 Welcome back to Georgia's Fantastic Tavern, an online feast of Georgian culture. I'm Maya Jaggi, the artistic director in London, bringing you this festival with Writers House of Georgia in Tbilisi, in partnership with the British Library and Words Without Borders in New York. This is the final event in the British Library's two-day series for Georgia's Fantastic Tavern, but not, I'm happy to say, the end of the festival. There's another day of Tavern encounters, streamed tomorrow by Writers House of Georgia. And you can also read newly translated novel extracts from four festival writers, two of whom are speaking tomorrow in the Tavern, Archil Kikodze and David Gabunia, on the open access Words Without Borders.org. All details at georgisfantastictavern.com. I'm delighted to welcome Boris Akunin and Boyd Tonkin to the Tavern, whose last conversation in public five years ago in London opened where Europe meets Asia, Georgia 25, which was the UK's first festival of Georgian writers. Boyd Tonkin is an author, critic, journalist and broadcaster, and the 2020 winner of the Royal Society of Literatures Benson Medal for Lifetime's Outstanding Service to Literature, following recipients, including Philip Larkin and Tolkien. His prolific writing on books, art and classical music appears widely, including in the Economist Financial Times spectator, new scientist, New York review of books and the artsdesk.com. Until 2016, he was the independent senior writer and art critic after 17 years as literary editor. He refounded the independent foreign fiction prize in 2001 and co-judged it for 15 years. This unique prize for best novel of the year in English translation, split equally between author and translator, became the model for the Man Booker International Prize, for which he served as the special advisor and inaugural chair of judges. The hundred best novels in translation, his critical book spanning four centuries of global fiction was admired by Ian McEwen as a brilliant and extremely useful guide and by Ben Ockry as the work of a wonderful, thoughtful and conscientious critic. Boyd's chosen book recently on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read was Tolstoy's novella, Hadji Moritz, set in the Caucasus. Before I hand over to Boyd, a few welcome words from the British Library. Hello, my name's Janice Marotek and I'm head of European America's and Oceania collections here at the British Library. It's my great pleasure to welcome you on behalf of the library today. Over the years, we've developed close relationships with a number of institutions in Georgia, including the National Library of Georgia and also the Art Palace of Georgia Museum of Cultural History. So we were delighted when Maya Jaggi, artistic director of Georgia's Fantastic Tavern, approached us to be a partner in this exciting and inspiring festival. So many thanks, Maya. I first fell in love with Georgia and it's immensely rich culture when I spent time there in the 1980s as a student. So I've been reveling in this cultural feast that the festival has brought to us, including the marvellous Katie Melua, Nino Haratishvili, Akka Morchiladze and Dad Turashvili who we saw on Friday. And I'm really looking forward to hearing Barissa Kunin today. With one of the world's most international collections, with rare and unique items from an extraordinary range of cultures, languages and faiths, one of the British Library's key purposes is to enable people to engage with the world through writing and culture. And events like these give us the opportunity to reach new audiences and alert people to our collections. Pandemic restrictions mean we've been limited in what we can present to you in terms of highlights of our Georgian collections today. But please do visit the British Library website where our Georgian curator Anna Chalutze has written a great blog which outlines the history of the Georgian collection and shows you some key items which will hopefully give you a taste to find out more. So once more, warmest thanks to Maya Jagi, Writers House Georgia and all the participants, and I wish you an enjoyable festival. Thank you so much and welcome again to Georgia's fantastic tavern. Now, it's a huge pleasure today to be able to talk again to Barissa Kunin whom, as we were hearing, I last discussed his work with in 2016. Now, Barissa Kunin, many of you will know as a hugely prolific, entertaining and successful writer of crime fiction, the creator of Erast Fandarin, whom we can only describe as imperial Russia's answer to Sherlock Holmes, but if possible an even cooler and cleverer version. But Barissa Kunin has written many other books in many other genres and of course there's a mystery pertaining to his own identity as well because today I am talking to Barissa Kunin, the hugely internationally successful Russian author, but I'm also talking to Grigiri Chakateshvili, a Georgian-born writer and someone who moved at a very early age from Georgia to Russia. So maybe this is the place where I should start. Grigiri, how much does being of Georgian origin mean to you? How important was it when you were growing up in Russia? How important was it to the people around you? Good evening. Well, as long as I remember myself, I've been living in Moscow, so I'm a Muscovite. I don't remember, well, I lived Georgia when I was one month old, so I couldn't really remember it. For me, like for most of people who grew up on a huge mega-police, well, I don't believe we tend to have that ethnical feeling. When you grew up in a city like Moscow, you feel urban. I am Georgian on my paternal side. I'm Jewish on my maternal side. My native language is Russian. From early age, I majored in the language and culture of Japan. So it is all very mixed up. It makes me what I am. Speaking about what is Georgia for me? Georgia for me is the Georgian accent of my father. He spoke with an accent to the end of his life, although he left Georgia before the war. He could sing Georgian songs when he was drunk. What else? Georgian music and Georgian songs definitely touch a chord in me. I can feel that. And my favorite cuisine is Georgian. This is probably, well, this is as Georgian as I am. And when you returned to Georgia, as I know you did a few years ago, how did you find it? Did you live up to your expectations? What you thought, what you had read about? Were there things about it that surprised you? I was in Georgia actually twice. The first time I was there as a very, very young man in my early 20s. But I was silly. I was interested in absolutely other things. I don't remember much except that I was drunk most of the time. The only thing that impressed me was the loveliness of Georgian girls. So when I went there for the second time, more than 40 years later at 60, I paid attention to absolutely other things. I was very much curious. I was curious to see if I would feel something inside myself, some sort of response, and I felt it. And it was quite a strong feeling. I cannot explain it. There were a lot of things that even the right I cannot explain, but it was definitely, it was definitely there. I liked the country very much. I should say that it exceeded my expectations because, well, Georgia is not a rich country, but I thought that people there had two very important features. One of them is dignity, which is felt in everybody. And from my readings and from what I understand about history, this is probably the most important thing in a nation. The degree of dignity that people live there possess. It makes a difference. And another thing is this easygoing thing, because as you know, there is a lot of political tension in Georgia. The country is more or less divided into two political camps. And I was sitting there among Georgian intellectuals belonging to both camps, and they could argue in an absolutely friendly fashion without animosity, which is absolutely unthinkable, say, in Russia. Because I cannot even imagine sitting and drinking with a Putin supporter. This is totally unimaginable. Just think of, like in America, someone who is pro-Trump and against Trump, well, being friends, this is something. Well, Georgia is different. This is, I thought that this was very intriguing and promising. And that raises the question of what is the relationship between Russia and all the territories, the nations and the culture around its periphery. In other words, the old Tsarist Empire and then the Soviet Empire. Obviously, 30 years ago, we had the breakup of the Soviet Union, the independence of Georgia and many other places. So how has that relationship changed with that end of Empire moment? Have some things improved or is it a matter of more tension, more misunderstanding? Of course, there is much more tension because today is Russia. It is still an empire. It acts like an empire. It wants to be seen as an empire, but it is a herd empire. And the herd empire is like a herd beast. It makes all sorts of aggressive movements. And being near an empire like this is not a pleasant experience. It is dangerous. And Georgia was hurt, as we all know, not only Georgia, Ukraine. Well, this is what is happening. Empire is always the problem to itself and to its neighbors. But at the same time, as we know in Britain, empire can also inspire feelings of nostalgia, of loss. And these feelings can be powerful political actors. Do you think that's the case in Russia? And in which case, how do you get over nostalgia for empire? How long before it fades away or does it never fade away? I think that this imperial part of Russian mentality will stay there as long as Russia continues to be an empire. I am writing a multi-volume history of Russia. I have written eight volumes already. I started working on this project in order to try to explain what Russia is like, not to my readers or to myself. I didn't understand it. Now I understand Russia much, much better, I believe. And I see the essence of the problem. Why it is the way it is. Why is the Russian state again and again zigzagging between freedom and dictatorship, moving this way, then it backfires, and it goes back to being an empire. I do not think now that this is Vladimir Putin's blame. No. I think that this is a totally logical thing, because with a state like Russia, which is built on total hyper-centralization, no democracy is possible. The only way they know how to keep this huge, this diversified country together is by force and intimidation. This is incompatible, neither with democracy, nor with freedom of press, nor with rule of law. So all other branches of power except the executive one should not work. It is bad for the health of the state system. So if nothing changes, if Putin's regime falls down and there will be a new democratic leadership, it will very soon face the same problem like Yeltsin's government in 1990s. The moment you relax the reins, the country starts falling apart. Is this a kind of destiny that comes from geography? Is it because Russia is simply so vast, so diverse, covers so many time zones, so many potential cultures? And if so, what is the answer? Is it maybe a proper form of federalism in which centralization was replaced with more devolved control? Absolutely. I mean, historically, this system worked because this hyper-centralization, it helps to mobilize the country. It is very tough. It shows especially during the times of war or famine or some other huge disaster. People are used to suffering. They are long suffering, all of them. Well, Russia has shown many times in its history that it can, well, you know, fight and fight back with Napoleon, with Hitler and so on and so forth. But now we live in the world where there are mechanisms which work much, much better. So this is obsolete. In a country like Russia, it cannot be centralized. The only way out of this dilemma, I believe, is to make Russia a really federal state, maybe even a confederacy like Switzerland. Because regions of the country are so different, it's so far apart that at the distance between the people and Moscow is so huge, you have to bring the authority and the people closer to each other. If you live, say, in the Northern Caucasus, you have other problems that people who live in St. Petersburg. So most of the money, most of the decision-making should stay at the original level. So you have to rebuild this country from the foundation. Unless it happens, it will be again and again and again returning to autocracy and dictatorship. There are only two ways to hold this country together, either by force and intimidation or by good will. So the second variant has not been tried before. It should be. Now, tell me something about this remarkable project you're engaged with the history of the Russian state, because it consists, as I understand, not only of historical works but of fiction as well. And the fictions are in partnership or in parallel to the episodes of the history that you're describing. How do you manage to switch between the two genres? Is it difficult? And what does fiction give you that historical writing cannot deliver? Well, in the beginning, when I was discussing this project with others, I told them that we need the fictional part in order to attract readership to the non-fictional part, because people read just a historical novel, a thriller. And they hopefully become interested in this epoch and in the fact, and they go and buy the volume which corresponds to this epoch. So these volumes still are published in pairs. A volume of non-fiction of history, per se, is followed by a volume of fiction. So this is how it works. But this is very important for me as well, and it's considerations apart. Because when I write the history of Russian state, I need to stay unemotional. I'm not on this side, on that side, there are no good guys and no bad guys for me. I need to understand, I honestly need to understand what happened and why. You cannot belong to your party when you do this. But I'm human, I have my sympathies, I have my hate, I have my feelings, I have to channel them somewhere. So all this goes into the fictional thing, into the novel, which is about this epoch. So dividing all these thoughts and emotions in two streams allows me to make it more interesting for me myself. And what about the readers? Do your readers in Russia tend to concentrate on the fiction, on the history? Do you have different readers for the novel versions as opposed to the historical versions, or are they the same people? I just got the yearly report, the statistics, and it was interesting for me because I see that the readers of fiction are only a tiny proportion, more numerous than those of the nonfiction. So it means that it works. People do buy nonfiction. They do buy this quite monotonous and boring reading about all those Tsars and Laws and Wars and whatnot. So it works. Now let me go back to the writing that readers in Britain and the US will mostly know from your work, which are the Thanderen detective novels, which of course are not just mysteries. They're also remarkably colourful and detailed portraits of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century. Why did you choose that period from the 1870s onwards? Are there parallels between that epoch in Tsarist Russia and where Russia has been recently? Is it a kind of mirror to the present? Or are you going there in order to escape from the present? I'm definitely not going there to escape. And when I started, the main reason was not history but literature. Those times, starting with the 1870s, was the time when Russian literature started to be at its peak. It is the epoch of the great Russian literature. So I wanted to live in this atmosphere of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Leskov, Chekhov, all those wonderful names. I wanted to play with their styles. I wanted to steal their characters and to use them in my novels. I wanted my reader to enjoy all the illusions, the game over with the plots and all that thing. It was more important to me than history. And did you attempt to write in a way that recalled the style and the atmosphere of the Golden Age literature of that time? Oh yes, I played a lot with that. In one of my novels, I rewrote crime and punishment completely. It is another series, not Eras Von Dorin. It is about Eras Von Dorin's grandson living in contemporary Russia. So he is looking for a lost manuscript by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The first variant of the novel Crime and Punishment, which was written as a detective novel. And he is discovering after chapter the real text of Dostoyevsky. So I became Dostoyevsky myself. I was trying to write in his style. I found a specialist in St. Petersburg who knows how to imitate Dostoyevsky's handwriting. And he wrote the manuscript on old paper in Dostoyevsky's handwriting with Dostoyevsky's drawings because Dostoyevsky used to draw faces and houses on the margins of his manuscripts. It now hangs on my wall, this manuscript. So it was like that. That's it. And as fans of the Van Dorin novels will know, they cover a big historical arc right from the 1870s up in the latest one, which is called not saying goodbye to the immediate post-revolutionary period after 1917. So when you have a serious character who covers more than 40 years, it creates problems for the author. How did you deal with that? Do you have him aging in real time or do you have to stop the clock to some extent? No, no, no, absolutely. I didn't want to make him an Erkut Kurok who is basically the same age or, you know, like we don't feel like Sherlock Holmes becomes older, don't we? No, I wanted to show a story of a man's life who starts when he's 20, when he's silly, when he's not a Superman, when he grows up, he learns things, he understands things, he changes. So Van Dorin changes from novel to novel to novel to novel and he lives life to its full in every season. This is the thing, because one thing is to be young, another thing to be 30, 40, 50 in the last novel, he is what, 64? Yes, yes. Was it more difficult to write about him in the revolutionary period when the culture of his youth has been completely swept away and all of the elegance, the politeness, the sophistication that you so enjoy evoking in the early novels has been replaced by something a lot more rough and brutal? Yes, it was, it is quite an unpleasant book, the last one. In one of the early books there is a novella which is called A Table Talk in 1882 and it is very polite salon talk with ladies and gentlemen and so on and so forth. In the last book there is a novella which is called A Table Talk in 1918. So, the contrast is incredible. It is like after the fall of Rome, something like this. And maybe that helps to answer my next question which of course is the one that has plagued every creator of a great character from Conan Doyle onwards which is will he come back? In novel form, no. I might, and actually I plan to do maybe a play, a theater play with Rass von Dornen, maybe a film script or something like this because I'm not going to write a real novel. I ran out of words having written 16 books on von Dornen. Well, my glossary is empty. The problem is not devising a plot, it comes easy to me. The problem is the texture, the fabric of the text. This is, you remember when I was writing the first novel it took me like, I don't know, six weeks to write the novel. It was very quick. Then it became slow. In the end it became very slow. I know the story, but it's not enough. Unless you find the right words, this story is not going to come alive. I know it only too well. So no more novels about von Dornen. So we can't look forward to an equivalent of the Hound of the Baskervilles when Sherlock Holmes returns. You mean the waterfall in Switzerland after he comes back? No, no. And if there are new plots it will be something from earlier periods. Now one other aspect of those books relates to your early training and your early career is Fandoren's Japanese assistant who has a very, very interesting sardonic outsiders take on imperial Russia at this time. Can you tell me a little about why Japan fascinated you when you were started out? Why you learned Japanese and what that immersion in Japanese culture and literature gave to you? I was 14. Our teacher of geography divided all the countries between us. Each of us got two and three countries which we were supposed to follow. Newspaper clippings and all that. So my lot was Tunisia and Japan. Nothing ever happened in Tunisia. I think my file was empty. But it was 1970. I was in the eighth form and in November the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima tried to stage a coup d'etat and then he committed seppuku, harakiri, and cut his own belly. And it impressed me enormously. I just imagined, I've seen a living writer only once. A writer from the Union of the Soviet writers came to our school to lecture us about October Revolution. To imagine someone like him committing harakiri, cutting his own belly seemed absolutely unimaginable. So I thought, what kind of country it is where writers cut their bellies? And this is how it all started. I started to read about Japan, watch movies, and then I wanted to learn the language culture and so on and so forth. Speaking about masa. And last year I thought that I am nostalgic for Japan. I need to go there. I was planning to. But then this whole pandemic thing started. Travel became impossible. Not only to Japan, but anywhere. And I know from my experience that when you have this sort of hunger inside you, you want to do something and you cannot. This is very productive in a creative way. You can pull out a book out of it. So I decided that I need to write a novel about Japan, a nostalgic one. And I did it. And it is a novel about masa without Fondoren. Going back to Japan where he hadn't been for 40 years. So it was for me very unusual. It doesn't belong to a series. It is a standalone. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun for me. I am grateful to Pundimi for that experience. And do you still read Japanese? I can read, but I don't think I'll be able to talk now because I haven't spoken Japanese for more than 20 years. So if I go back to Japan, maybe I think after a couple of weeks I'll start speaking again, but I don't think not now. Did you find an affinity between Japan and if you like the eastern side of Russia in the sense that we're always told that Russia is split between looking west and looking east. And if it looks east, do you find affinities with Japanese history and Japanese culture now? I do not. Well, this is not my feeling. I think that Russia has been always looking to the west. And I think that Russia should look to the east more because to the east they're very interesting neighbors. China, Japan, Korea. There was a lot to learn there. So now if we speak about the eastern side of Russia, it concerns Russian state, not culture, not mentality. Russian state is definitely built along the lines of Chinggis Khan's empire, definitely. It copies all the levers, the architecture, everything, but not the mentality. No. No. Mentally, Russians have always felt themselves to be a part of the west of Europe. Do you think that's the case even when they are politically opposed to the west or attacking the west? So in other words, is that a hostility that is based on kinship rather than on difference? Yes. They are still sizing themselves up against Europe, America. I do not know a single politician in Russia who would be interested in China and wanted to imitate China. No. Which is the loss in my view? Can I ask you a little about your other work as a writer of fiction? Because of course, as we were saying here in Britain, in America, we're dependent on knowing you through the Vandoren novels. But what about the historical novels you write under one of your other names, the novels about the immediate post-Revolution period and the 1930s? Why did you embark on that series? When I decided to write the history of Russian state, I understood very quickly that I'd have to stop in 1917, and I will. The reason is very evident to me. I would not be able to stay unemotional describing the events of the 20th century. It is too close to me. It is already the history of my family. So I would not be able to write about, say, Vladimir Lenin or Joseph Stalin in an objective manner. So better not to write at all. I decided that I'd reflect on this century, on the 20th century in another way. I write a series of novels, but not entertainment novels. Well, you know those gloomy, heavy Russian philosophical novels, something which I had never done before. And it would center around a family album of photographs. There will be photographs, real photographs, from a family album with a story tied to each of them. So I have written already four novels about the Civil War, about 1920s, about 1930s, about 1940s. And I plan to continue. When you're writing these novels, do you feel that you're tapping into a different literary personality to the one you have to operate when you're creating a mystery story? It's not another personality. It's not the mood. Because we all of us know and experience different moods, don't we? Sometimes we are hilarious, sometimes we are sad, sometimes we are silly, sometimes we unexpectedly become wise. So I'm trying to be wise in this instance. I don't know whether I succeed or not, but anyway, that is the intention. And how has the reaction to those novels been in Russian? Do you feel that you're reaching the same audience of readers? Or are you stretching out to touch other readers with this subject matter? Well, the first novel had a huge circulation because people were expecting me to entertain them again. Then the audience became much, much smaller. But this audience is very precious to me because these are people who are interested in the same things with me who want just to reflect. It is a very unpleasant reading, absolutely unlike from Dorian, because it has been a tragical century, especially for Russia. And I must say that I do not read these novels for my readers, for my audience. I read them for myself because there are some problems, difficult problems, which I need to understand. There are some questions which need to be answered. And for a writer, in order to answer a question, you have to write a text about it. You have to create a universe, a world, where people face this problem that you cannot solve. And then you see how they respond, how they react. And then hopefully you'll get your answer that how it works. You talk about Russia's tragic century and the century since the revolution. And I wonder, given that what's been happening in Russia recently, whether you thought there was anything new on the horizon or are we basically seeing a repetition of the patterns that we have seen over that century? It is definitely the repetition of the general pattern. Rebuilding empire after it was threatened by dissolution. Speaking, well, if I lived 100 years from now, and if I had to write the history of this period in Russia and stay unemotional, I would write something that in 1991, the first phase of the dissolution of the empire happened. The second phase, the dissolution of the second half of empire continued for another, I don't know, 30, 40 years. So I believe that we live now in this period. I do not think that Putinism will succeed acting the way it is to keep this country together. I don't think so. So we have now moved into the anticipated stage of life dictatorship by Putin. Then something happens to the dictator and the system falls apart. That's how it usually works in history. But from what you were saying about the cycles of Russian history, what we would expect afterwards is simply another figure to emerge of the same kind. Unless Russians do understand the importance of restructuring the state. I am very satisfied that there are two opposition programs, one created by Mikhail Khadarkovsky and another by Alexei Navalny and both of them insist on turning Russia into a federal state. This idea is a new one for Russia. It still has to find support in the country. But more and more people, I think, now tend to agree with that. So maybe at the next stage, Russia will finally reboot and start being something else, something better. About 10 or 9 years ago, you yourself took quite a prominent part in the protests at that time against the government and against the leadership. Can you imagine conditions in which you might return to again take part in organized protest? Well, even back then, I was not acting as a politician. I was not a leader or something. I was just helping. I was just helping political activists in whom I believed, whom I trusted. So that was my role. I'm still helping them now by my writing, and I will definitely. But I think that Russia needs a new generation of politicians, new generations with new brains without this Soviet-era experience. I think that the young generation in Russia is much better than we used to be in their age. This is probably the best thing that is happening in Russia these days. These new faces, new way of thinking. I have a lot of faith in it. And do you think it will be many years before those people come to be able to exercise leadership or could it happen very fast? I think that the regime is fragile. It is much, much weaker definitely than the Soviet Empire. It is corrupt. It is ineffective. When it wants to kill someone, as we know, even that they often fail because they would steal half of the funds on the way there. Another thing is it doesn't have ideology. And a dictatorship without an ideology is a dull and hopeless thing. So people in Russia, they do not really support Putin. They have no illusions about him. They just think that, well, life is bearable better this than a big change in the future. We don't know what it will bring us. So it will continue as long as, well, till a huge economical crisis or something like this. It can happen anytime. It can happen this year. It cannot happen for 20 years. So it's an aging, inefficient plutocracy. That's what it is. And of course, because of that, it's produced people like you who basically live abroad. And I wanted to talk about the great theme of the exile in Russian literature. I don't know whether you would describe yourself as an exile and expatriate. What would be your preferred term? I'm an expat, of course. I did not run, you know, from Bolsheviks or something. It was my choice. I haven't been in Russia since 2014. And for me, it's a matter of principle. I just don't want to be there. But I can buy a ticket when the lockdown is over and fly. So it's not true. So I don't believe I can be called an exile now. And there were a lot of people like me now, Russians living abroad, visiting Russia and coming back, especially people in professions, which are threatened by the dictatorship. If you have anything to do with freedom of word with... Well, it is like it's really, really difficult to be a journalist in Russia these days. Being a writer is the freest person in the world, probably. You don't need anything just to your head. Do you feel that there is a danger of any writer who lives outside their own country, that you lose touch with the... If you like the pulse of the community with the small changes that are happening and the way they build into big changes. In other words, can the distant writer perhaps get locked in a view of the country that brings to the past that gradually recedes? Well, it was definitely the situation in Turgenev's times. Because Turgenev lived in France. He wrote in France. After a while, he had a very vague idea of what was actually... He was living in Russia with his imaginations. Of his imaginations. These days, most of us live in the Internet. We get our information about what's happening around from the social networks. When I lived in Russia, my life was not so much different from what I have today. I was still sitting in my study and reading in the Internet what's happening around me. It doesn't matter whether it is one kilometer away or 3,000 kilometers away. It's basically the same. Do you have much to do with other Russians here in London? Do you feel you're part of some sort of community of not exiles but expats, certainly? Not this year. Not this year. But yes, there were a lot of Russians in London and UK. Interesting Russians, creative Russians. I think that Russian culture ways, London is probably third in line after Moscow and St. Petersburg. Would you say that there is maybe some kind of school of writers or journalists or filmmakers who have been shaped by living outside the country? And who may perhaps at some point return and add something new to Russian culture on its home territory? Yes, but it's happening now. A lot of directors, they work on contract in another country then they come back or they live between different countries. It has become quite cosmopolitan this milieu. And a lot of Russian writers, good writers live abroad now. I don't know. One of my favorite ones, Mikhail Shishkin, lives in Switzerland. Vladimir Sarotkin, who is very popular, lives in Germany. Ulytmila Ulitskaya, an excellent writer, lives mostly in Italy. There are writers who live in Israel and so on and so forth. Now, of course, one question that always arises when Russian writers are outside the country for a long time is, do they at some point give up the Russian language? Obviously, I'm thinking about Nabokov, for instance. Has that ever been a temptation for you? Nabokov didn't have a choice and he was much younger than me. So I don't want to lose the language. I live in that language. I haven't lost even the contact with my readers because thanks to the internet, I am connected. I get feedback every day. I ask them what they think. Sometimes I take polls like what do you think about this or that and so on and so forth. We live in an amazing world. We are very privileged compared to our predecessors. I usually live in three countries. Just now, I'm here in the UK because of the lockdown. Usually every two or three weeks, I move to my Spanish home, my French home, because I always write on three books simultaneously, each of them in a different country. This is the way I exist. So if you asked me where I live, well, I live here in my head. It doesn't change. Now you talked about this before, about writing different kinds of books in different countries. Could you say a little about which location favours a particular literary genre? What is France good for? London is perfect for nonfiction. Yeah, something in the air is very good for it. France, to be more precise, I have a house in the north of France, which is very unlike Côte d'Azur. It is good for serious literature. It is good for serious literature. It sets you just in the right direction. And entertainment I write in Spain, in the south of Spain. This year, when I couldn't travel and I had to travel inside myself, I discovered some new territories unknown to me. And I wrote some new types of books which I hadn't even imagined I'd be able to write. I wrote a collection of fairy tales quite unexpectedly for myself. I am because I'm stuck in London. I'm writing now a book which is called A Russian in England, which is an experiment for me. It is about all Russians from different epochs who lived here. What happened to them? What they felt, what they thought it is. It's interesting for me. And there are some other experiments that I'm going to try like online theater from a distance. Which wouldn't have been impossible without all this crisis. That's really exciting. And my last question before we move to the questions submitted by our audience. In general, has lockdown allowed you to do things creatively that you would never have done otherwise? You know, it is. I've had a slightly similar experience in the past. When I had my first, well, crisis. Literary, well, creative crisis. I went on a world tour, on a world cruise, on a ship three months in the sea. It was quite an ordeal because it was incredibly boring. Incredibly boring. You see only water each day. You understand that the earth is actually not earth but water. But from the sense of creation, it did me a lot of good. Absolutely new unexpected ideas. I started moving in a new direction. The same here. The same here. So I'm actually grateful to Pandemia and I do not even resent the fact that I had the COVID. Well, thank you. Thank you so much. We have some really interesting questions from the audience. And if you don't mind, I'd like to start with one from Tamuna, who asks about your influences, not from Russian, but from other European literature. Which writers, non-Russian writers, have affected the way that you write? And is that a particular period of other European literature that you appreciate? Oh, my head and my memory is like, I don't know, is like pizza. So there is a piece of all kinds of literary works and literary influences in it. Yes, I often do play with non-Russian authors as well. I have a novel which imitates Robert Liu Stevenson, Prince Floresel. I have a whole novel, a thick novel, with 30 or 40 chapters. Each chapter is a title of a certain literary work from world literature. And it starts or ends with the exact phrase by which this work starts or ends. So this is that sort of crystal grid for me. It was a challenge, it was fun. I have a collection of detective novellas, which are dedications to different masters of the genre. Charles Holmes, Semenon, Patrice, Highsmith, whatever. So I am playing with their styles and their heroes. So I do a lot of that. Thank you. Now we have a question from Marietta, going back to our discussion of your Georgian roots. And it is, how much Georgian literature do you know? Do you read Georgian writers, either contemporary or historical? Is Georgia part of your literary map? Unfortunately not. I read Soviet writers of Georgian origin when I worked in a literary magazine. I had two. But recently, no, well, I must say that I do not read any fiction. I haven't read it for 20 years. I read only nonfiction because reading fiction is not healthy for a writer, at least not for myself. You don't want to be influenced by other people's styles. Thank you. Now there's a question from Julia, which is about how much of your work we can read in English. And she's saying that apparently some of the fundraising works are currently not available in translation. And are we going to be able to read the entirety of the fundraising novels in English? The publisher skipped two books from Pandorian series because they are not novels, but collections of novellas. And they think that collection of novellas do not sell. All the novels have been translated and published in the English language. And there is also the series about Sister Pilagia, which has been translated. What about if I could follow up with the question of my own? You were mentioning these very fascinating sounding novels about Nikolai Pandorian, the detective grandson. Is there a chance that we might see them translated into English? No, I don't think there are any plans to translate it. There are four novels in the series. And a question from Boris, who asks whether you've been tempted to write a novel set in Georgia, perhaps. A novel, no. I don't know Georgia well enough. But when I went to Georgia five years ago, I went there with a purpose. I always travel with a purpose. I'm a very scheming writer. I needed to find a setting for a theatre play about Eras Pandorian in Georgia, and I found it. And I think that I'll probably do it this year, finally. Now a question from Kate, which goes right back to your early work about the nonfiction book that you wrote about suicide and the philosophy of suicide and suicide in literature. Why did that subject present itself to you? I'm very much surprised. I've been often asked this question. Why did you get the idea to write about suicide? Well, in my view, to be or not to be is the basic philosophical question. Whether life is worth suffering all its unpleasantness. Why do we need to see this film to the end? Sometimes it's a horror movie. Sometimes it's incredibly boring or whatever. So this is, you need to understand. I wanted to understand. So I wrote this book. I chose as my material the lives and biographies of writers who committed suicide, only writers. Not because I was interested in writers committing suicide, but because a writer is a human being which likes to explain everything that he does. And if a writer commits suicide, he'd always explain why he did it and sometimes beautifully. Because when your neighbour kills herself or himself, you often wonder why the hell he or she did it. A writer will always explain it. So they are very good to understand this whole phenomenon. Well, thank you. I think we're going to have to wind up the questions there. Yeah, but it was fantastic to talk to Gregory, to Boris, both of them, about a literary career that has spanned so many genres, so many forms, and taken him and his readers to so many different places. Now that is the end of the British Library hosted days for the George's Fantastic Tabin Festival, but I'm glad to say it's not the end of the festival. Tomorrow there'll be a series of events called Tabin Encounters, which are being hosted online by the Writers House of Georgia. So thanks to them and there's a lot more to look forward to. However, this isn't the end of our event today. We have a little farewell treat for you, which is a song, sung by Chella, the Cambridge Georgian Choir. So we can look forward to that and it only remains for me to say thank you so much to Gregory, Boris, for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you, Boyd. Hi, I'm Charlotte Collins, one of the co-translators of Nino Haratishvili's The Eighth Life. I also sing with Chella, the Cambridge Georgian Choir, and we're delighted to have been asked to prepare a song for you. We figured that after the long winter, everyone could do with a bit of cheering up, so we've prepared a city song called Ghazapuli, which means spring.