The Russian publishing house Alpina Publisher will publish a book by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which will be called Prison People. The short stories collected in it, published earlier in The New Times, will tell about the modern Russian prison, its morals and people. About the personal experience gained by the author.
“In any case, what was written in prison shows you that hell is the work of human hands, created and completed by them,” - Joseph Brodsky.
Prison People is a continuation of the Russian tradition of publishing prison stories from those who have been wrongfully convicted. Among the authors of such bestsellers are Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, Ginzburg and Brodsky. Now Khodorkovsky too.
As a rule, in such works, the authors do not directly, but through the stories of those with whom they were pushed into their torture chambers, through their fate and characters, write about themselves, leaving out of the brackets reflections about the judicial system and about life in general.
Brief historical background
Of course, among writers, publicists, poets, journalists, politicians et cetera, there are quite a lot of those who passed the conclusion: both in Russia and abroad - from Cervantes, Kropotkin, Lenin to Wilde, Zhenet, Aleshkovsky and Mandela. But very few, who have served their prison in difficult historical times of dictatorships and revolutions, repressions and stagnation, and dictatorships in timelessness, reflected the experience gained in prison on paper. They were reflected not in the form of diary entries, but as literary processed works.
“We must become a country of convictions, without persecution and violence … All this will be possible only when the grounds for the revival of a totalitarian regime and uncontrolled power disappear,” Andrei Sakharov.
In modern reality, it is impossible to avoid a collision with the system. It was never possible if the system was not built on respect for the human person. About this, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's short stories, like Brodsky's prison poems, Sinyavsky's and Daniel's prison speeches, or Sakharov's journalism - all of them were published and republished more than once.
Well, modern statesmen, as if confirming the remark once dropped by Churchill, about the obligatory appearance of new fascists who will call themselves anti-fascists, now quote the maxims of the 20th century enlighteners to justify their own crimes, thereby launching the unjust system in a circle every day.
Zek of the era of stability
“I am bitter from this hopelessness, from the ruthlessness of our system, from the cries of people who do not want to know the truth and demand one thing:“Crucify !!!” People, stop, look around! Not everything is so simple and unambiguous, - Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
"Prison People" by Mikhail Khodorkovsky is a literary work. In short, completed novellas, tough journalistic reality and biographical accuracy are combined with generalized, sometimes fictional fates and details.
“Are we able to live in peace, pretending that the fate of others does not concern us? How long will a country exist where indifference is the norm? The time for answers is always coming,”- Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Among the heroes of 17 selected short stories are those for whom prison is a “mother's mother”, and those who ended up in torture chambers because of a systemic “tick”. Those who, under any circumstances of prison life, are able to preserve human dignity even having descended below the bottom of prison life itself, as the hero of the short story "The Offended" and those who directly represent the state system that breaks lives and fates, as one of the heroes in The Investigator.
“… There is no point in humbling your beliefs on this side of the wall, because you may end up behind it,” - Joseph Brodsky.
A drug addict from the short story "Here They Are" and a pedophile from "The Story of Alexei", informers and hard workers, suicides and thieves, and guards indistinguishable from the guarded - in Khodorkovsky's short stories, the life of the prison is shown as a cross-section of modern life in Russia.
