walk and encounters local homeless people. His striking red footwear is admired. ‘“Those shoes are sick, bro. Where did you get them?” “Those are just some dead man’s shoes from a flea market”. “What’s the name on them? What’s the brand?” ’ 

Americans simply cannot understand why he doesn’t have a credit card. ‘“Is it because you’re a communist?” “Because you don’t want to use things made of plastic?” ’. In Los Angeles his landlady, Rita, a ‘vivacious, sharp and elegant octogenarian’ first tries to rip him off and then propositions him. Mozgovoy flies back to Brussels and his ‘very own family from Bucha’ with a huge sense of relief.  

As the new year of 2024 approaches, and the diary draws to a close, Svitlana goes to Kyiv to spend the holiday with her soldier son, leaving her parents in Brussels. Mozgovoy visits them.  ‘Alas! The table was heavy with salted fish, fried potatoes and extremely sweet, bizarre alcohols of all colors’. On his way home afterwards Mozgovoy finds himself thinking nostalgically about ‘how similar these gatherings at Mykola and Maria’s were to the evenings I used to spend with my own grandmother, my uncles and aunts in Siberia. The same warm embraces, the same tearful eyes … the same indigestible foods and revoltingly sweet drinks.’

 A few days later, on holiday in a borrowed apartment in an empty Venetian palazzo, the very ‘garret’ where he started writing Spring in Siberia ten years earlier, Mozgovoy learns by email that he has won the $2000 Bo Huston Prize. The award would enable him to publish the diaries. But Mozgovoy faces a moral dilemma. He writes for advice to his Ukrainian friends, to his mother and his partner. ‘Should one publish books about the war that is still ongoing? Books subjective and rough like this bare wire of a diary?’  We, the readers of this diary, must be grateful that Mozgovoy’s friends and family encouraged him to publish. These vivid, painful and tender insights are a valuable testament to the countless lives of exile and displacement being lived out currently in the heart of today’s troubled Europe.