THE NIGHT WE DISAPPEARED

Nikolai V. Kononov

10,00 

Individuum Publishing, 2022

ISBN 978-5-6048006-4-5

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Autor

Николай В. Кононов

Nikolai V. Kononov

Nikolai V. Kononov is a shortlisted finalist for the Dar Prize 2025. Journalist, editor, writer.

Expert opinions

Евгения Вежлян

Evgeniya Vezhlyan

Poet, literary critic, essayist, literary scholar and sociologist of literature

“Kononov's novel is a novel of post-memory. Its framing plot is the acquaintance of very different, dissimilar contemporaries (a London student of Russian origin, Alexandra, who is writing an essay on anarchism, a German psychologist dealing with the causes of her compatriot's crime and suicide, a Russian schoolgirl, Kuti, preparing a report on her grandmother's letters) with documents from the “uncomfortable past” created by stateless people who emigrated after the 1917 revolution and lost their citizenship (...). ) Kononov's text on stateless people provides very uncomfortable answers to contemporary questions - about war, about emigration, about political struggle, about the state and the violence associated with it.”
Николай Александров

Nikolai Aleksandrov

Cultural and literary scholar, essayist, journalist

“The past, which accommodates the present and the future, a century of wanderings and losses, wars, revolutions, repressions, ideological battles, grinding human lives - perhaps the main theme of this heterogeneous and plot-rich, exciting novel. Kononov manages not only vivid and surprisingly accurate picturesqueness, but also documentary authenticity of the biographies of the main characters. With all the difference of characters, views, origins and destinies of the characters, they all have one common feature: doomed to a nomadic life by the force of circumstances, bloody catastrophes of the 20-21st century, they, nevertheless, have not lost the memory of their past and their sedentary life and return to them or discover them for the first time”.
Лиза Биргер

Elizaveta Birger-Eroğlu

Philologist, translator, literary critic, curator of literary and theater programs and “Room and a Half” bookstore in Istanbul

In each of the three parts of Nikolai Kononov's novel “The Night We Disappeared” the heroes from the present discover some document from the past, an audio tape, letters, records of interrogations. And each of these documents reveals a rather fantastic story of its hero. These are stories of fugitives - people who, as a result of the catastrophes of the twentieth century, were forced to literally become someone else, to change their country, their occupation. For people of our time, immersion in the other turns out to be a radical opportunity to experience “the experience of entering the tornado of time and kinship with the ghosts shivering in it.” But the novel does not try to tell typical stories of the twentieth century, and documentary as a technique only emphasizes the unreality and ghostliness of the narrative. Kononov's idea is not only that the past cannot be silenced and forgotten, it always returns (and therefore, contrary to the title of the novel, no one disappears). He also shows how working with memory expands our knowledge and perceptions of the world to almost mystical proportions, making them multidimensional.

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