Biographers From Italy

"The West has beauty, a great cultural heritage, and enormous potential, but it must free itself from Anglo-Saxon hegemony."

"My only commitment is to block any kind of support for the war. I have no other political interests. I have never been seriously interested in any kind of political program."

"My values ​​are left-wing, but not as the left is defined in Italy. I am not someone who fits into an ideology within the Italian system. I know well that in Italy some say that I am a fascist, because they quote some out-of-context phrase, or some old position of mine. But the truth is that I am the product of the Soviet system, for better or for worse."

"Despite the fact that he [Volodymyr Zelenskyy] is from a Jewish family, and that his grandfather served in the Soviet army, he supports Nazism for money, for economic reasons."

"It was ISIS in league with the Ukrainian Nazis. [...] But the order came from the CIA."

"That's the beauty of the Democratic Party: they support the Nazis in Ukraine, but they call me a fascist because I went to Casapound."

"When I was 12, Andriy Parubiy entered my town of Bender in Transnistria, leading some Nazi gangs who killed, among others, my uncle and my little cousin Tatiana."

"I don't wish any harm to anyone. I hope that these people [Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini] will live to a ripe old age. I hope that these people will also be able to reflect on the mistakes that have been made, but I know very well how it works in Russia, I know very well who the Russians are and how they act when they get angry. When they are hit, let's say, in their heart, they react quite harshly. And so, my sincere wish to these Italian journalists who have done this pro-Nazi propaganda work is to be very careful, be very careful. Don't accept tea from strangers. Be careful at the café. Be careful where you eat. Be careful with new friends, because it may be that the GRU operatives, who are the military secret services, are already working against you, and if they have really taken on a task, you can be sure that in a year, two years, three years, five years, in any case they will find you and tear you to pieces."

"Obviously [the Russo-Ukrainian war was] a gift to the Jewish lobbies and BlackRock. When they arrive, they lick their fingers when they see such a situation: Here you go! A new race and ethnicity has been invented. We can destroy Russian power, massacre Slavs and force them to kill each other thanks to an idea cooked up by the Poles and Hungarians even before the First World War and which was then spread widely by the communists. This is, in summary, the pain of Ukraine. They are Russians who reject the idea of being Russian, they've invented this thing about being Ukrainians, and obviously through this crazy, stupid idea they destroy themselves and their roots. It's obviously easier to control people this way. They've installed their Jewish boy to run this degraded land and he rightly doesn't want to end the war. How come? Because this is the essence of their plan: to massacre as many Ukrainians as possible in order to replace them with Jewish colonists from Israel and other parts of the world in order to create a new state there in Ukraine."

"He doesn't belong to a family of criminals, much less a Siberian one. His surname, for what it's worth, also sounds Polish. [...] When all's said and done, Lilin is just some guy who emigrated to a country where he had little chance of making an honest living, and he screwed it up big time by exploiting his exotic origins, inventing a larger-than-life character and passing it off as real. He is a literary impostor who plays on the thin line between imagination and reality. Life is never as romantic as we would like it to be, and this compels some to play a role they never had in the real world. Posing as a descendant of a criminal tribe and a Chechen War veteran is less risky than fighting in Chechnya and carrying out illegal activities. At most, people will think you're a liar."

"Un tappeto di boschi selvaggi [Lilin's autobiography] includes the reabilitatsiya, the rehabilitation certificate, of his great-grandfather (Nikolay Verzhbitsky). While writing the text of this photographic and autobiographical book, Lilin included the document and passed it off as a death sentence, as if there was nobody in Italy who knows a bit of Russian. It turns out his great-grandfather was born in Tiraspol, not in Siberia. [...] He was not a Siberian criminal deported to Moldova but, on the contrary, one of the many victims of Stalin's repressions, killed because he had a foreign surname and came from Moldova."

"He brings his fictional biography to life from beginning to end. And the more far-fetched it is, the more shocking moments it contains, the more fans he has. [...] All the facts of his biography have nothing to do with Siberia, Moldova or reality in general."

"He has never lived in Siberia and this whole criminal story about the Urka people in Siberian Education (Einaudi), who never existed, is fiction from beginning to end. Nicolai easily and even skillfully collects artistic facts that can actually be found in Russian and Soviet writers, for example, Dostoevsky, and which, over time, turn into stereotypes and prejudices about Russia and Siberia in the minds of readers. And on this basis it transforms them into presumed facts of modern, current reality. This is called an artistic hoax."

"If I called Lilin a "slasher", it's only because, having read his book which was marketed as an autobiography, I found scenes where he violently stabs his enemies. If it's not true, then the book isn't an autobiography. Tertium non datur. [...] He ought to act less touchy. In a democracy, which he clearly isn't used to, you accept counterarguments with civility."

"Siberian Education feels like a compendium of the dark fantasies that Westerners have about Transdniester as a place where people are left to fend for themselves or establish their own law. The reader is led to believe that the laws of the Siberian urkas are but one set of these surrogate forms of authority that exist in the black hole of Europe. It is a laughable portrayal."

"Lilin [has] forsaken his criminal upbringing in favor of a successful literary career in which he peddles Westerners their own deepest, darkest fears about Transdniester and Russia. Astutely aware of the region's outsized reputation, Lilin has found a literary niche, a captive audience uninterested in the facts."

"While framed as a memoir, Siberian Education deliberately embellishes the criminal elements of the PMR. As a storyteller, Lilin is the quintessential insider who confirms our darkest fears and fantasies. Born and raised in the PMR, he himself embodies its outlaw reputation and handsomely profits from it."

"As an author, Lilin places himself in the unimpeachable position of a trusted insider. Yet, upon closer inspection his biography and criminal history are more fictive than real. In online forums addressing the book's content and local reactions to it, locals and former acquaintances of Lilin intimate that, far from being a criminal, he actually served in the local militia before he emigrated. Locals' reactions to translated parts of his book range from disbelief and laughter to anger and outrage at the author's hollow attempts to besmirch his native city. Perhaps tellingly, some express astonishment that he was capable of pulling such a fast one on westerners."

"Although Lilin's book [Siberian Education] is about a Russian-speaking region and his native language is Russian, he writes in the language of his adopted native land, following in the tradition of Nabokov, Serge, and Triolet (nee Kagan). His choice to write in a non-native idiom firmly places his audience outside of the Russian-speaking world, yet the subjects of his two books – criminality in Transnistria and his experiences as a saboteur in Chechnya – emerge from distinctly Russian contexts. Perhaps most tellingly, both issues touch upon a perceived incommensurability between Russia and the West. It is somewhat ironic that Lilin's audience consists of the very same westerners who previously were the objects of his scorn. The enemy that he once hated, the West, now provides his bread and butter; the fact that there will soon be a film based on the book only adds to the absurdity."

"Somehow as a reader I find myself genuinely interested in the details of how someone with such a lengthy criminal record could serve multiple tours in Chechnya, immigrate to Ireland, move to Italy, learn Italian, and write a bestseller for a prominent Italian publishing house. Yet, his choice of subjects, his presentation of them, and his inability to acknowledge his critics leave the reader with even rudimentary knowledge of Transnistria wondering how one can so thoroughly drain the rich social fabric of the region of its content while simultaneously seeing criminal in anything and everything."

"Publishing has been plagued by fabricated memoirs in recent years. [...] But Nicolai Lilin's Free Fall: a Sniper's Story from Chechnya may be unique. Lilin, who wrote a brutal first-person account of fighting in the Russian army in the Chechen war, praised by its publisher as "a unique and remarkable memoir", has admitted that he did not experience much of what he described and deliberately embellished it to help sales."

"[...] it contains tales so unlikely that most editors would surely have spotted them as false, such as when Lilin finds a Chechen with a rifle loaded with hyper-accurate bullets filled with liquid mercury. Such an idea is nonsense since the liquid would shift in flight and render them useless."

"The foreword states that names, dates and places have been changed "to protect those involved" but gives no clue that the book is not a truthful account of someone's experiences. Almost a quarter of the book, pages 99-188, is an ultra-violent account of fighting in a built-up area – presumably Grozny – in which Lilin and his group rescued a cut off Russian unit, but not before it had lost 13 lieutenant-colonels."

"If Free Fall were a novel, it would be just a plot-free Russian version of Andy McNab. But, marketed as a memoir, Canongate can say that it "offers a unique perspective on one of the most controversial wars in living memory"."

"Judging by the many laudatory reviews of Nicolai Lilin's book in the European and American media, Western readers have no doubts about the veracity of the facts he presents. [...] The reviewers were not even bothered by the fact that Bender was called Tighina before 1940 and was part of Romania, and Stalin simply could not exile anyone there, especially since people back then were exiled to Siberia, not from it."

"If we summarize the information from Nicolai Lilin's book, his interviews in the Western press and speeches at book fairs, then by the age of 23 the author had managed to: serve two terms in a Transnistrian prison, be under investigation in Russia, serve three years as a sniper in Chechnya and a couple more years as a mercenary in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. At 24, he got a job as a fisherman on a ship in Ireland, then moved to Italy, where he got married, opened a tattoo parlor, wrote a bestseller and almost became a victim of a politically motivated assassination attempt. Now Nikolai Lilin is 30 years old, he has his own fan club and he seriously discusses why Anthony Hopkins is not suitable for the lead role in the Hollywood film adaptation of his book."

"I asked Nicolai Lilin-Verzhbitsky what he thought about the comments of his former friends. He thinks that they envy him: "They feel offended and inferior. I managed to leave there and achieve something, but they did not". At the same time, in a conversation with me, unlike in interviews with Western journalists, he repeatedly emphasized that his book is not an autobiography and that his Western publishers are marketing it as such. And he, they say, has nothing to do with it."

"The author insists that the book [Free Fall] is based on his own combat experience in Chechnya. In an interview with Ogonyok, he said that he took part in the second Chechen campaign, but refused to give details. I learned from the Italian media that he allegedly served in the 56th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment. However, sources in the Ministry of Defense claim that there was no soldier named Lilin or Verzhbitsky in Chechnya."

"Nicolai Lilin has fled Italy because, he says, he was accused of being a spy for Putin. Considering all the bullshit he has spouted since arriving in Italy, probably none of this is true, except that he fled. If you are a spy, they don't take your passport away, they take you away. Who knows?"

"I met Lilin years ago after the publication of Siberian Education. He told me he was a friend of Licio Gelli and that he went around armed because he had many enemies. The book was very interesting, but it contained a series of obvious lies, both about the history of Russia and about his life. Half of my family is Russian and therefore I have direct sources, but I was amazed that everyone believed him. Shortly afterward, he wrote an article for L'Espresso, where he explained that he was a former sniper and that he had received offers from high-level mercenary groups to go and fight somewhere. It was such bullshit that I expected people to throw eggs at him. But no. The world of culture began to acclaim him as a hero, a thinker, a philosopher. Just look at those with whom he debated, who introduced him, who praised him. It was like living in a parallel world where those who loved him most were left-leaning. He took part in debates on democracy, on war, on the whole world, he had exhibitions of "Siberian" tattoos with institutional sponsorships. Every time I spoke about him I was accused of spreading shit about "someone more famous than you" or of having been fooled by Russian friends and relatives, who evidently had it in for someone who told the truth about the Putin regime."

"Over time his books began to sell less and he became a propagandist of the worst pro-Putin bullshit. I thought that everyone who had given him prestige and visibility would have done some self-criticism. Fat chance. People on the left who I knew very well decided to side with him because he was a "pacifist" and once again it seemed absurd to me, like an episode of Black Mirror. Just how was it possible for them to ally themselves with someone who published photomontages of the Ukrainian president snorting cocaine, in which he wrote that Navalny's wife was having fun with her lovers while he was dying, who insulted homosexuals hidden in the Ukrainian army? I don't know, I still can't wrap my head around it. Okay, the story is not over, given that today he made veiled threats to use polonium on journalists who speak badly of the Tsar. I just hope that, now that he is a fugitive, he doesn't become a martyr for free thought. And I also hope that those who previously praised him don't insult him now. Certain things have to be done when it's hard, not when it's convenient. But we're in Italy. Whoever talks the loudest always wins."

"Nicolai Lilin's words, in which he finds himself threatening our journalists with mafia-like methods and tones, are, to say the least, shameful. [...] But it is also shameful that this character has for years been invited to important television studios to talk about the Russian war in Ukraine, and that he has had ample space to pollute public discourse in our country."

"His works ("Free Fall: A Sniper’s Story" and "Siberian Education") are truly impressive for their triteness and the sheer quantity of outright lies, nevertheless, this man is a favorite among some Western readers in Europe and the United Kingdom."

"Needless to say, Lilin has never set foot in Chechnya or a Siberian prison, but, following in the footsteps of Baron Munchhausen, this does not stop him spouting a load of exorbitant cock-and-bull stories – and everyone, at least nearly everyone, laps them up!"

"Inside Russia people watch Nikolai Lilin’s ascent with surprise and admiration. [...] Wild and uncivilized as Russia may be, it is still highly unlikely that a book by a contemporary German writer about a squadron of former SS officers hiding in the forests outside Berlin, listening to Wagner with their children and grandchildren, reading aloud from the works of Junge and banging on tin drums as they rob passing trains, would ever be published here. [...] Everyone here would immediately see this drivel for what it is. But back in Europe, strange things can happen. Plenty of second-rate books make it to print, and the most popular still seem to be this load of nonsense that no one in his right mind would ever bother reading in Russia."

"If you would prefer Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs without their ingenious wit and structure, this may be a book for you."

"The narrative mode of the book is strange: sometimes, an anthropologist seems to be describing the traditions of a hitherto unknown Siberian ethnos who combine utterly ruthless criminality with the religious punctiliousness of the Exclusive Brethren, their traditions embodied in a Grandfather Kuzya who guides the juvenile hero and his friends on when, whom, how and with what weapon to maim and kill. At other times, author and reader wallow in a pornography of violence."

"Translation rights to this book have been sold all over the world, but not in Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, or any language which the inhabitants of Bendery and Tiraspol might read. Lilin explains this as a precaution against revenge for revealing the secrets of the Siberian urka's language, tattoos and code. Doctoral theses and Internet archives, however, tell everything about the symbolism of Russian criminal tattoos, while the beliefs of Orthodox dissenters and of "thieves-in-the-law" have been described for over a century (but never before confounded as they are in this book, where revolvers used for killing are kept under icons)."

"Nicolai Lilin (if that is his real name) has obviously encountered the criminal world, but he makes gross errors – claiming that fenia, the criminal jargon originated by the ofenia, Russian travelling pedlars, is an aboriginal Siberian language."

"This book reads like a fantasist's ravings [...]. The success of Educazione siberiana implies that Italian publishing is floundering in the same cesspit as Italian television. One can only hope that British readers are not so gullible."

"Hailed as an insider's account of a cruel yet unknown world, Siberian Education was a literary sensation when first published in Italy in 2009. Lilin's raw and ungrammatical Italian has now been smoothed into readable English by Jonathan Hunt. The veracity of the story's basic elements has been fiercely defended by Lilin and accepted by many critics; yet many readers may feel they have landed in the Hayborian age invented by Robert Ervin Howard, among the likes of Conan the Barbarian and the Vanir warlords."

"The book [Siberian Education] is presented as a "shocking exposé of an extraordinary criminal underworld", although a strategically placed note (absent from the Italian edition) warns the reader that "certain episodes are imaginative recreation, and those [unspecified] episodes are not intended to portray actual events". During an interview on Italian television, Lilin repeatedly threatened a journalist who cast doubt on his story. At the risk of exposing myself to the wrath of the last descendant of the Siberian criminals, I venture to say that the urkas have never existed — at least not as described by the author."

"When confronted with glaring innaccuracies and contradictions, Lilin retorted that these charges are the equivalent of accusing Anne Frank of miscounting the number of electricity poles in Bergen-Belsen. I leave it to the reader to pass judgement on the aptness and sensitivity of the comparison."

"Lilin draws on the vast literature about the prison life and criminal underworld of Russia to create a sect whose putative "Siberian" origin is fantastical and whose traditions, practices and language are lifted from well-known Soviet and post-Soviet prison-based criminal fraternities [...]. Lilin's furious reactions to those who cast doubt on his criminal credentials can best be explained by the fact that some elements of the book do reflect his own experience while most of the rest is widely known in Russia to readers of quasi-fictional crime tales by Valery Karyshev and to viewers of the prison-based TV series Zona."

"... Born in 1907, Laura Capon came from a family of upper-middle-class Italian Jews. They were living in Rome when Benito Mussolini came to power in 1922; and when she and Enrico married in 1928. Laura, who had been studying science, enjoyed following her husband’s work and related breakthroughs in physics. She helped my grandfather write his first textbook. Five years of forced wartime secrecy from 1940–1945 temporarily broke the flow of discourse between them. She shared more about those details in Atoms in the Family, but my grandmother doesn’t mention how Hitler’s Holocaust robbed her of her father Augusto Capon, an admiral in the Italian Navy. Because of his position, my great-grandfather didn’t believe he was in danger, even when the situation under Mussolini continued to deteriorate. The elderly Admiral Capon refused an offer from Enrico’s older sister Maria to take shelter at her home outside of Rome along with some other Jews."

"The founder of the Civic Disarmament Committee (CDC) of Chicago interpreted the US gun problem in light of her experience working for nuclear peace and universal human security in the early Cold War. As the spouse of Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who conducted the first successful experiments in nuclear fission at the University of Chicago in 1942. Laura Fermi had witnessed the birth of a new global order. Like Enrico and many of the scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project, Laura Fermi became active in the nuclear peace movement after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fermi learned to organize activists first in the peace movement and then, beginning in 1959, as a local environmentalist, years before the cause gained national attention. ... At the end of the 1960s she turned toward disarming civilian populations and abolishing handguns, reasoning that disarmament was as feasible for American citizens as limiting nuclear proliferation had been among nation-states. Others working in nascent gun control groups marveled at her incomparable wit and humor and her tireless passion for peace. She liked to tease audiences that they should "never underestimate the power of little old ladies in tennis shoes.""

"... I reached the door and read the sign: '. " ...." The name brought back the memory of a slim and swarthy young Sicilian leaning against the tall in my parents' backckyard, isolated and quiet among the numerous merrymakes at my wedding reception. It was the summer of 1928, and earlier that year Majorana had joined the small group of students being trained in "modern" physics by Enrico Fermi and Franco Rasetti. Fermi had told me marvels about him: he was a wizard at mathematical calculatons; in physics he was a genius, like Galilei and Newton. Nature had bestowed upon him exceptional intellectual gifts ... but not the power to cope with life. After a few years of association with the group, Majorana stopped going to the physics building; despite his outstanding work he isolated himself and eventually became almost a recluse. Then, after a dramatic return to the academic world and a few weeks of teaching at the , he mysteriously disappeared in 1938, forever, perhaps a suicide, or perhaps a hermit in the secrecy of some convent. Forgotten for many years, his name was now a beacon attracting to Erice the brilliant in science, the young as well as the old."

", a first-year student of physics like Fermi, was not a usual person; his main interest was directed to that part of the world which is not made of human beings. ... ... He had organized a group of students among whom Fermi was prominent in an "Anti-Neighbors Society." The society's single aim was to pester people. The tricks they played ranged from placing a pan of water on a door left ajar which would give a shower to the first person going through, to exploding a in a classroom during a solemn lecture. For the latter prank Rasetti and Fermi, who had built the bomb, risked being expelled forever from the university. They were saved by their teacher of experimental physics, Professor , a tolerant man with keen judgment, who stressed their scholarly achievements at an especially convoked disciplinary meeting of the faculty."