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Jen Stout’s Followers (8)
Jen Stout
Born
Shetland, Scotland
Genre
Influences
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Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War (BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week)
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published
2024
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5 editions
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Foula: Island West of the Sun
by
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published
1983
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2 editions
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* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.
“Vast rivers, the kind that flow through continents and look like seas at their widest points, hold a particular fascination for me, as do trains. The reason is simple: we don't have these things in Shetland, and I hope the childlike awe I feel on a riverbank, or watching an intercity train swoosh across a high bridge, will never fade. Best, of course, when the two are combined.
About a hundred miles southwest of Kharkiv the train had slowed, and I watched from the window, totally transfixed, as we clunked across a bridge that seemed to stretch on and on over the dark river. Lights glimmered, reassuring, in the distance. There are many bridges which knit the city of Dnipro together, taking trains and traffic across both the Dnipro and Samara rivers. The city sprawls at their confluence.”
― Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War
About a hundred miles southwest of Kharkiv the train had slowed, and I watched from the window, totally transfixed, as we clunked across a bridge that seemed to stretch on and on over the dark river. Lights glimmered, reassuring, in the distance. There are many bridges which knit the city of Dnipro together, taking trains and traffic across both the Dnipro and Samara rivers. The city sprawls at their confluence.”
― Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War
“In early Soviet times, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, Moscow's policy of korenizatsiia - 'nativisation' - prompted a brief flourishing of a Ukrainian avant-garde, paywrights and poets and journalists attracted to this bustling city of industrial and trading fame, allowed to write in their own language at last. The policy was the Bolsheviks' attempt to endear this restive republic, and the others, to their rule. In this political environment, writers were elevated.
This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker.
Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.”
― Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War
This special treatment came, however, came with the heavy caveat of state control which was followed by repression - a story familiar across the Soviet Union. But in Kharkiv the axe fell quicker.
Stalin grew tired of korenizatsiia and opted to wipe out the native intelligentsia instead. In the early 1930s, the party line shifted abruptly; Ukrainian 'bourgeois nationalism' was the new enemy. The purges began. The Soviet Union under Stalin's paranoid control regressed to Tsarist ways. Russification and centralisation, brutal orders issued by Moscow and carried out by its secret police.”
― Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia's War
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