The Mountain and the Wall

THE MOUNTAIN AND THE WALL

Shamil, a young local reporter in Makhachkala, arrives at the paper to find his editors in a state of great agitation. There is a rumor going around that the Russian government is building a wall to cut off the Caucasus from the rest of the country. Unrest is spreading through the capital city on the Caspian Sea, with new protests and assemblies held daily by religious and ethnic groups to respond to the crisis. The atmosphere is tense. Fear hangs in the air. But Shamil tries to go on living as if nothing had changed. He is shocked out of complacency when Madina, his fiancée, tells him she is going to take the veil and follow a strict Islamist into the mountains where the rebellion is being plotted. Even after the first people in town have been killed and his well-educated cousin Asya tries to convince him to flee with her to Georgia and from there on into the West, Shamil cannot overcome his hesitation. But then events catch up with him…

More international praise for Alisa Ganieva:

“Like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, Ganieva’s protagonist Shamil wanders through his hometown of Makhachkala…[
The Mountain and the Wall
] marks a real event in contemporary Russian literature because it tackles an important topic—the intercultural dialogue between Russians and Russia’s Muslim population—but does so in a compelling artistic form. Ganieva successfully avoids the trap of naïve realism but rather combines a complex representation of the protagonist’s consciousness with a high degree of literary self-reflexivity.”

—
ULRICH M. SCHMID,
Neue Zürcher Zeitung

“Alisa Ganieva has aimed to write in clear-eyed fashion about her homeland, a region that has been racked by violence fueled by criminal and clan elements and an Islamic insurgency.”

—
BBC
on
Salam, Dalgat!

“Her long story
Salam, Dalgat!
aims a merciless lens on a Dagestani town roiling with drug gangs, Islamic fundamentalists, water-supply breakdowns, burning garbage cans, abusive police officers and women fawning over Gucci knockoffs.”

—
CELIA WREN,
Washington Post

ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY ALISA GANIEVA:

Salam, Dalgat!

translated by Nicholas Allen

(available in
Squaring the Circle,
Glas, 2010)

Deep Vellum Publishing

2919 Commerce St. #159, Dallas, Texas 75226

deepvellum.org
· @deepvellum

Copyright © 2012 by Alisa Ganieva

Copyright © 2012 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

Originally published as
by Astrel in Moscow, Russia in 2012.

Published in German as
Die russische Mauer
by Suhrkamp in 2014.

English translation copyright © 2015 by Carol Apollonio

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Ronald Meyer

First edition, 2015. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-941920-14-5 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2015935164

Published with the support of the Institute for Literary Translation (Russia)

Translation of this publication and the creation of its layout were carried out with the financial support of the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication under the federal target program “Culture of Russia (2012-2018).”

The publication of this book was made possible with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation’s Transcript program to support the translation of Russian literature.