Dmitry Glukhovsky, the author of Metro 2033 and Metro 2034, talks about his new book, It’s getting darker, presents his interactive projects and reveals the plans of conquering the world.

Interview by Monika “Nine” Glibowska

You have come to Poland to promote your new book, It’s getting darker, and it’s not your first time here. Have you had the time to do some visiting? What are your impressions of Poland?
Sadly enough, my impressions are not the impressions of Poland, but rather of Warsaw. It is the third time that I come here as a writer and it is always approximately the same: a row of interviews and meetings with the readers and then I fly back. And also I now have a little baby at home, so my wife is not very eager to let me just explore Poland in my free time. Probably we should wait and when the baby becomes a bit bigger, then we can all go together.

How is It’s getting darker different from your other books?
I’d say it is very different. So far I get four books all in all and one is very different from another. Metro 2034 is very different from Metro 2033. Although they have a very similar title, the genre, the characters and the language are different, just the setting is the same. For me it’s always the main character that defines the story. I try to write with the vocabulary that the hero could have and share his vision of the world. So if Metro 2033 is a book as if written and composed by someone who is twenty, then Metro 2034 is written and composed by someone who’s fifty something, because the man who is telling the story is that age. It’s getting darker has nothing to do with the plotline of Metro. It is an independent novel, told from the part of a person in his middle thirties, living in today’s Moscow and working as a translator, doing some very tedious and boring routine jobs: translating instructions and contracts. One day, unexpectedly for him, he is getting an order that he was not prepared for: pages from an old Spanish manuscript, dating back to the XVI century.

Where did the idea of connecting contemporary Russia’s reality with Mayan beliefs come from?
We have examples like this. The most known is probably The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, where you’ve got one novel inside another. One of the main characters, the Master/the writer, is composing a story happening with Christ. So you’ve got a double plotline. One, an alternative story of Jesus Christ, and another is the story of the person who is depicting it, and they are integrated. It was not my clear reference. I didn’t want to copy it. My story is a merger of two other epochs: the Spanish conquest of the South and Central America on the one hand, and today’s Moscow on the other hand. The story of the Spanish expedition has some historical references. My conquistador character was sent by Diego de Landa, who was the Spanish bishop of Yucatan.

How would you define the book’s genre?
I have troubles with genres. They are for mass markets. A genre is a format that helps mass consumer digest a story. Many people treat books the way they treat a movie or a hamburger and it’s quite stupid. And why am I supposed to abide by the limitations and rules set by someone else?

It’s getting darker is being compared to Dan Brown’s novels and you are called the Russian Stephen King. What do you think about those associations?
When we discussed with the marketing specialist what to put on the back cover, we just chose the reference points that sell. But definitely the sources of my inspiration were Jorge Borges, Umberto Eco, Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, not Dan Brown. Dan Brown is fun, but it is not something that can inspire you to write a book.

When you started writing, what were your experiences with the publishers? Is it difficult to publish a book in Russia?
It’s definitely easier for a sci-fi author because science fiction is a commercially more successful genre, so the publishers are ready to take risks. For mainstream novels it is much more complicated. You need to understand the publisher’s logic: although the book can be brilliant, they will first of all judge it. Unless you are a Nobel prize winner and it is a question of prestige to have you, they’ll just make a pure, cold-blooded business decision: are we going to sell this or are we not going to sell this? I know that the publisher who ended up publishing my book first, was getting by then 10 new manuscripts a day.

I’m asking about it because I know that Metro 2033 was first published online and it’s called "an interactive experiment"…
After being rejected by all publishers I had sent it to, I decided to put it on the web. It was quite a brave idea, but a desperate one. It was precisely because no one wanted my book that I decided to publish it myself. Instead of saying: "Ok, so nobody likes me, I’m gonna kill myself and burn the manuscript or first burn it and then kill myself", I just created a website. It was back in the year 2002, before Facebook, before blogs, and it was the era of homepages. I didn’t care about not being paid for it, because the only thing I wanted was to find the readers who would appreciate what I did.

How come a novel available online became a bestseller in its printed version?
It is a process. Today everyone is doing this, but the question is always to be first. Well, Stephen King was first, but he charged money for reading his books. I didn’t care about money. Today every beginning author is publishing on the web, but this is to say that the information noise is so high that it is practically impossible to find something worthy. It was a good thing to do ten years ago... In whatever I do I try to come first. So Metro 2033 has become a freely available thing. Then it has become one of the first interactive projects, because I consulted my readers when I was writing and interactivity was a new thing back then. Next I turned a book into an art project, where I invited musicians and artists to create the book together with me as I was writing – it was Metro 2034. A gallery of oil paintings, scanned and put on the website, was appearing together with the publication of the new chapters. And a very cult, smart musician was composing songs and soundtrack and publishing it too on my website.

And now it’s the Universe of Metro 2033 project. Can you explain what exactly it is about?
Different authors join their forces to develop one single coherent world, writing their own books about it. The Universe of Metro 2033, although in Poland it’s only starting with the publication of Piter, in Russia it has already 20 published novels. Their action unfolds in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Siberia, the Ural Mountains, Russia’s far north and Ukraine. Right now there are foreign countries coming in. There’s going to be a book about Cuba: a teenage lesbian warrior will meet the characters of a Russian novel who are travelling across the ocean in one of the last nuclear submarines. Characters meet each other, plots cross each other and altogether we have an ambition to create the world’s biggest saga about the same coherent world and it’s definitely something that has never been done before. Authors from America, Germany, Greece, Spain are about to join.

How does this process look like? Do you choose the authors or do they contact you?
There are different ways. First of all, we have this Russian website, metro2033.ru, which provides the content. People write stories, post them on the website and there is a voting system. Together with the publisher we choose from the top 20 the books that deserve to be published. In 2011 we have published three books by beginners. We want to take this experience also to Poland. On the website – the Polish embassy of Metro 2033 universe, which is metro2033.pl, we will be collecting stories written by fans, trying to look for an author who could discover the destiny of post-nuclear Poland in the year 2033 and join the franchise. If the novel is good, it could also be translated to other languages.

In the near future are you going to focus on this project or publish your own book?
Definitely I’m going to continue with my own books. It’s very ambitious and it’s a cool thing to do to "conquer the universe", but I’m not abandoning my writing ambitions and I have already plans for the next book, which is going to be pure sci-fi. The book that I published last in Russia and it’s coming out in Poland soon is just a collection of political satire stories depicting Putin’s Russia. So again it’s quite different from things that I’ve done so far. I don’t want to be a sci-fi author, because that’s too narrow. I just want to feel free and do whatever I want. If you’re not getting pleasure in what you’re doing, people won’t get pleasure in reading what you wrote.

Thank you very much for the interview.