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← Back to all issuesGranta 30: New Europe!
Spring 1990
The year 1989, annus mirabilis, was the most important year in Europe since the end of World War Two. After 1989, Europe changed irreversibly, for better or worse. This special issue of Granta focuses on this crucial moment and projects itself into the possible future outcomes.
From this Issue
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Looking for Jiří Wolf
Graham Swift
‘The fact remains that when I did ask questions, I got the same response: genuine, not stimulated, ignorance. No one seemed to have heard of him.’
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The Borderlands
Neal Ascherson
‘Here is the forest. Not just a forest, but a puszcza: a Polish word that means a world of trees which have never been felled since the first bands of human beings arrived to hunt here.’
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Turia
Michael Ignatieff
‘Turia’s room is at the end of an aquamarine-tiled corridor in a mansion in Holland Park, built for a department-store millionaire before the First War and now used as a halfway house for mental patients.’
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The Death of Merab Kostava
Patrick Zachmann
Patrick Zachmann’s photographs from Tbilisi, Georgia, in Granta 30: New Europe!
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Centre of Gravity
Victoria Tokareva
‘For reasons I don’t want to go into, I decided to commit suicide.’
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Our Circle
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
‘I am afraid that my memory is confused about these events, the final events of my life, by which I mean what happened before I started to go blind.’
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Wedding Day
Yuri Ribchinsky
Yuri Ribchinksy’s photographs of a wedding for Granta 30: New Europe!
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The Siege of Leningrad
Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky
‘Alexander Ivanovich woke at six, the hour when radio broadcasting would normally have begun, but the radio had been silent for a month now.’
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Democracy
Joseph Brodsky
‘Nothing, really, Petrovich. That Georgian, you know, that foreign minister of theirs, says that half an hour ago, Himself announced at a press conference that democracy is being introduced here.’
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New World (Part Two)
Jonathan Raban
‘It was how Europeans had always seen American nature – as shockingly bigger, more colourful, more deadly, more exotic, than anything they’d seen at home.’
