I Love Russia
**WINNER OF THE PUSHKIN HOUSE BOOK PRIZE 2024**
'Would you like to know where Putin comes from? What the Russians are like today? And why? Read this book' SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
'Brilliant and immersive ... reportage at its brave and luminous best' OBSERVER
To be a journalist is to tell the truth. To be patriotic is to be critical, honest, and fearless.
I Love Russia takes us to places that non-Russians have never seen and brings us voices we have never heard. It is Elena Kostyuchenko’s courageous attempt to document Russia as experienced by those whom it systematically and brutally erases: village girls recruited into sex work, queer people in the outer provinces, patients and doctors at a Ukrainian maternity ward, and reporters like herself.
At once uncompromising and deeply humane, it stitches reportage and personal essays into a kaleidoscopic, often other-worldly journey. Here is Russia as it is, not as we imagine it.
I Love Russia may be the last work from her homeland Kostyuchenko will publish for a long time – perhaps ever. She writes driven by the conviction that the greatest form of love and patriotism is criticism. And because the threat of Putin’s Russia extends beyond herself, beyond Crimea, and beyond Ukraine.
This is a singular portrait of a nation, and of a woman who refuses to be silenced.
'Elena's bravery and reportage are astonishing' CHRISTINA LAMB
'Kostyuchenko is an important guide to the twenty-first century' TIMOTHY SNYDER
*A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023*
Elena Kostyuchenko (Author)
ELENA KOSTYUCHENKO was born in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1987. She began working as a journalist when she was fourteen and spent seventeen years reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia's last major independent newspaper.
In March 2022 she crossed into Ukraine to cover the horrors committed in Russia's name; Novaya Gazeta was shut down in the spring of 2022 in response to her reporting. Returning home now would likely mean prosecution and up to fifteen years in prison.
She is also the author of two books published in Russian, Unwanted on Probation and We Have to Live Here, and is the recipient of the European Press Prize, the Free Media Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize.
Ilona Chavasse (Translator)
Ilona Chavasse was born in Belarus and, together with her family, emigrated to the United States in 1989. She has translated three novels by Yuri Rytkheu, including most recently When the Whales Leave, Aleksandr Skorobogatov's Russian Gothic, and Galina Scherbakova's short stories for the Dedalus anthology Slav Sisters, as well as The Village at the Edge of Noon by Darya Bobyleva. She lives in London.
Bela Shayevich (Translator)
Bela Shayevich is a Soviet American writer and translator. She is best known for her translation of 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time, for which she was awarded the TA First Translation Prize. Her other translations include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Vsevolod Nekrasov's I Live I See, which she cotranslated with Ainsley Morse. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Jewish Currents, and Harper's Magazine.