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It seems that I'll be writing quite a lot about Russian literature this year.

I recently spoke on the subject of "Pelevin and beyond", wrote a review for a magazine on the latest Russian fiction publications in English, and I am looking forward to the London Book Fair, which will be featuring 50 or so Russian writers, many of whom are my friends.

Therefore I couldn't miss the new series of documentaries, aired by ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service called How My Country Speaks, which - according to the producers - "discovers how the poetry of different countries interprets nationhood, nationalism and patriotism".

The series started with Irina Ratushinskaya - the well-known Russian poet, who was incarcerated in 1982 for 12 years in a labour camp for writing "anti-Soviet" verse.

There's a famous Russian saying that "a poet in Russia is bigger than just a poet".

This is certainly true in the case of poet Yevgeniy Yevtushenko, who gathered together stadiums full of listeners during the Cold War "thaw" in the 1960s.

However I wouldn't confine grand statements of this sort just to Russia.

As John Lennon said of The Beatles "We're more famous than Jesus".

But what's true about Russia's literature is it mainly focuses on how to achieve harmony between the internal and external, between the present body and lost overcoat, the borrowed spirit and own life, foreign ideas and local reality.

These ideas began with Nikolay Gogol's short story Overcoat - according to Dostoevsky all subsequent Russian literature was influenced by it.

There is a constant metaphysical gap among the systems of ideology followed by the Russian public life, whether it's Middle Eastern Christianity, German Marxism, or Western consumerism, or the Russian natural mentality.

Different ethnic groups have adapted universal systems of ideology according to the conditions of their lives: the Iranians have mastered the Shia branch within Islam, the Central Asian nations transposed Islam in the local fashion through Sufism, whereas the English or Germans created local adaptations of Christianity in Anglican or Lutheran forms.

As for Russians, they seem to profess the very orthodoxy of those universal systems.

So it was with Christianity, as was the case both with Marxism during the Bolsheviks, and now with consumerism.

And Russian literature - including Russian poetry - tries to understand and harmonise those excesses of zeal in followship.

Poetry as an expression of the best of the language of any country is the closest representation of a national mentality and in that sense it's often seen as the force opposed to all imposed systems of ideology, including state propaganda.

Therefore quite often the liberating qualities of poetry are considered as a potent and imminent threat to state ideologies.

Ratushinskaya herself says that she has never written any protest poetry, however writing poetry as such was enough for the Soviet authorities to sentence her for 12 years.

The Soviets ceased to exist, but poets are still behind the bars in many post-Soviet countries.

Yusuf Juma, Mamadali Mahmud and Dilmurod Sayid of Uzbekistan, Vladimir Neklyaev of Belarus (has only recently been released), Shota Gagarin, Aleksi Chigvinadze, Irakli Kakabadze of Georgia, Alpamys Bekturganov of Kazakhstan and many others are still listed by International PEN as imprisoned poets.

One of the poets from this documentary Inna Kabysh reads her poem Making the Jam in July and ends it with the bitter words:

Whoever makes jam in Russia
Knows there's no way out...

But as if answering her, Irina Ratushinskaya wrote in October, 1982, in the KGB prison in Kiev where she was being held, an ode to the liberating strength of the poetry, which could persist through everything, saying:

Murcat! Look, my cat:
What a sun, even the glass of the window aches!