Sofi Oksanen: What It’s Like To Write About Russia

 

Photo: Sofioksanen.com

Sofi Oksanen: What It’s Like To Write About Russia

by Sofi Oksanen

In 2003 I published my first novel in Finland, Stalin’s Cows, which dealt with the recent history of Estonia. I was confronted by journalists who called my book “anti-soviet”, at one time a very negative epithet, a word that belonged to the traditional vocabulary of Finlandized Finland. I was also confronted by leftist journalists whose knowledge of the Soviet Union was so flimsy that they asked in amazement why nothing had been written in the Soviet press about the deportations of Estonians, which discussed in my novel.

“I wanted to tear those stereotypes apart" / An interview with Sofi Oksanen

 

"Eating disorders and the Soviet Union—maybe they seem like very different subjects, and first I was hesitating how it would work. But then I thought this was a way to get very different readers." - An interview with Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen.

"I wanted to tear those stereotypes apart"

An interview with Sofi Oksanen

Márton Benedek

5 July 2011

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Born in 1977, Sofi Oksanen is one of the most popular writers in Finland. Her mother emigrated to Finland from Estonia in the 70s, and she was raised up as a Finnish child. Her play entitled Purge (2007) was a great theatrical success. She expanded it into a novel which became a bestseller in Finland and was translated into almost thirty languages. Sofi Oksanen struggled with eating disorders, and she tries to come to terms with this personal problem as well as with Estonia's recent past in her novel Stalin's Cows (2003).