Pushkin House and Natasha Rulyova are pleased to invite you to an online interview with the award-winning Russophone Avar author Alisa Ganieva. This will be the second event in our series of conversations with authors of Russophone literature. The event will be held in English.
Alisa Ganieva grew up in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, which is an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation, situated in the Northern Caucasus. After graduating from school in Makhachkala, she moved to Moscow where she enrolled in the Gorky Literary Institute to read literary studies. In 2009, her debut story Greetings to you, Dalgat, submitted under the male pseudonym Gulla Khirachev, won a literary competition for the authors under 25. In 2010, she was awarded the Triumph Prize in the Young Winner category. Since then, Ganieva has published three novels: The Mountain and the Wall, Bride and Groom and Offended Sensibilities, all of which have been translated into English by Carol Apollonio and published by Deep Vellum in the USA.
Her first two novels deal with Dagestan’s post-Soviet political and cultural complexity where the ideas of egalitarian Soviet education clash in unpredictable ways with post-Soviet Islamisation and the encroachment of western pop culture, in the context of corrupt local government, which is dependent on the Kremlin. Ganieva uses postmodern irony to adopt “various aesthetics and voices”, as was aptly noted by Aatif Rashid in The Kenyon Review (19 June 2018). In her texts, there is indeed an extraordinary polyphony of voices, speaking a variety of languages and dialects. Her characters often find themselves at crossroads of multiple clashing cultures, confused, muddled, perturbed, threatened and threatening. Her last novel examines life in an unnamed provincial Russian-speaking town. In it, she creates some Gogolesque characters who gossip and snitch on each other.
Ganieva haș also published a non-fiction book about Lilya Brik, an enigmatic woman who is primarily known for being admired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and living in a love triangle with him and her husband of many years, Osip Brik. Finally, Ganieva is an activist. She is adamantly against Russia’s war in Ukraine and makes her view heard on social platforms and in offline events.
Dr Natalia (Natasha) Rulyova is Associate Professor in Russian at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests spread across the areas of Russian literature, translation studies, post-Soviet media culture and genre studies.