Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 64: Russia: The Wild East
Winter 1998
This issue contains the voices of a people who have suffered under (and coped with) two of this century’s greatest experiments. With: fiction by Victor Pelevin and Andrei Platonov; Colin Thubron in Siberia, Masha Gessen on her grandmother, the censor; Vitali Vitaliev on the vodka escape, and more.
From this Issue
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Siberia
Colin Thubron
‘The faintly clownish name of Omsk raises light-hearted expectations.’
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Survivors
Angus Macqueen
‘In these circumstances man becomes like an animal: silent and bowed. You never said a word.’
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Moscow Dynamo
Victor Pelevin
‘That's why they're able to live like normal human beings, he thought, because they never forget about their duty. They don't spend all their time getting pissed like folks here.’
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Burying the Bones
Orlando Figes
’There are times when every nation needs to think a little less about its history.‘
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The Lost Boys
Anna Pyasetskaya & Heidi Bradner
‘If a star began to fall it meant that a plane was preparing to bomb.’
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The River Potudan
Andrei Platonov
‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’
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The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
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Peter Truth
Charlotte Hobson
‘Petya Pravda's dead. He died forty days ago, as elongated and translucent as an icon.’
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The Romanovs Come to Stay
Frances Welch
‘When I was a child I seemed to live in a fog of inattention which cleared only when I was alone.’
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Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
