"How Writing a Book About Diaries Changed How I Wrote My Own Diary Entries"

From lithub.com

By Betsy Rubiner

Betsy Rubiner on What We Can Learn From Writing in Journals

For several years, while I was working on a book about the diary’s role in our lives and culture, I actively looked for “diary stories” and found them, which fuelled my hunch that the diary or journal (I use the terms interchangeably) is a cultural mainstay, in an under-the-radar way.

But months after calling off my search because my book was done,  I still see diaries, often in unlikely places.  Diary! Diary! my brain alerted me recently when I read a passing mention of the late tennis great Arthur Ashe’s diary in Billie Jean King’s autobiography. And when a journal-writing passion was briefly noted in recent newspaper stories about actor Noah Wyle (of The Pitt), rapper Danny Brown, and Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps. And when revelations from the journal of the late neurologist/author Oliver Sacks were used in a reappraisal of his work in a recent New Yorker.  And during a ballet performance, when a dancer plopped down on a stage for a few minutes to write in, yes, a diary, signalling her character’s distress after a breakup.

My all-consuming book project also changed how I read, especially other people’s diaries.  Instead of reading primarily for diarists’ accounts of their life and times, I’m looking for what, if anything, diarists wrote about their diary writing—why they invest time and energy to chronicle their experiences and thoughts, day by day. “I owe a good deal to this journal,” England’s Anne Lister wrote in 1821. “By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, in some degree to get rid of it.”

Beyond seeking a mental release, diarists write to preserve and retrieve memories.

Later dubbed the “first modern lesbian,” Lister became famous after the 1988 publication of her journal, which included details of her love affairs with women. The journal inspired the 2019 BBC drama Gentleman Jack, the nickname locals gave Lister for acting in what was deemed a manly way.

Beyond seeking a mental release, diarists write to preserve and retrieve memories. “The journal gives me back some of what I have lost,” American author Alice Walker explained in 2022.  Some diarists write to report, reveal, rebel, resist. Witness the pandemic journaling projects that started soon after the Covid-19 pandemic.  And Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s diary entry from a remote penal colony where he was imprisoned in 2021: “If they do finally whack me, the book will be my memorial.” Part-memoir/part-diary, his book was published in 2024, months after Russian officials announced his death, during imprisonment.

Claude Fredericks, a classics professor, playwright and poet, considered his journal “a work of permanent importance.” Writing from age eight to shortly before his death at age 89 in 2013, he produced about 65,000 pages. He self-published a portion. A research institute later purchased the diary and other papers. Virginia Woolf wrote in 1919 that her diary writing “does not count as writing.” But writing for her “own eye only” was “good practice” that “loosens the ligaments.”

Reading my own diary, which I’ve written daily (almost) for more than fifty years, I tried to understand what I am doing and creating as a diarist. I started a diary and kept writing because I wanted to be a writer. Because I write on a diary’s blank page every night, I found that as a journalist, freelance writer and author I was not afraid (or was less afraid) of a blank computer screen. Because I can write anything I want in my diary, it offers a welcome break from my day job. It has served as a testing ground, for honing my craft, and a storage space, for squirreling away ideas for possible future use. (I didn’t expect that use to be a book about diaries.)

                                                                   Our Diaries, Ourselves by Betsy Rubiner is available via Beacon Press

Now that my book has helped me better understand why I keep a diary, I’m more self-conscious and intentional when I write my evening entry. Because I’m now more aware of the potential value of what I’m writing—both to me in-the-moment and to possible future readers—I am trying to write more about what matters, to be a more conscious curator of my on-the-day experiences and thoughts about myself and the world.

Has my project changed my professional writing? It’s too soon to say. I am slowly starting to contemplate a writing life (or life in general) after “the book.” Maybe I’ll dig deeper into my diary to see what more I can make from or with it, and maybe I’ll write in a more diaristic way. Or maybe I’ll plunge into a different topic and genre, away from “the diary,” away from my nonfiction book’s blend of reporting and reflecting. I’m tempted to let my diary rest in peace. Reading it can be emotionally exhausting.

As for still seeing diaries, I knew, and feared, that more diary stories would surface after my manuscript deadline. Who knew I’d be able to keep a running list?  For years now, friends and family have kindly emailed or texted me diary-in-the-news items and shared their personal diary stories, which enriched my book. Some keep sharing stories. Google and Facebook algorithms still occasionally feed my diary fixation, sending more content. At first, I found this creepy (Stop reading my mind Google!) until  I realized the content often proved valuable.

Among the many diary mentions I’ve spotted, of late, some have bolstered what I learned during my diary research. A January trend story reported a surge of journal-and-pen shoppers at Chicago stationary stores and noted an abundance of online videos about the “lost art” of  journaling, heralding a possible return to analog. Another newspaper story featured a man who wrote a marriage proposal to his girlfriend in the journal they share. (They married.)

German composers Robert and Clara Schumann started a joint “marriage diary” back in 1840. Appreciations of actress Diane Keaton after her death last year mentioned her journal and her beloved mother’s journal, both used for Keaton’s 2011 memoir.  Writers who’ve used their own diary and/or mom’s diary include English novelist Will Self, whose 2024 novel Elaine is based on the diary of his late mother. A photograph of a teenager’s troubling journal entry accompanied a recent magazine article about his parents filing a wrongful death lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company, after the teen’s suicide. His journal suggested he was enthralled by an AI chatbot. Other diary entries have helped prompt legal action.

I expect, and welcome, more diary stories soon, this time from my book’s readers. Already, new diary-spotters who’ve heard about my book’s impending publication have stepped up. I’ve learned about a man who stole his wife’s diary; and about brother and sister diarists who made a pact that the diary of whoever dies first will be left for the surviving sibling to preserve, for family history and possible publication.

One friend thinks her travel photos may be a travel journal and reported reading the final diary entries of her sister, who recently died. “Whoa!” she texted me. These shared stories, combined with my book project-induced habit of seeing diaries where others may not notice them and my fascination with diarists’ motivations, continue to feed my diary fixation and drive my new diary-writing approach. If, or how, my lingering diary-on-the-brain affects what I write, beyond my diary, remains to be seen.

https://lithub.com/how-writing-a-book-about-diaries-changed-how-i-wrote-my-own-diary-entries/

The pages of our lives

From observer.co.uk/style

By Anthony Quinn

Diaries can be the most revealing records of who we are. One compulsive diarist introduces the intimate reflections of Audre Lorde, Salvador Dalí, Elton John and others

Diaries are shrines to privacy. In an age obsessed with exposure and display, the diary is a refuge for the self and a balm for the soul. “In an increasingly digital world”, as Shaun Usher, editor of the new collection Diaries of Note writes, to keep a diary is “a reminder of the power of writing simply for oneself”. Social media users, take note: there is a healthier (and happier) way to order your thoughts than splurging in public, and you will probably end up a better writer for it too.

I began writing a diary nearly 25 years ago, and the books stretch along an entire shelf in my office: “a multi-volume monster”, as my wife calls it. I can’t remember why I started it, but nowadays compulsion keeps me going. Its usefulness is undeniable, for I notice how stray remarks, anecdotes and momentary gestures tend to reappear in my novels. If you keep a diary, you’re always working, topping up the material of observation that can be adapted years later. There is also, in the re-reading, that strange shock of encountering someone you don’t quite recognise from the person you are now. Diary-keeping furnishes an inadvertent picture not just of what you did but of who you were, and in their pages you may trace the “varieties of the self” as it changes through time. It can be an alarming experience, and makes me the more determined to shield my diary from anyone else’s inspection – at least while I’m alive.

And there’s the rub. A private diary should remain private. Living writers who allow their diaries to be published are surely acting in bad faith, because they sacrifice the essential qualities of the form: intimacy and honesty. There are exceptions to that rule: the London theatre critic James Agate wrote a brilliant sequence of diaries that were published from 1932 until his death in 1947, and his title for them acknowledged their inspiration: Ego. He had high hopes for them too, imagining their place alongside Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Alas, for him they fell out of print years ago, and Agate’s name outside of theatrical circles is barely known.

My other favourite diarists all kept theirs as a sideline that would eventually transcend anything they wrote for their day job. Only obligation would induce me to read Virginia Woolf’s novels, but in her diaries she is hair-raisingly good, at once brittle and doubting, droll and majestic. I love James Boswell’s journals for their energy and self-lacerating honesty. Siegfried Sassoon’s war diaries are superb, and even his moany later ones have merit. Arnold Bennett’s journals have a grave old-fashioned beadiness and shed an astonishing light on what literary success used to mean.

                                                                                                    Illustration by Matthew Hancock

All of them feature in Diaries of Note, extracts from which are published on these pages, and whose cumulative force becomes irresistible. Usher nicely mixes tones of voice and types of character, as the best anthologies do. I liked finding Eric Morecambe sandwiched between Henry James and Queen Victoria, and Brian Eno between Elizabeth Smart and Ernest Hemingway. Themes emerge piecemeal. The multiplicity of nature is a frequent prompt. I was beguiled by the strange serenity of the Canadian artist Emily Carr, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins walking outside Oxford and trying out lines already furred with lyricism (“cowslips capriciously colouring meadows in creamy drifts. Bluebells, purple orchis”).

In an entry from March 1842, Frontierswoman Mary Richardson Walker gets through her daily chores – housework, baking – before concluding with magnificent offhandedness: “Nine o’clock P.M. was delivered of a son.” Captain Robert Falcon Scott, doomed with his team by the Antarctic weather, records the heroic farewell of his colleague Lawrence Oates, who said that he “may be some time”.

An earlier explorer, Isabelle Eberhardt, notes in June 1900, “I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt”, striking a chord that resonates through the book. Doubt is an inescapable part in understanding the self. Mary MacLane, whose frank journals scandalised America in 1902, asks reasonably: “can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius, and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town?” The place is specific; the yearning universal. The poet George Crabbe puzzles in May 1780 over the need to stitch an elbow in his only coat, while hoping to finish his book: “Sometimes I think I cannot fail; and then … I am again desponding”. In May 1949, a young Susan Sontag asks herself what is preventing her from “taking off”, aside from fear of her family and her mother, and of sacrificing her “books and records”. Would she be sent back home by the police if caught? “God, living is enormous!”

Dying is too, and the disasters of war loom massively in these pages. From Zeppelin raids on London and civil strife in Russia to the D-Day landings and the first atomic bomb, death is everywhere. The enormity of the Holocaust comes back in heartbreaking confessions, notably in the diary of Éva Heyman, a Hungarian girl about to be transported to Auschwitz (“I want to live even if it means that I’ll be the only person here allowed to stay”) and that of a Dutchwoman, Etty Hillesum, bound for the same terminus and brave to the last, pitying not just her fellow prisoners but her Nazi persecutors: “every atom of hate we add to this world makes it still more inhospitable”.

Nobility of spirit is given its proper due by Usher, but I wonder if he’s rather skimped on the other things we read diaries for: mischief, meanness, malice. The Scottish poet William Soutar called the diary “an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen”, and indeed the phrase furnished Alan and Irene Taylor with a title for their comparable anthology of 2000, The Assassin’s Cloak. Kenneth Tynan, a waspish observer, is here accorded a meagre squib about the existence of ghosts. We don’t always want to see diarists in their best light, which is why I enjoyed Clara Schumann (August 1886) putting the boot into Franz Liszt, who’d died only the day before: “a bad composer”, she sniffs, whose work is “trivial, boring, and will surely vanish completely from the world after his death”. Charming valediction!

I dare say Clara would have been mortified if this judgment had become known. But that’s one of the boons of keeping a diary: the only person who’ll read it, in this life, should be the one holding the pen. Posthumously, who knows? You’d have to be pretty high-minded to reject outright the idea of your diary ever being published, and if it happens that people are shocked by what you’ve written about them, too bad: you will be elsewhere. A good diary should offend, amuse and intrigue. The abiding pleasure for the diarist is that you can write whatever the hell you like, all the time.

Diaries of Note by Shaun Usher (Faber, £25). 

Extracts from Diaries of Note

2 Sept 1952

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí, born in Spain in 1904, was the mustachioed maestro of surrealism, with a flair for the fantastical in both his life and work. Like his art, Dalí’s diary offers an often-baffling journey into his mind, filled with wit, imagination, and the unapologetic quirkiness that made him one of the most memorable artists of his time.

                                                                  Notes and drawings in Salvador Dalí’s diary

Again this morning, while I was on the toilet, I had a truly remarkable piece of insight. My bowel movement, by the way, was perfectly exceptional this morning, smooth and odourless. I was thinking about the problem of human longevity, because of an octogenarian who works at this problem and who has just parachuted over the Seine, using a red-silk parachute. My intuition is that if it were possible to make human excrement as fluid as liquid honey, man’s life would be extended, because excrement (according to Paracelsus) is the thread of life, and each interruption or fart is but a moment of life flying away.

It is the equivalent in time of the Fates’ snip of the scissors, who in the same way cut the thread of existence, divide it up and use it. Temporal immortality must be looked for in refuse, in excrement and nowhere else... And since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualise everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement. And how distressing it is to note that among so many lofty minds there are quite a few who give vent to their needs like everybody else. The day I write a general treatise on this subject, it is quite certain that I will astonish the whole world. For that matter, that treatise will be the exact opposite of Swift’s essay on latrines.

9 September, 1948

Jack Kerouac

When Jack Kerouac wrote the following journal entry in September 1948, he was 26 and his first novel, The Town and the City, was yet to find a publisher. It would be another seven years until he achieved widespread acclaim with the publication of On the Road.

Got form-rejection card from MacMillan’s. I’m getting more confident and angrier each time something like this happens, because I know The Town and the City is a great book in its own awkward way. And I’m going to sell it. They won’t fool me with their editors who want to skimp everything down to the shallow formulas of this age. How many “forgotten-in-one-month” books must they publish before they realise what they’re doing? Just like the movies, and like countless cheap goods that are used up as fast as they’re produced, they turn out these cheap “topical” or “human-interest-small-village-in-Mexico-representing-the-human-undying-spirit stories” by the week, or books by celebrities, or “angry” novels full of sex and violence. I’m ready for any battle there is, against anybody, in defence of this excellent book I have written, which comes from the heart and from the brain – it being only incidental, in a significant sense, that it should come from my heart and brain – and even if I have to go off and starve on the road I won’t give up the notion that I should make a living from this book: because I’m convinced that people themselves will like it whenever the wall of publishers and critics and editors is torn down. It is they, by Christ, who are my enemies, not “obscurity” or “poverty” or anything like that. It is they, the talking class (trying to rationalise itself out of a base materialism) who are the enemy of the people of this country. It is they who build New Yorks and Hollywoods, and flood our radios with inanity, and our papers and magazines with sterilised ideas… I mean the great “Upper White Collar” class, the Commuters, the Whatnot, the people with snotty “progressive” daughter six years old and sons who call their fathers “daddy”. By God, I guess maybe I ought to go back to Canada. But I won’t – I’d much rather make the rounds with that baseball bat. Tonight I finished and typed the final chapter. Last sentence of the novel: “There were whoops and greetings and kisses, and then everybody had supper in the kitchen.” Do you mean that the folks of this country won’t like this last chapter? – or would it be better if I said, “everybody had dinner in the dining room”. But the work is finished.

21 September, 1978

Audre Lorde

Groundbreaking poet Audre Lorde famously described herself as a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. In 1978, she faced one of the greatest challenges of her life: breast cancer. Following the diagnosis, the day after writing this diary entry, she underwent a mastectomy.

The anger that I felt for my right breast last year has faded, and I’m glad because I have had this extra year. My breasts have always been so very precious to me since I accepted having them it would have been a shame not to have enjoyed the last year of one of them. And I think I am prepared to lose it now in a way I was not quite ready to last November, because now I really see it as a choice between my breast and my life, and in that view there cannot be any question.

Somehow I always knew this would be the final outcome, for it never did seem like a finished business for me. This year between was like a hiatus, an interregnum in a battle within which I could so easily be a casualty, since I certainly was a warrior. And in that brief time the sun shone and the birds sang and I wrote important words and have loved richly and been loved in return. And if a lifetime of furies is the cause of this death in my right breast, there is still nothing I’ve never been able to accept before that I would accept now in order to keep my breast. It was a 12-month reprieve in which I could come to accept the emotional fact/truths I came to see first in those horrendous weeks last year before the biopsy. If I do what I need to do because I want to do it, it will matter less when death comes, because it will have been an ally that spurred me on.

I was relieved when the first tumour was benign, but I said to Frances at the time that the true horror would be if they said it was benign and it wasn’t. I think my body knew there was a malignancy there somewhere, and that it would have to be dealt with eventually. Well, I’m dealing with it as best I can. I wish I didn’t have to, and I don’t even know if I’m doing it right, but I sure am glad that I had this extra year to learn to love me in a different way. I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which satisfy me enough. Since it is my life that I am gambling with, and my life is worth even more than the sensual delights of my breast, I certainly can’t take that chance.

7:30PM. And yet if I cried for a hundred years I couldn’t possibly express the sorrow I feel right now, the sadness and the loss. How did the Amazons of Dahomey feel? They were only little girls. But they did this willingly, for something they believed in. I suppose I am too but I can’t feel that now.

26 September 1773

James Boswell

In 1773, Dr Samuel Johnson, the eminent intellectual and moralist, and James Boswell, a young Scottish lawyer captivated by Johnson’s brilliance (and who would later write his biography), embarked on a journey through the Highlands of Scotland. The night before he wrote the following entry in his journal, Boswell had stayed up until 5am drinking punch with his hosts – a decision he would soon come to regret.

I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, “What, drunk yet?” His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. “Sir,” said I, “they kept me up.” He answered, “No, you kept them up, you drunken dog.” This he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. “Ay,” said Dr Johnson, “fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends have no sport.” Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy; and when I offered to get up, he very good-naturedly said, “You need be in no such hurry now.” I took my host’s advice, and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head-ach. When I rose, I went into Dr Johnson’s room, and taking up Mrs M’Kinnon’s prayer book, I opened it at the 20th Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, “And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.” Some would have taken this as a divine interposition...

10 October, 1794

Martha Ballard

Esteemed midwife Martha Ballard was 50 when she began to keep a diary – a detailed record of life in 18th-century rural America that would grow to 10,000 entries over 27 years. On the day of the this entry, Ballard successfully delivered one of the 816 babies she would bring into the world during her career, but this one was not the smoothest of births. To her frustration, the family had also called on the services of one Benjamin Page, an inexperienced 23-year-old male doctor who had decided to introduce opium when it wasn’t needed.

Birth David Sewalls Son

Cloudy. At Mr Sewalls, they were intimidated & Calld Dr Page who gave my Patient [20] drops of Laudanum which put her into Such a Stupor her pains (which were regular & promising) in a manner Stopt till near night when Shee pukt & they returnd & She was Delivd at 7h Evn of a Son, her first Born. I left her Cleverly at 10 & walkt home. I receivd 12/ as a reward.

15 October, 1930

Virginia Woolf

Aged 15 when she began her first diary, by the time of her death in 1941, English novelist Virginia Woolf had filled more than 30 handwritten volumes with reflections, observations, and personal struggles that offer a window into her complex mind. When she wrote the following entry, Woolf was 48. Two years after the publication of Orlando, she was now working on the second draft of what would become one of her masterpieces, The Waves.

I say to myself “But I cannot write another word”. I say “I will cut adrift—I will go to Roger [Fry, painter] in France—I will sit on pavements & drink coffee—I will see the Southern hills; I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage & let it swim—this fine October”. I say all this; with energy: but shall I do it? Shan’t I peter out here, till the fountain fills again? Oh dear oh dear—for the lassitude of the spirit! Rarely rarely comest thou now, spirit of delight. You hide yourself up there behind the hotel windows & the grey clouds. (I am writing this with a steel pen which I dip in the ink, so as to forestall the day when my German pens are extinct). It is dismal to broach October so languidly. I rather think the same thing happened last year. I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; & my legs pounding along roads; & sleep; & animal existence. My brain is too energetic; it works; it throws off an article on Christina Rossetti; & girds itself up to deal with this & that.

17 October, 2016

Lionel Barber

Alexei Navalny was Russia’s most prominent opposition leader – a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin who, in 2024, after years of imprisonment, paid the ultimate price for his defiance. This diary entry was written in 2016 by Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times, during a visit to Moscow.

Moscow

The dimly lit office of Russia’s most famous political opponent of Vladimir Putin is located on the third floor of a shopping mall in central Moscow. Alexei Navalny is a tall, burly man with a spiky cowlick fringe, piercing pale-blue eyes and the hint of a paunch. He speaks good English, with a heavy accent. Friendly but watchful, he is dedicated to a twin mission: to expose state corruption and mount a serious bid for the Russian presidency in the 2018 election. “Please, do not describe me as a dissident,” he tells his FT visitors. “A dissident does not take part in the political system. I want to take part in the presidential election.” Navalny has been arrested, beaten and jailed. His brother, he notes with a shrug of broad shoulders, has been stuck in a prison psychiatric ward in the latest official bid to shut him up. Navalny’s courage is not at issue, even if his political company is sometimes less than savoury. Apart from attracting a cult status among Russia’s youth following, he has also won support from ultra-nationalists, a charge met with another shrug of the shoulders. The goal, he insists, must be to use every inch of political space which Putin has afforded the opposition, from the nationalists to the liberals.

To that end, Navalny and his team are using social media and data analytics to build a serious campaign. A video exposé of prime minister Dmitry Medvedev’s secret property empire near the Black Sea, along with vineyards and yachts, has attracted 24 million views. As we exit past a row of young workers head-down over laptop computers, Navalny points to a tabulated list of all his supporting groups around Russia. He has 130,000 dedicated campaign volunteers, tens of thousands of activists who have shown up for protests, and more than 1.7 million subscribers to his online video channels. Proud and defiant, Navalny is the last (visible) man standing in opposition to Vladimir Putin.

27 October, 1969

Elton John

In October 1969, Elton John was yet to become the superstar we now know. Still only 22, his debut album had been out for four months, and it would be another three years until he legally changed his name from Reginald Dwight.

SESSION DE LANE LEA 9:00 BOBBY BRUCE

STAYED HOME TODAY.

WENT TO SOUTH HARROW MARKET

THE SESSION WAS HILARIOUS.

DIDN’T NO ANYTHING IN THE END

WROTE ‘YOUR SONG’

                                                                                A momentous day for Elton John

1 November, 1868

Louisa May Alcott

The second volume of Little Women, a seminal work in both American literature and feminist canon, came on 1 January 1869, two months after Louisa May Alcott wrote the following entry in her diary.

Began the second part of Little Women. I can do a chapter a day, and in a month I mean to be done. A little success is so inspiring that I now find my “Marches” sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play. Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.

Edited extracts from Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time edited by Shaun Usher, published by Faber & Faber on 9 October. Salvador Dalí: from Diary of a Genius, translated from the French by Richard Howard © Éditions de La Table Ronde, 1964. Jack Kerouac: from Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954, edited by Douglas Brinkley (Penguin) © 2004 by The Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, Literary Representative. Audre Lorde: from The Cancer Journals (Aunt Lute Books) © 1997 by Audre Lorde estate. All Rights Reserved. Virginia Woolf: from The Diary of Virginia Woolf (Granta Books) © 1982 by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Elton John: from Elton: The Biography (Andre Deutsch) © David Buckley. Reproduced with permission of Hachette. Lionel Barber: from The Powerful and the Damned (WH Allen) © Lionel Barber 2020. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Limited.

https://observer.co.uk/style/features/article/the-pages-of-our-lives

Alexei Navalny’s Prison Diaries

From newyorker.com

The Russian opposition leader’s account of his last years and his admonition to his country and the world

On August 20, 2020, during a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow, the Russian opposition leader and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny thought he was dying––he was disoriented, and felt his body shutting down. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and Navalny was hospitalized. Two days later, thanks to the persistence of his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, and international pressure, the Russian authorities allowed a German plane to take him to Berlin for treatment.

Navalny emerged from a coma on September 7th. A week later, he announced his intention to return soon to Russia, despite the obvious danger. Doctors concluded that Navalny had been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent called Novichok. While recovering in the German countryside, he began writing his memoir, “Patriot,” and investigating the attempt on his life. He had no doubt that it had been the decision of Vladimir Putin and the work of the F.S.B., the Russian security services, but he was determined to uncover the details. During an unforgettable telephone call, which was filmed for a documentary about his life, Navalny duped an F.S.B. agent into describing how agents had broken into his hotel room in Tomsk and dosed his clothing with the poison.

On January 17, 2021, Alexei and Yulia flew back to Moscow. Navalny was arrested at the airport. Despite international protests on his behalf, Navalny immediately entered a netherworld of trumped-up criminal charges (embezzlement, fraud, “extremism,” etc.), prison cells, and solitary confinement. By the end of 2023, he landed in the “special regime” colony known as Polar Wolf, north of the Arctic Circle. In captivity, he managed to keep a diary and even had his team post some entries on social media. In one Facebook post, he explained why he refused to live out his life in the safety of exile: “I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.”

“We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth,” Navalny wrote. “This is the most powerful weapon.”Photograph by Martin Schoeller / AUGUST

2022     January 17th 

Exactly one year ago today I came home, to Russia.

I didn’t manage to take a single step on the soil of my country as a free man: I was arrested even before border control.

The hero of one of my favourite books, “Resurrection,” by Leo Tolstoy, says, “Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”

It sounds fine, but it was wrong then, and it’s even more wrong now.

There are a lot of honest people in Russia—tens of millions. There are far more than is commonly believed.

The authorities, however, who were repugnant then and are even more so now, are afraid not of honest people but of those who are not afraid of them. Or let me be more precise: those who may be afraid but overcome their fear.

There are a lot of them, too. We meet them all the time, in all sorts of places, from rallies to the media, people who remain independent. Indeed, even here, on Instagram. I recently read that the Ministry of the Interior was firing staff who had “liked” my posts. So in Russia, in 2022, even a “like” can take courage.

In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him. And they, in turn, need to convince everyone around them that they should not be afraid, that there are, by an order of magnitude, more honest people than the mean little tsar’s security guards. Why live your whole life in fear, even being robbed in the process, if everything can be arranged differently and more justly?

The pendulum swings endlessly. Or the tug-of-war. Today you are brave. Tomorrow they seem to have scared you a bit. And the day after tomorrow they have scared you so much that you despair and become brave again.

I have no idea when my journey into space will end, if ever, but on Friday I was informed that another criminal case is being brought against me and going to court. And there is yet another coming up, in which I am supposedly an extremist and a terrorist. So I’m one of those cosmonauts who don’t count the days until the end of their term. What is there to count? People have been kept in prison for as long as twenty-seven years.

But I find myself in this company of cosmonauts precisely because I tried my utmost to tug my end of the rope. I pulled over to this side those among the honest people who would not be or could no longer bear to be afraid.

That is what I did. I don’t for a second regret it. And I will continue to do it.

Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck: Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.

Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it.

I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds.

I love you all. Hugs to everyone.

March 22nd

Nine years of strict regime. Today, on March 22nd, a new sentence was announced. Before that, I ran a sweepstakes with my lawyers. The losers would have to buy whoever won a drink. Olga reckoned eleven to fifteen years. Vadim surprised everyone with his prediction of precisely twelve years and six months. I guessed seven to eight years and was the winner.

I decided to record my feelings right away, because all year I had been training for situations like today, developing what I call my “prison Zen.”

Whatever way you look at it, nine years, especially in “strict” conditions, is an extremely long sentence. In Russia, the average punishment for murder is seven years.

A prisoner sentenced to an extra term of nine years is going to be upset, to say the least. When I got back to the prison, everyone—who of course already knew about the sentence—furtively gave me a particular kind of look. How was I taking it? What was the expression on my face? It is, after all, intriguing to see someone’s reaction when they have just been told they will be serving the longest sentence of anyone in the entire prison complex. And that they are going to be sent somewhere especially grim and usually reserved for murderers. Nobody is going to come over and ask how I feel, but everyone is curious to see how this plays out. It’s an occasion when a person might hang themselves or slash their wrists.

But I am completely fine. Even “my” jailer said in the course of a really annoying full strip search, “You don’t look to me to be all that upset.” I am really O.K. I am writing this not because I am willing myself to keep up a pretence of being carefree and blasé but because my prison Zen has kicked in.

I knew from the outset that I would be imprisoned for life—either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of this regime.

Regimes like this one are resilient, and the most foolish thing I could do is pay attention to people who say, “Lyosha, sure, the regime is going to last at least another year, but the year after that, two at most, it will fall apart and you will be a free man.” And everything along those lines. People write that to me frequently.

The U.S.S.R. lasted seventy years. The repressive regimes in North Korea and Cuba survive to this day. China, with a whole bunch of political prisoners, has lasted so long that those prisoners grow old and die in prison. The Chinese regime does not relent. It releases no one, despite all the international pressure. The truth of the matter is that we underestimate just how resilient autocracies are in the modern world. With very, very rare exceptions, they are protected from external invasion by the U.N., by international law, by the rights of sovereignty. Russia, which right now is waging a classic war of aggression against Ukraine (which has increased tenfold the predictions of the regime’s imminent collapse), is additionally protected by its membership in the U.N. Security Council and its nuclear weapons.

Economic collapse and impoverishment await us most likely. But it is far from obvious that the regime will come crashing down in such a way that its falling debris breaks open the doors of its prisons.

My approach to the situation is certainly not one of contemplative passivity. I am trying to do everything I can from here to put an end to authoritarianism (or, more modestly, to contribute to ending it). Every single day, I ponder how to act more effectively, what constructive advice to give my colleagues who are still at liberty, where the regime’s greatest vulnerabilities lie. As I said, giving in to wishful thinking (about when the regime will collapse and I will be released) would be the worst thing I could do. What if I’m not free in a year? Or three years? Would I lapse into depression? Blame everyone else for not trying hard enough to get me released? Curse world leaders and public opinion for having forgotten me?

Relying on being released anytime soon, waiting for it to happen, is only a way of tormenting myself.

I decided from the beginning that if I was going to be released as a result of pressure or a political scenario it would happen within six months of my arrest, “while the iron was hot.” And, if it didn’t, I was up the creek for the foreseeable future. I needed to adjust my thinking so that when they did extend my sentence I would feel even more sure I was doing the right thing when I boarded that plane back to Moscow.

Here are the techniques I worked out. Perhaps others may find them helpful in the future (but let’s hope they are not needed).

The first is frequently to be found in self-help books: Imagine the worst thing that can happen, and accept it. This works, even if it’s a masochistic exercise. I can imagine that it’s not suitable for people suffering from clinical depression. They might do it so successfully that they end up hanging themselves.

It’s a fairly easy exercise, because it involves a skill everyone developed in childhood. You may remember crying your eyes out in your bed and exultantly imagining you are going to die right then and there just to spite everyone. Imagine the look on the faces of your parents! How they will cry when it finally dawns on them who they have lost! Choked with tears, they’ll beg you, as you lie quiet and still in your little coffin, to get up and come and watch TV, not just until ten o’clock but until eleven, if only you would be alive. But it is too late, you are dead, which means you are unrelenting and deaf to their pleas.

Well, mine is much the same idea.

Get into your prison bunk and wait to hear “Lights out.” The lights are switched off. You invite yourself to imagine, as realistically as possible, the worst thing that could happen. And then, as I said, accept it (skipping the stages of denial, anger, and bargaining).

I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here. There will not be anybody to say goodbye to. Or, while I am still in prison, people I know outside will die and I won’t be able to say goodbye to them. I will miss graduations from school and college. Tasselled mortarboards will be tossed in the air in my absence. All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren. I won’t be the subject of any family stories. I’ll be missing from all the photos.

You need to think about this seriously, and your cruel imagination will whisk you through your fears so swiftly that you will arrive at your “eyes filled with tears” destination in next to no time. The important thing is not to torment yourself with anger, hatred, fantasies of revenge, but to move instantly to acceptance. That can be hard.

I remember having to stop one of my first sessions at the idea that I will die here, forgotten by everybody, and be buried in an unmarked grave. My family will be informed that “in accordance with the law the burial site cannot be disclosed.” I had difficulty resisting an urge to start furiously smashing everything around me, overturning bunks and bedside tables and yelling, You bastards! You have no right to bury me in an unmarked grave. It’s against the law! It isn’t fair! I actually wanted to shout that out.

Instead of yelling, you need to think about the situation calmly. So what if that comes to pass? Worse things happen.

I’m forty-five. I have a family and children. I’ve had a life to live, worked on some interesting things, done some things that were useful. But there’s a war on right now. Suppose a nineteen-year-old is riding in an armoured vehicle, he gets a piece of shrapnel in his head, and that’s it. He has had no family, no children, no life. Right now, dead civilians are lying in the streets in Mariupol, their bodies gnawed at by dogs, and many of them will be lucky if they end up in even a mass grave—through no fault of their own. I made my choices, but these people were just living their lives. They had jobs. They were family breadwinners. Then, one fine evening, a vengeful runt on television, the President of a neighbouring country, announces that you are all “Nazis” and have to die because Ukraine was invented by Lenin. The next day, a shell comes flying in your window and you no longer have a wife, a husband, or children—and maybe you yourself are also no longer alive.

And how many guiltless prisoners there are here! While you are sitting with your bagful of letters, other prisoners have never had a letter or package from anyone. Some of them will get sick and die in the prison hospital. Alone.

The Soviet dissidents? Anatoly Marchenko died from a hunger strike in 1986, and a couple of years later the satanic Soviet Union fell to pieces. So even the worst possible scenario is not actually all that bad. I resigned myself and accept it.

Yulia has been such a help in this. I didn’t want her to be tormented by all that “perhaps they’ll let him out after a month” stuff. Most important, I wanted her to know I was not suffering here. On her first extended visit, we walked down a corridor and spoke at a spot as far removed as possible from the cameras wired for sound that are tucked in all over the place. I whispered in her ear, “Listen, I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I think there’s a high probability I’ll never get out of here. Even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.”

“I know,” she said with a nod, in a voice that was calm and firm. “I was thinking that myself.”

At that moment I wanted to seize her in my arms and hug her joyfully, as hard as I could. That was so great! No tears! It was one of those moments when you realize you found the right person. Or perhaps she found you.

“Let’s just decide for ourselves that this is most likely what’s going to happen. Let’s accept it as the base scenario and arrange our lives on that basis. If things turn out better, that will be marvellous, but we won’t count on it or have ill-founded hopes.”

“Yep. Let’s do it.”

As usual, her voice sounded as if it belonged to a character in a cartoon, but she was dead serious. She looked up at me and batted her eyes with those big eyelashes, at which point I swept her up in my arms, hugging her in delight. Where else could I ever have found someone who could discuss the most difficult matters with me without a lot of drama and hand-wringing? She entirely got it and, like me, would hope for the best, but expect and prepare for the worst.

Yulia laughed and broke free. I kissed her on the nose and felt much better.

There is, of course, a hint of trickery and self-deception in all this. You have accepted the worst-case scenario, but there is an inner voice you can’t stifle: Come off it, the worst is never going to happen. Even as you tell yourself your direst fate is unavoidable, you’re hoping against hope that someone will change your mind for you.

The process going on in your head is by no means straightforward, but if you find yourself in a bad situation, you should try this. It works, as long as you think everything through seriously.

The second technique is so old you may roll your eyes heavenward when you hear it. It is religion. It is doable only for believers but does not demand zealous, fervent prayer by the prison barracks window three times a day (a very common phenomenon in prisons).

I have always thought, and said openly, that being a believer makes it easier to live your life and, to an even greater extent, engage in opposition politics. Faith makes life simpler.

The initial position for this exercise is the same as for the previous one. You lie in your bunk looking up at the one above and ask yourself whether you are a Christian in your heart of hearts. It is not essential for you to believe some old guys in the desert once lived to be eight hundred years old, or that the sea was literally parted in front of someone. But are you a disciple of the religion whose founder sacrificed himself for others, paying the price for their sins? Do you believe in the immortality of the soul and the rest of that cool stuff? If you can honestly answer yes, what is there left for you to worry about? Why, under your breath, would you mumble a hundred times something you read from a hefty tome you keep in your bedside table? Don’t worry about the morrow, because the morrow is perfectly capable of taking care of itself.

My job is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. They won’t let me down and will sort out all my headaches. As they say in prison here: they will take my punches for me.

March 26th

The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children.

What sort of pathetic greeting is it to send a letter to your son on his fourteenth birthday? What kind of memory will that be of being close to his father?

“For my birthday my dad took me on a hike.”

“Well, on my birthday, my dad taught me how to drive a car.”

“For my birthday my dad sent me a letter from prison on a piece of notepaper. He promised that when he gets out he’ll teach me how to boil water in a plastic bag.”

Let’s face it, you don’t get to choose your parents. Some kids get stuck with jailbirds.

But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in.

Zakhar, happy birthday!

I really miss you and love you very much!

April 3rd

It’s a real Russian spring day. That is, the snowdrifts are up to my waist, and it’s been snowing all weekend. Snow is something prisoners hate, because what do they do when it snows and after it snows? That’s right, they clear the snow away. Arguing that it is, after all, April, and in at most ten days it will all just melt anyway, not only doesn’t work but draws heartfelt indignation from the prison administration. If anything is lying anywhere in violation of the regulations and the normal routine of doing things, it must be shovelled up, scraped off, and removed. That said, clearing snow actually is one of the most meaningful activities in prison life, because most of the others are an inane response to the need to generate work at all costs. The prisoners have a saying: “It doesn’t matter where what gets chucked, as long as the con feels completely fucked.”

This describes my feeling every weekend, because, although you can find at least an inkling of sense in shovelling snow in April, the work is genuinely exhausting. Because I am classified as a nontrusted prisoner, they don’t allow me to shovel the snow like everyone else and to break the ice on the “main line,” the camp’s principal street, along which the commandant walks. In my local area and with my own squad, though, I have to shovel.

We all have that classic labour-camp look that belongs in a movie about the Gulag. The heavy jackets, fur hats, and mittens, the enormous wooden shovels, each of which is so heavy you would think it was made of cast iron, especially after it gets saturated with water, which freezes. They are the self-same shovels used by the soldiers who cleared the streets of my military home town when I was a child. You might have thought that in the thirty years that have passed since then shovel technology would have progressed toward production of lighter shovels, but in Russia, as with so many other things, we didn’t hack it. We were brought a couple of lightweight shovels that immediately broke. The response was the usual “Oh, well, what the hell, let them use the wooden shovels. We’ve used them for shovelling snow all our lives. They are reliable.” As if to say, Our grandfathers invented these shovels and far be it from us to doubt their wisdom by trying to improve something that is already ideal.

So there I was, scowling, wearing a heavy winter jacket, and wielding a wooden shovel with snow frozen to it. The only thing that amused me, and at least partly enabled me to accept this reality, is that on these occasions I feel like the hero of my all-time favourite joke. It is a Soviet joke, but has a certain relevance today.

A boy goes out for a stroll in the courtyard of his apartment block. Boys playing soccer there invite him to join in. The boy is a bit of a stay-at-home, but he’s interested and runs over to play with them. He eventually manages to kick the ball, very hard, but unfortunately it crashes through the window of the basement room where the janitor lives. Unsurprisingly, the janitor emerges. He is unshaven, wearing a fur hat and quilted jacket, and clearly the worse for a hangover. Infuriated, the janitor stares at the boy before rushing at him.

The boy runs away as fast as he can and thinks, What do I need this for? After all, I’m a quiet, stay-at-home sort of boy. I like reading. Why play soccer with the other boys? Why am I running away right now from this scary janitor when I could be lying at home on the couch reading a book by my favourite American writer, Hemingway?

Meanwhile, Hemingway is reclining on a chaise longue in Cuba, with a glass of rum in his hand, and thinking, God, I’m so tired of this rum and Cuba. All this dancing, and shouting, and the sea. Damn it, I’m a clever guy. Why am I here instead of being in Paris discussing existentialism with my colleague Jean-Paul Sartre over a glass of Calvados?

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping Calvados, is looking at the scene in front of him and thinking, How I hate Paris. I can’t stand the sight of these boulevards. I’m sick and tired of all these rapturous students and their revolutions. Why do I have to be here, when I long to be in Moscow, engaging in fascinating dialogue with my friend Andrei Platonov, the great Russian writer?

Meanwhile, in Moscow, Platonov is running across a snow-covered courtyard and thinking, If I catch that little bastard, I’ll fucking kill him.

Although, of course, I am no Andrei Platonov, I have the quilted jacket and the fur hat, and I, too, am writing a book. Next, I’ll finish the chapter about how I met Yulia.

July 1st

I live like Putin and Medvedev.

At least I think so when I look at the fence around my barracks. Everyone has the usual fence, and inside there are rods to dry the laundry on. But I have a six-metre-high fence, the kind I have only seen in our investigations of Putin’s and Medvedev’s palaces.

Putin both lives and works in such a place—in Novo-Ogaryovo or Sochi. And I live in a similar place. Putin lets ministers sit in the waiting room for six hours, and my lawyers have to wait five or six hours to see me. I have a loudspeaker in my barracks that plays songs like “Glory to the F.S.B.,” and I think Putin has one, too.

That’s where the similarities end, though.

Putin, as you know, sleeps until 10 a.m., then swims in the pool and eats cottage cheese with honey.

But, for me, 10 a.m. is lunchtime, because work starts at 6:40 a.m. 6:00—Wake up. Ten minutes to make my bed, wash, shave, and so on.

6:10—Exercise.

6:20—Escorted to breakfast.

6:40—Searched and escorted to work.

At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height.

10:20—Fifteen-minute lunch break.

After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called “disciplinary activity.”

On Saturday, you work for five hours and sit on the bench under the portrait again.

Sunday, in theory, is a day off. But in the Putin administration, or wherever my unique routine was set up, they are experts at relaxation. On Sunday, we sit in a room on a wooden bench for ten hours.

I don’t know who can be “disciplined” by such activities, except a cripple with a bad back. But maybe that’s their goal. But you know me, I’m an optimist and look for the bright side even in my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.

While sewing, I’ve memorized Hamlet’s soliloquy in English. However, the inmates on my shift say that when I close my eyes and mutter something in Shakespearean English, like “in thy orisons be all my sins remembered,” it looks as if I were summoning a demon.

But I have no such thoughts: summoning a demon would be a violation of the prison regulations.

2023

January 12th

In my two years behind bars, my only truly original story is the one about the psycho. Everything else has been told and described numerous times. If you open any book by a Soviet dissident, there will be endless stories of punishment cells, hunger strikes, violence, provocations, lack of medical care. Nothing new. But my story about the psycho is fresh; at least, I’ve never seen or heard anything like it.

So, let me give you an idea about the SHIZO, the place where I sit all the time. It is a narrow corridor with cells on either side. The metal doors offer little to no soundproofing, plus there are ventilation holes above the doors, so two people sitting in opposite cells can have a conversation without even raising their voices. This is the main reason there has never been anyone in the cell opposite mine, or in my entire eight-cell section. I am the only one there, and I have never seen any other punished convicts the whole time.

And then, about a month ago, they put a psycho in the cell across from mine. At first, I thought he was faking it. He was very active. If you tell a kid to act like a madman, that’s what he’ll come up with. Screaming, growling, hitting, barking, arguing with himself in three different voices. But, in the case of my psycho, seventy per cent of the words are obscene. There are a lot of videos online of people who think that they’ve been possessed by demons. This is very similar—the growling wail (my favourite of his three personas) comes on periodically and doesn’t cease for hours. That’s why I stopped thinking he was a faker; no normal person can yell for fourteen hours every day and three hours at night for a month. And, when I say “yell,” I mean the kind of yelling that makes your neck veins swell up.

For the past month, I’ve been going nuts and starting every check-up by demanding this lunatic be transferred elsewhere. It’s impossible to sleep at night or read during the day. They don’t transfer him, and they go out of their way to emphasize that he is a convict just like me.

And then I find out a wonderful detail: this nutcase was incarcerated (he got twenty-four years for killing someone) in another place, and a month ago they moved him here, and now they keep him in a punishment cell so that he can, so to speak, keep me entertained.

I have to admit that this plan is working: I never get bored, nor do I ever get a good night’s sleep. Being ill here is something else: during the day you suffer in a cell with a fever and long for it to be night, when they lower your bunk bed and give you a mattress, but at night you listen to the cheerful barking of your neighbour. As you know, sleep deprivation is one of the most effective tortures, but formally I can’t complain: he’s an inmate like me, he was also put in a punishment cell, and it’s up to the administration to decide who gets put into which cell.

But as usual in such situations I am amazed at something else.

This was all planned. Someone thought of this and implemented it at the regional or federal level. You can’t transfer a convict for no reason at all; there’s a rule about serving your whole term in one camp. So there was an order from above: Put pressure on him. And the generals and colonels at lower levels held a meeting: So, how shall we put pressure on him? And someone wanting to distinguish himself said, We have a madman in such-and-such prison; he screams day and night. Let’s take him to Navalny.

What a great idea, fellow-officers. Comrade Colonel, proceed and report on it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that they took a raving madman from a prison hospital and declared him sane, just to keep him in a cell across from mine.

The moral of this story is simple: The Russian prison system, the Federal Penitentiary Service, is run by a collection of perverts. Everything in their system has a sick twist: the infamous mop rapes, sticking things up people’s anuses, and so on. It wouldn’t occur to a bad-but-sane person to do such a thing. Everything you read about the horrors and fascist crimes of our prison system is true. There’s just one correction needed: the reality is even worse.

January 17th

It has been exactly two years since I returned to Russia. I have spent these two years in prison. When you write a post like this, you have to ask yourself: How many more such anniversary posts will you have to write?

Life and the events around us prompt the answer: However many it may take. Our miserable, exhausted motherland needs to be saved. It has been pillaged, wounded, dragged into an aggressive war, and turned into a prison run by the most unscrupulous and deceitful scoundrels. Any opposition to this gang—even if only symbolic in my current limited capacity—is important.

I said it two years ago, and I will say it again: Russia is my country. I was born and raised here, my parents are here, and I made a family here; I found someone I loved and had kids with her. I am a full-fledged citizen, and I have the right to unite with like-minded people and be politically active. There are plenty of us, certainly more than corrupt judges, lying propagandists, and Kremlin crooks.

I’m not going to surrender my country to them, and I believe that the darkness will eventually yield. But as long as it persists I will do all I can, try to do what is right, and urge everyone not to abandon hope.

Russia will be happy!

June 4th

It’s my birthday today. When I woke up, I joked to myself that I can now add the SHIZO to the list of places where I’ve celebrated it over the years. And then, like many other people who reach a certain age (I turned forty-seven today, wow), I thought about my accomplishments over the past year and my plans for the next.

I haven’t accomplished much, and this was best summed up the other day by the psychologist at our penal colony. The procedure requires that before you are sent to the SHIZO you must be examined by a medical officer (to check whether you will be able to withstand it) and a psychologist (to make sure you don’t hang yourself). Well, after our meeting, the psychologist said, “This is the sixteenth time we’ve put you in the SHIZO, but you keep cracking jokes, and your mood is much better than that of the commission members.” That’s true, but on the morning of your birthday you have to be honest with yourself, so I ask myself the question, Am I really in a good mood, or do I force myself to feel that way?

My answer is, I really am. Let’s face it, of course I wish I didn’t have to wake up in this hellhole and could, instead, have breakfast with my family, receive kisses on the cheek from my children, unwrap presents, and say, “Wow, this is exactly what I dreamed of!” But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can be achieved only if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come when speaking the truth and advocating for justice will be commonplace and not dangerous in Russia. 

But, until that day comes, I see my situation not as a heavy burden or a yoke but as a job that needs to be done. Every job has its unpleasant aspects, right? So I’m going through the unpleasant part of my favourite job right now.

My plan for the previous year was not to become brutalized and bitter and lose my laid-back demeanour; that would mean the beginning of my defeat. And all my success in this was possible only because of your support.

As always, on my birthday, I want to thank all the people I’ve met in my life. The good ones for having helped and still helping me. The bad ones for the fact that my experience with them has taught me something. Thanks to my family for always being there for me!

But the biggest thank-you and biggest salute I want to give today goes to all political prisoners in Russia, Belarus, and other countries. Most of them have it much harder than me. I think about them all the time. Their resilience inspires me every day.

June 19th

Some people collect stamps. Some collect coins. And I have a growing collection of amazing court trials. I was tried in the Khimki police station, where I was sitting under the portrait of Genrikh Yagoda. I was tried in a standard regime penal colony, and they called it an “open trial.”

And now they’re trying me in a closed trial in a maximum-security penal colony.

In a sense, this is the new sincerity. They now say openly, We are afraid of you. We are afraid of what you will say. We are afraid of the truth.

This is an important confession. And it makes practical sense for all of us. We must do what they fear—tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.

August 4th

Nineteen years in a maximum-security penal colony. The number of years does not matter. I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where “life” is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.

The sentencing figure is not for me. It is for you. You, not I, are being frightened and deprived of the will to resist. You are being forced to surrender your country without a fight to the gang of traitors, thieves, and scoundrels who have seized power. Putin must not achieve his goal. Do not lose the will to resist.

November 13th

When you are looking for a wife, be sure to check the potential spouse to see whether she has been registered as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t do that and here I am.

On a daily basis, the administration informs me that they are unable to deliver another letter from Navalnaya Y. B. The correspondence was seized by the censor because it contained evidence of preparation for a crime. It applies to all recent correspondence.

I wrote to her, saying, “Yulia, stop preparing crimes! Instead, cook some borscht for the kids.”

However, she can’t stop. She carries on inventing new crimes and keeps writing to me about them in her letters.

Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, she told me that in her school days, she, along with her friends, conspired to steal a briefcase from a classmate and study the trajectory of an object flying out of a second-floor window. Just to clarify, the flying object was the briefcase, not the classmate. Although, actually, I’m not so sure now.

Even back then, her criminal inclinations were evident. Not a spouse, but more like some kind of outlaw.

December 1st

I have no idea which word to use to describe my latest news. Is it sad, funny, or absurd?

I am brought letters and the conversation begins:

“Any letters from my wife?”

“Censored.”

“Any papers from my lawyer?”

“Censored.”

“So what do you have?”

“There’s one from the investigator.”

I open the letter from the State Investigative Committee: “We inform you that a criminal case has been opened against you for a crime under Part 2 of Article 214 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Two episodes.”

They initiate a new criminal case against me every three months. Rarely has an inmate in solitary confinement for more than a year had such a vibrant social and political life.

I have no idea what Article 214 is, and there’s nowhere to look. You’ll know about it before I do.

Nevertheless, this seems to be a case of positive feedback, as the scientists might say. If this Kremlin gang of corrupters, traitors, and occupiers does not like what I (we) are doing, we must be on the right path.

December 26th

I am your new Santa Claus.

Well, I now have a sheepskin coat and an ushanka fur hat, and soon I will get felt boots. I have grown a beard during the twenty days of my travels under escort. Unfortunately, there are no reindeer, but there are huge, fluffy, and very beautiful German shepherds.

And the most important thing: I now live above the Arctic Circle in the village of Kharp, on the Yamal Peninsula. The nearest town has the delightful name of Labytnangi.

I don’t say, “Ho ho ho,” but I do say, “Oh oh oh,” when I look out the window, where I can see night, then evening, and then night again.

The twenty days of my trip were pretty exhausting, but I’m in a good mood, as befits a Santa Claus.

They brought me here on Saturday night. I was transported with such precautions and by such a strange route (Vladimir—Moscow—Chelyabinsk—Yekaterinburg—Kirov—Vorkuta—Kharp) that I didn’t expect anyone to find me here before mid-January.

So I was very surprised when the cell door was opened yesterday with the words “A lawyer is here to see you.” The lawyer told me that you had lost track of me, and some of you were quite worried. Thanks very much for your support!

I can’t regale you with stories about polar exotica yet, because I can only see the fence, which is very close.

I also went for a walk. The “exercise” yard is a neighbouring cell, a bit bigger, with snow on the ground. And I saw guards, not like in central Russia, but like in the movies, with machine guns, warm mittens, and felt boots. And with the same beautiful fluffy German shepherds.

Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I’m totally relieved that I’ve finally made it here.

Thanks again to everyone for your support. And happy holidays!

Since I’m Santa Claus, you’re probably wondering about the presents. But I am a special-regime Santa Claus, so only those who have behaved really badly get presents.

December 31st

This is the third New Year’s Eve. I have taken the traditional family New Year’s Eve photo using Photoshop. I am trying to keep up with the times, and on this occasion I asked to be drawn by artificial intelligence. I hope it turned out fantastic; I won’t see the picture myself until the letter reaches Yamal.

“I miss you terribly” is kind of incorrect from the point of view of Russian syntax. It’s better to say, “I miss you a lot,” or “I miss you so much.”

But, from my point of view, it is more accurate and correct. I miss my family terribly. Yulia, my children, my parents, my brother. I miss my friends, my colleagues, our offices, and my work. I miss you all terribly.

I have no feelings of loneliness, abandonment, or isolation. My mood is great and quite Christmassy. But there is no substitute for normal human communication in all its forms: from jokes at the New Year’s feast to correspondence on Telegram and comments on Instagram and Twitter.

I miss being able to argue with people who send stupid, identical greetings and pictures via their WhatsApp list on New Year’s Eve. It used to annoy me, but now I just think it’s cute. Imagine someone sitting down and sending everyone a couple of kittens with hats under a Christmas tree.

Happy New Year to everyone.

Don’t miss anyone. Not terribly, not much, or very much. Don’t miss your loved ones, and don’t let your loved ones miss you. Continue to be a good, honest person, and try to be a little better and more honest in the coming year. That’s pretty much what I wish for myself. Don’t get sick, and take care of yourself.

Arctic hugs and polar greetings. Love you all.

2024

January 9th

This idea I had, that Putin would now be satisfied with the simple fact of having me in a cell in the far north rather than just keeping me in the SHIZO, was not only overoptimistic but also naïve.

I had just come out of quarantine when it was reported that “the convict Navalny refused to present himself according to the regulations, did not respond to the educative work, and did not draw appropriate conclusions for himself.” I got seven days in a SHIZO.

A wonderful detail: in a punishment cell, the daily routine is slightly different. In a normal cell, your “exercise” takes place in the afternoon. Even though it is a polar night, it is still a few degrees warmer in the afternoon. In the SHIZO, however, “exercise” starts at six-thirty in the morning. But I have already promised myself that I will try to go for a walk no matter what the weather is.

My “exercise” yard is eleven steps from one wall and three to the other; not much of a walk, but at least there’s something, so I go outside.

It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F]. Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.

Few things are as refreshing as a walk in Yamal at six-thirty in the morning. And what a wonderful breeze blows into the courtyard despite the concrete fence, it’s just wow!

Today I went for a walk, got frozen, and thought of Leonardo DiCaprio and his character’s dead-horse trick in “The Revenant.” I don’t think it would work here. A dead horse would freeze in about fifteen minutes.

Here you need an elephant. A hot or even a roasted elephant. If you cut open the belly of a freshly roasted elephant and crawl inside, you can keep warm for a while. But where am I going to get a hot, roasted elephant in Yamal, especially at six-thirty in the morning? So I will continue to freeze.

January 17th

Exactly three years ago, I came back to Russia after treatment following my poisoning. I was arrested at the airport. And for three years I’ve been in prison.

And for three years I’ve been answering the same question.

Prisoners ask it simply and directly.

Prison officials inquire about it cautiously, with the recording devices turned off.

“Why did you come back?”

Responding to this question, I feel frustrated in two ways. First, there’s a dissatisfaction with myself for failing to find the right words to make everyone understand and put an end to this incessant questioning. Second, there’s frustration at the political landscape of recent decades in Russia. This landscape has implanted cynicism and conspiracy theories so deeply in society that people inherently distrust straightforward motives. They seem to believe, If you came back, there must have been some deal you made. It just didn’t work out. Or hasn’t yet. There’s a hidden plan involving the Kremlin towers. There must be a secret lurking beneath the surface. Because, in politics, nothing is as straightforward as it appears.

But there are no secrets or twisted meanings. Everything really is that simple.

I have my country and my convictions. I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary.

And, if you’re not prepared to do that, you have no convictions. You just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles; they’re only thoughts in your head.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s not currently in prison lacks convictions. Everyone pays their price. For many people, the price is high even without being imprisoned.

I took part in elections and vied for leadership positions. The call for me is different. I travelled the length and breadth of the country, declaring everywhere from the stage, “I promise that I won’t let you down, I won’t deceive you, and I won’t abandon you.” By coming back to Russia, I fulfilled my promise to the voters. There need to be some people in Russia who don’t lie to them.

It turned out that, in Russia, to defend the right to have and not to hide your beliefs, you have to pay by sitting in a solitary cell. Of course, I don’t like being there. But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland.

My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience.

Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship.

The future lies in these principles.

But, for the present, sectarians and marginals are in power. They have absolutely no ideas. Their only goal is to cling to power. Total hypocrisy allows them to wrap themselves in any cover. So polygamists have become conservatives. Members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have become Orthodox. Owners of “golden passports” and offshore accounts are aggressive patriots.

Lies, and nothing but lies.

It will crumble and collapse. The Putinist state is not sustainable.

One day, we will look at it, and it won’t be there. Victory is inevitable.

But for now, we must not give up, and we must stand by our beliefs.

Alexei Navalny died on February 16, 2024. ♦

This is drawn from Patriot: A Memoir.

Published in the print edition of the October 21, 2024, issue, with the headline “Prison Diaries.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/alexei-navalny-patriot-memoir