Boris Mainaev, Author, Journalist, Historian and Teacher

Boris Mainaev is the author of several popular books published in the USSR, Russia, Germany, UK and US.

The themes and genres are diverse: science fiction, detective stories, psychological thrillers, short stories and novels, and historical novellas.

"Instead of providing you with a dry and boring biography, I would like to answer a question I get asked a lot:

What inspires me to write?

It is both hard and easy to say when, how, and why I started writing. I had attempted to put my first “novel” on paper when I was 11 years old. At that time, I was in the fifth grade, attending School No. 199 in Leningrad, which is now associated with the Russian Museum. My friend back then, Vadim Sinitsyn, filled two notebooks under my dictation. He was good at drawing and had beautiful handwriting, which, at that age, I thought was very important.

I carried those notebooks with me for a long time across the Soviet Union, but when I was in the army and my father was transferred to a new post, they were lost. However, I think the desire to write was born in me when I was around five or six. At that time, my father was an officer and military doctor at the Garrison Hospital in a small Turkmen town called Nebitdag. My mother also worked as an economics engineer. I was raised in the care of the soldiers in my father’s ward. To this day, it seems to me that I have never met people as kind and open hearted as those boys who had endured a terrible wartime childhood. I do not know why, but they shared their stories with me — a child. Senior Lieutenant Cheremisin once told me how he saw a German machine gunner shoot his father. They had gone to a collective farm field to gather potatoes for their starving family, but the field was guarded, and the gunman killed his father . . .

Private Anikushkin shared how he and his mother were forced to lead the fascist execution squad to the partisan hideouts . . . I still remember the smells, colors, faces, and voices of those people from that time.

Books held a special place in my family’s home. They were not just read; they were treated like dearest friends. Perhaps that is why I developed a passion for reading early on. I started reading at an early age, devouring everything I could get my hands on. In elementary school, I read all the fiction books, textbooks, and anything else available at home. Later, around the seventh grade, I secretly laughed at my father when he unexpectedly asked me not to touch Maupassant and his medical books just yet. I said, “I will not,” because I had read them long ago. When I discovered that libraries existed, I immediately registered at five or six. This was because each library allowed me to take only one or two books at a time. These lasted me for a day or two. On Fridays, the exchange day, I would gather a whole stack and enjoy them all week. I read in school during classes, hiding the book under the desk. I read during breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I read at night, hiding under the blanket with a flashlight, defying my parents' prohibition.

Every two or three years, my father was transferred to a new place in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, bringing me into contact with new cities, schools, and people. All these experiences provided me with countless unforgettable impressions. When I shared them at home, my father would always say, “Write it down, at least for yourself, so you will have memories.”

My mother tongue is Russian, and as a child I also spoke Georgian, Armenian, Uzbek, and Tajik, thanks to my mother. She worked with me a lot with dictations, retellings, essays . . . In the last years of school, I was lucky with my literature teacher, Vera Yakovlevna Pereverzeva. She allowed me to write whatever I wanted in essays; sometimes she praised me, sometimes she scolded me, but she never ignored my work. I wrote my first complete piece in 1964, in the tenth grade. It happened as a bet with my classmate, Vovka Kunievsky. He said that some Almaty newspaper had announced a competition for the best short story. At that time, we were living in a military town (a military base) near the small Kazakh station of Sary-Ozek.

“Bet you cannot write something,” said Vovka. So, I wrote it, putting down my home address, and the military unit. A couple of months later, I was suddenly called to the principal’s office during class. Naturally, I was nervous as I went. He handed me a grey square with a postal money transfer. It was my first fee for my first story. Apparently, the editors had discovered that I was a student and decided to acknowledge my first work this way.

Then came the army, which I joined voluntarily to gain new experiences. I gained plenty. I learned. I took and held it well. I wrote, but did not get published. After three years, I returned to Frunze, where my father had been transferred. I worked as a locksmith at a factory, studied in the evening division of the Polytechnic Institute, and wrote poems for my girlfriends. By the fourth year, I finally realized that electrical engineering and I were incompatible, so I entered the history faculty of the university. As far back as I remember, I had loved history and literature. So, I decided to take the first step towards my dream. I studied the medieval East and graduated with honors. I wrote and published in the newspapers of Kyrgyzstan’s capital. Since February 1981, I have been in professional journalism. I made it on my own, but they accepted me only after I put a hefty stack of fresh newspapers with my articles and stories on the editor-in-chief’s desk. I wrote under a dozen pseudonyms. Sometimes it was amusing — on different pages there were materials under different pen names such as Marinin, Dadiani, Asylbekov, but all were mine!

My first book was published by the publishing house “Kyrgyzstan” in 1988 after having lain in my desk for ten years. It would have come out earlier had I agreed to a publisher’s suggestion that I put two names on the cover.

Now, I have lived long enough to write novels.

I probably learned to write from Russian writers. I love Pushkin, Lermontov, Mandelstam, Khayyam, and Lorca. When my soul is heavy, I read O. Henry, or Ilf and Petrov. As a boy, I could not part with Jack London’s stories. I have learned to read and savor words, sentences, and interesting, vivid expressions.

No one has ever mentored me as a writer. However, one of those whom I could call a mentor, the writer Yevgeny Kolesnikov, shared his life experience with me and helped me get published in the magazine of the Kyrgyz Writers’ Union. Another, Valery Vakulenko, who made me rewrite a story for the first time, later traded journalism for teaching and became a professor at Kyrgyz State University when I left for Germany.

I moved to Germany in 1995, having realized that Central Asia was plunging into civil war and dictatorship. I saw the bloodshed in Osh and Jalal-Abad, and the ruins in Andijan. I know how the transparent “varnish” of what is called civilization smells.

I love to write, and I do!"