Absurdistan: Somewhere between Russia and America

Absurdistan tells “the story of a very fat man who destroys a very small country” in the words of its author Gary Shteyngart. His protagonist Misha Vainberg, son of the 1,238^th richest man in Russia, is a thirty-year-old overweight Jew, holding a degree on multiculturalism from an American college and in love with Rouenna, his Latina girlfriend in the Bronx. While he is back in Russia for a visit, his father murders an American businessman and that confines Misha to Russia, barring him from ever again obtaining a visa to the United States. However he becomes hopeful again when a corrupt consulate officer offers Misha a solution: he can purchase a Belgian passport from Absurdistan, an oil-rich, former Soviet Republic. And as soon as he steps on this strange land, he finds himself “covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century.”

When Absurdistan came out in USA in 2006, it received vast critical acclaim, and was chosen one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. It has been published in twenty-five countries which now include Turkey. This was Shteyngart’s second book; his first novel The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, published in 2002, immediately marked him as “a major new talent” in the literary world. His debut book won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. It was also named a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year by The Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, and one of the best debuts of the year by The Guardian. Shteyngart was also chosen by Granta as one of the twenty best young American novelists in 2007, and he won the 2007 Berlin Prize, by the American Academy in Berlin. He is also a travel writer. Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972, and came to USA when he was seven. He lives in New York.

We talked with Gary Shteyngart about his novel and authorship, just before my Turkish translation of Absurdistan was published in Turkey.

Figen Bingul: It sounds like you’ve become a “hit” rather quickly while most authors suffer for a long time before they’re recognized.

Gary Shteyngart: Yes, and that’s very strange because there’s such a downward trend in readership in America. I don’t know whether there is in Turkey, but it is so in America and other countries too. The prevalence of electronic media especially has made it too difficult for people to read. But one thing that’s very heartening I think is New York is a great city for reading. I think it’s because people spend three hours in the subway, reading. You always see them read a book. And newspapers they read are not these junky newspapers they give away for free. In Europe you always see that in the metro. Here people read the New York Times and larger papers. Yes, I’m very, very lucky to begin well.

How did it happen?

I don’t know; it’s a good question. I think now is a great time to be an immigrant writer because America is finally figuring out that it’s not the only country in the world. And the topics I write about—for the first book I dealt with immigration, for this book I deal with oil politics. The book I’m writing now is about America, but about the economic collapse, the social and cultural collapse of America. I think of myself as partly a journalist in a way because I spend so much time traveling, interviewing, and being with other people. I try to have a psychological background to every character I create, but I’m also incredibly interested in the fascinating but somewhat frightening times in which we live. I’m trying to make sure that I’m always kept current and in a strange way that mirrors almost the information age in which we live. So a writer these days has two choices: either you embrace what you can understand about the huge technological shifts that are happening right now, which are partly destroying the market, or one can just retreat and write very interior stories like Chekhov.

You published your first book in 2002. Were you writing before then?

I just kept writing the same book over and over again. I didn’t think it was any good, so I was too shy to publish it. Then I sent it to a professor at a university and he liked it so much that we had the book deal in two weeks. But every time I wanted to send it out, I thought that—I’m a little embarrassed, this is the first book by a Russian born writer in my generation—I thought people would be upset, my parents would be upset. Because you’re the first one to air the dirty laundry of your ethnic group.

You were born in Russia during the Cold War. You lived there until you were seven. Did you know anything about America before you moved here?

I knew it was the enemy.

So how did you feel when you came to America?

It was very difficult adjustment because back then America was the enemy the way the Muslim world is the enemy now. There was a lot of anger toward Russians. My parents sent me to a Hebrew school thinking that would be the antithesis of anti-Semitism they had in Russia, but it was actually much worse to be a Russian in a Hebrew school. Everyone made fun of me, my thick Russian, bear coats, and all that stuff. So it was very difficult adjustment. I didn’t learn English properly until much later; I didn’t have any friends, I couldn’t really speak with anyone. But I had my writing. I was writing short stories. Then I wrote a kind of a satire on the Jewish Torah, called The Gnorah, my first sort of satire. It was a very religious, very hard Hebrew school and I came from an atheist Soviet background. Even though I started to believe in all this stuff, part of me did not. I thought it was a joke to be made fun of.

And now? Do you consider yourself an American?

Well, yes and no. I mean, it’s just my luck. I always end up in an empire that’s falling apart. Soviet Union at one point, and now America I think is in very deep crisis for the last seven years. Even in terms of its own identity, of what it represents. I think there are a lot of problems right now. I see myself as a New Yorker in a very good way. This is the city that I understand the most, I love the most, where I feel most comfortable. I’m American, yes, I’m an American citizen. But in 2004, when Bush won again, there were so many of us who took the Canadian citizenship test. We all passed. That’s very easy to become a Canadian citizen.

But you never thought of moving there?

I like Vancouver. I think I can live there. I don’t have any allegiance to any particular country. I just want to live in some place normal and I think that’s what most people really want. They want to be in a place where they can understand the language because that’s a big plus. But why not Vancouver? Canada is a nice place.

One of the themes in your book is multiculturalism. But what about national identity?

Well, the dream maybe is to be in a place where that really doesn’t matter that much. I lived in Germany for four months. Germany is still a country where blood is the most important thing. It tries to be very progressive. But at the same time it’s very hard to be from a different country—as you know there’s a Turkish community and it’s very hard for them to be integrated into society. The best thing about America is its ability to swallow up any race, nationality, and religion.

Absurdistan opens by Misha’s words, saying, “This is a book about love.” Love for what? For America?

It’s about love for a lot of things. Misha’s entire job is to overcome the adversity of his terrible background. He is the son of a very unappealing man, and so many of what he longs for is voiced in the situation of the absent mother. His mother died. That’s mentioned very rarely in the book, but that’s one of the motives in the book, and mother is his extinctive motherland. He wants to be in a normal country. His all view is so skewed by the presence of a lot of money, also lack of talent, lack of ambition, lack of a lot of things. So in a sense he is almost quintessential to global nomads that you have in New York, London, and now Berlin to some extent. They don’t really know what they want. They’re always hungry for ideas; they’re always hungry in a general way. Misha is hungry for the world. He is hungry for love and for that he looks into many women, but he’s also hungry for ideas for a kind of meaning. And that’s much harder to find. That’s what love means to him.

You describe St. Petersburg, or “St. Leninsburg” as you call it, as a “phantasmagoric third-world city” in 2001 where “intelligent, depressive citizenry has been replaced by a new race of mutants dressed in studied imitation of the West.” Is this book a critique of Westernization or Americanization in terms of Russians losing their national identity?

After Soviet Union there wasn’t much national identity left. When you walk around in any major European city you can spot the Russians from ten meters away. They have this look; they’re trying really hard. There’s this ridiculous access of money spent on trying to look a certain way. It’s not only about the Russians, but Russians take it to a much higher extreme. There is a huge insecurity. Russia lost the Cold War in a very big way. Russia always felt inferior to West anyways, all those slogans on streets, and so forth.  But at the same time there’s a huge feeling that “we are mutants; we’re in a different world; we can’t compete.” The period I described is the end of one period, the Yeltsin era, and beginning of something else which is welcomed by a lot of Russians. There’s genuine economic uptick in the major cities now, and the smaller cities have been accompanied by still a yawning gap between the tiny elites and the masses. There has been a Brazilianization going on. So the scene I described in 2001 has changed somewhat in 2008 when you walk down the streets of St. Petersburg, but I think the spirit of it is still the same.

In literature, we are used to seeing immigrants who are homesick or suffer from alienation, and loneliness. But your protagonist Misha seems very well adjusted to America; he loves America. He even thinks that he is “an American impounded in a Russian’s body.” Is he the representation of a new type of immigrant?

Yes, absolutely. When you look around you in this area [Lower East Side], this is the end of Chinatown and a lot of people here you see are from the poorer provinces in China. Now it’s becoming gentrified. Because I guess the major new kind of immigration to America is by very educated people. A lot of Indian computer programmers, Chinese investors, Russians with a lot of degrees are coming more. The city that’s discovered this quite well is London; it’s some kind of a hub or a global town. They kind of stole this idea from us, but it went even further, making it easier for people to come to London and live there. Future belongs to that kind of brand of immigrants; it’s not the kind of immigrant that shows up and longs for home because home means the culture, the language. All these people that are coming in, they already speak English, they already wear the same clothes as we do, they listen to MTV Europe, MTV Russia, and so on. Young people especially, they can slide into society so easily. The New York real estate market is in the verge of some problems because the whole supply thing is collapsing, unlike the rest of the country. Global hub prices are just kept up because so many foreigners are buying these apartments. And the cities that are global hubs are almost transnational, and that’s Misha’s goal: transnationalism.

He consumes everything: food, women, pop culture. He is fat, he is rich, and he is in therapy. Is he a representation of America, more than he is of Russia?

For therapy, yes. The therapy is also kind of a Jewish New York part. And that’s the part that sort of sticks out in the book. Someone like Misha who’s on the surface to be in analysis—he wouldn’t really seek therapy. So I tried to make the scenes of the therapy very one-sided. Even when the therapist and he are talking, they’re past each other. A therapist can never understand or care about that Misha is really going to improve himself. He does want to improve himself, but he’s going about it from a very long way. But the rest of it I think is a similar pattern. The fatness is something that’s maybe a little unusual because so many people in this elite work out a lot, but I wanted him to be maybe a little bit old-fashioned. I’m harkening back to the grand condition of fat literary men—Rabelais’ Gargantua, Oblomov from Russia, a great novel, one of the best American novels of the last thirty years is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, amazing book—there is a tradition there. The imagination to write from the perspective of somebody so large: in a way you have to reinvent the way just an average character deals with the world and that helps you to look at the world from a different angle. I wish I could write from the perspective of a pregnant woman. For me that’s almost acting. For research, I went to Russian baths to look at really fat guys to see how they moved and things like that.

Misha goes back to Russia in 1999 for the first time after ten years of living in the States and before his plane lands, he sees “defeat on the ground.” He says: “Let us be certain: the Cold War was won by one side and lost by another.” What do you think the world would have looked like now if it happened the other way around?

Well, we’re about to find out because China is about to win. Russia was so full of self-contradictions that to imagine its coming out in any way victorious is very hard to believe. I’m now rereading 1984 by Orwell. The book is really about Russia. A lot of American commentators say, “No, it’s also about us.” When you think that it’s about a corporate and consumerist society, I guess you can make that argument. But for me, it’s like you lived in Russia. It really understood the way the society worked, especially the deprivations of that society. It was just so oddly set up; whenever you approached any kind of human happiness, you were always rewarded by some ridiculous bureaucratic thing. So I think it would’ve been a disaster. But the American victory is disastrous in its own way because it demonstrates a kind of an endless superiority. This idea of there’s no countervailing force that will ever stand up to it at all. Now America is facing a huge challenge, a challenge I really don’t think from some cave in Pakistan. The challenge is India, China, countries that want it more than we want it. And the challenge is that we are now trained to do nothing but consume in a very large way. That’s what makes Misha the perfect American. He doesn’t know how to do anything else. He studied multiculturalism, but he can’t turn on the shower in the Hyatt hotel room, and that’s the kind of people I think we have raised lately. That’s a huge problem for America. Forget about it’s a world power. I think the loss of literacy has something to do with it too, lack of thinking long term thoughts, thinking beyond very simple things that are presented by the electronic media. Of course electronic media is everywhere. I spent some time in Korea; by far it’s a more advanced society, but on the other hand people still work for hundred-hour days and they don’t consume as much. There is a balance.

Misha talks about “the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok.” Does he lament that Russia has become like this? Or he doesn’t care?

First of all he doesn’t really know. Those people don’t know anything about Vladivostok. I think in his mind it’s the idea what Ann Arbor represents, a small academic city where people study multiculturalism for years on end. It’s the idea that’s basically the enlightenment toward his feeling of this Eastern barbarism that Russia represents to him. And his life is an attempt to sort of make peace with these two ideas: where he comes from and what he wants. And it is so vastly different. It is interesting to see people who are educated in the West. When they come back, there are two possibilities: one is so repulsed by what America is, by its freedom, and also by its mindlessness when one tries to focus on the problems back home. And the other is this continuous love affair with this country and the rejection of everything on its contrary. Either scenario, in a way, is not good. It doesn’t create much happiness. It’s pretty hard to balance between one and the other.

On the prologue, Misha says Absurdistan is “where the calendar will never pass the second week of September 2001.” Why did you want Absurdistan to come to an end on this particular time?

The book ends on September 10^th. I wanted to make sure that this book wasn’t in the end about America. It is and it isn’t. I didn’t want to explore what had happened on September 11^th. The reason I wanted the calendar to stop [at that date] is because I wanted this book to be about the countries I described. While I was writing this book, there were all these books about 9/11 in America. Some of them were OK, but most of them were so self involved, so unable to go beyond one’s personal feelings like, “What happened to my dog on September 11^th.”

I’d like to talk about the similarities between Misha and you. He is a Russian Jew who went to college in Ohio just like you. He loves America. Or should I say New York?

New York. And the college he goes to is a certain extension of New York City. Like the college I went to, it was in Ohio, but half of the kids were from New York.

He loves rap, and he is a multiculturalist. How much does Misha represent you?

I like rap. But with a more sarcastic approach to it. I don’t swallow this whole liberal milieu the way Misha does without any reservation. I think a lot of is hilarious. Because I’m not rich; I think that’s a major difference. I come from a middle class family. I don’t think I take anything granted. I can’t do whatever I want. I think pragmatically and in a way, this book to me is the celebration of the middle class who has some responsibility and it doesn’t have that unmourned feeling that Misha does, that everything is his, he has whatever he wants. He sees his own terrifying problems in a sense of “unbearable lightness” as Kundera would have said. You know, in my first book I would say I was sure a lot more like the protagonist. I was very young; I wrote quite autobiographically, but with Misha, my appetites are not as big as his for anything. And in a way Misha has a cynical side, but there is also earnestness about him. When I came to visit these different countries, Azerbaijan and Georgia, I knew what everybody wanted, all these different things going on, and everyone has their interests, but Misha doesn’t quite get it. He is naïve in that way and I think that—I hope that—makes him more endearing than me traveling around.

Did you make your research in Azerbaijan?

Yes I did a lot there and in Georgia. It’s so hilarious there. I was very confused. The majority of Azeris live in Iran and the language of course is Turkic. And there’s this Russian tie in every direction you’re being pulled and then there is the oil. It’s a disaster in its own right.

You’ve said in one of your interviews that “Russia was like America. Now America is like Russia. And Absurdistan became both countries.” How so?

It is true in some ways. My favorite quote is when Dick Cheney went to Kazakhstan and when introduced to Nazarbayev, the president, he said: “I really like your political and economic system.” What we’re seeing now, the economic problems now come from the same amount of greed, same amount of stupidity. Insider trading, an overall reliance on oil, natural gas, all different cartels... We’ve seen a lot, stagnation of income in this country, income has not been keeping up at all. On the other hand, there’s a super wealthy class, net worth of individuals being in ten millions in investable assets. It’s such a mirror of what’s happening in some other countries. Former Soviet Union was an example, Brazil is another example, and there are a lot in Latin America, certain Asian countries. We need a restoration of the middle class. In some ways our economic system, our pattern of consumption mirrors Russia more than Russia mirrors us. And hopefully with this recession that’s coming, some of it will change. Maybe the new administration will change things. There’s especially an unparalleled greed, an unparalleled consumption, and a seeking of status. All of a sudden flying first class became “you have to have your own jet.” And then your own jet has to become this kind of jet. An endless consumption… The country doesn’t produce anything, everything is moving offshore. Russia didn’t really produce anything other than natural gas and oil. It’s a very scary world; it’s almost a feudalistic society.

Can we say this book is about globalization, or rather the American dominance over the world?

That won’t be the American dominance anymore, but definitely there will be dominance of someone. Chinese are at a very good stake right now. They’re doing all the right things. They’re buying more assets in Africa, buying the supplies to keep their metropols growing. They’re doing all right. And they’re doing this to compete with us with complete disregard of freedom, or human rights, anything like that… All great civilizations come to an end. And this one has been around for only 200 years. It would be a shock if it fell as spectacularly as it rose. Globalization and position in technological advance. That’s it. Those are the two main topics right now. Everything else is going to take the back seat. And it is happening very, very quickly. [People in that part of the world feel they can’t compete.] There’s a survey of happiness in the world, and these people always come at the very, very bottom, Moldova is the saddest country on earth. They feel it’s all over their destiny; they have nothing to offer the world; nobody cares. All they are is a bother for fun, like Borat, the movie.

There are many references to Russian authors in your novel, such as Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Mandelstam. And you have characters from books like Crime and Punishment and Fathers and Sons. Do you aim at carrying on the legacy of the Russian literature for new generations?

Somewhat. It is a huge legacy and a lot of the problems in Russia right now are because it is almost too much. Because I think it really was the best of its kind from 1820 to 1920, for the whole century, where there was such an amazing emotional and even psychological purity the writers were handling. And literature mirrors the incredible flow of emotion of cognizance of, political understanding of what’s happening, social and economic understanding of what’s happening. It was no wonder when the socialists came to power in 1920s one of the first things they did was to look at the poetry and it really meant something. Mayakovsky was a prime example; somebody they tried to coop to control. Obviously it was the biggest influence to grow up with Russian literature, important for me for at least two books to deal with. The next book is set in America and that’s less.

One of the characters in the book is Jerry Shteynfarb, a Russian immigrant in New York, a Creative Writing professor and author who is the nemesis of Misha. Why did you choose to have an alter ego?

It’s fun to have some bastardly guy! I like to make fun of literature as a business. Shteynfarb is a professional immigrant who appeals to the American market for immigrants.

I’ve read that you’ve said 60 % of the book is based on real events. That is almost non-fiction.

Yes, so much of this has happened.

Did you want this to be a realistic, naturalistic novel? Or it just happened that way?

It happened that way and I exaggerated it a little and I made it funnier. And sometimes you really don’t have to make it funny. It is what it is. One of my favorite writers is Joseph Roth, the East European writer, who chronicled the collapse of Austrian-Hungarian Empire in Radetzky March, and this man basically in all his career was smoking too much and drinking too much, sitting around cafés in various seasons, and just looking around. And that’s always been my approach to writing about new places. You sit yourself down, people approach you, they have these outlandish ideas… And my main topic I think is self-delusion. People all over the world are so confused and deluded about who they are, where they come from, what their future will be, and even in some basic things like what’s best for their children. We live in a world that’s perfectly made for somebody like George W. Bush because he’s divorced from reality. And partly because of the technologic aspects, that reality being divorced and virtual reality being created. In a way, Absurdistan is the non-electronic version of what some people see when they put on their goggles because it’s so divorced from what’s best for the country. Nobody cares about anything except for very immediate gain for them and maybe their very immediate family.

The book is full of hip-hop lyrics. And I must say that you’ve written quite creative ones. How did you do that? You must have been listening to a lot of hip-hop.

Ah, college! It was all that we listened to. And actually some of them are real and I had to pay money to reproduce. I just think that they’re really funny and I like the aggression in them. It goes really well with the aggression in the book. When I lived in Azerbaijan I listened to a lot of lyrics from various local bands and a lot of it was about the war in Karabakh; very explicit, very graphic about: “What we should do with those Armenians!” In America the rapping is between the rivalries of East Coast vs. West Coast rappers. In Los Angeles it’s always the gangs: Crips and Bloods. People, even if they’re not from these gangs, they pretend they are. There it’s on a national scale; rap is not about killing people from down the street but the entire nation.

Being a Jew yourself, you make fun with Jews as well as with Russians and with every other group for that matter. You must have offended a lot of people. Did you get many angry responses?

Yes. A lot.

In New York as well?

Not so much in New York. Not so much from the Jewish community. Whenever I write a book, my father says, “Is this good for the Jews?” and I always say “Oh God!” American Jews: nobody cares after Philip Roth. To me that’s a sign of a healthy community. A community that no longer has to worry about these. But Russia is a very insecure country...

How were the reviews in Russia?

The book just came out in Russia and the reviews are terrifying. “That balding traitor betrays motherland,” things like that.

No sympathy for you?

Never. They’re always very angry. My friend emails me the reviews; they’re so nationalistic. You almost wonder: are they selling the party line in some ways?

The bullish, on the other hand, like me because they hate Russia so much. The book really makes fun of everyone and in fact some people say it’s as anti-American as it is anti-Russian. Some of the responses have been, “How can you leave us and then make fun of us?” It’s not even from the literary respective, this emotional feeling of “why? why?”

I don’t think you left out anyone.

I don’t think so. I’ve been around the world and I think the problems are different but at the same time there is a commonality and a lot of it has to do with using power, what do  people in power are doing to those who aren’t in power. That’s my concern, a sense of lack of fairness and a sense of people participating in their own downfall. I always say people will believe in any philosophy handed down to them, whether it’s religious or nationalistic or grander philosophy like communism or even Americans’ incredible belief in themselves as the world’s savior. These are such stupid beliefs and they underline everything.

You are a satirist and you attack on many issues here without any reservation. Do you have a greater purpose in doing this?

You know, a lot of the books I admire are also portraits of a particular civilization at a certain point of time. Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is a wonderful portrait of Jazz Age in New York. Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, all the Russian writers, Turgenev for example, portray country life and life in St. Petersburg at a certain point, what people expected what the dreams were, how the society assigned ranks and positions for everybody involved. Dickens is another example. A writer I think in the end has to write about what’s important to people. What’s important to people is love, how they can find love, and the other thing is survival and money. And for the upper classes the degradation of the status, as a matter of fact. Almost every great book, in some degree, aggresses the riches in the society. There are books of course that are much more interior, but even they have to portray where that character is placed. That’s my purpose to find and understand what’s happening to a city like New York right now. With all this money coming in, but all of a sudden in the next year or so things are going to shift in some direction, where are they going to shift? And what’s that going to do to the people’s perception of the self, what is it going to do to their relationships? I’ve known couples who stay together for years, they hate each other, but the real estate is so expensive they can’t afford to leave. How do these things change the way the society lives? There was some criticism of Dostoyevsky early on that he writes too much about rubles, you know, but how could you write about society at any point without writing about rubles? It’s incredibly important and that again is the heart of the journalistic aspect. One of the things that bother me so much is that the long-form of journalism is in very deep trouble. Journalism of 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000 words. Very small electronic equipments destroy big newspapers in places like America, but also in Europe and everywhere else. It’s not allowed for new ones to portrait how all these different things flow together, the economic part, the social part, the religious part. Together to breed information and to figure out the world at large, just at a time in history when one needs to know more than one already knows. And I think it’s all coming to an endless dumbing down. And also the advent of images: when one sees images over and over again, one can learn things, but the mind processes visual and oral information in a much different way and with so much less potential. And the written word is more important now than ever, but on other hand is in deeper trouble now.

There is a paragraph in Absurdistan talking about a bumper car set imported from Turkey, featuring “a cartoon of a young brown woman being chased by a drooling gray wolf brandishing a knife and fork.” And then you say “if a Turk had appeared on the esplanade and explained to me why this cartoon was supposed to be funny.” Well, even though I am a Turkish native, I can’t explain this to you; in fact I’d like you to explain it to me. How did you come up with this anecdote?

A lot of stuff in Azerbaijan is leftover stuff from Turkey, which was probably great in Turkey 50 years ago but now junk. The point I’m trying to make is Misha can’t really understand anything about the world, anything about any of the people he’s encountering. And in some way it’s about the unknowability of things. An example to how humor goes: my books are published in 25 countries; some countries laugh, and in other countries like Germany there’s obviously no sense of humor. I was thinking, why this cartoon would be funny? All I knew is it was made in Turkey. And why would that be funny in this society and not funny in that one?

Are your books censored in Russia?

Russia now allows. The books are published as is. The only country that’s changing it is China, the Peoples’ Republic. They said they had to take out—they had a whole list—anything with Islam because they don’t want to offend the Uigur minority, the Turkic minority, and they don’t want to offend Russia because they get the gas from them. The book is going to be very small!

Did you read any Turkish literature?

Yes, Snow is great. The other one I read is My Name Is Red. Orhan Pamuk is a great guy; he’s here all the time. He is lucky enough to be in one of those positions that he can do anything. I hope very much for one of those some day.

I assume you’ve been to Turkey.

I’ve been to Istanbul for a few days on my way to Baku. It’s a beautiful city, and it’s becoming quite trendy now. It’d be nice to go there again. There are so many Russians there. I want to go to the coast too—maybe to make and write a story about it.

- Figen Bingül, January 23, 2008, New York City