2023/2024

Alisa Ganieva

Writer

Almaty, Kazakhstan

Born in 1985 in Moscow
Studied Creative Writing at Maxim Gorky Literature Institute

Project

Phantasmal Republic, a Novel

Some social movements arise casually and inadvertently, sprouting up from a joke, a slip of a tongue, a momentary sentiment that suddenly acquires life and energy of their own. While toying with reminiscences of The Mountainous Republic, a partially recognized state that blinked on the territory of the North Caucasus just for a few years during the Russian civil war of 1917–1922, a group of friends couldn’t expect that their light talks would crawl from under their control to extend and grow into a real power carrying along characters of different social strata, genders, ethnicities, and worldviews.
Narrated from the perspective of a middle-aged divorced woman, a teacher of Dagestani literature struggling with the patriarchal pressure of her own family, a story of ideas that escape their creators and start a journey of their own, intermingles with a myriad of other stories about battles of individuals and a state, a person and a society, experiments and traditions, law and enterprise.
The Mountainous Republic was a concept of a secular union of numerous Caucasian peoples that for a brief moment won its way in the historical clash of different visions of the region’s future after the Bolshevik coup. A contest among the Sharia Islamic groups, reactionary imperialistic groups, and leftist and Bolshevist groups that took place right after the dismantling of the Russian Empire, a tangle of Turkish, German, and British influences – all that suddenly reemerges in the present revealing the relevancy of almost the same choice for today.

Recommended Reading

Ganieva, Alisa. Prazdničnaja gora. Moscow: AST, 2012. English: The Mountain and the Wall. Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum, 2015. German: Die russische Mauer. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014.
—. Ženich i nevesta. Moscow: AST, 2015. English: Bride and Groom. Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum, 2018. German: Eine Liebe im Kaukasus. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016.
—. Oskorblennye čustva. Moscow: AST, 2018. English: Offended Sensibilities. Dallas, TX: Deep Vellum, 2022. German: Verletzte Gefühle. Klagenfurt: Wieser, 2021.

Colloquium, 25.06.2024

The Mountain Utopia

The novel I’ve been working on this year at Wiko is once again set in my home republic, Dagestan, a territory in the northern Caucasus, on the crossroads between Russia, Central Asia, Middle East, and the countries of the South Caucasus.

Dagestan is an interesting example of the mixture of different worlds and civilizations: mountains and steppes; Christianity, paganism, and Islam; warriors and merchants; democratic and autocratic policies. It was one of the most recent conquests of the Russian Empire, and therefore it retains a unique identity that distinguishes it from other territories of present-day Russia.

In my colloquium, I would like to explore a series of questions and subjects of Dagestan’s history and modernity that feed my fiction and my current novel in particular.