A feature by José Vergara

Alisa Ganieva: I always return to the idea that the main character of my novel is not Shamil or any other human. It’s rather the region itself, the space of Dagestan as a whole, and the Caucasus as a region with all its voices and ethnic minorities and wine and crowds and all this multiplicity of positions and perspectives. This is what makes up the main character of the book. You mention that Shamil looks nonchalant. I think many of my characters seem too passive, maybe. They’re not as active as heroes used to be. They’re perceiving the catastrophe going on around them as if it’s normal. They’re not trying to resist it at first, and this way of presenting my characters as groups, instead of individuals, without their own complicated psychology, was a conscious move on my part, because that was the way I was trying to catch the shifting reality of the Caucasus.