“The Kuleshov Effect” (“Эффект Кулешова”): The Novaya Gazeta Review

Two days before Thanksgiving, I woke up to yet another reason for gratitude: A review of the Russian-language version of my novel, The Kuleshov Effect (“Эффект Кулешова”), had run in the great dissident newspaper (now operating in exile) Novaya Gazeta. The review was written by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, one of Russia’s greatest animators, who had gone to film school in the 1960s with many of the real-life figures who populate my novel. At the center of my book is the ingenious, mercurial, often joyful and ultimately tragic screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov. Khrzhanovsky was close friends with Shpalikov, and Shpalikov wrote Khrzhanovsky’s beautiful, almost hallucinogenic first film, There Lived Kozyavin (1966), as well as his second film, The Glass Harmonica (1968), a surreal allegory of greed, power, and the healing capacities of art. (The Glass Harmonica has now become a world classic, but only after it was banned for two decades.) In other words, Khrzhanovsky lived the worlds that I could only imagine and knew the people I could only re-invent. So his words are particularly dear to me. I have translated Khrzhanovsky’s review into English in the PDF below.

First, I also want to say a word about Novaya Gazeta, which for decades has been one of the great endangered bastions of true journalism in Russia, questioning power in the face of increasingly draconian repression. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the newspaper’s owners; the great investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya—who was murdered in 2006 for her truth-telling—was one of Novaya’s star reporters; the newspaper’s former editor, Dmitry Muratov, won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which Novaya Gazeta denounced, the paper was forced to move its operations to Riga, Latvia. There it has continued its tradition of boldness, critical thinking, and professionalism in its reporting about Russia, the war, and the world. Novaya Gazeta has also continued to serve as a island of safety and sanity for the best of Russian culture, carrying on the centuries-old tradition of the opposition intelligentsia not only in journalism, but also in literature and the arts. As a longtime journalist, magazine editor, and journalism teacher, I am awed and inspired each day by the work Novaya Gazeta does, and I am proud and humbled to have been mentioned in its pages.

I hope in the coming months to decide on an English-language publisher for The Kuleshov Effect. It’s odd, of course, for a novel to have been released first in translation, but it’s also somehow appropriate that my story should come first to those who knew its heroes, whether through their art or, as in Khrzhanovsky’s case, their direct friendship. I’m extremely grateful to the outstanding exile press Freedom Letters—as well as to the brilliant writer Dmitry Bykov, who championed the manuscript, and Ekaterina Kevkhishvili, who translated it beautifully—for the opportunity to share The Kuleshov Effect with Russian-language readers around the world.

Here is the translation of Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s review …