What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life?
Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”
Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury).
Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year.
This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.
Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin?
Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019.
A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue.
I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound.
JY: The initial premise appears to be straightforward: a daughter delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. There is literally a point A to point B plotline. However, Wound beautifully complicates this, and we’re left feeling like there is no one destination. The novel mentioned procrastination as a part of the writing process and I wonder if we could view procrastination—a putting off, a delay, a detour—as an art form incorporated into this novel?
OV: Yes, the plot of the book is quite simple. When people asked me what I was writing about, I said that the book was about the path from A to B; such simplicity is possible in a math problem or in elementary physics. But life is a lot more complicated than a line drawn [between points].
I think the main character of all my writing is, first and foremost, time. Time contains within itself all the complexity of a person’s life, and of the earth. Time allows us to be here and now. And delay is always an illusion, because the work of memory, grief, writing, it continues even when we’re sleeping or standing at a bus stop. I always joke that I write in the bathroom. It seems like such a simple, routine activity, but going into the bathroom, I turn on the water, put my hand beneath the stream, and start to think. I’m always loath to spend time on everyday things, but now I know there’s nothing more important than washing the dishes or sitting at a bus stop waiting for the bus to come. It’s in the time when it seems like nothing is happening that the most important things happen. The formation of a worldview and of writing.
JY: Elina, you’ve said Oksana’s poetry is “terrifying”—in the right way—so I’m curious: what about it terrified or provoked you?
Elina Alter (EA): I guess it’s funny when you say that something is terrifying, because how do I qualify or justify that description? It’s just very brutal. Things are compared to torn flesh often, or putrid flesh. So, it’s gruesome and brutal but without being ostentatious, which I dislike in English language writing often—when there’s a purposeful vulgarity, a “look at me, isn’t this shocking?” But I think that for Oksana and her work, it’s not about shock value so much as it feels like the best description you can possibly offer for how she generally sees things. It feels less forced or performed, even though all poetry is a performance. I was drawn by the strength of [her work’s] vision. And that’s just as true for the poetry as it is for the prose.
JY: Alongside this focus on time and brutality, there’s an emphasis on the incomplete; why is the fragment form crucial to this book?
OV: I’m fascinated with fragmentary writing. To the extent of my ability, I’ve been studying the history of fragmentary writing in Russian, and I know that the fragment is one of the richest forms for working with a person’s experience and their memory. I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language is insufficient, it contains vacant spaces, because language isn’t enough to reflect the fullness of the world and its phenomena. The gun doesn’t need to go off, because the logical coherence of a text inheres in the planes of its syntax and structure, not in its action.
JY: In the book, you mention how memory is crucial for women’s writing—how do your own memories influence your writing practice?
OV: For me, memory is the most important tool for working with writing. This is possibly connected to my mental organization, but I’m always remembering things: when I walk the dog, when I teach. Memory is like a raging sea within me. It demands to be expressed in language.
JY: Elina, What drew you to translate Oksana’s work?
EA: Oksana had been publishing poetry for a couple of years before she wrote this novel, and I loved her poetry. I thought it was really remarkable and oppressive and kind of terrifying—in the way that it was intended to be. I’m also very interested in people who write both poetry and prose.
I translated [Wound] because I love the book, I thought it was really strong. What Bela [Shayevich] says—and I think this is true—is that some of the most interesting writing from the last twenty years in post-Soviet states has been done by writers who identify as feminists or women—not all the writing, but a lot of it. When people talk about Russophone literature, they’re still mostly talking about Dostoyevsky, and I find that somewhat infuriating. Not like I’m mad at them; it’s just that a lot of stuff happened after Dostoyevsky. [Wound] was something current, something happening now, so it also felt like an important thing to take on.
JY: What else do you think is distinctive about Oksana’s writing?
EA: I think that she is exceptionally clear-sighted. And that’s part of why some of the writing can seem brutal, because there isn’t much affectation. It’s not very dressed up, the way that she writes about herself or other people, and it doesn’t feel like she’s forcing a kind of style or caricature on anyone. It feels, as much as possible, like reportage. It’s very clear, which I appreciate. I also think that her willingness to think about the work of other writers is pretty generous, and it feels necessary to her [writing]. The critical apparatus is more necessary to Russian writers who, after the fall of the Soviet Union, had all of this work flooding in that hadn’t been coming in for years, whereas it had been traveling pretty freely between the US and Western Europe. For Oksana, it’s a genuine consideration of this work; it feels like an honest and exciting engagement with other thinkers and writers.
JY: Wound is centered on the mother figure, but it’s also about the narrator’s exploration of her sexuality; both seem to be tied together through their focus on the female body. I wonder if you wanted to elaborate on why you threaded these subjects together.
OV: I may sound here like an old-fashioned Freudian, but the story of my relationships with women begins with my relationship with my mother. My mother is the one who gave me a body and gave me language, who taught me to feel and to love. You could say she was the first woman in my life. I saw her body and I heard her having sex with her lover. Her voice is always sounding in my mind. Everything I’ve done and am going to do is and will always be connected to her. I’m not saddened or stymied by this—I just accept it as a given.
EA: There’s one thing that the book does—which I’ve tried to do in translation. (I’m concerned people aren’t used to it in English.) In the last ten, fifteen years or so, there’s been a movement among some Russian feminists to introduce feminitives into the language; previously, it was considered more correct to refer to everyone neutrally—a doctor is a doctor, regardless of the gender of the person performing the work. But some Russian feminists now prefer the feminine version, so a doctor is a doctorka, and so on, a female journalist is a journalistka. The book is consistent in using those forms, so I’ve been consistent in using those forms in English. Obviously, there’s a totally different valence attached to it in English, but I think pointing to the Russian usage is important. I’m not sure if anything other than the feminitives would stand out, particularly to a reader. But then again, I’m probably not the best person to ask this because I’ve been living in the book for a long time. I felt a little insane at the end.
JY: The narrator talks about writing poetry for the living, but these essays [are] for her dead mother. What do these different genres do for you, and what was behind your decision to move between the two?
OV: When I teach writing, I always ask my students for whom they’re writing. It’s not a question about their target audience, but a question about the entity to whom the writing is addressed: the addressee is beyond life and death. I think [the addressee] is literature and time.
My writing is performative; each time I begin a prose piece or a poem, I enter into the writing and respond to questions pertinent to that particular text. For the heroine of Wound, the border between the dead and the living is obvious, and she makes clear the distinction between prose and poetry. Now, in 2023, having written this novel three years ago, I can no longer return to that text and answer this question.
JY: What are you most excited for Anglophone readers to encounter in this book?
EA: If people who don’t normally read poetry are excited about it, that’s always gratifying. There isn’t a great amount in the book about desire, but I think that what is in there about passion is very powerful. I miss that, sometimes, from books that have a lot of sex but the sex itself seems mechanical or regrettable. I’m curious what the response will be, because Oksana describes what it’s like growing up as a lesbian in Siberia, then in Moscow, and the divisions that exist within the queer communities there—which don’t exactly map onto the divisions within the queer community here [in the United States]. I think it’s also a good record, a brief insight into the Soviet century, through the lives of her mother and grandmother and great-grandmother. The short section that deals with that has a lot to say about the inheritance that people of her generation—which is also my generation—are living with.
JY: In a way, the novel begins with paperwork—the bureaucracy of death, as the narrator tries to get documentation for her mother’s ashes. As Wound expands, we could view it as paperwork: handling grief through paper and words, balancing the abstract with the material. Could you speak more about these connections between grief, the space created by paper, work, and language?
OV: I’m still grieving. A little while ago, I was walking with my dog in the woods, and I realized I couldn’t call my mother. I think I’ll grieve for the rest of my life. My grieving will end when I myself become dust. A poet I know said that the book is dust—black letters on a white background gathering to become text. But I don’t think that working on writing helps me with my grief. I’m a writer. Writing is my job. Creating texts, worlds, spaces—that’s my work. I draw a line between my work and my personal experiences. My auto-heroine certainly felt relief when she finished writing her book, but I, as a person, have to keep living, and I still suffer.
JY: Steppe and Rose aren’t yet translated into English; I wondered if you’d like to talk more about these books, and what it was like to write after Wound.
OV: Steppe is concerned with my father who died of AIDS, but like my other work, it’s not a book precisely about him. It’s a book about a generation of men born in the 1960s—who were young in the 1990s. They were infected with a myth of masculinity and became part of the destructive culture of the 1990s, and then a new era began and each of them found his own way in the new world. From his youth, my father kept his drug addiction, his gangster music, and HIV. Steppe is mostly a book about Russia. Like all my books. Rose is a book about my aunt, who died of tuberculosis at thirty-eight. She was my mother’s sister, and her whole life, she tried to overcome the inertia of the family. She wanted to be free, like I do.
Rose is the most beautiful book in the trilogy. It contains the greatest amount of light and a considerable amount of meditation on depression. About two years ago I was finally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and one of the consequences of the disorder is severe depression. While trying to deal with my mental illness, I began to realize that my aunt Svetlana complained of having the same symptoms that I was living with: severe migraines, whole-body aches. I started thinking of Svetlana and realizing, in retrospect, that she had the same disorder as I do. She was always an outcast and everyone blamed her for her illness and her death, and as I wrote the book, I realized that a lot of her death-wish really came from her desire to break free. Of the world, her body, her family. I felt a complete sense of kinship with my aunt, and having written about her, I felt liberated.
After Wound, I suddenly felt very strong. I understood that for all the years I’d been writing poetry, I had forbidden myself to write prose. Now, having gone through the writing of a trilogy, I can proudly say that I’ve learned to write better. And I want to keep learning. I think a person learns to write all her life.
Oksana Vasyakina is a Russian poet and curator. Her debut poetry collection, Women’s Prose, was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize in 2016, and the original Russian-language edition of Wound won the NOS Prize in 2021. She lives in Moscow, where she teaches courses on writing and feminist literature.
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Paris Review, The New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor of Circumference, a journal of translation and international culture.
Jaeyeon Yoo is a PhD student in Literature at Duke University. She is a contributing writer at Electric Literature and an editor-at-large for Barricade. Her work has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Millions, The Carolina Quarterly, and more.
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