Writing a novel in Crimea

The New Yorker - March 13, 2014 - Posted by David Bezmozgis

The Novel in Real Time

For the past four years, I have been writing a novel set in present-day Crimea. When one is writing a novel for a long time—and most novels take a long time—one gets used to being asked repeatedly what it is about, often by the same people. It is easy to forget another person’s preoccupation, easier still if that preoccupation is set in some obscure, foreign place. So I have grown accustomed to reciting, “A disgraced Israeli politician meets the old friend who denounced him to the K.G.B. forty years earlier. This happens in Yalta. Which is in Crimea. Which is on the Black Sea. At the southernmost part of Ukraine. Which is …”

But now, unexpectedly, and for the first time since Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill met in Yalta, to divide up postwar Europe, Crimea is prominently in the news. Watching the uprising in Kiev, and then seeing Russian troops fan out across the Crimean peninsula, inspired in me a complicated response. First, and altogether selfishly, I was glad that the obscure place I had been writing about had achieved relevance. Simultaneously, I was, like most people, frightened and disturbed by the violence and chaos that gripped Ukraine and that threatened to escalate into something far worse. In fact, because I was familiar with Crimea, had visited the place, and had friends there whose safety was in jeopardy, I was especially apprehensive. But there was something else, too, which on its face may sound as self-interested as my happiness at Crimea’s newfound prominence but which is actually a feeling of wider scope: I felt frustrated that world events conspired to undermine my designs for the book.

I’d wanted to write a novel that, among other things, engaged with current politics and that, in fact, even gestured at a modest prescience. As I was writing the book, I kept changing when the action was set, constantly pushing the date ahead by another year—2011, 2012, 2013, 2014—to coincide with the year of its ultimate publication. I closely followed the news to see if real events had yet outpaced my inventions. I expected this to happen at any moment in Israel, where things always seem to be on the verge of upheaval. And yet, as I write these words, it isn’t Israel that has undergone a transformation but Ukraine and Crimea, places I’d believed to be locked in a dismal kleptocratic stasis. 
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