This is a telling remark for an author who is managing to synthesise his own experiences, from his early years in Moscow to his expatriate life in Zurich, with the themes of a literature that vary, like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope, with every twist and turn of its country's history.

Calligraphy Lesson is a collection of eight works, some fictional, others plainly autobiographical. In this book he has blended many of the themes of Russian classical literature into a unique contemporary record, a grammar of the Russian heart, in ways that Andrei Tarkovsky did visually in film. There is not so much as a trace of the soppy semiology of that wicked artifice, "the Russian soul", here. It is the stark reality and brutal routines of Russia's serial pasts that make themselves all-too-painfully present in the lives of the characters depicted.

Shishkin's childhood memories feature large. In "The Half-Belt Overcoat", an obvious reference to Gogol's famous story, "The Overcoat", we encounter him as a pupil at a school in which his mother teaches. His mother, a patriotic martinet no less at home than at school, "would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but also with a sense of having fulfilled her mother's duty to the nation". But little Misha rebels. After all, he is growing up in the samizdat generation, freaking out over Vladimir Vysotsky's sardonic blatnyie pesni (criminal, or pariah, songs) about the gulag. His mother, however, is a "good teacher". He writes:

"A bad teacher, meanwhile, will instruct his charges to live by a different law, the law of the conservation of human dignity. By and large this is a road to marginalisation at best, and to jail or suicide at worst. Unless they just shoot you."

Shishkin escapes this bleak, if average, Soviet childhood and makes a life for himself in Switzerland, managing to look upon it all with clear-eyed equanimity and a good portion of wit.

These stories are delightful reads, despite the journeys they take you into the barren cruelty perpetrated on people by rulers and those who will kill to be rulers.

In another story, "Of Saucepans and Star-Showers", the author is caught in a narrative between his estranged alcoholic father and his son, a bright university student in Switzerland. But this is no "home drama". In 15 pages, he manages to connect the narratives of several lives running through his own. How he discovered the fate of his Uncle Boris, shot by German captors in 1942, gives us a grim reminder of the way in which the legacy of Red Army soldiers was manipulated by the government. His grandmother was never informed of the death, only told that he was missing in action and compelled to wait and pine for him until she herself passed away.

"The state was waging war against its own people," Shishkin writes. And reading this story one feels that this applies to Russia in 2022 as surely as it did in 1942.

Shishkin turns to history as documentary in "The Bell Tower of San Marco". Here he tells the story of Lydia Kochetkova (1872-1921), physician and socialist activist, and her husband, Swiss physician Fritz Brupbacher (1872-1945), who went on, after her death, to author books and lecture on sexual equality, contraception and legalised abortion.

The narrative contrasts their highly charged letters to each other with Fritz's confessional diary entries, documenting a relationship of high purpose and emotional disaffection. Lydia deliberately abandons any semblance of Swiss stability, returning to Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century. Yet she finds herself drastically overwhelmed by her choice. The descriptions of the squalor of life in the backblocks of Russia are reminiscent of those in Mikhail Bulgakov's notebooks when he was a country doctor two decades later.

Lydia's fate, so dryly yet powerfully portrayed in the story, is a symbol of the revolution itself: ecstasy that turns into disillusion; betrayal by "comrades"; and the forfeiture of everything humane.

The story "Nabokov's Inkblot" describes the re-encounter he has with an old schoolmate who was once a Komsomol toady, but is now an arrogant oligarch. Nabokov left this black mark in a drawer at a Swiss hotel they visit together. Though we learn the arrogant oligarch is himself blotted out by a contract killer in Moscow, we wonder what happened to his innocent, if spoiled, daughter, in an affectionate portrait of her.

The stories in this collection are beautifully rendered by four translators into a single consistent voice.

Mikhail Shishkin is well known as an unrelenting critic of Vladimir Putin and all that he and his tight circle represent.

"In Russia," he said in a Russian interview in 2010, before the annexation of Crimea that he continues to oppose, "the government is the chief enemy. Writers are always divided into the militant (my example of this is Solzhenitsyn) and the staunch deserter, who, as a matter of principle, abandons all sinking ships. And if I had to, I would absolutely choose the role of the militant."

He is currently fulfilling this role as, in my book, the greatest Russian wordsmith living outside, if not also within, that country's borders.