Camp Russia: On Zakhar Prilepin’s “The Monastery”
Zakhar Prilepin
THE LAST TIME ONE of Zakhar Prilepin’s novels was translated into English, the 2014 Winter Olympics had just wrapped up in Sochi, and Putin was pretending to look the other way while his insignia-free soldiers marched into Ukraine. That April, Prilepin’s fast-paced, anti-government protest novel
Sankya was published with a foreword by Alexei Navalny, himself no fan of the Russian state. In it, Navalny feted this young, relevant writer, and explained that Prilepin’s novel could tell the reader more about Russia than Tolstoy ever could. This year, Prilepin’s novel