15. Closing session

I am the writer who has crossed a border. The border that separated me from the world where I could breathe. I reject the society where bespredel reigns, the total absence of limits of any kind, an immense arbitrariness of the authorities. In the atomized society of Russia, under the totalitarian yoke of reprisals, where people cannot utter a single word against the war, the task posed by a writer, who is aware of the tragedy of the present, is to help the people not to feel abandoned. I, the one who crossed the border, am the voice of those who must remain silent behind it.

The work of the writer resembles the reception of radio waves that the author perceives when he goes beyond the limits of his own experience. He finds himself in the dark forest of Dante's initiation, enters the Big House, the place of initiation, and finds his Virgil, who shows him the path to the future that is consciously chosen. But, apparently, the writer is Virgil himself and also acts as a Virgilian guide for the reader.

The writer is an antenna tuned to the waves of choice and hope without which the future. It's impossible. Now, before my eyes, new facets of the books I wrote before the war open up. In my novels Odigitria and The Casa Grande, based on the heritage of other historical eras, I predict in a certain way the political and human situation that happened after the year 2022. It was the work, almost, of a pythia, amazing and horrible at the same time. And now, with the help of my books, I better understand the present and the legacy of the past and, who knows, perhaps the vector of the future.

• Nadia Muraveva, writer, poet, journalist and translator, author of The Big House