An interview in Russian Bazaar/ Интервью в Русском Базаре

Alexander Dolinin, author of Against Destiny

(print ISBN 9781601641731, Adobe ebook ISBN 9781601643261, Kindle ISBN 9781601643278, Sony ISBN 9781601643285)

Several days ago I was interviewed by a well-known journalist, Natasha Sharymova (Наташа Шарымова), for one of the major Russian-language North American newspapers, Russian Bazaar (Русский Базар), which is based in New York.

The interview has now been published, in Russian. You can access it by clicking here .

If you google “Александр Долинин Вопреки судьбе”, the page will show up in the top 10 listings.

I find one fact about my interviews interesting. So far I have been interviewed three times about Against Destiny (in Russian Вопреки судьбе). The first interview was published in Polish in Australia, and its English original is on my previous post. The second was live on Hamilton radio station CHML on Bob Bratina’s morning show. The third was the present interview by Natasha Sharymova. The three interviewers asked me quite different sets of questions, but independently raised one common question: Is my novel about an escape from Kolyma labour camp to Alaska based on documented information about a real escape? The same question was asked by many of my friends and also by a reader commenting on the novel.

My answer to this question is no. As far as I know, no documents about such an event have come to light, either in Russia or in Alaska. But the topic of an escape fascinated me.

In my last posting I explained that there were some speculations that an escape like this one could have happened. As for my novel, I only explore such a possibility. I develop a fictionalized probability of how this could happen.

Why Alaska? Because it was the closest destination for an escape from the Kolyma region, and the only realistic one. It is actually shorter and less dangerous than other destinations described in memoirs of real escapes. Thus in The Long Walk Slawomir Rawicz describes an escape from a Jakutija labour camp to British India by way of the Gobi desert. In As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me Josef Bauer describes his escape from a camp in Chukotskij peninsular via Siberia proper to the Caspian Sea and to Iran.

As for the characters in my novel, I asked myself a question: Who could carry out such an escape? First, it could be accomplished only by individuals who had a substantial military experience and knew how to fight through the obstacles. Second, in order to cover thousands of kilometers of the subarctic wilderness, there had to be a guide, an aboriginal person, for whom this land is a place of normal habitat.

So the plot of the novel is built around these parameters. The destination is Alaska. The escapees are a group of five, four of them World War II veterans (and there were in reality lots of such people in Stalin’s camps after the war) and one a Chukchi man. To see how events unfold, you have to read Against Destiny. If you read Russian, you can read my Russian translations of excerpts from my novel (entitled in Russian Вопреки судьбе) in Nasha Canada (Наша Канада), in issues 208 (December 2009, already published) and 210 (January 2010, forthcoming at the time of this posting). I plan to post them on my blog “History and Us”.