Through travel, encounters, and sharp observation, Erika Fatland shows how landscapes, people, and traditions are shaped by the Soviet past and the search for new identities.
From dried seas to nomadic steppes, she uncovers a region marked by borders on the map yet fluid in culture and history.
Curated by Land to Land
“A hauntingly lyrical meditation to the contingencies of history. Ms. Fatland’s greatest gift, is listening…allowing the people she meets to reveal themselves in meticulously rendered dramatic monologues, capturing their tics, eccentricities, and detailed personal histories. Russianness gives way to humanity—but not a simplistic one.”
The Wall Street Journal
“Borders are lines drawn by power, but life—messy, nomadic, human—rarely fits inside them.”
Erika Fatland
Born in 1983 in Haugesund, Norway, achieved her international breakthrough with Sovietistan (2014), for which she was awarded the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize. She has an M.A. in social anthropology from the University of Oslo and the University of Copenhagen.
Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan
Source: Pegasus Book
An unforgettable journey through Central Asia, one of the most mysterious and history-laden regions of the world.
Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world.
Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In Sovietistan, she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships.
In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she witnesses the fall of a dictator.
She travels incognito through Turkmenistan, a country that is closed to journalists. She meets exhausted human rights activists in Kazakhstan, survivors from the massacre in Osh in 2010, and German Mennonites that found paradise on the Kyrgyzstani plains 200 years ago. We learn how ancient customs clash with gas production and witness the underlying conflicts between ethnic Russians and the majority in a country that is slowly building its future in nationalist colors.
Once the frontier of the Soviet Union, life follows another pace of time. Amidst the treasures of Samarkand and the brutalist Soviet architecture, Sovietistan is a rare and unforgettable adventure.
