The Freedom Factory
Ksenia Bushka’s The Freedom Factory tells the story of a real-life military factory through monologues collected from anonymized workers, managers, and engineers. Not exactly realism, the novel combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion to transport its reader to the harsh and magnetic factory floor. If the Moth Radio Hour had a special episode to introduce listeners to the mythos, pathos, and yes, bathos of twentieth-century Russia, this would be it.
Winner of Russia’s National Bestseller Prize (2014) and essential reading to understand the persistence of the Soviet mindset, The Freedom Factory is a book of paradox, at once recognizable and idealized: a bittersweet recounting of military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure, life stories and love stories.
The Russian cover.
Read Chapters 2 & 3 of The Freedom Factory in The Moscow Times (1 August 2020). (ONLINE)
Read Chapters 4, 12, 14, 30 and 35 of The Freedom Factory in the St. Petersburg Review Vol. 8.5 (Spring 2018), 123-138. (PRINT)
Read Chapters 1, 18, and 31 of The Freedom Factory in Cardinal Points 6 (Fall 2016), 86-96. (PRINT)
Reviews of The Freedom Factory
“The novel’s multitude of voices, linguistic styles, and cultural specificity make for a tall order for translator Anne O. Fisher, who […] expertly maneuvers between shop-floor banter, bureaucratic jargon, bucolic scenes, and even outright gibberish. […] Rife with laugh-out-loud moments, heartbreak, and arresting lyricism, Buksha’s “Freedom Factory” brings a bygone era to life in all of its madness, harshness, and beauty. And lucky for us, Anne O. Fisher has rendered it in an English text that is just as dazzling as the original.”
“A novel about a Soviet military factory whose workers must eventually adjust to a post-Soviet way of life does not sound like a thrilling read. Yet there’s a very good reason why Ksenia Buksha’s [novel] won Russia’s National Bestseller Prize in 2014 (Buksha is only the second of three women to do so since the prize’s founding in 2001) and was also a finalist for the Big Book Award. In the author’s hands, this unpromising raw material is skillfully transformed into a genuinely and unexpectedly compelling narrative.”
—Yelena Furman, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Fisher brilliantly adjusts her translation to follow the many modes Buksha’s prose adopts. And it’s no simple task. Buksha’s a poet, equally adept at dialogue-heavy, realist, oral history as she is at creating lush, literary character portraits, in an array of settings from the factory floor to a ship bound for Cuba.”
—Matthew Jakubowski, Critical Flame
“Frankly, it is not hard to understand why The Freedom Factory, written by Ksenia Buksha, won Russia’s National Bestseller award in 2014... [and readers] will have the privilege to appreciate the fluidity and profound humanity of this book.”
“In poignant and lyrical prose, Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory renders the history of a real military factory in St. Petersburg... sometimes humorous and at other times heartbreaking.”
—Meagan Logsdon, Foreword Reviews
“Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory offers a very particular window into ... how history shapes quotidian experiences, from the humdrum to the harrowing.”
—Tobias Carroll, The Watchlist (Words Without Borders)
“Ksenia Buksha’s The Freedom Factory is not only a brave reconstruction of the Soviet ‘construction novel’ of the 1920s and ‘30s, it is a bravura attempt to capture the polyvocal soul of the Soviet experience. Buksha writes like Svetlana Alexievich possessed by the spirit of Samuel Beckett, and Annie Fisher’s expertly modulated, impressively resourceful translation communicates the effect of her style in full.”
—Boris Dralyuk, translator, executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
“The Freedom Factory presents an unusual, deeply human kaleidoscope of lives in the Soviet Union. As if the factory itself witnesses the stories that unfold inside it, the reader encounters fragments of conversation that skip through time and rarely come to any resolution. The images of experience are variously positive and negative and sometimes tragic, often against the background of older characters' recollections of the Siege of Leningrad. Anne O. Fisher's translation from the Russian is supple and effective, catching the tone of the conversations, personal or bound to the workday. In a society where labor was the basis of social policy, it is no surprise that so many aspects of life come up between these covers—inside or around the walls of the factory.”
—Sibelan S. Forrester, poet, translator, and Russian professor at Swarthmore College
“The Freedom Factory is a thriller, a romance, and a social drama all in one, and—this is especially important—it’s a book by a post-Soviet person about the Soviet experience.”
—Dmitry Bykov, Winner of the Big Book prize
“My first impression was that of a production novel written by a slightly drunk Joyce.”
—Maxim Amelin, Solzhenitsyn Prize and Poet Prize Winner
“[When I read the novel] I thought of Spanish Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela and his novel The Hive… which through the blending of many disparate voices gives an image of the time, the characters, the particular atmosphere. The Freedom Factory has echoes of this same device.”
“Ksenia Buksha has successfully done what no one else, it seems has been able to do: combine utopia and dystopia.”
“The novel’s impressionistic narrative moves on the borderline between personal and collective memory (as mediated by almost forgotten Soviet films, literature and songs), trying to re-create the sensations and senses of the past through juxtaposing details of speech and imagery rather than through re-writing historical narratives. The narrative’s reflections on its own mediated quality (its reliance on remembering), particularly evident in the chapter “May Day,” are among the most interesting aspects of Buksha’s project.”