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 166: Generations Online
Generation Gap
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
Generation Gap
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
Generation Gap
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
Generation Gap
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
Generation Gap
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
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 →