The Freedom Factory
The Freedom Factory tells the story of a real military factory in Saint Petersburg, recounted in the form of monologues collected from its anonymized workers, managers, and engineers. The Freedom Factory is not exactly realism: it combines poetry and documentary in unique proportion to convey the atmosphere of the absurd, harsh, and magnetic factory floor. Sometimes the narrative comes very close to everyday speech, sometimes it evolves into lyricism or grotesque humor, but it always remains sincere. The Freedom Factory recounts life stories and love stories, military secrets and anecdotes, work and leisure, as the many voices of the factory merge into a chorus.
Poet, fiction writer, and artist Ksenia Buksha was born in Saint Petersburg. She holds a degree in economics from Saint Petersburg State University and has worked as a journalist, copywriter, and day trader. Since her breakout fiction collection Alyonka the Partisan (2002), Buksha has been winning acclaim as a brilliant stylist and satirist whose linguistic experimentation is guided by a healthy sense of the absurd. In 2004, The Freedom Factory won the National Bestseller award and was a finalist for the Big Book Award. Buksha’s work has been translated into Polish, Chinese, French, and English.
Anne O. Fisher’s recent translations include works by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Nilufar Sharipova, Ilya Danishevsky, Aleksey Lukyanov, and Julia Lukshina. Fisher and co-translator Derek Mong collaborated to produce The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (White Pine Press, 2018), awarded the 2018 Cliff Becker Prize. Fisher is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukie.
