During his years of solitary incarceration, Alexei Navalny was never completely alone: for company he had Shakespeare, Hunter S Thompson, Maupassant, Tolstoy and JK Rowling. He had Yuval Noah Harari, Solzhenitsyn, Tolkien — and Oliver Twist.
He had books: those he remembered from a lifetime of reading, those he read in his cell, and the one he was writing. The Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and political prisoner died in a Siberian penal colony in February after three years of brutal and illegal captivity.
The book he left behind, Patriot, part memoir, part diary, is a political manifesto, a darkly funny adieu and a posthumous indictment of his murderers. But it is also a poignant paean to reading and the solace of the written word for a man deprived of freedom.
“For as long as I can remember,” Navalny writes, “I’ve always been a man of letters.” On admission to prison in 2021, he records a conversation with his jailers. “Give me a book, please.” “Fill in the request to the library tomorrow.” “What about now?” “It’s not possible now.”
For the next three years, he devoured almost every book he could find (or was permitted). “The library here contains the complete works of Guy de Maupassant,” he rejoices in his first prison. “I found Boule de Suif’ … I’m blown away by how cool it is.” Gustave Flaubert gets shorter shrift. “I have just finished reading Madame Bovary. Very disappointing. I was going to write that it is Anna Karenina-lite, but there’s no comparison.”
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Elsewhere, he writes: “I’m just finishing the last book in the library, which is by Shakespeare, and I’m worried I won’t have anything left to read.” He declares Shakespeare to be sexist. “I can’t see why feminists don’t demand that The Taming of the Shrew be cancelled, and expelled from libraries. It’s diabolical, even for those times.”
Literary allusions adorn every page of his writing, not as faux-erudite name-dropping but with the easy facility of someone steeped in books: Andrei Platonov, War and Peace (“my favourite book”), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hemingway, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Jean-Paul Sartre, The Grapes of Wrath and Arthur Hailey’s Airport.
In jail Navalny devoured almost every book he could find
AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
As his imprisonment stretches out, Navalny longs to reread books he doesn’t even like. “It is morning now, and it would be good to read two hundred pages of Vanity Fair — a really dull, crappy novel full of third-rate satire, but so well known that for the sake of decency it has to be read … ”
A line from Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century prompts him to take up meditation. To shore up his resolve, he recalls the words of “that wonderful philosopher Luna Lovegood” in the Harry Potter series. “When times are hard it’s important not to feel lonely, because if I were Voldemort, I would really want you to feel lonely.” He doesn’t say who the real Voldemort is. He doesn’t have to.
Navalny loved to read in English. He “really enjoyed” Oliver Twist but winces when Dickens mimics the accents of the Victorian underclass. (“He is hopeless at it.”) The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, a work of comparative mythology published in 1949, is “wildly pompous and far-fetched poppycock”. “In the last month I have read six books in English. A good score … ”
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But as Putin’s cruel and petty prison regime tightens its grip, the flow of books dwindles and Navalny is restricted to just one hour of writing time a day. Only then does his spirit start to gutter. “There are no books in English here, or in any other foreign languages. I’m reading very little. I’m not writing in my diary. In short, I’m going downhill … ”
• Alexei Navalny’s secret prison diary: ‘This will be my memorial’
In the penal colony where he would eventually perish, he observes: “There is no time to read, let alone write. You are by no means the sage captive seated next to a stack of books; you are a blockhead in a wet fur hat who is constantly being marched off somewhere.”
In one of his last diary entries, Navalny writes: “I am back in the punishment cell, and the single book to which I am entitled by prison rules is currently A Short History of England” — by Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times. “It’s a great read but completely unfathomable until before the end, when the rulers of Europe stopped their endless stabbing and marrying, marrying and stabbing, and invariably calling their children Henry or Edward … one moment we have a Gloucester, the next he is a Richard.”
Navalny takes notes as he reads, trying to chart the complexities of the Wars of the Roses. His papers are taken away by the prison authorities. “I do hope my research at least prompts the FSB to compile an analytical report for the Kremlin warning that I am conspiring to engage in anti-government activities, together with citizens of Lancaster, Percy, York and others … ” This may be his last joke.
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Books have always offered a way for people behind bars to escape, briefly. Libraries are the psychological mainstays of most prisons. Despite the shockingly low rate of literacy in British prisons (more than 60 per cent of inmates struggle with reading), charities do a superb job of ensuring a steady flow of books into prisons. I have given several talks on books in prisons: the engagement and enthusiasm of prisoners with the written word is on a level most literature festivals could only dream of. Anyone questioning the importance of books in prison life should read this one.
Navalny profoundly understood the power of books, and of his own. With Patriot, he joins Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the long, grim, inspired tradition of Russian gulag literature. Like them, he knew that only the written word can defy despotism for ever, and long outlive the author.
“If they do finally whack me,” he writes, “the book will be my memorial.”
This post was originally published on here
