ONE OF THEIR OWN

Afanasy Mamedov, a Russian writer, was born and brought up in Baku before relocating to Moscow in the mid-1980s. His portfolio is diverse, encompassing not only numerous fictional works but also journalism and literary criticism. He was the publisher of Lehaim magazine from 2007 to 2016 and ran the Green Lamp column on the Labyrinth online bookstore portal in 2016-2022. He is a member of the Union of Writers of Moscow, the Russian PEN Centre (until 2018), and a finalist for various literary awards. His works have been featured in various magazines, including Friendship of Peoples, October, Znamya, and Novy Mir.

Mamedov’s prose is a poignant farewell to the empire and its former inhabitants. He portrays this not through grotesque caricatures or frozen stereotypes, but through vivid depictions of suffering, dramatic shifts in social roles, and diverse adaptations to new life. Many of Mamedov’s characters are thinly veiled representations of himself. This year, the renowned author from Baku was a part of the Russian delegation at the 9th Baku International Book Fair. Two of his novels, Frau Schramm and Steamship Babelon, have been translated into Azerbaijani and have strong connections to Baku.

"Nostalgia. What kind of a beast is it?"

"It's quite a serious beast, I would say, which is impossible to get rid of. Well, you don't need to get rid of it anyway. It's like a chronic disease; one must acclimate to it, learning to live each day to the fullest. It should not hinder us. Nostalgia might be a key component of human destiny, a fate. Especially for an artist, for whom nostalgia is not just a locus - a point in space to which a person is bound by fate, but also a starting point, the origin of origins. It’s no wonder we yearn for our childhood, our youth; we need a reference point and a sense of proportionality in our existence. We want to gauge how far we’ve come from the city of our birth, the city we left behind, the city we miss… But just as we find ourselves tinged with a gentle sadness for our homeland, we also yearn for our first love, which didn’t work out. And even if it did, it turns out that you loved a person who, after a quarter of a century, bears little resemblance to you, even though it seems that every morning he wakes up with you, serving you a cherished cup of steaming coffee. And you have to adapt to such changes. My words may seem like an absolute cliché, on one hand, and a fact that is dangerous for life, on the other hand: we cannot live without changes, and once we have changed, we start to feel sad. Nostalgia sets a certain tone, a certain way of being for years to come. It is part of our image, our portrait. All we have to do is not to fear it, but to exist in the flow of gentle sadness…"

"So, to some extent, you have adapted to nostalgia yourself, incorporated it into your own creativity, and you advise us to do the same?"

"You could say that. But I’m not urging anyone to follow my lead. Mainly because not everyone lives for art, not everyone consumes art. Some people are content with good weather. Some people need a broom in the corner. For an artist, art is a kind of pill that helps to exist, to see life from a perspective that is close to the soul, and to construct their reality. Or maybe we just see it all, and nothing more. This is not ruled out either. Buddhists say that all our life is a dream, an illusion, a deception." 

"Your birthplace plays a significant role in your works. Despite frequent flashbacks, your works, with few exceptions, remain future-oriented. How does that work? Is this a literary device?"

"The place of birth and creativity are directly related. A causal relationship, if you will. And it applies to everyone, not just artists. If we consider the idea that our lives progress in various directions at an equal pace, a concept that physicists have proposed, then the past and future interchange based on the observer’s perspective. This might explain why we, as if blind, occasionally feel as though everything was preordained before our existence."

"Are you talking about deja vu?"

"Yes, among other things. Children experience it more intensely than adults, and unlike adults, it doesn’t overwhelm them. As for a creative interpretation of nostalgia, I believe its presence is an essential trait of an artist. Perhaps that’s why my prose is dominated by the past. Almost all the characters exist in the past tense. I’m not sure if I understood the essence of sadness earlier, but I’ve always been drawn to the literature of the 'White Emigration'. Literature of immense human and civilizational loss. I’ve always been fond of it, especially one of its most prominent representatives, Vladimir Nabokov/Sirin."

"I believe this personal perception implies that each reader ‘hears’ something unique in any work they read. This is how individual preferences are developed… Do you feel the same way?"

"To some degree, yes. I believe Sirin's works contain much of the sadness I sought in my early youth, which I later discovered in Moscow. Every writer has their own ‘sad motifs.’ Each writer does the same things that have been done before them and will be done after them, but the ‘illumination’ is always different. And it doesn’t depend on the theme. For instance, Bunin, on the theme of first and last love, has one lighting, one angle, while Nabokov’s illumination on practically the same theme is portrayed in a completely different manner. As a result, the interplay of shadows differs."

"Short stories, novellas you just mentioned, is it merely a literary form and nothing more?"

"That’s an intriguing question… To be safe, I’d like to say yes, but in reality, it’s not. I anticipate your next question. I believe it’s not about volume, not about the size of a box in which you can fit the entire theme. Mainly because themes are never fully explored by writers. It’s about poetry, rhythm, musical structure. Some writers have short stories that are larger than their novels and novellas. I too, it seems, have stories that are larger than my novels. They are poetic. They’re mythic. They’re less pretentious."

"Yes, some of your pieces do have a poetic quality…"

"I could assert that I began as a poet, but that would likely be a falsehood. I immediately recognised the absence of a pure poetic gift, although in my first year at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute I studied at the seminar of Yevgeny Mikhailovich Vinokurov, who once told me at the end of the academic year: "Mamedov, if you don’t write in rhyme, I will ask you to leave my seminar." I believe I interpreted the maestro’s warning properly and transitioned to Yuri Vladimirovich Tomashevsky’s prose seminar. Once there, I made every effort to retain poetry in my prose."

"How did the new master react to your transition? Did you fit right into the class?"

"I was accepted immediately, albeit with caution. At the Litin Institute, transitions from one master to another were not particularly encouraged. There was a certain sanctity in the relationship between masters and students. But I am grateful to fate and, as it seems to me, poetry is present in my prose in a different dimension."

"What makes a short story, a novella unique?"

"Breathing. Warm breath. Musical structure. A unique musical structure. Then, perhaps, the images. The bind in which they fall. And how it happens is difficult to explain. And a novel is quite different… A novel is a human act. It’s an oil painting. When you can make several variants, correct it, re-prime it… When you finish a novel, you end up as a different person. Not fundamentally changed - but a person with new experience."

"As if you’ve lived through it?"

"Exactly! It’s as if you’re living a different life. You become a different person. It’s like having a new language. As if you spoke Russian and suddenly started speaking and reading English. I believe there are more fitting examples of soul maturation, possibly esoteric. It’s not worth delving into them in a single conversation."

"Speaking of languages… I think translating a work into another language gives it a different resonance. Your works have ‘survived’ translation. What happens to you in this case? With your works? What is lost or gained?"

"It’s hard to answer your question, as I was long considered an untranslated author, and then suddenly two of my novels were translated into Azerbaijani within a year. I’m referring to The Steamship Babelon and Frau Schramm. I must say that when I wrote Steamship Babelon, my life began to change along with me. And it did so rapidly. But that’s not always the case. When I wrote Frau Schramm, initially some ‘gates’ opened, but they were quickly slammed shut. Steamboat Babelon was published three months after I took it to the publisher, and just six months later, I found myself touring with my novel. A life began revolving around it. For which, of course, I am grateful to the novel. Here is an example of how not only the author changes, but also what happens around his work. It’s true that I haven’t yet gotten used to the fact that my two novels have acquired an Azerbaijani sound, but I can say that I am endlessly happy about it."

"A kind of qismət (fate), as we say?"

"I think that’s exactly right. Steamship Babelon is definitely a qismət! As to Frau Schramm… It is all about the fate of my grandfather, my grandmother Sara, the fate of Baku Jewry sewn into this book. And of old Baku in general. As if everything is woven into a braid…"

"Are the Baku of the time of your novel, the Baku of your youth, and the Baku of today three different cities? As a writer-creator, what unites them and vice versa?"

"Perhaps, I cannot answer straight away what separates them. The unifying factor for me is the connection with the past: the three cities are undoubtedly connected. And not only by streets and houses, but also by something that can be called vertical, celestial… But for all that, I don’t find the city I’m writing about, which keeps me afloat to this day. And this is also an interesting point that requires reflection. When I found myself in Moscow, one of my super missions was to preserve the memory of Baku of the last quarter of the twentieth century. I felt myself literally a chronicler, I felt then that my city (Baku) was rapidly sinking into the abyss of the past, although people close and dear to me were still alive. Frau Schramm is a novel-nostalgia, a novel-blues for the old Baku, the city that is about to disappear."

"But can a place disappear along with the city?"

"I was thinking about this during my flight to Baku: ‘If a city disappears, is there still a pulsation of place?’. I’ve seen a lot of disappearing cities. I have seen the ruins of Carthage, the Roman Forum, I was in Ephesus. There’s definitely still a pulsation. Some kind of incompleteness. Even in the stones of these ruins. But as for Baku… No, no, it is alive, just the frequency of existence has changed. My city has transitioned to another dimension."

"It seems like you're talking about a spiritual component. But what about the reality?"

"In reality, I can get lost in Baku’s new neighbourhoods. For me, Baku is the centre. Now I understand what Muscovites felt when they demolished whole districts of old Moscow. I know that. But there are also breakthroughs, the connection I mentioned above. Once I found myself in Beş mərtəbə and remembered how we used to go to the cinemas Vətən, Nizami, Azərbaycan and others. We used to walk through the bus and tram circle, where they had a terminus. When I inspected the place this time, there was a motorway instead! I felt as if I was lost in the forest."

"But you still consider Baku your hometown, don't you?"

"No, certainly not! Today, I feel a deep connection to three countries: Azerbaijan - Baku, Russia - Moscow, Israel - Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem… Living in the latter is particularly challenging. Every corner there has a story. And it’s unfinished. But Tel Aviv has already become a bustling metropolis, and so has Haifa, which feels very familiar to residents of Baku. I deeply feel this triple connection. It’s my ‘pattern’ of life, if you will."

"When does that first pause occur before the first word appears?"

"Your question is more about the psychology of creativity. It varies for everyone. But for me, the most crucial elements are probably the first paragraph and the last line. Everything in between, I’ll hammer out. If there’s already something, I mean a small form, it’s ALL there! Because the first paragraph sets the tone. It sets the ‘temperature’ of the piece. It’s an opportunity to be in front of ‘doors’. And the end of the piece is that sadness-nostalgia. It has many different guises… But it is always as if you are stepping over something. You find yourself at the door. And then suddenly you realise that the door isn’t in the wall, there’s no wall at all. It’s just a wall you thought you had. And then it all starts. Someone builds a plot, for some it’s a general formula for a piece. Someone draws the transitions, the arteries of the novel. It’s a bit like Leonard’s codices. I have a different way of doing it. As for Steamship Babelon, I was putting it off constantly until I began as if hearing the voices of my characters. This sign of a strange state of mind is the key to a piece’s success. And then, when the voices subsided, the piece began to grow. Then my grandfather Afanasy’s brother Joseph Milkin passed away, and his widow gave me his autobiographical book, in which I discovered the short story A Gift to the Commissar. It seemed to me to be written in a Borgesian vein. It contained these words: ‘As you know, in war, sometimes stories happen that you can’t just make up’. They captured me and became the key to the novel. The Polish gentleman, the estate, the regiment of horses… As if I saw it all before my eyes. Then appeared the first line of my story: ‘As if told you by strangers, a shot sounded in the gap between heaven and earth, and then immediately everything quieted down, and there was anxiety no more’. By the way, this line later moved to the seventy-third page."

"It seems that these days the readers do not learn how to use the proper language of literature, to understand it deeply. This is facilitated by the works of fiction that fill the literary space, especially on digital platforms."

"Your words has a certain degree of truth only. It is true that the modern Russian language is losing volume and depth. But it is also losing them because we are on the brink of great changes: we need to preserve the old language while preparing a new one, going hands in hands with the time. Since the world is now a complete mess, we cannot count on a voluminous and coherent language, except to maintain the old with the help of reading books."

"We can often hear about a mosaic thinking of people around us."

"Mosaic thinking is not the final verdict on modern man. It can be cured by authentic examples of literature, black-and-white cinema from the 1960s, and so on. It is about overcoming oneself, about the desire to constantly grow."

"Is it possible for a real writer to both preserve himself and play along with the modern reader, whose ability to assimilate complex things today is in great doubt?"

"I have often had amazing meetings with amazing people in my life. I remember when Mario Vagras Llosa came to Moscow. A living classic of Latin American literature, a friend of Cartasar, Marquez, and Fuentes. A legendary man, you might say. I decided I had no right not to meet him. I just had to hear what he would say. I was expecting him to say something that would be a message to me. I did not realise then that the very meeting with him was already a teacher's advice. Noble grey hair, shining black shoes, elegant corduroy trousers and a bright jumper... And what an officer's poise he held himself!.... The way he spoke... He seemed to glow with the world of Latin American literature, but not a single cherished word, nothing that could serve as my motto, affirmation. And yet it happened. Someone from the audience asked the maître a question, the answer to which became a life-long advice for me. And maybe it will be in some way the answer to your question as well. Llosa said that today most writers write so that it would be easier to translate their novel or make a film based on it, whereas a writer has only one condition to fulfil - to write a novel as it appeared to him once. Those were the very words I was waiting for him to say, the words I heard from the other shore. That's how I try to write..."