During his career as a novelist, critic, historian, and professor, Russian satirical writer and dissident Yuri Druznikov has been called everything from a “traitor of the Motherland” to the “Best speaker of the Bibilona theatre in Mantova Literary Festival”. He is a man of letters with idiosyncratic views, perceptive and put with wit and grace. Druznikov is the internationally recognized author of a diverse body of books that includes well-known Informer 001, provocative Contemporary Russian Myths: a Skeptical View of the Literary Past, the Alexander Pushkin psychobiography Prisoner of Russia. The exciting satirical novel Angeli Sulla Punta di uno spillo (Barbera Editore) has been named one of the 10 best Russian novels of the XX century by the University of Warsaw and the best contemporary novel in translation by UNESCO. His novels Passport to Yesterday and Madonna from Russia have been published in London. Blacklisted in his homeland for 15 years Yuri Druznikov survived Stalinism and endured censorship and KGB harassment before immigrating to the USA in 1988. Now he teaches at the University of California and lives with his wife Valerie in Davis. They have two adult children. He is also Vice President of International PEN-club (Writers in Exile section) — the World organization of writers and journalists. His last novel There is not here has just been translated in Italy by Barbera Editore with the title of Là non è qua. Here is an interview with the author, who has also written sf.



There is not here, now translated in Italian as Là non è qua, is an extraordinary gallery of characters. Are there true stories, as it seems?


I am a novelist. It usually means you may see 50 characters at 500 pages and long funny history of each hero depended of others in a plot, like in my satirical novel Angeli Sulla Punta di uno spillo. I lived hal f of my life in the Soviet Union and the other half in America. In a new book of very short anecdotic stories Là Non è qua (Barbera Editore) I realized that some persons I met in Russia and in America are so comic or strange that for each such personality it would be enough for a special novella, but very short. One can read this story in a train or in a car waiting for his girlfriend and then to retell her. Of course, the stories are true, but humor is supposed to be extracted from life like a cup of espresso from a portion of Lavazza coffee and — served to you. I love to do both: stories and espresso.

How close or how far do you feel to Russian XIX literature? And did you get inspired by Gogol' in your style?

You ask the writer who is a professional philologist like, for example, Umberto Eco (however we are deeply different). I teach XIXth century Russian literature for my students and published several books on it (including “Russian Myths: a Skeptical view of the Literary Past” and a trilogy on Pushkin political iconization in Russia). But for me it’s a kind of foundation pot altogether with the full spectrum of all European literatures of the XIXth and the XXth centuries. And I hope I am building my own window in the literature of the XXIst century. Coming to Gogol', I love him. He was twice a genies because he could hardly graduate from high school. But for me there were many more teachers. Angry Russian Saltykov-Shchedrin who said “We live better because we are suffering more”, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Mikhail Bulgakov, Chesterton…

Some stories look to be under a "fantastic" inspiration. How close do you feel to sf, fantasy or fantastic literature?

If you open my Works in 6 Volumes published in America, you will see some sf, and some mystic, and fantastic stories with characters from unknown worlds. It was written when the author was younger and experimenting. Now I need fantastic situations with real characters to put them into a paradoxical pool or exaggeration and to see what will happened.

Do you know Italian writers? If yes, who do you think could be close to your style?

Half a century ago in Moscow, in my student years, I wrote a paper on Giuseppe Parini’s satirical poem of dark ages. Studies on Italian literature have always been deep and serious among Russian scholars even in the Soviet Union, but censors called them sometimes “bourgeois literature.” Later I could not expect that in my own biography I will repeat Parini’s steps. Like him, I was a teacher, a newspaper editor, a poet, and then a university professor. Fate! I like Italo Calvino’s irony in his short stories, and we both wrote critical essays on literature in the eighties. Melania Mazzucco and I close because there are emigration problems to the US at her novel Vita (Life). It was interesting for me to compare survival stories by Primo Levi with reminiscences of my characters, Soviet ‘zeks’, e.g. prisoners. And I am a critic of corruption and mafia like Leonardo Sciascia. By the way English translation of Italian Literature sounds perfect.

You've been translated in Italian. Do you think your sense of humor could be understood?

Last year I was invited to talk in “Bibiena” theater at Mantova Literary Festival. There were 700 people, and they were laughing for two hours. It seems to me that sense of humor is in genes of Italians and in my genes too.

Humor, literature and the society might change consequently. How close can the relationship be?

The relations are always at risk. I am laughing at my friends or political leaders. My readers are happy, but my friends do not call me anymore, and leaders do not invite me for a lecture into their meeting. Can a writer change reality with his works? Mostly nowadays, in a world tending to buy new refrigerators, where people have less and less time to read and think? I used to be sure that a writer can’t. There was a socialist myth: literature can create “a new man of new epoch.” And the result was only negative. I came to a primitive conclusion: I thought I wrote — you read; if you liked it you had pleasure, if not — not. Every good writer has his/her own circle of readers, kind of friends or even distant relatives of this writer. But recently students were reading my new picaresque satirical novel (in English, but gonna to be published in Italian): “Madonna from Russia, or A Golden Crown for my girlfriend.” By the way I wrote in it about my students, especially girls who came to the lectures dressed in T-shorts with idiotic slogans, in sleepers, and were sitting in class as if they were in a gynaecological chairs. Girl-students were indignant at the author, wrote critical assays. But the next day at my lecture they all were sitting in class dressed perfectly well, shoes with high hills, ear rings, hair style like stars in Hollywood. So a writer sometimes can influence reality!

USA and Russia. You seem to think the two countries are not so different, isn't it?

They both are subjects for my satire and laughter. The percentage of fools is equal in both countries. I do not have statistical figures on drunkards (they sleep at home in America unlike in the streets in Russia). But the more I live in the US (20 years) the clearer I understand the difference. Russia is still a police state. So called “The KGB Party” manipulates the country. And for stability and democracy I think Russia needs from 50 to 100 years of slow development.

The best aspect of USA on your opinion.

My independence here. No any kind of control in California on what I am saying and writing as you may see in There is not here!

The best aspect of Russia, still on your opinion.


Deep cultural history and in different periods, like Silver Age in the beginning of the XXth century, blooming literature, and art, and music of world significance. Some foreign philosophers say that political pressure and totalitarism useful, helped to develop productive underground. But I’d prefer real democracy in US or Italy.




home