When does a soldier's 'memoir' count as fact, and when as fiction?

Oliver Bullough investigates the curious case of Nicolai Lilin

The Indepoendent, Friday, 12 August 2011

AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Stretching the bounds of memoir? Russian soldiers loading shells into tanks on Grozny's outskirts

Publishing has been plagued by fabricated memoirs in recent years. Famous cases include that of a Belgian woman describing how she had been kept alive by wolves, and a man who said he was saved in a Nazi concentration camp by a girl throwing food over the fence. 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.

Previously, the authors have at least initially insisted on the truthfulness of their tales. Lilin, however, immediately told The Independent that much of his book had not actually happened to him, including the opening passage, in which he is conscripted forcibly into the Russian army.

"That is not my story. That is the story of one of my comrades who fought with me," said Lilin, who now lives in Italy but grew up in Transnistria, when queried over inconsistencies in the tale - such as why he was conscripted into the Russian army when he did not live in Russia. "I wrote the story of a comrade who was sadly killed in the war. He told me that that was how it happened and it interested me. He was from a poor family, a village boy, and I liked his story very much."

Lilin himself joined the army voluntarily, he said, which means that the first 30 pages of the memoir, a first-person description of violence, brutality, anger and defiance, are invented. Lilin admitted this meant his book did not qualify as factual. "When I wrote the book I did not want it to be considered as historical. First because I could not write a memoir, because I am not important or something. If I was Mozart or Queen Elizabeth, they could write a memoir, but I am no one," he said. "I do not know what to call it. It is not a memoir. It is a novel based on real events."

Canongate, the book's Edinburgh-based publishers, announced the book as a "remarkable stand-alone memoir", before going on to claim that "Lilin writes with honesty and extreme cynicism, and with a sharp eye for the banality of evil". Canongate's Nick Davies said that fact-checking was down to the Italian publisher, Einaudi, who issued the book first. "If we had been the originating publisher then we would have fact-checked," he said. 

Einaudi, however, describes the book as a novel, and in fact 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.

Full piece at The Independent.