On Tuesday Russia’s best-selling novelist Guzel Yakhina presented her third novel, “Train to Samarkand” (Eshelon na Samarkand), in an online press conference.
Yakhina took Russia’s literary world by storm in 2015 with the publication of her first novel “Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes.” It won the Yasnaya Polyana and Big Book awards, was translated into over 30 languages, and was made into a television series.
Both “Zuleikha” and Yakhina’s second novel “My Children” explore some of the most traumatic episodes of early Soviet history while shining light on the unique experiences of Russia’s ethnic minority communities.
“Train to Samarkand” continues to focus on the country’s painful past. It tells the story of orphaned children evacuated from Russia’s Volga-Ural region during the famine of the early 1920s, also known as the Povolzhye famine.
English-language edition of «Zuleikha» Wikimedia Commons
“Difficult but compelling”
When Yakhina set out to write a new book more than two years ago, she thought the topic would be the “dreams and difficult childhood” of orphaned children in Tatarstan’s island town of Sviyazhsk. But, she said, “As I was diving deeper into the topic and the history of the early 1920s, I realized that the civil war and the famine defined the lives of everyone back then.»
And so, the famine, which took the lives of over 5 million people, became the “invisible but central character” of her novel.
Yakhina presents «My Children» at the 20 Moscow International Fair Non/fiction. Wikimedia Commons
