Sign in to Granta.com.
Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
Ivan Chistyakov
Translated by Arch Tait
‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’
Granta 167: Extraction Online
You Are the Product
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
You Are the Product
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
You Are the Product
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
You Are the Product
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
Two Poems
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Ivan Chistyakov
Ivan Chistyakov was a Muscovite who was expelled from the Communist Party during on the the purges of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway, which was built by forced labour. He was killed in 1941.
More about the author →Translated by Arch Tait
Arch Tait (www.russianwriting.com) has translated 30 books from Russian, and short stories and essays by many of today's leading Russian writers. His translation of Anna Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia was awarded the inaugural PEN Literature in Translation prize in 2010. Most recently, he has translated Mikhail Gorbachev's The New Russia (2016).
More about the translator →