Alexei Navalny, "Patriot". One Book Publishing, 2024.
A politician's book is always not just a book, a unit of literature, but also politics. In other words, agitation and propaganda. It is impossible to evaluate only the quality of the text – along with it, one inevitably assesses things that are completely unrelated to the word: actions taken by the author to gain or retain power.
Art and Politics
It has always been clear to everyone that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Winston Churchill not for the artistic merits of his memoirs (regardless of their artistic merits). If a politician's book is released at the peak of political disputes and is meant to serve as an argument in them, it becomes even more difficult to think in terms of literature.
Alexei Navalny's "Patriot" was released amidst the noise and scandals surrounding the FBK and was framed by the associates of the murdered author as a large-scale international PR campaign: simultaneous publication in several dozen countries (except for Russia and Belarus, of course) in several dozen languages (including Russian), a half-million print run in the United States alone, a photo of Sarah Jessica Parker on the set of the sequel to "Sex and the City" holding "Patriot" on the day of its release, and so on.
And of course, it is impossible to read this text without somewhat abstracting from the figure, fate, and beliefs of Alexei Navalny himself.
Moral Shock
However, neither the circumstances of the publication nor, even more so, the connection of the book with the author's political activities prevent "Patriot" from being a text of exceptional power. Specifically, literary power. After all, over the millennia, no simpler and more convincing criterion for the quality of literature has been found than Aristotle's catharsis – the ability of a text to evoke a moral shock in the reader. None of the Russian books of recent years (at least) can compare to "Patriot" in this ability.
It consists of two parts. The first is an autobiography that Navalny began writing in Germany while recovering after the assassination attempt with a "Novichok". The second part, stronger and more terrifying – a prison diary that Navalny kept after returning to Russia and immediately getting imprisoned.
And if earlier we observed this tragedy of Shakespearean intensity with an evangelical plot only from the outside, now we can learn firsthand what the main character thought and felt – a person of remarkable consistency and courage, a figure of historical scale, the best thing that has happened to Russia in this century.
