Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman, writer and literary critic
Paris in December doesn’t care about your romantic ideas.
The low-hanging sky hangs over the zinc roofs. The chill from the Seine works its way into your bones. You walk past closed cafes, shivering slightly. The ghosts of the city surround you – Proust, Bunin. Winter makes this city feel incredibly heavy.
I came over on the Eurostar for the eleventh ‘Russkaya Literatura’ Salon, held at the Russian Spiritual and Cultural Centre on the Quai Branly.
The British book world is rather contented at the moment. We live comfortably on our island, reading our own books and translating a small percentage of the world’s literature. We prefer nice stories and nice themes. So, the thought of packing a bag to attend a cultural event celebrating cross-cultural literature in France felt rather exhausting.
I don’t usually go to expat cultural events. They feel rather like polite wakes, full of people drinking warm wine and talking nostalgically about a country that died decades ago.
Actually, scratch that. It wasn’t that either.
When I walked through the doors on the fifth of December, the event felt rather tense, but in a rather good way.
Inside, the sheer volume of the place was deafening. After checking my damp coat, I walked immediately into a solid wall of sound. It was not the polite, hushed murmur one usually anticipates at European literary launches – those sterile affairs where glasses of tepid white wine are nursed alongside cautiously calibrated opinions. Instead, it was a chaotic, fervent scramble of French, English and Russian.
This was the 11th Paris Salon du Livre Russe, an annual gathering that, in an increasingly fractured world, feels less like a trade fair and more like a fragile, vital lifeboat. Irina Rekshan, the architect who willed the entire sprawling enterprise into being, had intentionally pinned the weekend’s schedule to a series of rather heavy, inescapable anniversaries. We were marking eighty years since the end of the Second World War. Ivan Bunin and Alexander Kuprin were turning 155; Sergei Yesenin, the tragic, golden-haired poet of the village, would have been 130. The Western publishing trade, of course, absolutely adores a centenary – it provides a convenient hook to sell handsome, cloth-bound hardbacks to the Christmas market. Yet, standing in that noisy foyer, nothing about the salon felt like a cynical marketing exercise. The stakes felt altogether too high.
This tone was set early on by Dmitry Bak, the head of the State Museum of the History of Russian Literature, who took the microphone with a quiet, arresting authority. In his address, he traced a fascinating, tragic line from the sheer, unbridled arrogance of the Silver Age poets straight down to the desperate, bare-bones lyrics forged in the crucible of the 1940s. He made a compelling, almost unassailable case that when politics completely and catastrophically fails, poetry becomes the final, and perhaps the only, reliable record of a human conscience. It was a profoundly solid point. It stopped my usual, ingrained London cynicism dead in its tracks. I had arrived prepared to observe, to critique, perhaps to mentally draft a wry column on the persistence of emigre nostalgia. Instead, Bak’s words demanded a different, more vulnerable kind of listening.
Indeed, it proved to be a strangely exposing weekend for me on a personal level. On the Friday evening, the salon screened my documentary, Lydia Grigorieva. I will live anyway. Lydia is a poet of immense fortitude, a contemporary of Joseph Brodsky, and her entire existence has been one long, sustained refusal to surrender to the brutal whims of the twentieth century. When Yulia Tulegenova and I wrote the script, we spent agonising weeks trying to pin down the exact texture of that stubbornness. We layered the narrative with Nikon Zhila voicing her poems over grainy, evocative archival footage, all underpinned by a complicated, haunting musical score from Fedor Stepanov, Dmitry Lazarev, and several others, masterfully wrangled into cohesion by Anna Zhila.
There are few experiences quite as awful as sitting in the dark at the back of a screening room. You watch the screen display the desolate, freezing reality of Lydia’s brutal northern childhood, the starkness of the Gulag shadows, and then you look at the sophisticated Parisian audience shifting in their comfortable, upholstered seats. You think, inevitably: They aren’t going to get this. The cultural chasm is simply too wide. But to my profound humility, they did. As the film progressed, the room went totally, breathlessly quiet. It was the silence of recognition, of shared human witness.
The vulnerability compounded on Saturday, which was scheduled for my own reading. I had brought a section of my new novel, Chelnovaya, a book entirely obsessed with the suffocating weight of dirt and memory. Chelnovaya is a tiny, unremarkable dot on the map along the Old Smolensk Road. To this day, there are still people wandering the mud there with metal detectors, absurdly hoping to dig up Napoleon’s buried gold, completely missing the point that the locals who actually survived that punishing mud are the real story.
I delivered a talk alongside the reading titled “Female cosmos and small homeland.” In the weeks leading up to the salon, I had agonised over the subject matter, worrying terribly that it was far too parochial. Why on earth would Paris, the glittering capital of global literature, care about the muddy squabbles of a forgotten village in the Smolensk region? But the truth I discovered – or perhaps remembered – in that room is that readers are utterly exhausted by slick, placeless, globalised thrillers that could be set anywhere and therefore mean nothing. People hunger for the grit. They want Svetlana Alexievich painstakingly digging through the radioactive ruins of the Soviet mind; they want Annie Ernaux dissecting the stifling, grey boredom of her provincial French youth with surgical precision. The hyper-local, the intensely specific, is practically all we have left that feels true.
This deep desire to bridge the hyper-local to the universal brings one inevitably to the translators, the unsung, bruised heroes of the literary world. I sat in a crowded room and listened to Geneviève Dispot speak eloquently about the sheer, physical headache of rendering Alla Gorbunova’s manic, feverish energy into coherent French, or the particular linguistic gymnastics required to deal with the prose of Igor Saveliev. Dispot articulated what every bilingual writer knows: translating isn’t simply swapping out nouns and verbs like currency. It is, to borrow a metaphor, rather like trying to move a massive, damp sofa up a very narrow spiral staircase. You swear, you trap your fingers, you unscrew the legs, you scrape the hallway wallpaper, and when you finally drag the wretched thing into the upstairs living room, you have to fluff the cushions and pretend it was always sitting there, perfectly at ease. Translators are performing the actual, gruelling manual labour of culture. Sergey Shargunov, speaking via a crackling video link later in the afternoon, echoed exactly that sentiment. They are the dockworkers of literature.
You could see the tangible results of that back-breaking labour simply by wandering the halls. The salon was a dizzying cross-section of cultural endurance. Andrei Makine was there – a man born in Siberia who writes in his adopted French with such startling elegance that he was elected to the Académie Française. The artist Mikhail Shemyakin had hauled his heavy volumes all the way over from Moscow to sign them for eager queues. Mikhail Seslavinsky took the stage to turn the arcane history of Sergei Diaghilev and Serge Lifar’s dispersed library into what felt like a gripping, high-stakes true-crime story. Tatiana Marchenko meticulously mapped out Bunin and Kuprin’s old Parisian drinking spots, tracing the geography of their exile, while Larisa Nuri delivered a fascinating lecture on how the specific, sickly yellow paint used on the facades of St. Petersburg systematically messes with human psychology.
Yet, perhaps the strangest, most arresting moment of the entire weekend for me arrived courtesy of Nicolas Rembert. He is a rather polished French philosopher, and he stood up at the podium to deliver a lecture on Russian metaphysics – specifically the works of Vladimir Solovyov and Alexander Kojeve. Hearing a Frenchman casually and elegantly dissect the murky depths of Russian mysticism threw me right back to my twenties. I suddenly thought of Yuri Mamleev. He was my teacher. In my youth, I used to spend freezing, pitch-black nights at his dacha in Peredelkino, just outside Moscow. The wooden house was perpetually thick with cheap cigarette smoke and the sound of people shouting over one another – Svetlana Vasilenko, Igor Zolotussky, the brilliant, damaged minds of the Yuzhinsky circle crowd.
I used to read my awful, pretentious early drafts to him in that smoke-filled kitchen. One night, he pointed a nicotine-stained finger at a manuscript of mine called “The Eye of God” and told me, in his slow, gravelly voice, that it possessed real mysticism. When you are young and desperately searching for a voice, a comment like that from a man like Mamleev alters your very DNA; it sets the course of your life. Sitting there in the sleek auditorium of the Quai Branly, listening to Rembert’s flawless French, it hit me with the force of a physical blow: these polished, formal European salons are, at their core, basically just trying to recreate the electric, desperate energy of those chaotic, smoky rooms in Peredelkino. We are all still just sitting around the kitchen table, arguing about God and syntax until dawn.
You cannot do this kind of cultural work without acknowledging the ghosts, though. The past in Paris is never truly past. The Association of Friends of the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery gave a sombre, moving presentation. Andrei Tarkovsky, Rudolf Nureyev, and Ivan Bunin are all buried there, under the quiet pines. It served as a sharp, painful reminder of the human cost of all this cross-cultural exchange. The first wave of emigres fleeing the revolution lost absolutely everything. Tsarist generals and world-famous writers ended up driving Renault taxicabs through the Parisian rain just to afford bread and coal. All they had left in the world was the Russian language, and so they guarded it fiercely, nurturing it like a fragile flame in freezing attic flats across the city.
That historical desperation hung palpably over the salon’s theatre performances, too. The Aprelik theatre group delivered a raw, impassioned piece on Yesenin, and the Heritage troupe staged a remarkably atmospheric adaptation of Bunin’s Dark Avenues. When Alexander Berlin and Alexander Krivich took to the stage to play the violin and piano at the end of the night, the music they drew from their instruments sounded almost unbearably sad, carrying the weight of a century of displacement.
This melancholy was further deepened by the cinematic offerings. The salon screened Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterpiece The Cranes Are Flying alongside Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man. I have seen Cranes a dozen times; I know its soaring camera angles and devastating close-ups by heart. But watching the French audience read the subtitles and react to the tragedy does something profound to you. Looking around the darkened auditorium at a crowd of Parisians weeping openly at the exact same scenes that made audiences weep in Moscow in 1957, you realise something fundamental: grief translates perfectly. It needs no dictionary. It is a bitter, unifying reminder of the absolute mess ordinary people are inevitably handed whenever distant governments decide to tear the map of the world apart.
I finally left the Quai Branly on Sunday evening, slipping out just after a beautiful Yesenin reading organised by Galina Pogozheva. Down the hall, I could hear children excitedly wrapping up their creative workshops with Natalia Inzhevskaya and Aleksandra Zelenskaya – the next generation, learning to inhabit two worlds simultaneously.
I walked out into the freezing, bracing air along the Seine, pulling my coat tight against the wind. People in the polished, insulated corridors of London publishing often dismiss these kinds of emigre events. They think it’s just expats drinking cheap wine and indulging in maudlin nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. They are totally, fundamentally wrong. In our current, terrifying era of closed borders and hardening hearts, getting a room full of people from vastly different countries and backgrounds to sit down, abandon their luggage, and passionately argue about the translation of a poem is nothing short of a minor miracle. It is messy, it is loud, and it requires an immense, often painful amount of patience. But it is probably the most important thing we can do.
