Alisa Ganieva is a talented, well-educated Moscow literary critic who left Dagestan to study at The Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. In his introduction, Roger Meyer writes that she is ethnic Avar (like the famed late national poet of Dagestan Rasul Gamzatov, but unlike him ‘identifies with Russian culture’. Rasul’s life-size bronze statue was unveiled by President Putin in central Moscow in 2013; and when Rasul, a former member of the Supreme Soviet of USSR, picked up the highest Russian order of St Andrew in 2003, I heard that he tartly remarked to Putin that he hadn’t known that Putin liked poetry. Putin was not amused.
Over many decades I have found that Dagestan, with a population of 3 million out of about 144 million in the Russian Federation, is under-represented culturally. Only recently, earlier texts were discovered in Dagestan, which established the truth, denied during the Soviet period that, inter alia Avar was a written language. All ethnic Dagestanis, then, who write about Dagestan must be welcomed; according to publisher Deep Vellum, The Mountain and the Wall is the first Dagestani novel to be published in English. There are enough reports of bombs and deaths, and abuse by both authorities and rebels/ terrorists to obscure Dagestan’s rich cultural heritage and brand them all as terrorists. On the human level, Ganieva is very courageous to write about what is happening in Dagestan, thinly veiled in the traditional Russian literary use of fiction. Several journalists who have written actual or perceived criticism of the system have paid for it dearly. Since Putin came to power, some 123 journalists have been killed in Russia not including 8 killed while writing about the second war in Chechnya.
According to publisher Deep Vellum, The Mountain and the Wall is the first Dagestani novel to be published in English
