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Sofi Oksanen is a Finnish-Estonian novelist and playwright. She has received numerous prizes for her work, including the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize, the Prix Femina, the Budapest Grand Prize, the European Book Prize, and the Nordic Council Literature Prize. She lives in Helsinki.
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What led you to write When the Doves Disappeared?
Most European countries didn't go through this during World War II, but the Baltic states have a history of double occupations: two Soviet occupations and one German occupation.
In my previous Estonia-related novel, Purge, I focused on the Soviet occupations. German occupation is such a big issue that I realized I would need a separate novel to cover it.
So I started work on When the Doves Disappeared, which takes place during both the Soviet and German
occupations. This was in 2010, at a time when the old Soviet-style propaganda about the Baltic states
was back in full swing in contemporary Russia, and I noticed this tended to confuse people abroad. If we don't know how Soviet propaganda was originally created and used, we can't understand Russia today – and then we aren't able to understand today's political situation.
Why did you choose to center the narrative around two time periods – the mid-40s during World War II and then the mid-60s during the days of communism in the Soviet bloc?
In the West, the image of the 60s is Woodstock. It wasn't Woodstock in the Soviet Union. The 60s was a period when the KGB took new ...
Born in Lima, Peru in 1977, Alarcón was raised in Birmingham, Alabama. He is Associate Editor of Etiqueta Negra, an award-winning magazine published in his native Peru, and in 2013 served as a Fellow in the Investigative... (more)
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