432
A country that has learned to love democracy. And a twilight Putin, whose only residual dream is to be the proponent of a new Soviet empire, willing to do anything, even to swallow an entire nation, in order to fulfill his crazy purpose. Thus Andrei Kurkov, 61, one of the best known contemporary Ukrainian writers, paints a Ukraine under siege, aware of its roots and its complex history (Kurkov is of a Russian-speaking family, and has written many of his works in Russian) but willing to sacrifice everything for freedom.