The memoirs of the late Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, written in the last years of his life, are set to be released on October 22 by the New York-based publishing house Knopf. The book is to be titled “Patriot,” according to a report by The New York Times.
Alexei's widow Yulia Navalnaya called the book, which is devoted to Navalny's political activity and the struggle for democracy in Russia, his “last gesture of defiance.” The memoir will be published simultaneously in multiple countries, with an initial print run set at half a million.
In a news release cited by the NYT, Knopf said that the memoir “expresses Navalny’s total conviction that change cannot be resisted and will come.”
In an Instagram post earlier today, Yulia Navalnaya wrote that her husband began writing the book in 2020 — after surviving a Kremlin-backed assassination attempt with the military-grade nerve agent Novichok — and finished it during his time in prison.
“After the poisoning attempt in 2020, everyone said, 'Alexei, you should write a book.' And he waved it off. Well, what biography can you write at the age of 44? Only a little more than half of his life had passed. And he was in no hurry — there was still so much ahead of him. And everything turned out as it did. Horribly and very, very unjustly. It turned out that there was no other half [to his life]. Nevertheless, Alexei began writing the book and was unexpectedly quickly drawn into it,” wrote Navalnaya.
According to Navalnaya, the memoirs will be published simultaneously in 11 languages — including Russian.
Alfred A. Knopf is an American publishing house founded by Blanche Knopf and Alfred A. Knopf Sr. in New York in 1915. The house is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group division of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Authors of 56 books published by the house have won the Pulitzer Prize, and another 26 have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Russian Federal Penitentiary Service in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug reported the death of Alexei Navalny in the IK-3 prison above the Arctic Circle on February 16. The politician's family and associates are certain that he was murdered.
The authorities initially kept Navalny's body from his family, demanding a secret burial, and only released it to his mother, Lyudmila Navalnaya, on February 24. On March 1, Navalny's memorial service and burial took place at the Borisoglebsky Cemetery in Moscow. Thousands of people gathered to pay respects to the politician. Several dozen mourners were detained by police.