Russia today: repression, disinformation, falsification of history. This is happening in several spheres, including that of literature. One example of this is Zakhar Prilepin, a 42-year-old writer, a former solider in Chechnya, a militant in the Russian National Bolshevik Party and one of the best known names in contemporary Russian literature.

His penultimate novel, The Abode, is about the 1920s in Russia’s first, and cruelest, Gulag, the one on the Solovetsky islands. The novel’s main character is a Dostoevskian parricide who killed his father to protect his mother; the political prisoners who beleaguer this common prisoner are depicted as subtly Machiavellian, completely unscrupulous people who deliberately spread slander and sow discord. In the context of a Russia whose historical memory is being eaten away by various attempts to throw doubt on the nature of Stalin’s crimes, the novel contributes to this tendency by questioning the ethical nature of the political prisoners and by relativising their suffering.