CLAUDE.AI — "WHAT WILL SAVE RUSSIAN LITERATURE"
An interview with Mikhail Shishkin for the "Radio Dolin" channel
Interviewer: Anton Dolin (critic, film reviewer, host of the "Radio Dolin" podcast)
Location: Switzerland (Shishkin's place of residence)
PART I
An extremely detailed retelling with literary treatment — in the first person of Mikhail Shishkin
Anton asks me — has it become easier to find words for what's happening around us? A strange question. I look out the window at the Swiss mountains, at this cozy peace that almost feels like an insult — and I think about how the last time we spoke was in Moscow, recording an interview at his place, and it wasn't many years ago, but on a different planet, in a different century, in a different universe. Although, in reality, not that many years have passed.
I remember how I once marveled: how was it possible that from 1917 to 1937 the country changed so dramatically? The spring of '17 — the freest country in the world. Women got rights earlier than in Switzerland — by half a century. And twenty years later — everyone votes for executions, the very same people. It seemed historically impossible to me. And now we ourselves are in this situation. I'm in it. You're in it. Twenty years ago — that country we both come from, and what's happening to it now. It doesn't fit in the mind. And the country lives as if nothing is happening. And writers — people who are responsible for words — live exactly the same way.
I have one very good acquaintance — I can't call him a friend, but a very famous writer. He's in Russia. I look at his Facebook. He writes almost every day — but he writes about cultural and historical anecdotes, about writers, about anything at all. Just not about what's happening. I don't understand this. If you're a writer — how can you not see what's around you? Then you're not a writer.
Anton interrupts me: maybe the person sees it, but understands — if he speaks, he'll end up in prison. It's hard to remain silent, there's nowhere to emigrate to. So they write historical anecdotes. I don't judge. Everyone will answer for themselves at the Last Judgment. But I know one thing for certain: the main thing is not to remain silent. Words come on their own when you don't stay silent.
When it all began, in February of '22, I immediately started explaining here, in Switzerland, why the country should stop being neutral. I spoke on television, at rallies. The rallies were like nothing Switzerland had ever seen — forty thousand people in Zurich. I said: Switzerland, the era of neutrality is over. We cannot afford this luxury. That same evening I spoke on the main political talk show. A few days later, the President of Switzerland announced: a historic event — Switzerland will support sanctions against Russia. Words always find themselves. You just cannot remain silent.
On what is happening in the world. Anton says barbarism is advancing from all sides — from Trump to Putin. I think — yes, of course. But something else is more important to me. We are experiencing a shift of cultural eras. The civilization we are accustomed to taking for granted is passing away. This is not panic, it's a diagnosis.
I'm asked: are you a Russian writer, a European one, an international one? I answer: I don't belong to a tribe — I belong to myself. I write in Russian, but that doesn't make me the property of any state, any ideology, any "narrative." Russian literature — it remains in history. Not because it's bad. But because the era that gave birth to it has ended. Just as the era of Greek tragedy or Renaissance painting ended. It was great — and it is complete. This is not a tragedy, it's a law of cultural life.
Why did I leave Russia? Anton knows the answer, but asks the question. I left long before the war — back in the nineties. But something else is more important: I was used as a face of the system. I participated in cultural diplomatic events, represented Russia at book fairs — and at some point I realized I was being used. Me, my books — as decoration, as evidence that culture exists in Russia. When I realized this, it became clear: there would be no more such participation.
About the "Dar" Prize. I founded it because I am convinced: the Russian language and Russian literature do not belong to any state. They belong to everyone who thinks and writes in them. The prize exists for writers in emigration, for those cut off from readers — banned in Russia, inconvenient in Ukraine, impossible in Belarus. In the first season, Maria Galina won with a novel written in Odesa, under bombs — a book about how a person who came from Moscow changes: her attitude toward the Russian language, toward Russian literature, toward herself.
A scandal arose. Some Ukrainian writers and readers found it impossible to accept an award from a "Russian-language" prize. This is a wound, not a split — an enormous, bleeding wound. When Yuri Andrukhovych, my friend, appeared with me, a wave rose against him on Facebook: every Russian, for Putin or against Putin — touched you, you stink. It hurts to read how Yura defends himself: Shishkin and I never spoke Russian on stage, only German, only English. This pain must be understood. It cannot be ignored. It was impossible to avoid the topic of war in the first season. We went through it. And the fact that the prize reached its second season — that is already a victory.
On the novel of repentance. It seems to me that the only thing that can save the dignity of Russian-language literature is a novel of repentance. But it must be written not by an émigré. An émigré has no moral right to this feeling of guilt — he is not there. This novel must be written by someone who sat in the trenches and asked himself the question: what are we doing here? That would be atonement. Whether it will be written — God knows.
On the silence of the novel. Anton asks cautiously: you haven't written novels since 2010. Why? I answer: if I knew why I should write another novel — I would, of course, sit down and write it. But the novel seeks its author, not the other way around. The four novels I wrote — they found me. I proved everything I wanted to prove to myself with them. I lost interest in proving the same thing again. I write essays — that interests me more now. I write in German. I recently finished an essay, "Hesse and Dostoevsky." I switched to German — not because I renounced Russian, but because I want to speak to a different audience. About why our homeland was taken over by bandits and we were exiled from there — everything about that has already been said many times. Nothing new can be said about it. We are in a state of civil war. Those on our side of the front understand everything without explanation. Those on the other side won't listen to us, because to them we are enemies.
There's a good metaphor from Nabokov in his lectures on Don Quixote. He keeps score: who won, who lost in each chapter. And his conclusion — a draw. Don Quixote and reality — a draw. The windmills knock him down again and again, but he gets up and goes again. The final victory of the idealist over the world is impossible, but so is final defeat. I'm in good company — Tolstoy lost, Rachmaninoff lost, Nabokov lost, Bunin lost. Losing is not a reason to give up. It's a reason to keep doing your work.
On the four novels. "The Letter-Book" (2010) — a novel in letters, the story of two lovers separated by war. The war in it is eternal, frozen, it never ends. The man goes off to war — almost mythical, at the turn of the century, a campaign in China — and the woman waits at home. The home changes, eras replace one another, but the war stands still. I wrote this in 2010, which now seems so peaceful. But wars were always happening — there was Georgia, both Chechen wars. It was obvious to me even after the first Chechen war: the country is heading toward dictatorship. And war is the natural state of any dictatorship. The only question is — when will it come. It came.
"The Venus Hair" — a metaphor for art. A story about what the word is capable of containing. A translator working with refugees records people's stories — and these stories intertwine with Dante, with the poetess Sappho, with the very fabric of culture. Art is a space where there are no boundaries between times and languages. Art is that Venus hair, that fern that survives everywhere, even in the crevices of a rock.
"The Taking of Izmail" — the most personal novel. It is a conversation with my parents — the conversation that never happened during their lifetimes. You can't tell your mother: "Wait, don't go to work, let's talk about what's most important." You can't tell your father: "Turn off the football, let's talk." This conversation only took place after their deaths — in the novel. It is a conversation with those who influenced me, who were important to me at my birth as a writer.
"Larionov's Notes" — the first novel, written back in the early eighties. I wanted to write about the contemporary — at that time, the Polish "Solidarity" was happening. The Poles said: "For your freedom and ours." I understood: we have a common enemy. But the people around me — perfectly normal people — suddenly woke up as nationalists: how ungrateful those Poles are, we liberated them... I moved the action to the Polish uprising of 1830, to speak metaphorically. I reread the novel recently — and was amazed: no matter what you write about in Russia, a time will surely come when it becomes more than relevant. It comes true.
On the book of essays "Mine." The cover — a fragment of a painting by my friend, Parisian artist Igor Bitman: "A Winter Day in Utopia." Russia is a logocentric country. Word is everything to us, literature is everything to us. We speak in quotations from "Onegin," without even knowing they're already part of our thinking. This book is a dialogue with Russian writers who matter to me. A dialectical conversation. I argue with myself, because there are no dogmas — only a living question: what do they mean now, through the prism of this war?
Pushkin. In "Mine" I write: translated Pushkin resembles an excavated statue of a god — there are still lines, the relief of muscles, but the main thing is missing: the awe before the divine. Translation is a filter. The liquid seeps through, the sediment remains. Pushkin's sacred sediment is untranslatable. He belongs to the Russian language — and only to it.
When Ukraine tears down Pushkin monuments — these monuments have nothing to do with Pushkin himself. They are symbols of empire — boots that were placed everywhere. Stalin placed them in 1937, for the poet's anniversary, as imperial milestones. As symbols of empire, they should disappear. Pushkin was used by everyone and always: before the revolution he was an imperialist, under Stalin his presence "illuminated" the executions — since Pushkin stands there, culture is with us, therefore we are right. The regime uses dead writers — and the deader the author, the easier he is to use. The regime will make Brodsky its own, it will make Solzhenitsyn its own. We don't know how they would have behaved — but it seems to me: Pushkin would have finally broken through to Europe. Brodsky would have repented for his essay on Taras Shevchenko. I am convinced of this.
The regime needs literature for fostering patriotism. In every school, in the literature classroom, there hangs a portrait of Tolstoy. Not a single teacher will write Tolstoy's words there: "Patriotism is slavery." This contradicts the very essence of what the state does in Russia.
Why teach literature in school. A bad teacher can kill any brilliant book. I was lucky — I had good literature teachers. Anton says: that's why you're here and not there. Perhaps so. I only loved one subject — Russian language and literature. In all others, I got C's. C's were given because a teacher who gives a D is giving a D to himself.
If you need to choose one book that says everything about Russia — funny, which becomes terrifying at the end — it's "The History of a Town" by Saltykov-Shchedrin. Let children read it and, who knows, someday they might understand something. And if I were to add to the school curriculum — Sukhovo-Kobylin's trilogy. "Krechinsky's Wedding" — a Gogolian comedy about a swindler. "The Case" — a Russian Kafka, a trial predicted decades in advance. "The Death of Tarelkin" — among the top ten texts written in Russian. If this were performed in school theaters — it might change thinking a little.
On Dostoevsky. I must say something that many won't like. Dostoevsky is harmful. Not because he's a bad writer — he's great. But precisely because he's great, he's dangerous. He is read as a prophet, as a spiritual teacher, as a metaphysician. And he is a sick man, with dark passions, with imperial chauvinism, with anti-Semitism. His ideas about the "Russian Christ," about "Constantinople," about Russia's destiny — this is poison that poisons readers. And when Putin's regime draws on Dostoevsky's ideas — it is no accident. It's logical.
Anton argues: but the Western Dostoevsky is a completely different Dostoevsky. In the West, he is read as an existentialist, as a predecessor of Camus, Sartre. I agree: yes, these are fundamentally different readings. But in Russia, Dostoevsky is read precisely that way — as a prophet of empire. And that makes him dangerous.
On Tolstoy. Tolstoy has not been read. At school he is "covered" — that is, killed. "War and Peace" cannot be read at school. It is medicine — but medicine for adults. I had surgery — and "War and Peace" saved me: no matter where you open it, you read — it heals. Reading is like a blood transfusion. Reader and writer exchange the most important thing: the strength of life. But the blood types must match. If they don't match — it's deadly. Forcing fifteen-year-olds to read Tolstoy is a different blood type. Violence that leads nowhere.
On Chekhov. Chekhov is the most understood of Russian writers worldwide. Why? In theater, dialogue is a way of advancing the plot, conveying information. Chekhov's dialogues are about nothing. Conversations of the deaf. Three sisters want to go to Moscow, but never go, because they're waiting for Godot. This is Chekhov's discovery. In Chekhov's prose, everything important, squeezed out of words, happens between the lines. Translated into the language of theater, everything important is squeezed off stage — into the auditorium. On stage — everyday life, in the auditorium — being. This is an underground passage to the theater of the absurd.
We were taught a different Chekhov — filled with hope for the future, that in a hundred years wonderful people will live here. In reality, Chekhov hates in people what we all hate: the complete absence of strength for a beautiful life. He hates his characters, and they die — because they are not worthy of living. You must be worthy of this life, you must fight. And what do the three sisters do? In the same year he wrote "Three Sisters," he finished "In the Ravine" — a verdict on the common person in this country. "Three Sisters" — a verdict on the intelligentsia. The verdict was carried out in seventeen. And it's good Chekhov didn't live to see it.
On the power of words. Anton asks the main question: why literature, if it didn't save anyone from the Gulag or from war? Why? My answer: literature and art cannot save everyone — they can save only one person. Only one. Each of its own. But all wars end sooner or later. And then literature, music, art will be needed.
Now a chasm filled with blood, pain, death has grown between Ukraine and Russia. But sooner or later a bridge will need to be built. This bridge will not be built by politicians. It will be built by artists — musicians, poets, writers, painters. And for that future bridge, which needs to start being built now, the dignity of the language must be preserved. The dignity of literature. That is what needs to be done.
PART II
Essay-Study: "The Dignity of Language and the Ash of the Word — A Spiritual-Psychological, Literary, Cultural, and Historiosophical Analysis of Mikhail Shishkin's Interview"
I. Preliminary Remark: A Voice from the Abyss
This interview took place on June 26, 2026 — more than four years after the world Shishkin and Dolin knew ceased to exist. Four years is not a long time in history, but it is long enough for words spoken publicly to have gained or lost their specific weight. Shishkin speaks from Switzerland — from that geographical and ontological position he himself calls "a different planet," separated from Moscow not by kilometers but by an epochal rupture. This rupture is not merely a biographical detail: it structures the entire interview as a particular genre, one that could be called testimony from the emigration of the spirit.
Shishkin's interview is a rare type of public utterance: it contains neither populist protest rhetoric nor academic detachment. It is the speech of a man who understands himself as a guardian — not of Russia, not of the "Russian world," but of the Russian language as a living ontological reality that transcends any state. This very paradox — defending the language while consistently rejecting the imperial claims of that language — constitutes the main intellectual tension of the conversation.
II. Silence as Position and as Capitulation: The Psychology of the Unspoken
One of the central motifs of the interview is the impossibility and necessity of the word in conditions where the word is punishable by prison. Shishkin describes an acquaintance, a writer remaining in Russia: the man writes historical anecdotes, avoids the topic of war — and Shishkin does not condemn him directly, but his judgment is unambiguous: "if you're a writer — how can you not see? Then you're not a writer."
Here a profound psychological and ethical problem emerges, which Shishkin resolves too straightforwardly — and it is precisely in this straightforwardness that his vulnerability lies. The position taken by writers remaining in Russia cannot be reduced either to cowardice or to complicity. It is the position of a person facing an irresolvable aporia: silence is perceived as agreement with authority — and simultaneously as the only form of preserving life and the possibility of continuing to write. This is what Viktor Kravchenko would call "the price of choice" — and what Jean-Paul Sartre designated as a situation in which every choice is guilty.
Shishkin from Switzerland can proclaim: "you just cannot remain silent" — and he is right within his own coordinate system. But this right is bought at the price of physical absence from where silence has a different nature. Silence in Russia of 2022–2026 is not emptiness: it is a form of survival of meaning. It is what Russian religious philosophy, especially in the hesychast tradition, understood as silence-preservation, opposed to empty speaking. Those who remain preserve something — even at the cost of visible muteness. The question is what exactly they preserve — and here Shishkin is helpless, because he does not know the answer from within.
The deep psychological mechanism of this situation is connected to what Donald Winnicott called the "true" and "false Self." A writer who publicly behaves as if there is no war is not necessarily a liar: perhaps his "false Self" performs a protective function, preserving the "true Self" for future writing that may never be written — or will be written later, when it becomes possible. This is a painful but real psychological strategy. To accuse it is to misunderstand the situation.
III. "We Always Lose" — The Historiosophy of Defeat
One of the most unexpected theses of the interview is Shishkin's proclaimed principle of defeat as the norm. He lists: Tolstoy lost, Rachmaninoff lost, Nabokov lost, Bunin lost. "We all lost." And he adds: "I'm in good company. And secondly, losing is not a reason to give up."
This historiosophy of defeat deserves serious analysis. In it one can hear echoes of several great intellectual traditions. First of all — Nikolai Berdyaev's idea that Russian spiritual history is a history of the unfulfilled: Russia is constantly striving toward the absolute and constantly thrown back from it. This is not a tragedy in the Greek sense — for Greek tragedy ends in catharsis. It is something darker: a permanent incompleteness, which is, however, the only possible form of existence of the Russian spirit.
Nabokov's metaphor of Don Quixote's "draw" — which Shishkin cites with evident admiration — clarifies this historiosophy. A draw is neither defeat nor victory. It is a paradoxical form of dignity possible only when you do not stop getting up. Don Quixote does not defeat the windmills — but neither do the windmills defeat him definitively. It is precisely this incompleteness of struggle that is the condition for the existence of culture.
Here Shishkin unconsciously approaches Paul Tillich's idea of the "courage to be" — the ability to affirm oneself in the face of absolute negation. Defeat that does not mean capitulation is precisely the courage to be in conditions where being is stripped of all guarantees. Russian émigré literature of the twentieth century — from Bunin to Nabokov — is, in essence, a long exercise in this courage. And Shishkin inscribes himself into this tradition not rhetorically, but biographically.
But here a dangerous contradiction arises. If "we always lose" — then what exactly is the measure of victory worth striving for? Shishkin answers: "the dignity of language," "the dignity of literature." This is beautiful — but metaphysically vulnerable. Dignity unsupported by any institutional or social reality easily turns into aestheticism, into a pose. A magnificent pose — but still a pose. Here Shishkin diverges, for example, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who believed that literature is obliged not only to bear witness but also to change — and who for this sake was willing to endure awkwardness, didacticism, coarseness.
IV. The Novel of Repentance: The Theologeme of Guilt and Literary Utopia
One of the most intense moments of the interview is the concept of the "novel of repentance," which must be written by someone who sat in the trenches and at some point asked himself: what are we doing here? Shishkin speaks of this with genuine passion — and that is precisely why it is worth stopping to examine this idea in more detail.
The theologeme of repentance in the Russian spiritual tradition goes back to confessional literature: from the "Life of Archpriest Avvakum" to Tolstoy's "Confession" — it is a genre of radical self-exposure that requires not merely an admission of guilt but an ontological turn. Repentance in the Orthodox tradition is not a legal act but a metanoia, a change of mind, an alteration of the very structure of vision. A novel written from the position of such metanoia would be an unprecedented text.
But here a literary problem arises. Who is the subject of this novel? Shishkin says: one who sat in the trenches. But is it possible for a person who has experienced the trauma of participation in war to write a text of such artistic power? Literary history gives an ambiguous answer. "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Remarque was written by a participant in the First World War — but Remarque wrote a decade later, in a state of relative psychological distance. Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata" — a novel of repentance without repentance: here repentance is turned inward, not outward. "Crime and Punishment" — the closest Russian archetype of the novel of repentance — was written by a man who himself killed no one, but psychologically lived the path of a murderer from within.
In other words, the novel of repentance Shishkin awaits is a utopia in the strict sense: a place that does not exist. Not because such a person does not exist — he does. But because the path from the trench to the novel passes through a psychological abyss that not everyone is capable of crossing. Nevertheless, this utopia is necessary — for literature not only describes what is, but also holds open the place for what ought to be. Shishkin, by insisting on the novel of repentance, thereby keeps this place open. This is an important cultural function — even if the novel itself is never written.
From the perspective of depth psychology (and here Melanie Klein would be an appropriate interlocutor), collective repentance is a sign of transition from the "paranoid-schizoid position" — where all evil is attributed to the other ( "Western provocateurs") — to the "depressive position," in which the subject acknowledges his responsibility for the harm caused. This is a painful transition. Russian culture in its mass has not yet made it — and therefore the novel of repentance, if it is written, will be a symptom and at the same time a driving force of this transition.
V. Pushkin as Imperial Sign: The Semiotics of the Monument
Shishkin's position regarding the demolition of Pushkin monuments in Ukraine is among the most conceptually clear in the entire interview: "These monuments have nothing to do with Pushkin. They are symbols of empire — boots that were placed everywhere." They were torn down — rightly so.
This statement requires semiotic analysis. A monument is always a doubling. It contains a denotatum (the real person to whom it is dedicated) and a connotation (the ideological meaning attributed to it at the moment of installation). Stalin's Pushkin monuments of 1937 — for the poet's anniversary, held at the height of the Great Terror — were precisely connotative constructions. Pushkin here acted as a sanctifier of executions: his bronze presence created the illusion of cultural continuity that obscured the destruction of that very culture.
Roland Barthes in "Mythologies" described this mechanism with surgical precision: myth empties the denotative meaning of the sign in order to fill it with ideological content. Soviet Pushkin is a myth in the Barthesian sense: not the poet who wrote "The Bronze Horseman" and "Little Tragedies," but an imperial symbol that "illuminates" any state action, from conquests to repressions.
Shishkin makes a fundamental distinction: Pushkin as text is untranslatable and belongs to the Russian language. Pushkin as monument is a state sign that has no relation to the poet. The demolition of the latter does not touch the former. This distinction is ontologically important and historically honest. However, it does not take into account that for many speakers of Russian — including those living in Ukraine and formed in the Soviet cultural environment — this distinction is not obvious. For them, the demolition of a Pushkin monument may indeed be perceived as a blow to the language and to memory. Their pain is no less real for being semiotically mistaken.
Precisely here lies one of the key fault lines of the contemporary cultural moment. Semiotically correct distinction may be politically insufficient — for politics deals not with pure signs, but with how signs are experienced by living people. Shishkin is right in his logic — and this rightness does not negate the complexity of the situation.
VI. Dostoevsky as Diagnosis: On the Harm of Great Literature
Shishkin's judgment on Dostoevsky is the most provocative in the interview and the most culturally significant. "Dostoevsky is harmful." Not a bad writer — great. Precisely for that reason, dangerous.
This position has a long prehistory. Even Nabokov in his Stanford lectures on Russian literature regarded Dostoevsky with undisguised antipathy — not aesthetic, but ethical: excessive sentimentality, melodramaticism, psychological hysteria. But Nabokov criticized Dostoevsky the artist. Shishkin goes further: he criticizes Dostoevsky the ideologue, whose ideas became the cultural foundation of Putin's imperialism.
The connection between Dostoevsky and Russian nationalism is not a conspiracy fiction. "A Writer's Diary" with its anti-Semitism, with the idea of the "Russian Christ," with the concept of the Russian people's "universal responsiveness" as the basis of its messianism — this is a political document written by a brilliant artist. That is precisely why it is especially dangerous: artistic genius makes ideological poison more seductive.
The paradox is that the Western "Dostoevsky" is indeed different. Camus read "The Brothers Karamazov" as an existential drama of God-abandonment. Sartre saw in Raskolnikov a precursor of "bad faith." For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, in which no single voice is the final authority. These readings are not false — they extract from Dostoevsky what is genuinely there: dialogism, openness to question, the impossibility of a final answer.
But in Russia they read a different Dostoevsky — monological, prophetic, national. And it is precisely this Dostoevsky who is the cultural raw material for building the "Russian world" as an ideology. Shishkin is right that this danger is real. His mistake — if it is a mistake — lies in not distinguishing these two Dostoevskys clearly enough. To say "Dostoevsky is harmful" risks rejecting the antidote along with the poison.
More precise would be to say: a certain way of reading Dostoevsky is harmful — monological, nationalist, prophetic. And this way of reading is a cultural product of a specific historical situation, not an immanent property of the text. The task is not to remove Dostoevsky from the school curriculum — but to teach reading him differently. A pedagogical and cultural task — but not a censorial one.
VII. Chekhov and the Theater of Inaction: The Ontology of Non-Action
Chekhov appears in Shishkin's interview as the most universal of Russian classics — and this judgment needs to be unpacked. Shishkin formulates it precisely: in Chekhov's prose, everything important happens between the lines — in theater it is "squeezed" into the auditorium. On stage — everyday life, in the auditorium — being.
This formulation deserves philosophical analysis. Theater in the European tradition — from Aristotle to Brecht — was a space of action: drama as mimesis of action. Chekhov's theater is a theater of inaction. His characters do not act — they exist. They do not perform deeds — they experience the passage of time. This is a radical ontological innovation, which Shishkin designates as an "underground passage to the theater of the absurd."
Here one can see a parallel with the Buddhist concept of "emptiness": in Chekhov, the most important thing is what is not there, what did not happen, what was not said. "The Cherry Orchard" is a play about how the orchard was not saved. "Three Sisters" is a play about how they did not move to Moscow. "Uncle Vanya" is a play about how life was not lived otherwise. This is an aesthetics of absence, which turns out to be ontologically more capacious than any presence.
Shishkin adds an important observation: Chekhov hates his characters. This is a strong statement that requires clarification. Rather, Chekhov feels toward his characters what in psychology is called "compassionate disappointment": he sees their potential and sees their powerlessness to realize that potential — and this spectacle is unbearable for him. This is not hatred — it is the pain of a person who loves too clearly. That is why Chekhov's endings are so bitter: there is no catharsis in them — only quiet hopelessness, which nevertheless does not negate life.
Shishkin's most precise observation is that Chekhov foresaw 1917. "Three Sisters" — a verdict on the intelligentsia that was carried out. This intuition coincides with what cultural historians call the "Chekhovian pause" of Russian history: between the 1880s and 1917, the intelligentsia talked about change, waited for it, suffered from its absence — but did not act. Chekhov was the diagnostician of this paralysis. The diagnosis proved accurate. And his death in 1904 saved him from having to see the diagnosis confirmed.
VIII. "A Bridge Over the Abyss": Eschatology and Utopia of Reconciliation
The final image of the interview — a bridge between Russia and Ukraine that will be built not by politicians but by artists — is simultaneously the most beautiful and the most vulnerable of Shishkin's theses. It is an image in which genuine faith in art borders on what he himself calls "stupid idealism" — and immediately adds: "I still believe."
This faith deserves not irony but serious consideration. History knows examples of how cultural bridges were built after catastrophes that seemed insurmountable. Franco-German reconciliation after World War II was prepared not only by political treaties but by cultural exchanges — Camus and Jünger, translations, shared literary spaces. Polish-German reconciliation took decades and literary gestures — the letter of Polish bishops to German bishops "we forgive and ask for forgiveness" was not a political act but a cultural and spiritual one.
However, the Ukrainian-Russian situation has a fundamental asymmetry that Shishkin does not fully account for. In the German-Polish or German-French cases, the aggressor at the time of reconciliation had been militarily and politically defeated — and thus its intelligentsia received the historical mandate to speak on behalf of the "other Germany." As long as the war continues — there is no mandate. Shishkin understands this well in relation to the novel of repentance: he says it must be written not by an émigré. But the same logic should be applied to the idea of the bridge: a bridge cannot be built unilaterally.
Nevertheless, the image of the bridge is culturally and psychologically necessary. It holds open the place of the future — the place that otherwise will be filled only with hatred. Georges Bataille wrote that eroticism is a "yes" to life, affirmed in the face of death. Art is the same "yes" — in the face of violence, in the face of destruction, in the face of the abyss. Shishkin, speaking of the bridge, speaks precisely of this "yes" — unconsciously, at the level of intuition, but accurately.
IX. "Russian Literature Remains in History": End of an Era or Transformation?
One of Shishkin's most polemical theses — "Russian literature remains in history" — requires rigorous analysis, because several different judgments are mixed in it.
If it is meant that the era of Russian literature as a world cultural dominant has ended — this is, in all likelihood, true. The 19th — first half of the 20th century was an era in which Russian prose and poetry defined the global agenda. This era has indeed passed — roughly as the era of Italian Renaissance painting or the French novel of the 19th century passed. Cultural dominance is historically limited.
But if it is meant that the Russian language as a living artistic medium has ceased to be productive — this judgment is premature and possibly incorrect. A language outlives the state. Latin as a living literary language outlived Rome by a millennium. Yiddish as a language of great literature continued to exist when Jewish statehood did not yet exist. The Russian language carries potential not tied to the fate of the Russian state.
Shishkin partially understands this — otherwise he would not have founded the "Dar" Prize, which exists precisely for Russian-language literature to continue beyond Russia's borders. But his rhetoric in the interview sometimes outruns his own logic: speaking of the end of an era, he simultaneously participates in the continuation of what he declares ended. This contradiction should not be smoothed over — it is the living nerve of his position.
Culturally, the most important thing here is what Shishkin describes: the rupture between the Russian language as belonging to the state and the Russian language as the possession of those who think in it. This rupture, sharpened by the war, is unprecedented in the history of Russian culture. Previously, such a rupture ran along the Soviet/anti-Soviet line — with both remaining within one geopolitical reality. Now the line runs differently: not between Soviet and dissident, but between state and human. This is a deeper rupture.
X. Blood Transfusion: On the Pedagogy of Reading and the Impossibility of Coercion
The metaphor of reading as a blood transfusion is one of the few indisputably successful formulations in Shishkin's interview. "Reader and writer exchange the most important thing that gives them life — the strength of life. But the blood types must match." This metaphor captures something fundamental: the experience of genuine reading is not pedagogical but biochemical. It is not transmitted through explanation or coercion — it either happens or it doesn't.
This judgment has direct consequences for the concept of literary education. Shishkin is right: compulsory reading is "a different blood type." Most of humanity does not read at all — "and we will die without it," he adds. This is an important recognition: genuine reading is the preserve of a minority. This is not elitism — it is honesty. Trying to make Tolstoy or Dostoevsky "accessible to all" through school curricula is to misunderstand the nature of literary experience.
However, here a pedagogical antinomy arises. If the reader must come to the book on their own — then what is the point of teaching literature at all? Shishkin answers: a teacher may not kill a book. A good teacher creates a condition of possibility — not transmitting experience, but opening a space in which experience can happen. This is a subtle but fundamental distinction. Pedagogy here is not transmission but the creation of an empty place — that emptiness which in Chekhov proves more productive than presence.
"The History of a Town" by Saltykov-Shchedrin as the main book about Russia — a symptomatic choice. It is a book about the eternally recurring absurdity of power, about the hopeless submissiveness of the population, about how "all of this" was — and will be again. Shchedrin's laughter — bitter, almost unbearable — is a particular form of cultural therapy: it allows one to see what would otherwise be impossible to bear. This is catharsis without catharsis — purification through laughter that does not free one from what one laughs at.
XI. Conclusion: The Guardian of Dignity
Mikhail Shishkin's interview with Anton Dolin is a document of a particular cultural moment: a moment when Russian literature is experiencing one of its deepest crises of identity. Who is it — a possession of a state waging war? A legacy of a great era completed by history? A living medium that continues beyond any state borders?
Shishkin does not give a final answer — and this is his virtue. He keeps the question open. He understands himself not as a prophet, but as a guardian: one who preserves the dignity of language at the moment when that dignity is most threatened. A guardian is not one who creates, but one who does not allow destruction.
His personal choice — to write in German, to found a prize for émigré literature, to refuse the new novel in favor of essays — these are choices of a man who has found for himself that form of presence in culture which corresponds to his mental and moral constitution. This is not a rule for everyone — but it is an honest position.
The abyss between Russia and Ukraine of which he speaks in the finale is real. The bridge he promises is utopian in the best sense of the word: a place that does not yet exist, but which must be held in the imagination so that it may one day become possible. Literature does precisely this. It holds the place of the impossible.
That is how it saves. Not everyone. Not the world. Only one — and only the individual. But that is enough to continue.
— The essay was prepared for the Omdaru Literature / AI Studies project
PULSAR, 2026
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