That was unusual for me as someone coming from New York, and someone who had spent most of my time in Russia in large cities like Moscow and St. My impression was that people-it’s a much smaller community, one where infrastructure is low and neighborliness is high for the sake of common safety, so people make it their business to know who you are and where you’re going and what you’re doing. I encountered higher scrutiny than I have in other places in Russia. JP: I was lucky to go there in a time that the majority of Kamchatka was open still and had no prospect of being closed again. So I wanted to go to this place and write this book. It’s so beautiful and so isolated, it was extraordinarily important in the history of the Cold War and the Soviet sense of itself as a military nation, especially as a nation in opposition to America and American culture and ideals, and a place that since the fall of the Soviet Union has been going through a dramatic and fascinating transition. When I learned about Kamchatka, it has all those things, and so much more. Julia Phillips: I thought if I could find a microcosm within the largest country in the world, that would be ideal. This week on The Maris Review, Julia Phillips joins Maris to discuss her debut novel Disappearing Earth.
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