Individuum has published Yegor Sennikov’s book “Diverging Paths”, subtitled as essays on 20th-century Russia and on those who left and those who stayed. Across 144 pages, the author compares the lives of post-revolutionary emigrants with those who tried to build lives within Soviet reality.
The reviewer argues that Sennikov works here primarily as a curator of material: rather than offering deep archival analysis, he arranges a sequence of short but vivid biographical fragments. In the prologue, the author says the book is about the moment when a shared past had not yet fallen apart, while a shared future no longer existed, even though people still spoke the same language and referred to the same values while giving them different meanings.
Within individual chapters, Sennikov places Mikhail Bulgakov next to Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Trotsky next to Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak next to Ayn Rand, and Alexander Kerensky next to Lazar Kaganovich. The cast also includes Zinaida Serebriakova, Vera Mukhina, Anna Akhmatova, Georgy Gazdanov, Veniamin Kaverin, Nina Berberova and others. Special attention is given to less remembered figures, including footballer and coach Valerian Bezvechny, as well as Spanish Civil War participants Vsevolod Marchenko and Ivan Yeryomenko.
During World War II, the book’s characters end up on opposite sides: some join the Resistance, such as Princess Vera Obolenskaya, while others collaborate with the Nazis, such as poet Dmitry Klenovsky. Through these stories, the book shows how differently the lives of returnees, emigrants and those who remained in the USSR unfolded.
“In the 20th century, understanding was too often replaced by judgment,” Sennikov writes, linking that experience to the present day as well.
In the reviewer’s view, the book’s central point is resistance to simplification, especially in wartime, when society quickly divides people into “us” and “them.” Sennikov offers a more complex picture: there is no universal right answer to whether one should leave or stay, because the consequences of that choice become clear only years or decades later.
From April 9 to April 12, “Diverging Paths” and other Individuum new releases are scheduled to be presented at the alternative festival “Parallelno” at the Parkhomenko bookshop, held at the same time as the spring non/fiction fair.