Sergei Lebedev is a Russian author, journalist, and editor. He has written five novels, four of which deal with the Stalin era and the consequences of the totalitarian regime for today’s Russia.
Lebedev will be holding this year’s keynote speech, Literature as a Political Tool: Born as a mass phenomenon in the XIX century, when the Russian Empire was rapidly conquering the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russian literature bears the hidden traits of this conquest, serving as a bard of colonisation and an instrument of it. The privileged treatment of the Russian language meant linguistic expansion and the erasure of cultural identities. Selectively incorporated into the Soviet project, the Russian classics became a core of Soviet cultural imperialism, while the Russian language played a double role of Sovietization / Russification. What is the way to rethink Russian literature today?
You have participated in several geological expeditions, including to Siberia. Are there any similarities between the geologist’s quest and the writer’s?
Geology works with time and pressure (my favourite quote from Shawshank Redemption). Geology works with substances that have been transformed by time and pressure. Transformed not just once – three, four, five times. This is a perfect parallel to Soviet history, because the USSR was constantly rewriting its history, denying the past and declaring a new future.
Besides, the search for minerals is like a thrilling hunt. You cannot rely on professional skills alone. Intuition, luck and a sixth sense are also important. You are like a detective looking for what happened hundreds or thousands of millions of years ago, following the traces of mineral veins in the landscape, in the river sand and in the pebbles, reading the book of creation. A perfect school for writers and detectives!
We can’t open a newspaper, turn on the TV or listen to the radio without hearing news about the war in Ukraine. How does it feel to be a Russian writer in exile and be confronted with all this?
The war actually began eleven years ago with Russia’s military annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine. There was no harsh and truly strong response from either the Russian opposition or the international community. But the Russian’s responsibility is much harder. We underestimated Putin and somehow downplayed the threat.
Some of my family members were forced to leave Russia one hundred years ago, during the Civil war. So, it can be described as a feeling of a wasted century, dramas without lessons.
Do you have any exciting projects in the works that you can tell us about?
I am planning to write a documentary novel, based on archival criminal cases and field research, will trace the fate of my great-uncle, executed during the Stalin repressions, and explore the interconnection between state violence and historical amnesia in Russia, resulting in a fertile ground for the next circle of violence, and will contribute to a better understanding of Russia`s inability, in the words of Teodor W. Adorno, “to work through the past.”
What are you looking forward to at Lillehammer and the Norwegian Festival of Literature 2025?
Meeting with readers and colleagues. I am looking forward to presenting my texts in Norwegian for the first time (many thanks to Ingunn Linde who did the translation). And maybe, if there is enough time, I would like to see the rock paintings at Drotten. I am an admirer of prehistoric drawings; they have such a special primal energy and universal visual language. It is like having the opportunity to see an art in its cradle.
Tickets to the Keynote Speech can be purchased here.
Photo: Jane Lezina