Wound (2023, Catapult), the debut novel by the queer feminist Russian poet Oksana Vasyakina, at first concerns her dying mother, whose approaching demise sets into motion a metronome of daily routines: grocery store runs, funerary decisions, peeling potatoes, and the silent distraction of police procedurals. But when her mother, a former factory worker, passes early on in the book, the coils of the narrative untwist and intertwine to tell the stories of Vasyakina’s quest to deliver her ashes to Siberia and her own journey from being a daughter to the woman she has become.
Though it sounds like the narrative of an auto-fictional novel, where Wound actually lands is somewhere between an intimate journal and the kind of notebook Joan Didion described as “patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées.” The result is a book that is both ambitious in scope and self-aware of its own ambitions, containing the insights and trappings of a writer wanting to observe and be observed, resulting in a writing Vasyakina likens to a pebble casting rings in the water: “I fall and glide and sink down to the very bottom of myself and travel far and deep into Siberia, into the wide open dark.”
Vasyakina is an exhaustive documentarian of the bureaucratic swamp of responsibilities and emotional management one has to face when a loved one dies. At turns somber and sentimental, Vasyakina’s methodical accounting of everything down to the travel logistics can feel like a response to her “mother’s resolutely unseeing eyes,” a tenderness that had long threatened to evanesce for Vasyakina. Her memories of the fleeting joys of Proustian good-night kisses and other achingly short affections deepens Oksana’s understanding that to love and possess a woman is not the same as to be accepted as one. Only in her passing can Vasyakina fully embrace her mother: “When she died I felt ecstatic—mama is finally mine.”
While Vasyakina the novelist seeks to to remember things with meticulous clarity, Vasyakina the poet is determined to carve out a larger story using the scaffolding of diary and verse to build a oneiric portrait of the national psyche. And it is “the frenzied steppe,” as she writes, of her poetics that centers the book, a feat by her translator Elina Alter to give Vasyakina’s voice consistency. Vasyakina’s frenzied steppe, the formation of Wound, is not that different from Georgia O’Keeffe’s desert; both the landscape —vast, limitless, and gray like a mother’s hair—and a feminine body as warm as a womb, its embrace extending to everyone Vasyakina writes about.
Like Gogol in Dead Souls, Vasyakina employs the device of a peripheral character to paint a bigger picture of the collective consciousness of the country itself, and her observations of other people are particularly vivid. When the book opens, we are introduced not to mother or daughter but to Lyubov Mikhalovna, a devoted Christian with grayish swollen arms, who believes she has set her cancer in remission through prayer and holy water. Lyubov’s appearance, like many other peripheral characters, is brief: she doesn’t return after the first two pages. But in portraying her and others, Vasyakina works her memory as on a whetstone, shaping an otherwise hazy mass of recollection. There is the benevolent ferryman of Astrachan who refuses payment for transporting the dead across the Volga, a crime for which he is later fined three thousand rubles (about $50 in 2018). Vasyakina writes, “Not even the dead can dodge the fare.” Later, when bringing up her homophobic cousin, Michail Sergeivich, Vasyakina lends an ear to his complaints about the gas man: “It was already expensive to replace the pipes, and now the fitter was asking for three thousand rubles on top of that.”
The same fee for transporting the corpse and fixing the gas in the house evokes a Gogolian reversed logic: it’s the living soul that is dead. When discussing the village’s traditional funeral bundles, Vasyakina mentions grandmother Anna who “kept cuttings of old wallpaper: she insisted that her coffin be covered in kitchen wallpaper, so she’d be at home in it.” The narration moves on, but Baba Anna is metaphorically fixed in her coffin-shaped kitchen, having tea and pickling cucumbers. Absurd details like these demonstrate Vasyakina’s prowess as a poet, where even a “sparkling new stove in the corner of the kitchen” is “still veiled in plastic, like a bride.” The scale shifts, what’s important is shrunk, and the banal is enlarged, all to encompass the nation’s larger sense of loss. The eventual wake of her mother, the crematorium bureaucracies, the choice of the urn, and a visit to the pathologist adds to the array of insignificance made significant.
In small towns across Russia, death and being deceased do not mean gone forever. At the cemetery, Oksana notices a grandmother talking to her grandson about which plot to buy for her recently dead husband: “plots at the cemetery are expensive, but he had to be buried next to his mother like he asked. Maybe he can be buried at the district cemetery with his son-in-law. But then the grandfather would be angry and come at night and yell. All his life he’d yelled at everyone and wasn’t going to stop now.” The dead have no trouble crossing the threshold into the world of living because there is no such threshold—it’s one world. Oksana’s mother indulges in the same brand of magical thinking: “Bury me next to Grandma, she said. Not next to Sveta, we fought before she died.”
Vasyakina is most compelling when she grapples with the collective trauma of womanhood in her family and the country as a whole. Men are violent and pathetic “damp wooden” creatures with “puppy eyes.” Valya, Oksana’s cousin, is convinced that the family is cursed, but only the female line, so Valya is lucky to give birth to a son. “Who cursed us?” Vasyakina asks as the grotesque and grim epos of the family unfolds. Grandpa Tolya, who “drank like a fish and played harmonica.” Grandpa Kolya, who lived in raspberry bushes, abused the grandmother and stole her money to buy Prima cigarettes. The world is governed by an incomprehensible force that keeps women living with men who beat them to death, where the culmination of one’s desires is a new washing machine, where money is stashed away in stacks of ironed linen and slowly dispensed on birthdays and holidays.
Though the book is filled with examples of social malady, the title of Wound refers to the melancholy that sets in after the death of Vasyakina’s mother. Like Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, whose soul resembles a locked piano with a missing key, Vasyakina compares her mother to a container: “an envelope, a guarantee of this world.” If the container is closed within itself, does it create the same kind of unreachable hollowness in the daughter? Melancholy seems to be Wound’s prevailing response to that empty space, yet it’s where Vasyakina gives in to platitudinal generalities (“writing is a path”) that fall flat, losing herself at times in the marrow of grief as she seeks to unlock the box, to suture “the wound,” to heal.
By the end of the novel, it felt as though I was on a three-way call with Vasyakina, her critics, and her therapist, which is a criticism that can be made of much contemporary fiction. “I don’t have a different self,” she writes, “and I don’t have a different understanding of the world or of writing.” Yet even Vasyakina chastises herself for these justifications: “I am tired of searching for grounds to call the literature I write literature.”
Wound, for all its grace and messiness, for its forays into diarism, journalism, memoir, and narrative, is still very much literature. When she moves the spotlight from herself to the world around her, Vasyakina powerfully encompasses the absurd and expansive universe of what Gogol described as the “unbridled incomprehensible Rus,” the land with its terrors, its poetry and loftiness and its magic, to the skin and bones of the tender and violent people who inhabit it.
