Falso mesías también en esto 😂

A companion thread from someone who knows some of the victims of Miles Hewstone, a powerful academic who harassed dozens of women for 18 years in Oxford and left the university in 2019 with no public explanation whatsoever
bsky.app/profile/jayv...

"The best way to catch the attention of a reader is to create an interesting character. Then they will want to know what happens to him or her," says Kurkov, describing his current novel series about Kyiv in 1919

The first thing Kurkov wrote was a poem for two of his hamsters when they died. One of his influences is Daniil Kharms, who wrote wonderful humorous books and died in a mental asylum

"You can't realistically talk about the future of Ukraine until Putin is dead. But it will be a different Ukraine. And there will be problems with people returning from the front and also returning from abroad. It will take some time to adjust. It will be a new Ukraine," says Kurkov

Kurkov compares Ukrainian writers who write in Russia as writers writing in French outside France. "In the hands of Ukrainian writers, the Russian language losing its aggressiveness. You can almost hear the Ukrainian melody"

"People can't be afraid of war for a long time. A friend of mine now use earbuds, and doesn't go to the shelters. But this doesn't mean Ukrainians are fatalistic. That's a very Russian attitude. We are not like that"

Kurkov explains how the war pushed him into a writer's block: he just couldn't take his eyes from war, and from travelling around the world giving lectures on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

"You can't erase history. And if you try, you're behaving like Russians," says Kurkov when asked about controversies around Gogol and Bulgakov. "For Ukrainians ethnic origin doesn't matter. We have Afro-Ukrainians, for example, producing wonderful songs in Ukrainian. We are not an ethnic nation"

While working as a prison guard, Kurkov learnt a lot about human nature. He thinks any writer should work as a prison guard. He also travelled around the USSR as a hitchhiker and in cheap trains, and talked with many people about the time of Stalinism

"Ukrainian mentality is individual. Russian culture is collectivist," says Kurkov. "That's why Ukrainian traditionally don't like their leaders and don't respect their rules"

Kurkov on his relationship with the Russian language:

"For 15 years I defended the Russian language in Ukraine. But I always knew about Russian as a tool used for imperialism. This continues until today. Russian rulers have always tried to limit Ukrainian language"

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Lo firma el gran @borjandrinot.bsky.social y mi gráfico favorito es este

Grandísima cantante. DEP