AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE IDEA FOR KOLIA came to me while watching a street magician pick pockets outside an Orthodox church in Bucharest, during a trip to Romania in 2004.

I have never actually stepped foot inside the former USSR, but I have been interested in Russia since my adolescence and the fall of the Soviet Bloc. While Kolia is set among real historical events, I have taken liberties with some of the conventions of the circus and certain aspects of Soviet life.

Rather than relying on the powerful Gulag narratives of Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, my research focused on historical documents, eye witness accounts, and reference materials, including Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), and documentation from Amnesty International on prison conditions in Russia prior to the amendment of the Penal Code in 2002.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of Moscow taken in 1954 (Moscou vu par Henri Cartier-Bresson. Paris: Éditions Delpire Éditeur, 1955), and those taken by Carl de Keyzer for his book Zona: Siberian Prison Camps (London: Trolley Books, 2003), were both inspiring to me, particularly in the evocative faces of their subjects, which peer out of the carefully staged photographs.

It was thanks to Philippe Petit’s book on tightrope walking, Traité du funambulisme (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997; preface by Paul Auster) that I learned that the solid core of the ropes and cables used by high-wire artists is referred to as “the soul.” I also drew on Philippe Petit’s book on the art of the pickpocket (L’art du pickpocket: précis du vol à la tire. Arles: Actes Sud, 2006; preface by Howard Buten).

The characters of Kolia, Bounine, Pavel, and Yulia are based loosely on the celebrated clowns Karandash, Oleg Popov, Yuri Nikulin, and Annie Fratellini.

The line of poetry that Kolia quotes in his letter to Tanya is derived from Mayakovsky’s poem “Back Home” (1925) and its famous missing line, which was edited out of later versions thanks to the influence of Osip Brik (cf. Roman Jakobson, La génération qui a gaspillé ses poètes. Paris: Éditions Allia, 2001, pp. 54–55).

My thanks to Luana and Oliver.