Update: there has been a venue change. This event is now happening at Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street.
Punctured Lines is co-hosting a Lit Crawl reading by six Bay Area writers born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova. Shaken by the horrific tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we will read pieces exploring our connections, direct and indirect, to the part of the world we associate with home and exile, and where many of our friends and relatives are suffering as a result of the war. We work in the genres of nonfiction, literary and historical fiction, YA, flash, and other literary forms to tell our stories, and will read excerpts from our published and new work.
This event will take place at 5 pm on October 22nd at Blondie’s BarStage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street in San Francisco .
Maggie Levantovskaya is a writer and lecturer in the English department at Santa Clara University. She was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in San Francisco. She has a PhD in comparative literature from UC San Diego. Her creative nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, The LA Times, Current Affairs, and Lithub. Twitter: @MLevantovskaya
Masha Rumer‘s nonfiction book about immigrant families, Parenting with an Accent, was published by Beacon Press in 2021, with a paperback coming out in October 2022. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Parents, and more, winning awards from the New York Press Association. Twitter: @MashaDC
Originally from Kishinev, Moldova, Tatyana Sundeyeva is a Russian-American writer living in San Francisco. She writes short fiction, travel writing, and Young Adult novels and has been published in Oyster River Pages, Cleaver, and Hadassah Magazine. Twitter: @TeaOnSundey
Vlada Teper is a writer and educator from Moldova. Her essays have been featured in Newsweek and on NPR. A former Fulbright Scholar in Russia, Teper is the founder of Inspiring Multicultural Understanding (IMU) Peace Club. With MAs in English and Education from Stanford University, Vlada is the recipient of the 826 Valencia Teacher of the Month Award. Twitter: @VladaTeper
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of forthcoming novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY set between Ukraine and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). She has written about Eastern Europe for The New York Times, TIME, BBC, Harper’s Bazaar, NBC, USA Today, Narrative, and others. Twitter: @SashaVasilyuk
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and four Russian-language story collections. She has published fiction and essays in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. She co-edits Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Twitter: @bowlga
Revolutions of All Colors (Syracuse UP, 2020) first came to my attention when we were putting together Punctured Lines’ 2021 Books for Review list. The novel’s description indicated that it featured African-American characters and was set, in part, in Ukraine. Intrigued, I looked it up and found myself completely immersed in the multi-generational saga that intertwines locations and histories that I had not previously seen connected.
This novel opens in New Orleans in the 1970s, with Ettie, a young African-American woman who, unsatisfied with what she perceives as her preacher father’s complacence in the face of racial violence, becomes involved with the Black Panther Party. The story details a dramatic incident of police brutality against the Panthers and the long-term repercussions of this violence.
The novel then jumps forward in time to the 1990s, when Ettie becomes a prison counselor and raises her son, Simon, in Antoine, Oklahoma—a town where a quarter of the population is employed by the state prison. We then move to a different point of view character, Frank, a well-respected prison guard, who takes Simon under his wing and raises him alongside his sons, Michael and Gabriel. From there, the book opens up even further to the perspectives of these young men and moves locations to Mogadishu, Somalia in 2005, and Kyiv, Ukraine in 2004, before returning stateside to New Jersey in 2006 and later that year back to Oklahoma.
Though this book has been called a novel-in-stories, and each piece stands very well on its own, at the end of each story I found myself yearning to turn the page, to know what happened next in the lives of these characters. In this way, it reads as a multi-generational family saga condensed to a few brief chapters.
Having finished the book, I emailed the author, Dewaine Farria, and he generously agreed to answer a few questions. The following conversation was completed over email during Farria’s residency at the prestigious MacDowell Colony.
Punctured Lines: In a Q&A with Book Culture, you said that the book grew out of the first story set in New Orleans. Could you tell us more about how your writing developed from there—when and how did you conceive the three central characters, Michael, Gabriel, and Simon, whom we first meet as young boys and see grow up in the course of this novel?
Dewaine Farria: While a Boren Fellow at the Kyiv Linguistic Institute from 2004–05 (during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution), I supplemented my income by teaching English as a second language. In this capacity, I substituted at a posh Ukrainian secondary school for a couple of weeks, taught “Business English” for a few private firms, and tutored one very rich kid in a high-rise apartment overlooking a Soviet-era TSUM department store that now blinked with advertisements for Benneton and Bvlgari. I returned to the States in late 2005 to begin a position as a contract analyst in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters, mostly doing translations. It was around this time that I first got the idea for a novel about a Black American teacher of English as a second language in Kyiv—the character that eventually morphed into Gabriel.
I first conceived of Gabriel’s brother Michael and their friend Simon for the short story “Walking Point,” the original version of whichwas published in Line of Advance back in 2017. In the story, Frank—the prison warden narrator that you mentioned in your introduction—describes his service in Vietnam to all three boys, but at the behest of Simon who is considering joining the military.
Tim O’Brien once remarked that, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” I originally conceived of Michael holding Frank accountable for the war story he tells the boys. Bookish, bisexual, and brooding, Michael suffers to defy Black masculinity’s rigid confines of expression. The experience renders Michael emotionally bulletproof. He learns young that there’s no way not to suffer, but that people will try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it—including lying to each other and themselves.
From his pedigree (Black Panther parents, war hero grandfather) to his service in the U.S. Special Operations community to a stint as a professional mixed martial artist, violence is central to Simon’s arc. For those capable of giving themselves over to it, violence can be one of life’s most intense pleasures: a visceral moral proposition that rearranges the universe into the present at its most absolute. As emergency medicine and mixed martial arts are among the endeavors that have demanded my closest consideration of violence, Simon became a paramedic and a fighter.
Punctured Lines: In the scope of this novel, the chapters set in Ukraine take up a fairly small part. Gabriel, the youngest of the three protagonists, is an aspiring writer, and he goes to Ukraine to teach English and also as a quasi-retreat where he hopes to finish his book. While there, he falls in love with a woman named Tamara, who encourages him to move from writing Tolkienesque fantasy and focus on something closer to his own life. In a lovely post-modern gesture of make-believe, you allow the reader to assume that at least part of Revolutions of All Colors belongs to Gabriel’s pen. I know from reading your biography that you spent some time in Ukraine, and I would love to know how that time has helped to shape you as a writer?
Dewaine Farria: My wife, Iryna, anchored me to Kyiv, but my fascination with that part of the world began long before she and I met. During my junior year in high school, I happened upon a copy of Tolstoy’s Master and Man and Other Stories, which contained the grandmaster’s fictionalized account of the real-life 18th century separatist guerrilla, Haji Murat. For a sixteen-year-old obsessed with fantasy heroes, Tolstoy’s tale of valor, violence, and betrayal struck all the right notes. It was also the first story I ever read about counterinsurgency, a mode of conflict that has defined warfare in the 21st century. I subsequently flew through Pushkin, Gogol, and Chekhov’s short stories.
In Gather Together in My Name, Maya Angelou writes of her discovery of the Russian writers:
I walked the sunny California streets shrouded in Russian mists. I fell in love with the Karamazov brothers and longed to drink from a samovar with the lecherous old father. Then Gorki became my favorite. He was the blackest, most dear, most despairing. The books couldn’t last long enough for me. I wished the writers were alive, turning out manuscripts for my addiction. I took to the Chekhov plays and Turgenev, but always returned in the late night, after I had collected my boodle, to Maxim Gorki and his murky, unjust world.
For my part, I pictured cities that were snow-dusted amalgamations of Moscow, Prague, and Paris. Locales brimming with intellectuals, radicals, and artists living in the sort of romantic poverty that I imagined bred great culture.
Dewaine Farria, Amman, Jordan, 1999
I enlisted in the Marine Corps out of high school and volunteered for embassy guard duty at the first opportunity (back then you had to earn the rank of corporal before applying). After finishing a year and change at the U.S. Embassy in Amman, the Marine Detachments in Saint Petersburg and Moscow topped my “wish list.” I jotted the Detachments in Vladivostok and Kyiv into the third and fourth place slots with (as anyone who knows anything about the Marine Corps can attest) inordinately optimistic disregard.
In December 2000, I stepped off a Ukrainian Airlines flight at Boryspil International Airport, blowing into my palms and looking up at a sky like a dull, grey smear—a twenty-something Marine Sergeant brimming with lion cub swagger. I last visited Ukraine in the summer of 2019, to christen our third child, return my father-in-law’s remains, and get some dental work done—more family business than vacation.
I ended up returning to Kyiv again and again for the same reasons other folks end up returning to Caracas or Cleveland. You meet someone, fall in love, and then discover that the package deal includes their hometown. For me now, Kyiv is friends and family who knew me when I was young. It’s dacha summers of darting swallows, dragonflies, and sun flowers—as well as drunken fistfights where I feared for my life. I’m not sure how Ukraine shaped me as a writer, but I do know that I cannot pretend to be unbiased when discussing the country or its people.
Punctured Lines: Gabriel studies ballet, and his Soviet émigré teacher Sergei is a big influence in his life. But thinking further about the connections that you draw between the United States and the Soviet and post-Soviet space, you mention Angela Davis receiving USSR’s Lenin Peace Prize. The Soviet Union famously made overtures to prominent African Americans, affecting support for the cause of Black liberation—a bit of political theatre, with some kernel of earnest engagement. I’m curious to know to what extent this history is a part of the context for this novel?
Dewaine Farria: Along with the rest of his generation, the Black Power movement colored my father’s views of international relations. So—despite his career in the United States Air Force—my dad frequently touted Soviet anti-racist and anti-colonial rhetoric as one of our Cold War enemy’s most redeeming features. As I didn’t make any distinction between “Soviet” and “Russian” back then, my dad’s attitude certainly affected the way I approached the work of the Russian writers I read in my teens.
Under Putinism, the Russian Federation continues to exploit the West’s weakness and division, and race continues to play a huge role in this. The Cold War maxim that “Everyone in America is racist and everyone in Russia is Russian” reflects how the American concept of race remains an easily exploited societal fault line. In the novel, I wanted to give a glimpse as to how the political theatre surrounding exploiting this fault line looked to the public within the Soviet Union.
Incidentally, I first heard the story of Angela Davis receiving the Lenin Peace Prize from one of the drivers at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv back in 2000. Guy named Andre. Big Stevie Wonder fan.
“She had been one of the Чёрные Пантеры,” Andre said of Angela Davis during our conversation, and I immediately committed the phrase to memory: Чёрные Пантеры. Then, he asked, “Whatever happened to them?”
Punctured Lines: Going beyond Soviet sloganeering, what Gabriel encounters on the streets of Kyiv is a whole bunch of unfettered racism as well as some benign curiosity about a Black American traveler. He also meets a local woman, Tamara, and the two begin a passionate love affair. Tamara is quite a sinister presence—she works for an international arms dealer, and her contracts extend to Africa and Asia.
In addition, you introduce a Jewish character, Max, who helps Gabriel and the reader to navigate the complex cultural landscape with nuance and savvy. These and other characters in the story create a fascinating representation of Ukraine at a transitional moment without falling back on stereotypes. I’m curious how you came up with Tamara and Max and what were some of the issues that arose for you in trying to describe Ukraine during the Orange Revolution of 2004?
Dewaine Farria: I don’t attempt to write characters with an identity different from mine unless I already have someone like that in my life whom I love. I don’t necessarily model the character on that person but keeping them in mind sustains my cognizance of the responsibility writing outside of your identity entails. Especially when you’re writing from the first-person POV, as I do with Tamara.
With a Georgian father and Russian mother, Tamara refers to her ethnicity as “mongrel,” but I like to think of it as “Soviet.” Either way, Tamara is a citizen of Ukraine. Max’s ethnicity is Jewish, and he too is a citizen of Ukraine. Two citizens with very different views of the country, due—in part—to their ethnic identities. Gabriel couldn’t have asked for better cultural liaisons.
For Tamara, the Orange Revolution holds the prospect that her country—the only country she has known for her entire adult life—might finally shed the residue of the empire capitalism defeated. As she puts it in the novel:
Before the Orange Revolution, Kyivites bitched about the wife-beating Afghan war veteran in the flat next door and the bumzhiki drinking themselves blind in Mariyinsky Park. Now we were having our first inferiority-free discussions of the European Union, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance was running vacancy ads in Kyiv’s English-language weeklies. Even expats like Gabriel—that is, expats without Ukrainian hyphenated identities—could not ignore the fire in the air. For a stark beautiful moment, my tribe—by far one of the world’s gloomiest—transformed into true believers.
Many of the aviators in the United Nations Department of Peace Operations hail from the former Soviet Union. While working in Mogadishu, I would occasionally find myself inebriated with these guys and—man—did they have some stories. One of which sparked the idea to make Tamara an arms dealer. Matt Potter’s Outlaws Inc: Flying with the World’s Most Dangerous Smugglers and Misha Glenny’s McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld also influenced the world of white, grey, and black arms deals that I wanted Tamara to inhabit. A world that also bleeds into Simon’s chapter in Somalia, “Mercenaries, Missionaries, and Misfits.”
Max’s perspective as an Eastern European Jew corrects some of Gabriel’s more rosy notions about the Orange Revolution. As Max puts it in this exchange with Gabriel in the novel:
“The hypocrisy of these anti-Semitic Cossacks suddenly pretending to be liberal with all this Orange Revolution nonsense disgusts me. Truly. I swear, I prefer the Russians now. At least you know where you stand with them.”
Before I can get a word in, Max jams a finger into my sternum.
“Save it. I’m an Eastern European Jew, man. I know the depths these motherfuckers can sink to.”
When I served in Kyiv, the U.S. State Department rented a large home in the city’s Syrets district for use as the Marine barracks (usually called the “Marine House” in U.S. diplomatic circles). As the infamous site of the Babi Yar massacre, living in Syrets got me interested in Kyiv’s Jewish community. An interest that led me to Anatoly Kuznetsov’s memoir, Babi Yar—a phenomenal book that, for some reason, no one really talks about much. Kuznetsov named his book for the ravine across the street from the Marine House, where Kyiv’s German occupiers murdered at least 33,771 Jewish children, women, and men.
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything’s Illuminated influenced how I wanted Max to sound.
While working in Jerusalem as UN field security officer, I got the idea to make Simon a “re-patriate”—someone who returned to Kyiv after serving his mandatory stint in the Israeli army. The Israelis are by far the most casually racist security personnel I worked with during my career. But, as a former Marine, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I recognized aspects of their police and military culture. But most of all, Max is based on a friend, and he remains one of my favorite characters.
Punctured Lines: Thinking about the book’s title, I posit that each character in this book experiences his or her own revolutions, both in the very real political sense, as well as metaphorically—revolutions that transform their understandings of themselves and the world around them. What does this title mean to you and how did you come up with it?
Dewaine Farria: Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to interview with Adrian Boneberger at the WBT podcast. In his explanation of the title, he’d found a correlation between the “color revolutions” in the former Soviet Union and American race relations. I just listened to the episode again and his explanation still sounds pretty good. But then your explanation feels right on point, too… Far be it from me to tell readers how to interpret the title!
Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia – Russian, Federation – UN Field Office 2010
Grozny, Chechnya – With Ministry of Interior Escorts – 2009
Manila, Philippines – Christmas Party – 2019
Kurtunwarey District – Lower Shabelle – Somalia 2014
West Bank, Occupied Palestine 2016
Mogadishu, Somalia 2014
Punctured Lines: One of the central themes of this novel, I believe, is the culture of violence to which Black and Brown kids are so often subjected growing up in the United States. Simon, perhaps, comes the closest to embracing this violence and turning it into a kind of art, first by joining the military, and later as he becomes a mixed martial arts fighter. I see Gabriel attempting to reflect on this experience of violence in his fiction. Michael, Gabriel’s older brother, has the most exceptional response to violence. As a teen, he suffers from the Dostoevskian “sacred disease”—epilepsy, and his epileptic episodes often seem to occur in anticipation of, or as a reaction to fighting around him. He starts to understand himself as a bisexual, becomes a fashion writer, and moves to New York City. In the same Q&A with Book Culture you mention being heavily influenced by the work of James Baldwin. Am I right in reading Dostoevsky and Baldwin as two of the prototypes for this character? I’d love to know what your additional influences in writing this novel have been.
Dewaine Farria: I drew heavily from both Dostoevsky and Baldwin for the character of Michael. Thom Jones’s story, “The Pugilist at Rest,” also played a big role in my conception of the left temporal lobe fits that plague Michael during his teen years. Here’s Jones’s Vietnam veteran narrator describing “the sacred disease”:
Dostoyevski {sic} was nervous and depressed, a tormented hypochondriac, a compulsive writer obsessed with religious and philosophic themes. He was hyperloquacious, raving, etc. & etc. His gambling addiction is well known. By most accounts he was a sick soul.
The peculiar and most distinctive thing about his epilepsy was that in the split second before his fit—in the aura, which is in fact officially a part of the attack—Dostoyevski experienced a sense of felicity, of ecstatic well-being unlike anything an ordinary mortal could hope to imagine. It was the experience of satori. Not the nickel-and-dime satori of Abraham Maslow, but the Supreme. He said that he wouldn’t trade ten years of life for this feeling, and I, who have had it, too, would have to agree.
Punctured Lines: Your book came out in December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and now Ukraine, the country that plays such an important role in this book, is under attack from Russia. Your characters feel so alive to me that I’m tempted to ask, how Simon, Michael, and Gabriel are holding up through it all. I am also impressed with how well the characters and the world you’ve created prepare us for this violence that broke out in the real world: you pointed out so many problems that have been brewing for decades. I would love to know what you think writers can do in the face of war, and if your thoughts on this have changed after the publication of this novel?
Dewaine Farria: Thank you so much for saying that, Olga. I really appreciate the care and attention with which you read my work.
The war in Ukraine is this generation’s Spanish Civil War—the conflict that future generations will look back on and wonder why good people didn’t do more. This generation’s response to nationalist-fueled authoritarianism will define it. As Timothy Snyder pointed out recently in the New York Times, people continue to disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism—but today’s Russia meets most of the criteria:
It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
In many ways, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a war against the humiliation that many Russians felt during the tracksuit banditry that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Grievance-fueled nationalism has always been a precursor to war and revolution. In such circumstances, writers would do well to remember that all art is political, and we owe allegiance—above all—to the truth.
Punctured Lines: This novel was such a wonderful read, and I can’t wait to see where your writing takes us next. If you care to share what you’re working on now, I would love to hear about it!
Dewaine Farria: I’ve been hard at work on a dystopic short story collection that stitches together myriad points of view and overlapping timeframes to de-familiarize the brutality of America’s criminal justice system, highlighting the connections between the marginalized and disaffected the world over. The project focuses on the central premise of both militarized policing and mass incarceration: the view of certain communities as outside the social contract, subject to the state’s authority, but without the full protections of citizenship. It has been a slog. As Oklahoman Ralph Ellison put it, “the writing of novels is the damnedest thing that I ever got into, and I’ve been into some damnable things.”
Please donate to help people fleeing from violence in Ukraine. Dewaine Farria says: “As a former UN staff member, I know that UNHCR and UNICEF are doing good work in Ukraine now.”
Dewaine Farria’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, CRAFT, War on the Rocks, the Rumpus, Literary Hub, and the anthology Our Best War Stories: Prize-winning Poetry and Prose from the Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Award. Tobias Wolff selected Farria’s debut novel, Revolutions of All Colors, as the winner of Syracuse University’s 2019 Veterans Writing Contest. Farria holds an M.A. from the University of Oklahoma and an M.F.A. from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has received fellowships from the National Security Education Program, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. As a U.S. Marine, he served in Jordan and Ukraine. Besides his stint in the military, Farria spent most of his professional life working for the United Nations, with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. You can find more of his writing at dewainefarria.com.
We’re happy to share the recording from the event we hosted on May 15, 2022, gathering writers who were born in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to Canada as children. Currently located all across Canada, from Montreal (Luba Markovskaia) to Vancouver (Maria Reva) with a definite hub around Toronto (Julia Zarankin, Lea Zeltserman, Maria Lioutaia, Maria Bloshteyn), these generous writers shared excerpts from their work and answered questions about living with hyphenated identities and building writing communities. Russia’s war in Ukraine was at the forefront of this conversation, as most of the writers and the participants have family and friends affected by the bombs. This event was a fundraiser, and we encourage everyone to continue donating to the organizations listed below.
Please enjoy this recording and reach out to us with ideas for future projects!
Maria Bloshteyn was born in Leningrad and emigrated to Toronto when she was nine. She received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her main scholarly interests lie in the field of literary and cultural exchange between Russia and the United States, with a special focus on Dostoevsky’s impact on American literature and culture. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007), the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters (Slavica, 2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (NYRB Classics, 2015), and the editor of Russia is Burning: Poems of the Great Patriotic War (Smokestack Books, 2020). Her articles appeared in a number of scholarly and not-so-scholarly journals and her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).
Maria Lioutaiawas born in Moscow and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her fiction has recently appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Gulf Coast, Tin House, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and Conjunctions. She was a Tin House scholar, a finalist for The Iowa Review Awards, and was on the longlist for the CBC Short Story Prize four times. She holds an MFA from NYU, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her last name means “fierce” in Russian. She’s currently at work on a novel.
Luba Markovskaia was born in Leningrad and lives in Montreal. She holds a PhD in French literature from McGill University and works as an independent literary and cultural translator. Her writing on language, identity, and immigration has appeared in publications such as Moebius, Spirale, and Nuit blanche, as well as in translation in Maisonneuve Magazine and Quebec Reads, and was shortlisted for the French CBC Nonfiction Prize. In 2021, she received the John Glassco Translation Prize for her translation of Elena Johnson’s Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra. She sits on the editorial board of Spirale magazine. You can visit her LTAC profile and connect with her on Twitter at @luba_mark.
Maria Reva writes fiction and opera libretti. She is the author of the linked story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear (Doubleday, Virago, and Knopf Canada New Face of Fiction, 2020), which was inspired by her own family’s experiences in Ukraine. Maria’s stories have appeared in The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, Granta, The Journey Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. She won a National Magazine Award in 2019 and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust of Canada 2020 Fiction Prize. Maria was born in Ukraine and grew up in New Westminster, British Columbia. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
Julia Zarankin is the author of FIELD NOTES FROM AN UNINTENTIONAL BIRDER. Her writing has appeared in Audubon, Canadian Geographic, ON Nature, The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Birding Magazine, Hazlitt, Threepenny Review, and Orion Magazine. She was recently a finalist for the CBC Short Story prize (2020). When not hanging out with a spotting scope at sewage lagoons or working furiously at her desk, Julia lectures to lifelong learners in and around Toronto. Zarankin is currently at work on a novel that features, among other things, a Babushka Beauty Pageant.
Born in St. Petersburg back when it was Leningrad, Lea Zeltserman was raised in Edmonton and now calls Toronto home. She writes about Soviet-Jewish food, history, immigration, and culture. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Tablet, the Forward, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, Walrus, and others. An essay on Soviet-Jewish food was included in the 100 Jewish Foods anthology from Tablet Magazine. She also publishes the Soviet-Samovar, a monthly round-up of FSU writing. Find her online at https://leazeltserman.com or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/zeltserman and Instagram: @leazelt.
– supplementing basic income for members whose income has dropped because they are focusing on emergency pro bono translation and interpreting
Natalia is herself in the city of Kalush in the west of Ukraine. She reports: “so far the fund has helped evacuate two people from Kharkiv and has helped cover the cost of special footwear and a safety vest for one of our colleagues who is now in the territorial defense; and provided funds to a single mother now in Kyiv for food and essentials for the child.” If you have questions about the UATI Support Fund, please contact Natalia at uati.org@gmail.com.
Find out how to contribute to the UATI Support Fund using PayPal, Venmo, check, or bank transfer here.
Most of these opportunities are currently provided by European institutions, and we urge our friends with any influence at North American institutions and those around the world to consider expanding existing opportunities and to establish new positions for writers fleeing the war in Ukraine, as well as for writers speaking out against their regimes in Belarus and Russia.
For those watching in horror the atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine and wondering what can be done from afar, here is a list of various types of organizations to support. Given the rapidly developing situation and the number of appeals from various channels, this list is by definition incomplete. If you know of other organizations please add them, and we will be updating, as well. We stand with the citizens of Ukraine, the Russian protesters, and members of the various diasporas who have family, friends, and ties in one or both places.
Here’s a video from yesterday’s poetry reading featuring poets from Ukraine and their English-language translators. Thanks to poets Olga Livshin and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach who organized this event 800 people from across the globe came together for Ukraine. This event, put together as a part of an ongoing poetry series Words Together Worlds Apart was a fundraiser, and it’s not too late to DONATE to UNICEF.
*Words Together Worlds Apart spearheaded by poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is a virtual reading series. Its mission is: “To maintain & build literary community across distance through our shared love of words. Featured readers will share their work around a weekly theme, followed by interactive discussion.”
Thanks to everyone who could attend our event on Saturday, December 4th, and thank you all for your engagement and for your wonderful questions. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s the video recording from the event and links to our work.
Seven immigrant writers read their fiction and nonfiction related to immigration, identity, family history and the mother tongue(s). Let’s talk about buckwheat and pickled herring with beets. What do you do if your children refuse to eat traditional foods? Or when your dying grandmother forgets English and Russian and begins speaking to you in Yiddish? Does a Soviet-era secret still matter when the country no longer exists? We explore love, life, loss and the nuances of living with a hybrid identity.
Masha Rumer’s nonfiction book, Parenting with an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in November 2021. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Moscow Times, Scary Mommy, and Parents, winning awards from the New York Press Association. She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. You can connect with her on Twitter @mashaDC and on her website and order her book here.
Sasha Vasilyuk is a Russian-American writer who grew up between Moscow and San Francisco. With a MA in Journalism from New York University, she has written for Harper’s Bazaar, The Telegraph, Narrative, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and Reed. She has won the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing and a NATJA award. Sasha lives in San Francisco where she is working on a novel. You can connect with her on social @sashavasilyuk and find her work highlights here.
Tatyana Sundeyeva is a Russian-Jewish writer and novelist originally from Kishinev, Moldova. She writes short fiction, travel writing, and Young Adult novels and has been published in Cleaver and Hadassah Magazine. She is also on the Executive Committee of San Francisco’s Litquake Festival. You can find her at Tatyanawrites.com or @TeaOnSundey
Yelena Furman was born in Kiev and lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches Russian literature at UCLA. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative, book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Baffler, and articles on Russian-American fiction, contemporary Russian women writers, and Virginia Woolf’s translation of Dostoevsky in various academic venues. With Olga Zilberbourg she co-runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures. You can connect with her on Twitter at @YelenaFurman.
Maggie Levantovskaya emigrated from Kiev, Ukraine, to San Francisco at the age of ten. She’s a nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, and Lithub. She teaches in the English department at Santa Clara University. You can find her work on her website and connect on Twitter @MLevantovskaya.
Vlada Teper’s essays have been featured in “Perspectives” on KQED. Her poetry has appeared in the Oberon Poetry Magazine and TulipTree Review, among others. A writer, teacher, and entrepreneur, Vlada is the recipient of the 826 Valencia Teacher of the Month Award, and the founder of I M U. She is currently completing her debut novel about being a substitute teacher in a Sex Ed high school class. You can find her on Twitter at @VladaTeper.
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and three Russian-language story collections. She has published fiction and essays in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. She writes book reviews for The Common, co-edits Punctured Lines, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop. You can find her work on her website, connect on Twitter @bowlga, and order her book here.
We’re delighted to publish our conversation with Konstantin Kropotkin, an author and literary and film critic who reviews LGBT books and movies, as well as trends in Russian culture. Kropotkin’s novels and collections of short stories centering queer lives are available on Amazon, in Russian. His commentary on queer culture appears daily on his Telegram blog “Sodom i umora,” and he contributes full-form critical essays to top Russian-language publications. Kropotkin lives in Germany and this conversation was conducted in English and Russian over email, and subsequently translated by the interviewer.
Olga Zilberbourg: Much of your fiction has been focused on portraying the lives of gay men, and as a critic you pay particular attention to LGBT literature and film. Your popular Telegram blog “Sodom i umora” is dedicated to queer books and movies in Russian or in translation to Russian. Despite the retrograde homophobic laws that Russia has passed in recent years, and horrific persecution of gay people in Chechnya, you have shown that Russophone queer literature is a vibrant field. In your blog you seem to strive for balance: you write about various forms of homophobia and also about the many creators that are participating in Russophone queer culture. How would you describe your cultural project as a critic? Does this project change in any way when you turn to fiction?
Konstantin Kropotkin: To get through to the mind, you need to pave the way to the heart. I have arrived at this principle in the early 2000s, when I began to write queer prose, and today I continue to uphold this principle. In 2018, I launched my project #содомиумора where I illustrate the idea that queer literature and queer film, on the one hand, follow their own conventions, and on the other, speak to universal values and can be of interest to a very wide audience. I’m trying to squelch the prejudice that LGBTIQ themes are exotic, incomprehensible, far away, alien. Using examples from books and movies, I’m trying to make the case that these themes are socially significant, have artistic value, are entertaining, familiar, and accessible to anyone.
Konstantin Kropotkin
In other words, I’m working on the same problems as the LGBTIQ rights organizations, though unlike them I’m addressing not only queer people, but an audience of potential allies (“Here, mom, if you want to understand me better, read this!”). This is why I welcome opportunities to write for publications that don’t position themselves as queer. These publications allow my essays, book and film criticism to reach people who are not familiar with LGBTIQ issues. These publications are also a means of habituating queer content within the professional communities, in this case, of film and literary critics.
In the same vein, my Telegram channel #содомиумора is deeply valuable to me as it allows me to deliver a service to my subscribers: everyone, no matter whether they are affiliated with the LGBTIQ community or not, can come here to find a movie or a book to enjoy. Then, the fiction itself does the work of enlightenment, providing readers or viewers with role models, stock phrases useful in everyday life, typical situations, vocabulary for articulating experiences that previously had been taboo.
I also showcase foreign books that would be good to have in Russian translation. I know that publishers and editors read my columns, and my recommendations can be of use to them. I should note that, unlike books, foreign queer movies are translated to Russian almost instantly. This is a paradox of a country where it’s difficult to make money on LGBTIQ content. Queer movies are pirated and translated by the pirates, and nobody represents the interests of the copyright holders in Russia. Russian distributors often steer clear of queer movies, especially indie productions: these movies are rarely profitable even in the West, and the distributors prefer to avoid the risk, given the hostile legal environment.
The work of education that I provide in my reviews, as well as the information provided by the books and movies themselves, is particularly crucial in the country whose government backs homophobia. Adopted in 2013, the “gay propaganda” law endangers the lives of queer people and has had a damaging effect on the Russian cultural landscape. The law is vaguely written and has been used selectively—as an instrument of repressions. I set out to illustrate, with examples, why homophobia causes harm in every way: both in people’s lives, and in the sphere of cultural production.
Olga Zilberbourg: I first came across your work in Gorky, and the essay that grabbed my attention, “Waiting for Boring Men,” was dedicated to the vibrancy of LGBT literature from Georgia. Invited as a guest of honor to the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Georgia made LGBT literature one of the central themes of its program. In this piece, you pointed out that Georgian literature has been able to address the traumas that Russian literature still dismisses as imaginary. I want to pause for a moment on the traumas you allude to: I assume you’re talking about the homophobic policies of the USSR and the near total silencing of the existence of LGBT people during the late Soviet era. What do you think have been some of the difficulties that Russophone writers experience in approaching these traumas? Conversely, do you believe it’s possible to sidestep the Soviet legacy altogether and to focus on contemporary issues without delving into the past?
Konstantin Kropotkin: The example of Georgia, a fellow post-Soviet state, shows the way contemporary Russian literature could develop if Russia’s homophobia wasn’t a government-level enterprise. (I use the word “homophobia” in an old-fashioned way that includes trans- and bi- and queer-phobia.) Both Russia and Georgia share history as republics of the Soviet Union, but today Georgia is pursuing a democratic route, while Russia is set on the reconstruction of the Soviet monstrous form of government. This difference shows up, among other things, in the literary production of the two countries. Notably, Georgia is a much smaller country than Russia, with less than 4 million citizens, and a relatively poor one. Its literary community is correspondingly smaller, and trends within it are more noticeable. It’s also more flexible in its response to the demands of the times, and to social change. What we observe as true for Georgian literature might well become true for Russian literature at a much later date. It’s important to consider how Georgia is addressing prejudices against queer people. There, LGBTIQ books are published with governmental support, which serves the advancement of their national literature overall and increases the visibility of queer experiences. This is crucial knowledge for Russian knowledge makers.
The Soviet Union’s LGBTIQ history demands a comprehensive, expert reflection, and I think, sooner or later, this will become obvious to people in Russia as well. Unfortunately, much of this history has already become inaccessible: most of the people who’d borne the Soviet queer experience have silently passed away, and so many important stories have been buried with them, unrecorded.
Olga Zilberbourg: You have thought deeply and argued for the importance of genre in the world of literary production. You have written about the slowly emerging genre of LGBT literature in Russia—and about the refusal of some writers who do center LGBT characters in their books to accept the label of “LGBT book” as though it were a diminishment of their accomplishment, wishing their books to be treated as literary fiction because it is a more desirable category. Something analogous happens, I think to women writers, who often refuse the label of “woman” writer believing that to be a diminishment. How do you explain the reluctance to use these terms? To what extent, do you think, is this a reflection on the state of literary criticism in Russia today?
Konstantin Kropotkin: Yes, in Russia, there’s still a strong prejudice against the marker “LGBT literature” (the term “queer fiction” is still in its nascent phase); people feel that it’s a marker of second-rate literature, that it signifies something overly sexualized, scandalous. The reason for this, likely, lies with the Soviet tradition of literary studies that treated sexuality as a taboo subject. Another explanation might be in the hierarchical structure of thought—at its heart, an imperial quality. An empire cannot accommodate the world’s multipolarity; the value of an individual, the significance of each unique “point of view,” is outside of its purview.
Sodom i umora, Kropotkin’s first novel.
This state of affairs is slowly changing, thanks, to a great extent, to the escalating prominence of women’s voices (including the voices of queer women). Both within literature written originally in Russian and within literature published in translation to Russian, women writers are gaining more attention and significance. Dismantling the outmoded status quo with the help of “the female gaze” is useful for queer literature—it clarifies the value of diversity in literary spheres. I believe the cumulative effect of incremental cultural change will play its part, too: for queer work to achieve visibility within the professional community, we need to see commercially successful publications of queer books, large print runs, and dynamic, publicly out queer authors. We’re bound to see all of these things in the next few years—provided that the government will not launch a new homophobic campaign.
Olga Zilberbourg: Your own novel Sodom i umora (2007) is a delightful romp about three gay men who share an apartment in the middle of Moscow in the early 2000s, getting into situations that make me think you set out to write a version of the American sitcom “Will and Grace” set in Moscow. Do you agree with this assessment? What I particularly enjoyed about this novel is that you’re both reproducing lovable stereotypes about gay men (i.e. fashion sense and gaydar) and complicating them, including with the specificities of everyday life in Moscow. The guys are for instance not out to their families and neighbors, which creates a number of situations that are funny in a way deep trauma can be sometimes processed as laughter. Did you have a sense of a particular audience you were writing this book for? How did your book resonate with readers in Russia?
Konstantin Kropotkin: My novel Sodom i umora was written spontaneously, without an outline; it didn’t go through a professional revision and editing process. It was a new form for me at the time and, as such, from where I stand now, has a number of shortcomings. (Artistically, my later queer books Dnevnik odnogo g and Zhivut takie parni are far more successful.) Overall, however, Sodom i umora is an original, for Russian literature, attempt to write about “gays with a human face” (in the words of one of my readers). I wanted to show gay men as approachable, likeable, and moving, and to achieve this I relied on certain devices that are rather cinematic in nature. This is a sitcom novel: I wrote it, imagining a TV series. I’ve never seen “Will and Grace,” but I was thinking about situational comedy as a genre, as an idea. (At the time I studied playwriting, and a few of my plays were later published.)
A volume of Kropotkin’s collected short prose, self-published as a result of the homophobic Russian law against “gay propaganda.”
One other source for this book, I should say, was Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series. It had a great effect on me. This American classic of gay literature is yet to be translated to Russian; I’d read Maupin’s novels in German translation. I was attracted to the idea of home as a safe space, particularly important for a queer person in a hostile environment. Truly, my novel is an embodiment of such a “safe space”—the very book is a place that a reader can inhabit without getting hurt. Later, I used the genre of autofiction in my book Zhivut takie parni to talk about the everyday happiness of a partnership between gay men (I chose selected chapters of that book for the definitive collection Takie parni): this is a story about a German-Russian gay family living in contemporary Germany.
The novel Sodom i umora has had a happy life. Right upon the publication of the first chapters online, the characters immediately found a warm reception from the online audience; later, the book was published in print by the now defunct Kvir Press. Soon afterwards, it was picked up by a German publisher. The German translation, Russen WG, showed good sales numbers. For a German-speaking audience there wasn’t anything particularly new in the plot and the everyday events described in the book, while within the body of Russian-language prose, Sodom i umora remains to this day a unique phenomenon: tragicomic fiction about queer people is yet to materialize as a Russian-language genre.
A German-language translation of Sodom i umora.
At the beginning of 2010s, I wrote a sequel. Sozhiteli, a mystery and a comedy of manners, took up the story of my characters ten years later. As a result of the “gay propaganda” law, the book’s only chance for publication was self-publishing. It’s available on Ridero. Perhaps, in another ten years, I will write the final chapter of this story.
Olga Zilberbourg: I’ve particularly enjoyed your end of the year columns where you summarize not only the important LGBT books that have come out but also devote some time to highlighting the trends in publishing, promotion, and reception of queer literature. You’ve concluded your 2020 post with a very hopeful outlook: LGBT books are coming out, the scandals they cause are few and far between, and the spectrum of LGBT literature in Russian is starting to resemble what’s been happening across Western Europe. It seems that translation is playing a large role in this process: many books on your list are translations of American and West European authors. What role do you think capitalism is playing in this process and in Russia’s ability to participate in this global marketplace—not only of ideas, but of books as physical objects that have certain sales numbers attached to them?
Konstantin Kropotkin: The strictness of Russian laws is matched only by the laxity of their enforcement. Today, the book industry treats the “gay propaganda” law mostly as a fiction. Government representatives pretend that they enforce the law; publishers that they obey it (in fact, both merely fulfill the required formalities). Publishers attach a sticker “18+” on the covers of queer books, and in most cases, that’s all there is to it. Queer books for teenagers do reach their target audience. However, the homophobic “norm” does increase self-censorship, both among the authors and the publishers. Telling the stories of queer people remains challenging, and the themes of homo- trans- and bisexuality are largely absent in print. The very existence of the homophobic law hangs over literary authors as the sword of Damocles, threatening the development of queer voices and movements.
That said, the number of LGBTIQ books is increasing. It’s becoming obvious that queer books can be money-makers. High-profile queer fiction is translated to Russian at an increasing rate (and the quality is improving). Simultaneously, publishers are looking to create their own queer stars. One example of such publishing success is Mikita Franko, who writes as a “trans-guy” (in his own words). He published two novels in 2020: one, a story about a family with two dads, Dni nashei zhizni, and another, about a family where one of the parents is a trans person. The first of these novels has been a great commercial success, and the second was warmly received by the critics. I was happy to have been asked by the publishers to contribute a blurb to Franko’s first book: my praise was displayed on the back cover of Dni nashei zhizni alongside contributions from the representatives of “conventional” literature. I expect that this novel will soon be translated into foreign languages, and I’ve heard that TV-series rights are in negotiations.
As long as the government doesn’t impose homophobic censorship, capitalism performs miracles. In Russia, there are at least two small presses that openly mention the significance of queer literature in their promotional materials—Popcorn Books and No Kidding Press. Large publishing houses are producing queer books ever more readily, though they try not to attract too much attention to the LGBT aspects of these books. I don’t think this is a partisan war against a homophobic government. More likely, they want to turn a profit with minimum risk. One recent example is the novel Moy beliy, a bildungsroman about a heterosexual young woman, a Muscovite, who is growing up with two mothers. This semi-autobiographical novel by Kseniya Burzhskaya was published by Inspiria, an imprint of the giant publishing house Eksmo.
Some books that are emerging today are of exceptional artistic quality. Katya Chistyakova’s novel Tam, na perimetre tells the story of a relationship between a homeless gay man and a volunteer of a nonprofit organization that helps the homeless; it can be compared, in part, with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Chistyakova’s novel received a small print run from a large publishing house, and though it’s a superb portrait of a queer person, the book was not marketed as a queer novel. (I see my job as a queer critic to point out the inequity of this approach.)
Notably, most authors don’t like to have the term “queer” attached to their work. Some go quite far in their desire to distance themselves from the LGBTIQ community. To a Westerner, Mikita Franko’s first interviews might appear as straight homophobia (I believe the young author had been insufficiently informed about queer history and theory). Kseniya Burzhskaya, who penned the novel about a lesbian family and had lived in France for a few years, protested in an interview against the usage of the word “queer” to define her book. According to her, queer desire is not differentiated from other forms of desire, it doesn’t have its own specificity. These words, I believe, were dictated by the wish to be perceived as an author conforming to the conventions of Russian-language literature. In both of these cases, the books speak more progressively than their authors. A writer doesn’t need to be a literary scholar, but my task as a queer critic is to point out convincingly the areas where the writer has made a bad call; this method of trial and error is the only way to formulate a new social consensus, appropriate for the contemporary moment.
Olga Zilberbourg: What role do you think diaspora authors, authors who live outside of Russia, are playing in the Russophone LGBT literary space?
Konstantin Kropotkin: Personally, I have the opportunity to dedicate myself to queer literature as an author and a critic only because I reside outside of Russia. Nobody censures me; I lead an active social life as a gay man, and I can publicize this experience in Russian without fear. I think my experience is an emblematic one. There are other queer authors who write in Russian and live outside of Russia, and they bridge two world views, the Western and the Russian, and among other things, this reveals new opportunities for Russian literature. Lida Yusupova, who lived in Canada and Belize, published lesbian prose and now has become a prominent representative of the new Russian poetry. Evgeny Shtorn, in Ireland, wrote a good autofiction, Khroniki bezhenstva, where he voiced his experiences as a gay refugee. Anatoly Vishevsky, a writer from Ukraine, who has taught at a U.S. university and now lives in Prague, wrote an excellent Russian-language novel, Khrupkie fantazii oberbossierera Loisa, which can be read in the vein of and developing the ideas of English-language canonical queer fiction from Edmund White to Alan Hollinghurst to Michael Cunningham. This novel was published in Russia last year, and I was glad that my support had contributed to making this publication possible.
Olga Zilberbourg: Contemporary Russophone LGBT authors emerge from across Russia — though homophobia is, reportedly, stronger outside of Moscow’s city center, there is plenty of talent outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg and young people are finding creative ways to share their writing. Do you see a trend in LGBT literature coming from Russian regions, or are the books that are becoming visible still important outliers (I’m thinking, for instance, about Mikita Franko)?
Konstantin Kropotkin: I’m confident that there are noteworthy writers in Russia outside of the metropolises. So many unique queer experiences have been left in the darkness, so many stories could become wonderful books. Considering current global literary trends, there might be a lot of interest in the voices of queer people from minority ethnic backgrounds—Chukchi, Evenki, Tatar. Indeed, Russia is a multiethnic state.
Today, queer authors from the provinces produce exclusively self-published writing, using fanfic websites, often anonymously. The example of Mikita Franko coming from the provinces, however, demonstrates that a queer person is able to become a successful author in Russia. Publishers claim that they are ready to publish homegrown, Russian LGBT literature. The demand for queer voices is growing.
A display at Eisenherz, the oldest German bookstore specializing in queer literature.
Olga Zilberbourg: I’ve been using the moniker “LGBT” literature in this Q&A, and I want to pause on the fact that terminology remains a hotly debated topic. In your blog and elsewhere you’ve used terms “gay literature” (гей-литература) and “queer literature” (квир-литература). My question at the moment is about the comparative visibility of the books and authors representing the entire spectrum of LGBTQIA+ identities in Russia. What identities do you see represented in Russophone literature most vibrantly and what identities do you think still remain underrepresented?
Konstantin Kropotkin: I persistently use the term “queer literature” (квир-литература) because it describes the entire spectrum of identities. This general term sounds better in Russian than “LGBTIQ+” (ЛГБТИК+). I also allow myself to use the shortened term “LGBT prose” (ЛГБТ-проза). The euphonic, pleasing sounds of the terminology are important to me, because I want my work to be received by a wide audience. I need to use language that’s not overly complex and isn’t marked as fundamentally, radically new. This is why I allow myself to use the somewhat old-fashioned synonyms—for instance, “gay prose” (гей-проза), a term that doesn’t describe the rainbow spectrum. I introduce new terms with caution—readers of my blog, my articles, my books must feel that I want to be understood. The measured, unintrusive introduction of the new vocabulary naturalizes these words in everyday parlance.
It’s clear that the Russian language lacks words to describe queer people. The case of agender, nonbinary people is particularly revealing. We are yet to arrive at a consensus about how to mark nonbinary identity in Russian, how to appropriately describe it. The arguments among linguists have been gaining notice. Some translators, including Tatiana Zborovskaya, attempt to translate Western agender books, books free from gender categories. The results of these attempts are quite interesting. It turns out that Russian grammar is capable of representing a gender-neutral character. Zborovskaya is translating the novel by a Swiss author Anna Stern, das alles hier, jetzt, in which the protagonists are not marked as “men” or “women.” According to the first published fragments from this work, Russian language is able to match the capabilities of German in this regard. (The translator has written a scholarly article about this.)
Olga Zilberbourg: Is it even productive to ask a question that centers the Western notion of “identity” in the Russian context? After all, coming out as anything still feels dangerous in Russia, and authors often prefer to obscure their personal identity.
Konstantin Kropotkin: It’s particularly important to manifest one’s queerness in the country where the laws against “gay propaganda” are in force. Though, of course, one ought to do this only when not in danger for one’s life. In the large Russian cities, there are opportunities for this. Things are different in smaller cities and in the regions where patriarchal traditions dominate—in Chechnya, for instance, where people die if their affiliation with the LGBTIQ community is discovered. An author is free to provide as much information about themselves as they consider necessary. I don’t think a single, universal strategy of queer self-representation could exist in such a large country as Russia. My rule is: if you are able to speak out, do so, but take care of yourself first; you only have one life—don’t take unnecessary risks.
Sozhiteli, a sequel to Sodom i umora, published ten years later. Orange meerkat is Kropotkin’s talisman, Motja.
Olga Zilberbourg: Last but not least, “Sodom i umora” is the title of your current Telegram blog, and your novel from 2007. I’ve also come across a text from 2003, where you used it as a title for a fictional medicine. I’ve been thinking of how to translate it to English, and the best I can come up with is “Sodom and raw humor” — to preserve the similarity with Gomorrah, though Russian “umora” is one of those untranslatable words that I think most closely describe this notion of laughter from deep trauma. Where did the phrase “Sodom i umora” come from and what does it mean to you?
Konstantin Kropotkin: “Sodom i umora” is word play and a callback to that tale about the sad fate of Sodom and Gomorrah that religious moralists love to use as a threat. The protagonists of my debut novel call their house “Sodom i umora.” To explain my method in this novel, I came up with the “safety instructions,” as they do for drugs. I don’t want to “cure” people from homophobia. Using entertainment literature as a placebo, I am asking people to cure themselves. I want them to use their own reason to arrive at the conclusion that homophobia is a hindrance for all of us.
In 2009, as I was arranging my novel for the German publisher, I proposed the title Sodom and Humorrha for it. (The publisher decided that it was too unwieldy and the book was published under the title Russen WG.) The version “Sodom and raw humor” sounds, perhaps, even better, it’s more precise and rhythmically closer to the original. Yes, laughter, even when it’s bitter, tragic laughter, is curative. That first book was a kind of therapy for me. It helped me to heal (or accept) my own psychic traumas—in Russia, I had been a victim of homophobia more than once. My funniest stories come out during the moments of the greatest emotional upheaval, when I feel exceptionally awful. Laughter is a step on the way back up, toward recovery. It’s only the very first step.
Noncommercial project #содомиумора with informational content about queer culture can be accessed on a variety of platforms:
Telegram (new content daily; is particularly important in Russia as a space protected from government censorship): https://t.me/gaybooksfilms
Maria Stepanova is a Moscow-based poet, essayist, and journalist. She’s also the editor-in-chief of Colta, a crowdfunded online publication that she created eight years ago and that has become a major outlet for long-form think pieces on contemporary Russian culture. Stepanova published ten books of poetry and three essay collections and has received numerous literary awards. In 2017, she wrote her first book of prose, In Memory of Memory. It’s a documentary novel that tells the story of the narrator who, after the death of her aunt, goes through the archive the aunt left behind, discovering her family’s history. In parts of this book, there’s no narration – just excerpts from diaries and letters written by Stepanova’s relatives; its other parts engage directly with other authors who wrote about memory – Osip Mandelstam, W. G. Sebald, and Susan Sontag. Despite or, maybe, because of the book’s non-traditional form, it gained a wide readership and won two major Russian literary prizes. On February 9, In Memory of Memory comes out in English from New Directions, translated by Sasha Dugdale, a British poet and playwright. This interview was conducted in Russian and subsequently translated to English by the interviewer.
In your novel, you quote someone saying that quite a lot of books have been written in English by people investigating their family histories. In Russian, though, your book is the only one of its kind.
Actually, it’s not the only one, which makes me very happy. To me, this is a discovery of sorts – that things we usually consider private and insignificant are turning out to be the most interesting not only for me, but also for a large number of people. And the stories they tend to tell sometimes are quite unexpected in their scope and variety. In some of them the twentieth century shows up in all its terrible glory, with all of its tragedies and disasters, but in a number of cases these are just regular domestic stories of how somebody’s grandmother arrived, or how someone left to work in the north, or how three sisters lived in a distant Hungarian village, but then decided to leave for the big city. And yet one can’t get enough of these stories. I think that this is a very important shift, this interest in familial memory. There’s an increasingly palpable hunger for contact with the past which grows stronger as the present becomes less acceptable to us. A couple of years ago, I worked in Berlin for a year, teaching memory writing in Humboldt University. I had large groups made up of different kinds of people, all of them hooked on this search for the past despite it sometimes being painful – because traveling to the past isn’t always pleasant. Moreover, this interest in memory is a global, international phenomenon, which is now shaping the outlines of a new community and works as a link between generations because it attracts people regardless of their age.
Do you have any idea why you became the first person to write about these things in Russian?
I wasn’t really the first one – writing one’s family history is something fairly normal in Russia, as elsewhere, and there is a good number books devoted to the legacy of the twentieth century and the traces it left in private lives…. Maybe the genre is something that makes a difference in my case: I was most interested in trying to shape a new territory between fiction and nonfiction: in my book, a novel, an essay, and a research project meet one another. I guess no one else wrote books like that at the time.
Do you think there isn’t a lot of experimentation happening in the Russian literary space?
This is how it works: since the beginning of the nineties, when literary awards appeared in Russia, the way contemporary fiction works has been largely determined by their existence. Winning one of them is the only opportunity for a prose writer in Russia to receive a substantial amount of money that can greatly improve their life. These awards, in one way or another, are geared towards finding the great Russian novel that is very similar to the great American novel. It’s a long, philosophical narrative without any stylistic nonsense – because it should be easy to read and digest – shaped within the mold of a nineteenth century novel. That is, the writer is forced to reinvent the wheel for the umpteenth time.
In other words, you didn’t expect that your book would become successful and would win two of these very same awards – NOS and Big Book?
I didn’t think about those things at all. I’ve been writing poetry all my life, and it always seemed to me that prose was the medium that wasn’t required of me, that if I wanted to write prose, I could easily write it in verse. And I did: I’ve written long narrative poems and all manner of ballads. At the same time, I always knew that someday I would write a book about my family, even though I didn’t know how I would go about it. I’d been meaning to write it from the age of ten, but I was taking a long time, endlessly getting distracted, looking for a chance to procrastinate a little while more. There came a point, however, when I realized that I had to do it. I set out to write a text that would be convincing to me, and there was one more goal that was even more important. You know, Brodsky has this essay called “To Please a Shadow.” This was what I wanted – to please my dead. I constructed my book in such a way that they would feel good in it. Maybe I could’ve written it in a completely different way, without all those historical and cultural references that work as a large structure into which my own stories then fit. I could’ve written a story about my family and nothing else, but I had in mind something that would belong to the realm of contemporary art. I wanted to create a space in which I could arrange the few remaining photographs, letters, and testimonies, and to make it so that they would feel good in this space, so that they would be seen and understood in the right way. This is how you work when curating an exhibition – you start with the space. I really didn’t think about anything else, and the fact that my book wound up being widely read was a shock both for me and for my publisher, who didn’t hope to sell more than three thousand copies, I think.
How did you arrive at this particular form for your book?
The book is about inconspicuous people, people whose lives resembled those of everyone else: they loved, they fell out of love, someone died, someone was born. As a family, they managed to survive many times, perhaps because they deliberately stayed on the sidelines. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they tried to be actors of history, but later they moved to its margins and spent almost a hundred years there. So, what worried me was the question of how to tell the story of people who didn’t really want to be noticed – and how to talk about people whose fates had nothing extraordinary about them.
I found the story of Lyodik who went to the front and died at the age of nineteen absolutely heartbreaking.
Lyodik’s letters have been in our family for as long as I can remember. When I was little, my mother told me about him sometimes and read his letters out loud. But it’s impossible to surmise from his letters what was actually happening to him and around him – he kept silent about that. In order to look beyond and understand what he kept silent about, I had to read a lot of historical literature on the blockade of Leningrad and the Leningrad front. A documentary novel is a genre in which there are a lot of gradations, that is, there’s a toggle switch that can be moved to the left, towards the documentary, or to the right, towards fiction. I’m probably keeping to the left of this spectrum. I have serious problems with the type of novel writing that uses people who are no longer alive as glove puppets to convey the writer’s own thoughts and emotions. I think and write a lot about the ethics and the etiquette of writing about the dead, about what is allowed and what isn’t, and at what point it turns into the exploitation of people who can no longer object to this treatment.
Have you come across books that dealt with the dead in a way that you liked?
There are a number of books that are great examples of how one can write about the dead without trying to make the story “interesting,” without trying to deceive, and at the same time doing this miraculous work of resurrection. First of all, I should mention W. G. Sebald because he balances on the border of fiction and essay writing in such a way that there’s a constant flicker. We want to, but we cannot ask: was this all real or not? Is this narrator Sebald or someone else with his mustache and his last name? It seems to me that a new type of literature is emerging which still doesn’t have a name, but it no longer fully belongs to either fiction or essay writing. The books I love most belong exactly to this type of writing that is gradually becoming more and more important.
You’ve mentioned in various interviews that fiction is becoming less and less interesting than documentary writing. Why, do you think?
Remember Mandelstam’s article “The End of the Novel”? It was written in 1923, almost a hundred years ago. He says in it that everything has changed, that the man of the nineteenth century had an individual fate and was therefore interested in the individual fate and its trajectories – hence the success and the significance of the novel as a genre in the nineteenth century and beyond, due to some kind of inertia. But we all know how the twentieth century dealt with these trajectories: it took these individual fates, collected them in a bundle, and broke them over its knee. Later, when the smoke cleared, it turned out that the individual survived, though not in the place where we kept looking. It’s no longer where the typical hero appears in the proposed circumstances and carries on their shoulders the novel construction. In the century in which people die in millions, one person isn’t quite the measure. An error, a detail, a very small thing – oddly enough, that’s the measure.
What kind of thing?
For example, a button that I saw at the Museum of the International Memorial in Moscow where they keep the belongings of the prisoners of Soviet camps. They have many remarkable things there, including an archive of drawings made by the prisoners. It amazed me – and I want to write about it sometime – because there are no scenes we remember so well from the Russian camp prose: no barbed wire, or German shepherds, or security officers on the watchtowers. But there’s a huge number of still lives with flowers as well as landscapes and portraits. For some reason, it was important to those people to create beauty rather than to give a realistic depiction of their circumstances. In this museum, I saw a button in which one of the prisoners had sent a note to his wife. This is a striking detail: they were horribly tortured, but they could give their overcoats to their wives for cleaning. This officer handed his overcoat to his wife, and from one of its buttons a corner of this note was sticking out slightly. On tissue paper, he wrote in microscopic letters about how he was arrested and beaten, and he added that he probably wouldn’t come back. The twentieth century is the time when life turns out to be so inhuman that people become speechless and can speak only for all of humanity, while objects do the speaking for them.
You’re fluent in English, and I assume that you’ve read Sasha Dugdale’s translation of your book. How did you like it?
I think it’s brilliant. Sasha is a wonderful poet and a close friend; she translated and still translates my poems – but my book is maybe the largest piece of prose she had ever translated. And what she did with this huge volume is, in my opinion, absolutely incredible. The Russian type of writing involves endless subordinate clauses that circle around the principal meaning until they finally find their way to it. The Russian syntax imitates the confusing, complex work of human thought, while English, it seems to me, entails a completely different logic and a completely different language etiquette. If you translate a Russian text aiming to convey mainly its syntactic features, it won’t deliver the intended message. What Sasha did was amazing: she found a balance between these two things. She delivered the message that is still the main objective of my work, and at the same time she created this English Russian that isn’t a literal reflection of the original, but somehow gives the reader an idea of how it works.
Your book has a subtitle – romance. In addition to its other meanings, this word designates a certain kind of song in Russian.
In the book, there are several definitions of the subtitle, and the reader can choose the explanation that they like best. To me, the English meaning of this word is the most important. I feel that this book is a love story, only it’s facing backward rather than forward, as is usually the case with love stories because love is always looking for some kind of completion in the future. Here, love is addressed to people who are no longer alive, so, on the one hand, my love is happy because I love them and I feel that they love me, but on the other hand, I can’t talk to them anymore, and this love is doomed in a sense.
Your book makes clear that your ancestors had to stifle their literary ambitions. Why was that?
When I began to sort through my archive, it struck me: they were all in one way or another people of the written word, even those of them who never intended to study literature. Therefore, there are parts in my book in which I don’t speak at all: I publish excerpts from letters or diaries to give my ancestors the opportunity to speak in their own voices. It seemed wrong and inappropriate to me to invent a voice for my great-grandmother where she had her own. On the contrary, I wanted them to say once again what they already said once, to get a final chance to be heard. My grandfather wrote poetry all his life, mostly comical, but when his daughter – my mother – began to write poetry too, he strictly forbade it, saying, “You’re Jewish, so you must have a profession.” My mother worked as an engineer all her life and never wrote poetry after that.
Was it the same way with you? Were you told not to write poetry?
In a sense, I’m the result of this half-century of their non-writing, because the first thing my mother taught me was to read and write. She was too shy to sing, so at night, instead of singing lullabies, she recited poetry to me. I turned out to be the completion of my family’s hope that someone could write and speak for everyone. It’s a lot of responsibility, because it’s like dragging around a suitcase full of family stories that haven’t been told, and I’m the knot in which they converge. I have to decide whether to talk about them or not, and what exactly to tell. On the other hand, I was infinitely happy, writing this book and doing almost nothing else for several years. I traveled to all the places where my ancestors once lived, and it was very strange and exciting. For example, I went to this microscopic village in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between Arzamas and Nizhny Novgorod, and there was no train there, only a bus that went there once a week, there was no hotel, no cafes, no nothing. And I looked at all of that and realized that there was some thread that connected me to that place.
Since nonfiction is more interesting to you than fiction, does this mean that you don’t read mainstream novels?
I have a very special reading routine: I read a book a day. This means that I constantly have to throw new texts into the furnace. I really love genre literature: for example, detective stories that have clear rules upon which the author agreed with me. It’s a game the author and I are playing. I also read complicated, experimental texts, and academic stuff. I do sometimes read mainstream psychological novels, but they don’t make up the bulk of my diet. If someone I love comes running and says, “Grab this new novel immediately and read it,” then, of course, I’ll grab it and read it. But when I’m in a bookstore, the shelf with freshly published novels isn’t the first one I’ll be looking at.
You don’t hide your political views: you oppose Putin’s regime. You must’ve had opportunities to leave Russia. Why have you stayed?
This is one of those questions that I have to ask myself every five years or so. When my parents left for Germany in the early nineties, I didn’t go with them. I stayed because I was fascinated by what was happening in Russia. It seemed odd to me to leave when the most interesting things began to happen. And now, I feel that someone has to love this place – with its monstrous situation into which we have driven ourselves, with Putin, with these comic-opera poisoners, with this “insane printer” [in colloquial Russian, this is what the Duma, or the state legislative body, is called – Punctured Lines] that passes these insane laws. Someone has to live here and to treat this space as their home, to make it meaningful. Which isn’t to say that I’ll grip this earth with my teeth and stay here under any circumstance. But as long as it’s possible to live here somehow, I would try to stay here. Because the worse it gets here, the more this place needs our love.
Svetlana Satchkova is a writer and journalist from Moscow, Russia, who currently lives in New York City and is working on her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her most recent novel People and Birds came out from Moscow-based Eksmo Press to popular and critical acclaim.
Punctured Lines 