Of love and war
Aleksandar Hemon on The World and All That it Holds, his continenthopping First World War novel
Your main character, Rafael Pinto, fights to survive when war breaks out. How did you reconstruct a soldier’s life at that time? I didn’t reconstruct it – I imagined it, based on the experiences of other people. Which is to say, I read books. There is, of course, a lot written about trench warfare, but I was particularly interested in the experience of Bosnians in the Austro-Hungarian army on the eastern front. My main source for that was a memoir by an officer in a Bosnian unit that fought in Serbia, Galicia [a region straddling the current Polish-Ukrainian border] and Italy.
Revolution also features, with Pinto later encountering Bolsheviks. How did you research this aspect?
Books again. I read Troublous Times (1931), a memoir by Captain AH Brun, a Dane who was appointed as delegate to the Concentration Camp Department at Petrograd, and who subsequently served in Turkestan, aiding thousands of prisoners of war imprisoned there. I also read the work of Dr Iris Rachamimov of Tel Aviv University, whose field of expertise includes PoW life in Russian camps. Hunted Through Central Asia: On the Run from Lenin’s Secret Police by Paul Nazaroff and Mission to Tashkent by FM Bailey were invaluable sources as well. More generally, I read quite a few books on the Great Game, many of them written by Peter Hopkirk.
Did you take inspiration from any real-life historical figures? Major Moser-Ethering is based on Frederick Marshman Bailey [a British explorer, naturalist and political agent who played a role in the Great Game]. Baron Tautenberg was based on Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the “Bloody White Baron” [an anti-Bolshevik general and warlord in Mongolia].