Literature.gr Foreign Phrase of the Year Prize 2016 was awarded to Anthony Marra for the phrase: ‘In what prayer does the last human not die alone?’  included in his book: ”The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories,” published in the USA, by Hogarth, in 2015 and translated into Greek by Mr. Achilleas Kyriakidis, for Ikaros Editions, 2016.

With great willingness Anthony Marra answered the questions of his translator, Achilleas Kyriakidis, the novelist Dimitris Sotakis, who presented the book in the ceremony and the novelist Tessy Baila, who proposed the awarded phrase.

Due to the distance he was unable to attend the ceremony personally, but he sent to us a video with his acceptance speech, thanking Literature.gr and his colleagues in Greece.

Literature.gr and me personally, warmly thank Anthony Marra not only for the excellent video that he sent to us but also for his very meaningful speech.

I hold the opinion that Anthony Marra is one of the most important writers in the modern American literature, his book is a literary achievement and I am sure his work will be an important chapter worldwide.

Dina Sarakinou 3/12/2017 

Achilleas Kyriakidis: So what is, ultimately, “The Tsar of Love and Techno”? Is it a novel in the form of nine short stories, or is it nine short stories that constitute a solid, substantial novel thanks to an ingenious montage?

Anthony Marra: In English there really isn’t a good term for books that occupy the space between a short story collection and a novel. “Novel-in-Stories” sounds terribly clumsy. “Linked Stories” sounds like a dating website. There’s probably a word for it in German. To me, The Tsar of Love and Techno begins as a short story collection and ends as a novel, leveraging the fragmentary nature of the collection form to sustain narrative that is larger and more polyphonic than what the novel form can typically accommodate.

Achilleas Kyriakidis: One thing that is truly impressive is the writer’s reserve from all judgement and, especially all indignation, not just for all that came to be of this fallen Empire that took all of humanity’s hopes down with her, but also for the actions of his heroes who he consigns naked to us, exposes them to our sympathy, our love, and above all our understanding. Where will your next book take us?

Anthony Marra:  I’m working on my third book presently, and it’s taken me this long to realize that one of the abiding through-lines in my work is a fascination with settings unbound from the constraints of realism. This is the case when Chechnya, the Soviet Union, contemporary Russia, and it’s equally true for the subject of my present project: European refugees working in Hollywood during World War II.

Dimitris Sotakis: It’s obvious that the stories in The Tsar interlink a lot with each other and though they could easily stand on their own, the emotional tension becomes stronger as we read them all together as a novel. Was it your initial intension, to create a novel consisting of smaller stories?

Anthony Marra: Initially, The Tsar of Love and Techno was a series of completely unconnected stories. After I published A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, readers would ask what I was working on next and I’d say, “I’m writing a short story collection!” The response was a resounding, “Eh.” Despite its remarkable history of short story writers, American literary culture tends to discount short story collections as minor works writers publish when they’re feeling a bit lazy between big novels. It occurred to me, then, that the very piecemeal quality of the story collection form presented the possibility of creating narratives more ambitious and multifarious than what the novel usually allows. So, I reworked The Tsar of Love and Techno over several years until it each short story functioned as a chapter.

Dimitris Sotakis: The book is full of artists, from art restorers to movie stars. And all these heroes belong to the broader map of the Russian and Chechen corruption of that period of time. How did you manage to blend the art side with the political “rotten” background of these years within the novel?

Anthony Marra: Russia isn’t unique in generating good art and bad leaders, but the scale of its cultural achievements and political disasters over the last two centuries makes it an interesting case study in the relationship between art and politics. In The Tsar of Love and Techno, I wanted to explore how the toxic political environment of the Soviet Union corrupted its greatest natural resource: cultural life.

Dimitris Sotakis: It seems that you know very well the areas you describe; I would say that you even have a “moral knowledge” for them; it feels like Russia is a part of your inner world, something very rare for an American writer. How did you achieve that?

Anthony Marra: I’ve lived and studied in Russia, and I took great pleasure in my research, but in the end, I’m a novelist and not a scholar of the region. What you eloquently describe as “moral knowledge,” I thought of as “moral language.” The voice of a character’s conscience, in essence. In creating voices for The Tsar of Love and Techno, I drew from perhaps an unlikely source. My father’s family is Italian-American, originally from Sicily and Calabria, and though those cultures differ vastly from Russia’s, they share moral languages created by centuries of corrupt and cruel governments: the deeply rooted sense of fatalism, the refuge of black humor, the disconnect between one’s public and private self, the distrust of institutions larger than the family. These aspects of Russian life feel alien to many Americans, but because of my family background, they were perhaps more accessible to me.

Tessy Baila: Constellation was a novel and your second book looks like a collection of stories. Is it difficult for a writer to write unconnected stories and finally make the reader realize that has read a non-typical form of a novel?

Anthony Marra: One of the challenges was finding ways of connecting the stories that felt natural and unforced. The connected-story form encourages coincidence and contrivance, so I spent a good deal of time trying to ensure the connections between characters are dramatically organic. There’s an old adage that says novel endings should be both surprising and inevitable. I tried to view the relationship between these stories similarly.

Tessy Baila: J. Baldwin has said that: “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them”. Does this apply to literature as well? What fascinates you in History?

Anthony Marra: As always, James Baldwin said it best. Sometimes the only justice is the judgment of history. That’s certainly true for a number of characters in The Tsar of Love and Techno. As I write these words, I can’t help but think that someday historical novelists will write about this moment in history. Their judgment will be damning.

Το βραβείο για την ξένη λογοτεχνική φράση της χρονιάς του περιοδικού Literature.gr, για το 2016, απονεμήθηκε στον Αμερικανό συγγραφέα Άντονυ Μάρρα για το βιβλίο του «Ο τσάρος της αγάπης και της τέκνο» (εκδ. Ίκαρος), με αφορμή τη φράση: «Με ποια προσευχή ο τελευταίος άνθρωπος δεν πεθαίνει μόνος;»

Ο Άντονυ Μάρρα, με μεγάλη προθυμία, απάντησε στις ερωτήσεις του μεταφραστή του Αχιλλέα Κυριακίδη, του πεζογράφου Δημήτρη Σωτάκη, ο οποίος παρουσίασε το βιβλίο τη βραδιά της απονομής και της πεζογράφου Τέσυ Μπάιλα, η οποία πρότεινε τη διακριθείσα φράση.

Λόγω της απόστασης δεν μπόρεσε να περευβρεθεί προσωπικά, όμως μας έστειλε ένα βίντεο στο οποίο αποδέχτηκε τη βράβευσή του και ευχαρίστησε θερμά το Literature.gr και τους συνεργάτες του στην Ελλάδα.

Το Literature.gr και εγώ προσωπικά ευχαριστούμε θερμά τον Άντονυ Μάρρα για το εξαιρετικό βίντεο που μας έστειλε με την τόσο ουσιαστική του ομιλία. 

Πιστεύω ότι ο Άντονυ Μάρρα είναι ένας από τους σημαντικότερους συγγραφείς της σύγχρονης αμερικανικής λογοτεχνίας, το βιβλίο του είναι ένα λογοτεχνικό επίτευγμα και είμαι σίγουρη ότι το έργο του θα αποτελεί ένα σημαντικό κεφάλαιο σε παγκόσμιο επίπεδο.

Ντίνα Σαρακηνού 3/12/2017