“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

— “Ulysses” by James Joyce

Into her eyes, the wind drove smoke and ash from a poorly kindled mangal1 and made the sky dissolve. Celestial bodies rolled about like billiard balls, be it the stars, the moon, or satellites and the ISS. Our heroine felt them upon herself, their brightness, their weight, their distance, both physical and metaphorical. The sky above the dacha2 was clear. Visibility stretched far, so far that one’s eyes rippled at its magnificence. Too beautiful, she thought. Such beauty ought not to exist. Such beauty could drive one beyond one’s wits. Such beauty should be outlawed, denied legal counsel, stripped of the presumption of innocence, for it, this unattainable beauty, is the prime cause of all human joys and woes. Yet, for some reason, no one else paid any attention to it at that moment; instead, they looked at each other, and not just looked (”Would be terribly awkward, wouldn’t it?”), but interacted, conversed, socialised. Was their interest genuine, or was it all a game with unspoken rules that everyone pretended to play? The people around were far from celestial, not yet anyway (”Touch wood!”), and far from luminaries, except perhaps in the sciences3 (”Fingers crossed”), but it was pleasant to share the same space and time with them, to observe them, to analyse their Chekhovian-Beckettian dialogues for meaning, while remaining silent herself. She could crack a joke when appropriate, throw in a sharp remark, answer a question directed at her. Yes, there were oddly many of those — she had suddenly become interesting (”Suspicious…”). For hours, she could wait, listen and re-listen, all while drifting somewhere else. Always this “somewhere else”; there’s no escaping it. It’s celestial, visible yet untouchable, impossible even to give it a proper name, for words are never enough to describe what you’ll never see. Some things have no name at all and cannot have one, so we call them names foreign to them to give them some semblance of form.

— Are you here? — Alyona smirked and sat beside her.

Me? Oh, if only I knew, she thought. Seems I’m here — here I sit, getting by without a sigh, nothing but skin and bones. How are things? As white as soot, no offspring to report4, watching the stars, warming myself by the mangal, listening to Kolya’s mediocre yet rather sweet guitar playing, but am I here? Perhaps. I’m just all dreamy, mysterious, unapproachable, with a special aura of alt girlie5, quiet but with volumes of Nietzsche and Machiavelli in my little black rucksack (”The straight-A student aura has long become boring to cultivate; straight-A students aren’t interesting to anyone and possess no mystery, except perhaps the ability to irritate those around them”).

— Uh-huh.

— Not cold?

— Nope.

— Want a throw?

— Won’t say no to a throw.

— Back in a sec, — Alyona smiled and vanished into the dacha house.

From there, laughter could be heard, loud music was playing, something from the charts, some nameless, thoughtless, worthless, mechanical repetition of three notes (”Sometimes fewer”) and lyrics about nothing of substance. It didn’t let her think, yanked her out of “somewhere else”, so she couldn’t hear anything but the music, neither others’ voices nor her outer voice nor her inner voice. A waste of time and eardrums — only pure, imbecilic decibels, or in other words, music for dimwits. Even Kolya’s guitar, though imperfectly tuned, had some soul and sincerity.

Alyona returned with a throw and draped it over our heroine’s shoulders. She also brought a bottle of wine and plastic cups with her.

— Beautiful, isn’t it? — she said, looking at the sky.

Our heroine nodded. They sat, silent. Silence is pleasant; you can observe it meditatively, like fire, the only difference being it doesn’t crackle.

— Well then… Ripe for some6? — asked Alyona, shaking the wine bottle.

I’m not an apricot, thought our heroine. “Ripe…” Why does everyone use this phrase? Ripe for what? Ripe for wine? Ripe for a husband? Ripe for children? Being a ripening apricot would be far more interesting, for you can extract cyanide from its core. “Ripe” indeed… This phrase in another context would seem like an attack, but from Alyona it sounded soft and unobtrusive (”No cyanide for her”). She probably wouldn’t have suggested wine to our heroine at all if she herself hadn’t already been “ripe” for four glasses (”No, I’m not keeping track. The girl’s grown up”).

Everything from Alyona always sounded soft and unobtrusive. Suspicious, as it seemed to our heroine at first (”Truly suspicious”). Usually, if someone were that kind and courteous, friendly and glowing with interest, it meant they wanted something from her.

— Maybe we could go somewhere? — they would say.

— Looking good today, you. Nice skirt, — they would say.

— May I borrow your essay? No, I won’t copy. It’s for inspiration. I’m having writer’s block or such, — they would say. — I know it’s about personal feelings, but isn’t personal universal?

— It’s five minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock, — they would say. — The geopolitical situation is complicated. Our predicament isn’t predetermined.

— You’re the smartest girl in the class, — they would say. — Did you know that?

— Oh, we were born on the same day! — they would say.

— I’m a foreign businessman with a very, very big black Lamborghini and hair transplanted from my arse. Pleasure to meet you. Want to see my cock? Though why am I even asking... here you go!

— Massive, indeed, like your mum, — our heroine would answer.

— I’m just a simple guy, you know? Not like those other guys. Want to come over and watch me play Counter-Strike while I drink beer from the can? I’ve got frozen pizza, — a skufidon7 would say.

— I’m honest, I’m always honest with you, — they would say. — No, my sincerity isn’t ephemeral. It actually exists. No, why are you saying it? No, I don’t have “an ulterior motive”. That’s your “motif”, that thinking. I just want to be friends.

— Oh, please, — she would say. — Spare me, won’t you?

With Alyona, with Kolya, and the others gathered at the dacha, there was none of that. They needed so little from her that it became suspicious. They, like her, enjoyed sharing the moment, gossiping about professors falling asleep during lectures, deans running corruption schemes, discussing anything but studies, laughing at her politically incorrect jokes, except those about comrade Yehoshua (”May his memory be blessed”), for Alyona took her baptism too seriously (”The girl’s grown up”).

Our heroine didn’t notice how all slow rationality abandoned her, and something inside her decided that she was ripe and grown up, too.

— Really? — Alyona couldn’t believe it.

Our heroine and alcohol were supposed neither to be mixed nor to be shaken, not invited to the same party, kept apart in every way possible; even putting them in the same sentence wasn’t recommended, or else one might receive a witch’s wrathful glare, a disgruntled feline hiss, accompanied by “I’ve already said I don’t drink”, “Well, maybe you’ve changed your mind?”, “Maybe I haven’t changed my mind?”, “Well who knows, maybe you have changed your mind after all”, *threatening screech of rolling eyes*.

— Pour before I change my mind.

She felt coldness on her neck.

The wine appeared winely; she knew well what it looked and smelled like. At every family feast, there was always cheap cardboard box wine for the ladies and vodka for the gentlemen. In respectable company, the type of alcohol wasn’t important, for everyone got sloshed in the same manner and practised the same disgusting behaviour each in their own way and did and said things they wouldn’t do or say otherwise.

— She can drink already. She’s here at the table with us grown-ups. It’s just a spoon anyway, isn’t it? No more than a spoonful of cough syrup.

— No, she can’t, she’s only a girl.

— Oi! Look at him, ha-ha. Face in a salad.

— I wash my rug every week. They say so in the news.

— Capital punishment is what we need.

— You, uncle?

— Well, not we, the country.

— Why would you wash your rug every week? What’s the point?

— Look at her, grown up everywhere, in every way, a fine girl, I must say. Can’t believe she’s only fifteen, can you?

— Wasn’t your grandfather executed by the KGB?

— There was no KGB back then.

— There was, has always been.

— I just use washing powder, there’s no secret.

— You blink, and she’s married, just wait. The girls are nasty these days. You’ll babysit your grandkids soon, I’m telling you. Look at her.

— Do you know Galina, a friend of mine? Her son, Denis, they spent a week with us when you were three, got all As.

— I heard he’s also grown up everywhere, in every way. Back from the army, he is.

— No, mum, he and his brother have one brain between them.

— Don’t say that. Why would you say that?

— He’s an idiot, mum, it’s no secret to anyone, is it?

— Listen to her. Young but already cunty.

— Language! She’s a teenager.

— Should it be whitening washing powder?

— I heard they just use soot because why not?

— Why not indeed.

She would crawl into the wardrobe in her room, plug her ears, wait for it all to end. If there were no wardrobe, she would just sit, ignore everyone and everything around her, and be “somewhere else”, somewhere where she had all the bitterest remarks to every dimwitted dialogue.

— Well, how’s the wine? — asked Alyona.

— Like wine, I suppose.

— Tasty?

— Strange. Sweet.

— Georgian.

— Thought it would be bitter.

— There’s bitter wine too. Probably.

— Like what?

— Like bitter wine, I suppose. Ha.

— Like wallpaper paste?

— Wallpaper paste??? What does wallpaper paste taste like?

— Very, very, very bitter.

— Did you taste wallpaper paste?

— Accidentally. I was bored when everyone was putting up wallpaper. I was five.

— What was the wallpaper?

— Like in a hospital. White.

Alyona smiled. She had a beautiful smile. She could sing too, did ballet, had fair hair, but was no friend to mathematics, wouldn’t have managed without our heroine — in other words, her complete opposite.

— Really never drank before? — Alyona asked.

Our heroine shook her head.

— Nope.

— You’re having me on.

— Nope.

— Everyone drinks.

— I don’t.

— Never?

— Not in my memory.

— Why?

— First it wasn’t allowed, then didn’t want to, by inertia, then read “Brave New World”, and well… you know me, — she finished the phrase and took a few sips.

Besides sweetness and the taste of surrounding smoke, she felt little else. It burnt her throat slightly, like cough syrup. That was all. How much does one need to drink to get drunk?

— What would a female Savage do? I mean, what if the Savage were a woman? — asked Alyona.

— Anything but suicide. Why all that drama? She’d fly off to a retreat on a quiet island in the Pacific, get into numerology, write a book, “How I Escaped Toxic Consumer Society and Found Myself”. Or just marry some City trader and open a yoga studio.

Alyona laughed with her mouth full, spraying wine on the throw.

— What? — Our heroine smiled.

— A bit cynical, that.

— You know I’m cynical.

— You’re not, though you want to be. Not everyone’s an influencer these days.

— Not everyone, but even Tolstoy would have a TikTok about life in the village and shagging peasant women.

Alyona’s laughter was ringing, almost childlike, unlike our heroine’s.

— Crudish.

— Prudish.

— A toast. We need to drink to that. This one’s on you.

— My first glass, and you want a “toast”. I’ve no experience in the matter. I don’t play games I cannot win.

— Well, learn first, then win.

— People probably spend years learning before winning.

— You’re clever. You can learn quickly.

That our heroine couldn’t deny — she was at a dead end. She didn’t want to think about anything, for thinking meant being “somewhere else”. To think means to immerse oneself in one fantasy, which leads one to another fantasy, and then to a third fantasy, and so on, spiralling down or up through that fantasy helix. Yes, respected teacher? Where am I? I’m here (”Actually, I’m somewhere there”). I’m not distracted at all. No, I’m not thinking about boys. Cross yourself!8 Do you think I’m a stupid girl? A nymphomaniac? I think about great things, Tamara Alekseevna. If you think about men, it doesn’t mean everyone’s like you. How dare I? Well, I’m a student — you asked, I answered. You won’t give me a failing grade anyway, even for bad behaviour; I behave well, or rather “not at all” — behaviour interests me little, and you can’t reproach me for unfinished homework, unlearned verse, failed test. I know everything, sometimes even more than you (”Right, what was I… ah yes, toast!”)

— To all this fuckery!

— Ha. Straight off like that?

— Well, why not? I don’t know what people usually drink to. To health? To love? To peace? To friendship amongst nations? To a bright future after dictatorship?

— Sometimes you can drink to “all this fuckery”, I suppose.

— Well then, to all this fuckery.

They raised their glasses and clinked, though plastic against plastic doesn’t create an authentic experience. Our heroine emptied her cup in an instant.

— Well, you’re going for it, girl.

This was purely intellectual interest and pathological curiosity. The expected sensations of intoxication weren’t there for some reason, and our heroine wanted to understand what was wrong with her again and what would happen when/if suddenly these sensations appeared, what they were like, what would become of her, and what of her “somewhere else”. The cat sits on the mat, mother sees Spot run9, father drinks beer, mother scolds, father hits, mother cries, our heroine hides, first in the wardrobe, and then, when the streams of spirits reach it and begin to seep inside through the gap between its doors — in “somewhere else”. Advanced problem: when she starts drowning in wine, how will Gandalf come to the rescue: on eagles, on a blue helicopter, on a yellow submarine, or on an ark?

— Want more?

— Don’t know yet.

— Who knows, maybe you’re wild.

— Me? Wild?

— Maybe you’re wild and we never knew.

— Anything but wild.

— Shy and quiet, but then, all of a sudden, wild — your real personality revealed.

— People better not see it, my real personality.

— We don’t know that yet. Maybe she’s nice and not wild at all. Tell me, what do you feel?

— Nothing, — she said with a shrug.

— Stand up, walk around. Get your blood moving. Stand up, it’ll go straight to your head.

Wrapped in the throw, our heroine rose and began taking big steps along the garden paths laid with blackened boards, to the fence, around the mangal and back (”Hmm… Not even wobbling a bit”). The sky was clouding over and the celestial bodies started fading.

— Nope. Nothing.

— And nothing in your head?

— Nope.

— And your mood? Happy?

— I wouldn’t know — I’m always happy.

— Oh, sure…

— Well yes.

— Comédienne.

— Secret happy personality.

— That’s for sure.

— Pour more. I reckon I’d be more drunk from kefir10.

— Truth is in wine.

— In vino veritas.

— Lush.

Why do people always dissolve into ethereal substrates over time? *Poof!* — and gone as soon as you stop reminding each other of your existence.

— We must see each other, — they would say.

— Let’s keep in touch, — they would say.

— If you’re in Tulubaika ever again, write to me, — they would say.

— At least post them stories from your Europes, — they would say.

— You know I post nothing.

Well, good riddance, but where do they go? Were school friends even real? Some managed to drink themselves to death, get hooked on drugs, go to prison, become family people (”Not sure which is worse...”), a rare few flew abroad, even rarer were those found hanging from an old birch in Victory Park after what was presumably an unsuccessful escape either from fascists or from antifa or both of them, or who were simply marathon runners. Got carried away, you know, ended up in the wrong area, stumbled with a neck on a rope, hanged themselves, didn’t even bother to soap it, didn’t even invite me to the funeral... What kind of person does that? Eh… Friendship is tested in troubles, unless it’s troubles in the head11. (”Oh, seems like the fingers on my hands are starting to pulse!”)

— I’ll step out.

— Go ahead.

In the mirror above the sink, she still saw a familiar face: no red eyes or red swollen nose, only ears… ears slightly reddened and a bit of a blush on her cheeks. She ran her fingers through her hair to push it back. The skin on her head was tense, a tad less sensitive than usual, yet more pleasant to touch. The experiment was going steadily; the subject was normal: no sudden desire to dance, nor to pour out her soul to those around or punch someone in the face; neither a straitjacket nor an adrenaline shot was required; quite the opposite — mental activity was bubbling. She wanted to think, think more, think about everything, think about the past, about the future, about thinking itself — to metathink, if you will — about the best moments, about the worst moments, about the best moments that became the worst, about the worst moments that turned out to be quite all right. Should have thought earlier, now you can’t think it all in a couple of hours, girl. Think, think, think, think, or you’ll drown. Weave a raft from thoughts, or you’ll drown. Think, think, think. No, don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, or think about how to stop thinking, think yourself out of this thinking somewhere far away. Enough thinking for you, you’ve thought enough, philosophesse. Rain began drumming on the toilet window. How frightening, how frightening to be under control, and oh how frightening, how frightening to lose that control, but how terrible is the desire to act uncontrollably, having seized chaos. No, she wouldn’t lose these friends as she had lost childhood ones — they weren’t just ignorant infants seated together at the same desk by the whim of planida12 but adults who had consciously chosen each other’s company. That’s different.

The rain drove everyone to the table. They settled inside on old wooden benches covered with throws to avoid catching splinters.

— Are you all right? — asked Alyona.

— Yeah.

The bottom of the hot three-litre teapot inadvertently stuck to the plastic tablecloth, making it shrink and crease. The perpetrator of this mishap couldn’t be identified.

— Want some wine?

Our heroine’s face wrinkled. She shook her head and nodded at the teapot. Into a gigantic cup with a heavy bottom poured the so-called world-famous “fragrant dacha ambrosia”, a sweetened chai13 drink made from mint, gooseberry and blackcurrant leaves. She wanted to remember this taste. Soon, in a few days, she’ll have views of the Mediterranean Sea from the office on the twentieth floor, unlimited espresso, seagulls crying in unknown languages, perfectly paved and treed streets, galleries, museums, theatres, and all such cultural things (”And the sun will shine more than once a year...”). In foreign lands, over the hill, over the border, in strange parts, in the West, there will be no muddy pavements, no road potholes, no stinking buses that momentarily transform ordinary street puddles into Hokusai waves and drench you head to toe. It won’t still be dark at eight in the morning and already dark by three in the afternoon. But they won’t be there either, those very people, across whose faces her gaze jumped, to and fro, to and fro, as if recording how they distribute under- and over-grilled meat onto plates, serve improvised salads, cut and pass home-baked bread, wave forks, knives, napkins, make toasts, “clink” glasses, drink, laugh, make toasts again, “clink” glasses, drink, laugh, play guitar, sing, make toasts, drink, laugh, laugh, laugh, chat, take pictures, drink, laugh, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, take pictures. Cosy, strangely cosy, but at the same time suspenseful, as if she needed to be on guard, as if everything were unreal and out of time, not an event, not an occasion that was in her calendar and was about to end, but simply a non-phenomenal phenomenon, a fragment of life into which she had stumbled by accident, and where she shouldn’t have been, for she had always wanted to be somewhere else, but now, for some reason, did not.

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This story is a part of our serialisation of Tulubaikaporia, in particular, Episode 3: about all the fuckery & beyond. Previous Substack instalments available here. You can also purchase the whole book — it’s already out, and readers are writing reviews!

Get Tulubaikaporia

We decided to dedicate a big chunk of our writing and publishing capacity this year to Tulubaika and the ritual of saving it, meanwhile, of course, writing [READACTED], which might and should top the level of Tulubaikaporia, a prospect both quite motivating and demotivating at the same time. And, well, we promised to finish translation of Posts from Underground. All of those and more will happen in one form or another, sooner or later!

What does this almost a year-long commitment entail? Simply, we’ve realised we have “a novel” on our hands that can be (conveniently so) “serialised” in a way very few novels can be, because each episode of Tulubaikaporia perfectly or almost perfectly works as a standalone piece, a short story, a novelette. Read together, preferably in order that is “a measure of distance to Tulubaika on a helix”, they are designed to unlock something, so the sum of the parts does become greater and reveals “the hidden truth”, an absent centre. So, it is a no-brainer to release one episode at a time here or like we decided — one every two weeks, for some of them are quite long and we don’t want to rush and overwhelm you. A month after publication, each episode available on Substack will become locked under paywall. This way, during 46 weeks (or slightly more), everyone’ll have a chance to participate in the ritual and experience Tulubaika.

Together with that, as a way to express at least some of our extra gratitude to dear readers of Tulubaikaporia, a wonderful idea reinspired and reinforced further by ’s essay (below), was born in our head, the idea that there’s indeed a lot to talk about “arounds” of the book, about what couldn’t make it to the footnotes, about inspirations, art of various sensory fields that orbit the book or at least orbited the author when he was writing it, in other words, “complementary materials to Tulubaikaporia” or “Extras” that wouldn’t be necessary for “comprehension”, of course, but enrich the experience for those willing and, if we’re honest, lure more people into Tulubaika and the cultural world around it. That said, thank you, Denise!

noticements

Books Need DVD Extras

This past month, I was ill for a week, and so, per my internal rule, I allowed myself to watch The Sopranos. I began watching it for the first time in late 2022 when I had food poisoning in India; three and a half years later, I’m still only halfway through season four…

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2 months ago · 23 likes · 10 comments · Denise S. Robbins

We also felt that if we don’t do all that the village might disappear (!) collapse ontologically into irrelevance invisibility undiscoverability (!!) which is hundred and forty six per cent against the whole point of the book both as a literary cultural object and its (author↔book↔reader) function and as an idea that lives within it, and, well, as the sole cultural ambassador (!!!) of the village of Tulubaika, too. Ambassador of something that is no more! Imagine all those USSR or Yugoslavian (or many other) ambassadors and their faces when they were in such positions when their place of origin was no more, and yet in our case it’s the other way around — there never was an ambassador when the bloody thing existed but there’s now!

Tulubaikaporia is a book about our village and our own inability to go back to that village for various reason, be it physical or metaphysical, be it political or ontological, but it’s not the primary concern of ours, for the book isn’t autofiction and doesn’t try to be therapeutic, for its aspirations are deeper, more magical and even spiritual, such as an attempt to, firstly, say goodbye to it and our grandparents (as the dedication implies), and secondly, to immortalise both them and the village by turning the place and memory into a myth that can then live forever in the literary planes. So, as the subtitle states, Tulubaikaporia is indeed a ritual, not a gimmicky one but a real one, a literary one, the only available to humanity method of mythologisation-immortalisation. The first stage, we reckon, has gone successfully, for there’re already more people all around the world who have heard about Tulubaika than before, and the next step would be to make more people nostalgic about the village than have ever lived there. And with that, we need your help this year!

The book

Now, we humbly bow away to see you in the next episode….
ALSO — THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE!!!!!

Of all stories in the book, Lingus Venus is the most distant to Tulubaika in many senses: geography, comprehension, writing, language. It was one of the first stories written for the book even before it became a book, and it is one of a very few stories originally written in English, as the result — not many footnotes. At the same time, it’s the closest to Tulubaika because precisely here, for the first time, we meet our heroine as a mysterious Sophiaesque figure. The reason is (if the reader can believe that) she’s possibly the book’s main heroine / protagonist! In this episode, however, her inner world is attempted to be seen through the narrator’s foreign eyes, so, if she = main heroine, then again, perhaps, in this story we’re farthest from Tulubaika. Much confusion! We’re just spiraling around! (Ah!)

Together with our heroine, a lot of concepts central to the book appear in this episode for the first time, all of which will be developed later. What follows is sensory satellites that shed light and orbit the episode…

Tulubaikaporia

Music & Sound

The playlist might not be music that directly appears in the episode, yet nevertheless it reflect the core mood of the text, or at least the author while he was listening to them while thinking / writing:

Binker and Moses — Accelerometer Overdose (a nod to the lament of a dying elephant) · YouTube · Spotify · Bandcamp

Kiltro — The Drunk · YouTube · Spotify

La Femme — Où va le monde · YouTube · Spotify

Rap&Vogue — Hotel Europe · YouTube · Spotify

Then, of course, playing throughout the episode in the background, we have the cicadian orchestra, in fact the loudest of any insect and comparable to a chainsaw, yet, while the latter is typically a sound of death, cicada’s chorus is a divine song of immortality, at least it was for the Greeks, who told the stories of muses transforming music-enchanted oblivious men into cicadas.

In a fraction of a millisecond… the cicadian orchestra starts its fierce symphony. Out of nowhere, a series of omnipiercing vibrating shrieks, like those of a spinning chainsaw or aroused starlings, takes over the space. BzzzzzZzzzZ BzzzZZZZzzz BzhzzzzZZzzZZZzzzZzZZZzzzZzzZzzzzzzzz and so on…

The City

Before us — an arcade, a long illuminated corridor with beige brick walls and a few dozen glass doors under an arching glass roof. The shops and restaurants are closed and dimly lit, the lights of melon-sized bulbs hanging sadly above empty counters.

We’re traversing a piazza, a concave square made of thousands of thousand-year-old convex stones polished by time and soles. In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus.

The unnamed and rather dislocated / liminal city of Episode Two, with its arcades, piazzas, canals, cobblestones, and seafood terraces under plexiglass, is located somewhere between Amsterdam and Rome, Venice and London, but it should look most like a Giorgio de Chirico painting, metaphysical cityscapes, which he painted in the 1910s and 1920s, depict exactly this kind of space: empty arcades casting long shadows, deserted piazzas with lone statues, a pervasive atmosphere of mystery suspended between dream and waking.

The very first painting in this style was The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon(1910). The painting depicts a part of Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce with oversimplified details. The main things we see are the almost empty square, the plain facade of the Basilica of Santa Croce and the headless statue right to it. De Chirico painted it during his recovery from a serious illness which made him see the piazza differently, as ill as he was. So he painted the piazza with that in mind, not focusing on the Basilica or any other objects per se, but focusing on his perception and vision of it instead.

None of the paintings depict night, when the Episode Two happens, and yet they map onto the episode’s mood and setting almost perfectly:

Venus

Look. This is Venus, — she says, pointing at the bright slightly pulsating dot on the sky.

Good thing about her is that once every 584 days she floats as close to Earth as she can and you can see her even in the city. Today’s that day. Today she’s as bright as you can see her from the Earth.

Venus is one of the episode’s thematic anchor’s, both the planet that bookends the night (visible at dusk as the evening star and dissolving at dawn), the headless goddess in the piazza fountain, and, well, the mythical queen ruling the episode.

Over eight Earth years (2,922 days), Venus completes roughly 13 orbits around the Sun (13 x 224.7 days ≈ 2,921 days). During those eight years, Venus passes between Earth and the Sun five times. These five points of closest approach, plotted against the zodiac, trace a near-perfect pentagram, sometimes called the “Rose of Venus.” The pattern shifts by roughly 2° every eight years, completing a full rotation over about 1,200 years. When we plot Venus’s geocentric orbit (its position relative to Earth over those eight years) the five loops of closest approach produce a five-petalled flower, the trace of its dance around us. The ancient Babylonian Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa— a 7th-century BC cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, copied from observations dating to c. 1650 BC — records Venus’s risings and settings over 21 years, making it the oldest surviving planetary astronomical text. The pentagram was Inanna’s sign, the Sumerian goddess who was Venus, whom the Akkadians called Ishtar, and five-pointed cuneiform star represented her orbit.

In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus. The statue has no head, the head has no eyes and no mouth, the figure has no hands and the hands have no fingers, it has no legs, no torso, nothing, the statue doesn’t even have itself, but it’s still there, visible, looming a few metres high over the piazza, dropping its shadow in all directions, overlooking the paused fountain, now filled with coins from all around the world — tributes to the goddess of love.

Orchids

Suddenly, I find myself alone in an orchid garden, a garden that is the whole world, a grandiose, boundless construction built to feature but one orchid elucidated in the cosmic glow… At its centre emerges the labellum, sensuous and pink, its lobes frilled with intricate ruching and folds.

This (unambiguous) orchid vision, hallucination, or dream, or all three, is what inspired the book cover and many imagery in the book throughout. It dominates the whole composition looming over it, pink and resplendent, so whenever you hold the book in your hands and look at the cover, you know what’s staring back at you.

~ ~ ~

Various Imagery

While the fish-headed waiters shout at each other in an unrecognisable tongue…

Arcimboldo built human portraits out of objects, e.g. his “Water” is a face made entirely of fish, crustaceans, and marine life: not exactly the waiter’s face but vibe-wise close enough!

On the porcelain plate right in front of me lies a slightly charred squirming tentacle of an ancient god, drizzled with saffron aioli.

Twenty rock oysters rest on the mountain of ice right in the middle of our table.

Around us, there’s a narrow and long public garden where, lanterned, grow various flora: camellias, roses, daffodils, lavender, hydrangeas, peonies, daisies, tulips, ferns, climbing ivy, jasmine, rhododendrons (lots of ‘em), wisteria, azaleas, chrysanthemums, lilacs, marigolds, irises, begonias, violets, cyclamens, heather, foxgloves, pansies, sage, more-of and more-poisonous yew, cypress, rosemary, juniper, fuchsia, dahlias, petunias, anemones, aster, zinnias, cosmos, verbena, and maybe some others I can’t recognise, for I’m not a botanical expert.

One of Tulubaikaporia’s features is it can be read episodically in random order skipping some of the episodes and still be enjoyed and understood at that layer. There’re, however, more and more layers!

In the introduction to “The Teacher of Symmetry”, which is framed as a translator’s commentary to the text translated from other language, Andrei Bitov, the author, writes this:

Each chapter of “The Teacher” can be read as a separate work; the reader is free to give preference to one or another as an independent story, but if they masters all in succession and hear the echo spreading from the previous to the next and from each to each, then they will discover its source, that is, they will read the novel itself, not a collection of stories.

We only discovered it in the late stages of writing Tulubaikaporia but it does seem to describe its organising principle perfectly, a principle that isn’t at all foreign to contemporary Russian literature as you can see.

The story today is one of the first written for the cycle and one of the few written in English. It’s also one of our all time favourites! And it can indeed be read as a separate story.

Meanwhile, new reviews:

“I am a myth. And you create it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“

— “Palisandria” by Sasha Sokolov

Among the timber tables run decrepit demon dogs, all ulcerated, their mouths bleeding, bubbling with an alabaster foam. I couldn’t care less about them, though. There’s me and there’s her, though for me, there’s only her, my heroine; nothing else matters, not even these weird creatures. The air smells of candle wax and balsamic vinegar someone has spilt at the table next to us. While the demon dogs are dead set on pinching anything off the tables, while the copious happy people around mumble, while the fish-headed waiters shout at each other in an unrecognisable tongue, while somewhere in the bushes right behind the restaurant cicadas compose a cacophonous lullaby, while branches of yew with red holey beads scratch the plexiglass roof of the terrace, my heroine, only my heroine, remains the sole focal point into which my decaying reality funnels, and while a fly drowns in my wine, I drown in her iridescent eyes. Those round, furtively blinking orbs are either grey, the hue of smoke or a thick morning fog, or green, the hue of jade, possibly faded a tad from overexposure to overattention. Around her dilated pupils, a ruby lattice of tiny capillaries has grown; masterful jewellery, her eyes now. Is this the third bottle this evening? C₂H₅OH and some other substances; the transmutation of the evening into the—

— This is secret ingredient of transmutation from evening into night, — my heroine says in broken tongue.

— What kind of ingredient, though?

— Secret ingredient.

— O-o-oh, I see. A secret ingredient.

— Secret ingredient, yes. You know what that mean?

I shake my head, lips arched up.

— This means I not tell you what is this. Did you think I tell you?

— You must tell me, though. My mother taught me not to take strange substances from strangers, especially strangerettes, which perfectly describes the situation I’m in right now.

— I understand. Mother word is law.

— I wouldn’t ask otherwise.

— Well, too bad, I still not tell you. Somewhere, somewhen, I am someone’s mother. Therefore, on a grand scheme of things, my word is law, “though”.

My heroine stretches a sly smile and takes a sip from her glass.

— But not now?

— You are so fixed on “now”. I not— I don’t understand.

My heroine keeps staring at me. She doesn’t blink, or perhaps we blink at the same time. It happens sometimes; people blink at the same time and never see each other with eyes shut, or blink in turns and never see each other with eyes open. I try to blink unevenly, at random times, so that doesn’t happen, but still never see her eyes shut. It is a state-of-the-art mesmerisation, no more, no less.

— I am. I won’t argue with that.

— Well, then don’t. Simple, da1?

— I won’t, but I thought it would benefit the evening a little bit and perhaps speed up the “transmutation” process if we build some trust.

— Such silly thing to say! I trust you. You’re crazy and naive enough to take pills from “strangerette”. You’re harmless. Harmless people trust everyone, you did that, so I think you “trust” me, in odd way. But why it matters?

A faceless waiter with five eyes, a peaky nose, and a Cheshire mouth under a Dali moustache walks by carrying on a plate a festering dog head sprinkled with parmesan and basil, the aroma of which overpowers the dog’s smell, as if it were pasta.

— Well...

— If you are afraid from falling, then fly. Or baituut. We said this in my village.

— Doesn’t make any sense to me, I’m afraid.

— You shouldn’t be afraid. You should turn on brain. Make it think, da?

— I’m afraid of “turning it on” to think about something like that.

— You see? You not understand. Risk of falling is not real if you already falling. It is in past and it is zero percent and hundred percent in same time, which in reality means it not relevant, which then means it not exist. Flying, on other hand, is w-a-ay more risky because risk of falling is still not zero — you can just fold wings! That is that.

— Didn’t know you were a risk manager.

— Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. I prefer to stay a strangerette. Maybe I will poison you, rob you, give you syphilis or something worser.

— Do you do that to many men?

— No, only to pretty ones. Rest I just rob.

— So I’m in grave danger then.

She scans me, head to toe, as much as the table between us allows, shrugs.

— Nah, don’t worry. I think you very safe.

— Very safe?

— What, I say not correct?

— No, I just thought I’d come back home with syphilis. I already dreamt of that.

— Well... no?

— I’m thankful.

— You should be.

— So, tell me, am I flying or am I falling?

— We will understand this soon.

On the porcelain plate right in front of me lies a slightly charred squirming tentacle of an ancient god, drizzled with saffron aioli. Shoggoth? Yog-Sothoth? I don’t want to know. The suckers on it stare at me by the hundreds of tiny eyes, not with pity, not with interest, but rather with irony, as if the tentacle is about to eat me: jump off the plate, wrap around my neck, squeeze until it cracks, and then, when my last breath leaves my lungs, crawl into my brain through a nostril and occupy my body.

— Maybe we should do it in the hotel.

She scratches her chin.

— Why?

I expect her to add “I do wonder” but she’s silent. My brain has started finishing her lines long ago.

— No, I mean... I am afraid I will start doing weird things soon.

— Weird things? For example?

— I wish I knew in advance, but no, I don’t know. Just weird things, stupid things, things you won’t like and I will regret...

— You have previous experience of doing weird things? I could make prediction about it. Maybe there’s trend...

— Are you an analyst now?

— Maybe I am an analyst...

— Like... I could start fighting with the waiters and then they would throw me in the canal and I would drown in there and die.

— No worry, I will pull you out from there. Did that happen before?

— Except the last part. Though I’m not sure about that sometimes... You don’t like your oysters?

Twenty rock oysters rest on the mountain of ice right in the middle of our table. My heroine’s order, untouched.

— I never ate oysters.

— You haven’t? I don’t eat oysters. They sometimes...

Here I think of how oysters, upon entering my body, would try to occupy it too, and I myself become an oyster, waking up in a rock shell the following morning.

— Well, I won’t spoil it for you.

— How do you eat them?

— You just, um, slurp.

— Slurp? What is slurp?

I kindly demonstrate the slurp sound.

— Ah, “slurp”. Okay.

Multiple signs of cunning surface on my heroine’s face: a smile, a squint, a long, thorough lip lick. She plots and executes, my heroine: takes an empty tap water glass, takes an oyster and pours it into the glass, setting aside the shell.

What are you doing?! I could’ve asked, but my curiosity suggests not to ask stupid questions and prefers to observe. My heroine takes a second oyster, a third, a fourth, ..., ..., until they all end up in her glass. Then, as I expected, she drinks them all (!), just like that, in one big slurp. Impressive. Somewhere in the back of my mind, one of my thoughts is already looking for where nearby one could buy an engagement ring in the middle of the night.

— What? — my heroine asks, a slight shyness in her posture.

— No, nothing. I am, well, I am, I must say I’m rather impressed.

— Rather?

— Rather, yes.

— I did something wrong?

— No, you did everything perfectly. Not sure I’ve seen anything closer to perfection.

— I can read irony.

— I know you can, that’s why it wasn’t irony.

My heroine smiles.

Next to us, in the artificial river locked into three walls of brick and concrete and one wall of light-polluted city atmosphere, among dark green algae, cigarette butts, and crumpled cans, a school of fish learns to fly. Do they fly or do they think they fly? Or do they fall horizontally? What do the fish feel at this moment? Where are they going so free, so aimless, so hopeful? Straining their fins, they travel to the spawning grounds where they, like zergs, in sin, will multiply in quantity, and then come back to hooks and nets, to fridges and freezers, to pans and plates, to fish and chips, to someone’s mouth. Mine perhaps. Or my heroine’s. Her pink lips, glistering with grease, unfold like an orchid in bloom and her red tongue licks the tartare sauce from her knife and her... Wait! My parents taught me never to lick a knife. It brings bad luck, it’s tempting fate, it’s bad etiquette, it’s basic sharp object safety. But she... For her... For her it’s a transference of energy or life force of the knife’s victim to the person licking it. She lovingly pierces a chip with her fork and starts chewing it, her sharp jawline going in zigzags. She is a rare species of orchid-flycatcher and I’m a not-so-rare species of fly who can’t decide between flying and falling. I can feel her chewing my head off with glee, or rather neutrally, in a manner of habit. My skull cracks open like a chocolate egg and the brain yolkly tries to escape this tragic transgression yet fates out like the fish. Then my heroine picks up a dried bucatini from her cocktail and, using it as a straw, performs one rapid succinct sip from my skull — *slurp!* — it’s gone! I’ve lost my head, I’ve lost my brain, I’ve lost my mind — I’ve lost everything.

— You never said it was so strong.

— You never said you were so weak.

— I’m not weak. I’m vulnerable to deception and drugs, like anyone else.

— Well, I am not vulnerable to whatever.

— Of course you’re not... You seduced me, fed me your weird pills and now my mind is melting. I see things I wish I couldn’t see. I think things I wish I couldn’t think.

— That is good description of my whole life. Strange that you need pills for that. What are you?

— I feel like, erm... (I wouldn’t tell her I saw her eating my head. That would ruin the romantique) My brain is made of malleable paraffin and it’s melting now, trying to escape this tragic transgression but fates out like the fish and my fish-fate appears predetermined, circumscribed by an insurmountable metaphysical aporia.

— Sometimes I don’t understand what you are saying.

— Just listen to the words.

— Is not fun to listen to the words when you can’t understand them, da? I could just listen to cicadas instead. Maybe I understand them better.

— What do they say?

— Cicadas?

— Yes, cicadas.

She scans her surroundings, squints intently, and, shrugging, returns her gaze to me. Those eyes again. I’m disappearing, flopping inwardly.

— Not sure. I don’t know much about Cicadian, or is it Circadian? Anyway, I know it even less than your tongue.

— Do they sing? Can you hear them singing a song?

After a short intermission of silence, the conductor hiding in the vegetation, its tailcoat fluttering in the wind, its eyes closed, its mind concentrated into a single dot, a dot that’s about to explode with music, spreads its little cicadian limbs and, bursting with pompousness, drops them down in one sharp stroke, cutting the air and, who knows, the whole world, the whole universe into two halves. In a fraction of a millisecond (which some oddly label “immediately”), as if the “start” signal was transmitted to them with no consideration of time, telepathically, the cicadian orchestra starts its fierce symphony. Out of nowhere, a series of omnipiercing vibrating shrieks, like those of a spinning chainsaw or aroused starlings, takes over the space. BzzzzzZzzzZ BzzzZZZZzzz BzhzzzzZZzzZZZzzzZzZZZzzzZzzZzzzzzzzz and so on... The orchestra, perhaps, consists of all living cicadas, all cicadas that have ever lived, and all cicadas that will ever live. The symphony, simple yet complex, discordant yet meticulously composed for maximum deafening effect, angelic yet demonic, rhythmic yet arrhythmical, turns the air around us into gelatin. Everyone and everything feels it. Every flower, petal, leaf, grass, poisonous yew berry, every glass and utensil on every table, the plexiglass roof of the terrace, every eardrum, every hair in every cochlea — everything trembles, neither from fear, nor from awe, nor from pleasure, but from belonging to something greater, to something shared, to something universal, as if now the vibrations emanating from the orchestra do not just touch everyone, but merge with them, propagated deep down to the innermost essence of every being and thing. It’s a rock opera. It’s jazz but with a billion “z” at the end of the word. It is a torrent of joy and agony combined into a hitherto unknown bittersweet sensation, a feeling of nostalghia for every fraction of a moment passed and every moment to come. Between the moments, if you tune in, you experience an eerie sense of quiet, like the universe has just pressed the mute button, and you have fallen through into a transient void. You feel its texture. You feel what the world really is, described in the cicadian tongue.

— ... That is how cicadas reveal to us the underlying vibrations of the world — through their music, through their unequivocal art, and they are just humble tree crickets. I can’t imagine what a human could do, — thus I finish my speech.

My heroine bursts into applause.

— Wow, I mean... Okay, it probably was too strong on you.

— Did you hear all my thoughts? The whole thing?!

— Yes, but because you said it out loud. And let go of my hand. I don’t mind it but your grip is just too tight, like a child handcuff.

I remove my hand from hers and look around. The dizziness takes over, and every person on the terrace, every guest and host (no dogs; they are gone, luckily), now has auras comprised of vibrating doppelgängers, their appearances multiplying before my eyes, each body fanning out into a cluster of blurred copies, as if the shutter speed of my mind-camera has gone snail.

— Sorry... Can you say something in your tongue?

— Like what?

— I don’t know. Something. I need to hear something I don’t understand because now, I reckon, I understand too much.

— You are ill? Here, drink water.

She moves her glass towards me and I pour it whole down my throat, together with ice. It feels like embers crawling down my oesophagus.

— We can leave? Have some fresh air.

— No, please just say something. Words, I need words.

— Such as? What do you want to hear?

— I don’t know. Just words. The whole thing I just thought... or said. About cicadas. Translate it to me. Please. I want to hear your native tongue.

— Okay.

I sit straight and look into her eyes. Mimicking everything else around, they multiply into dozens and hundreds as if she’s Argus now. I close my eyes and prepare to listen.

— Erm... well... it’s, ugh, kaiabtuluulbaiakkatu.

She’s silent. The only thing I hear is the cicadian orchestra.

— Wait, that’s it?

— Da.

— Is that what it means? The whole whatever-that-was translates into... that? Just... what? One word? Two words?

— My tongue is very expressive. And it’s not a word, there’s no such concept in my tongue.

— Where are you from?

— It’s called Tulubaika.

— Tooloo-what?

— Tulubaika.

— Toolookai- no... I can’t do it.

— Tu-lu-bai-ka.

— Too-loo-bai-la?

— No!

— I think you’re making it up. The wicked tongue. Everything. It makes no sense.

— No, I don’t. Why make up? World has enough things already.

— Yes, you’re making it up. I can see that in your eyes.

— You think I lie?

— No, not lie. It’s different. You’re making it up.

— No, I’m not. Why would I do that? I can’t invent nothing.

— I don’t know. To play me?

— I don’t play games.

— What was it again? Tooloobulu-something.

She’s laughing, I can feel she’s laughing, inwardly, she’s making fun of me, taking the piss.

— Tulubaika. Is Tulubaika.

— No, it can’t be real. This can’t be serious.

— It’s all very, very serious. Everything is serious.

— I don’t mean to sound impolite but is it some... I don’t know... rare unknown indigenous place? Is that where you are from?

— Tulubaika.

— But what country?

— Asking woman where is she from is worse than asking age, mister. You can guess my accent.

— I don’t know. I’m bad at accents. You’re extraterrestrial.

— Yes, good idea. I like it.

— I mean it as a compliment, by the way.

— I know. Now I say I am alien from Venus. Tulubaika is village on Venus. The only one maybe. How does this sound?

— Alright. I see. Venus. Well... Okay. I mean, why not. Describe it to me.

— Describe?

— Yes. I want to know what it’s like, Tooloobaila, Venus.

— Tulubaika! It is small, very small village, da? There isn’t nothing to describe, “I’m afraid”. It is very quiet and peaceful. There’re fields around and nothing else. We have a few small houses and we have orchid gardens.

— Orchid gardens? For real?

— Da.

— In a village?

— Yes, just one.

— An orchid garden? As in a garden with orchids?

— See? You don’t believe me, whatever I say. You don’t trust me. This is your problem. You must trust people. This is how society work.

— In Tooloobaila?

— Everywhere.

Tilting, I watch her eyes multiplying on her face.

— We’d better get some fresh air.

Along the cobbled path, high above the surface, run four legs, from them two bodies holding hands grow gradually, entwined into one drunken silhouette that chuckles, bursts with laughter — the silhouette’s only language. The words, the real words composed of morphemes with attached hints of meanings and history of the evolution of hundreds of tongues, have ceased to exist, dispersed into individual sounds, and these sounds, in turn, have dissolved into the air like vapour billowing from an air humidifier, and instead of them there now exist only glances, touches, emotions, laughs, the smell of hormones and alcohol, basil and garlic stuck between teeth, the waves of twisted electricity hopping joyfully from neuron to neuron, from brain to brain, liberated, given to themselves. Words are no longer necessary, necessity itself is unnecessary; it simply is, everything simply is. The memory that has been and memory to come, the coordinates of seconds, minutes, perhaps hours, and any sense of continuity are — *snap!* — gone. They are lines on paper filled with numbers and ticks that our brains cannot read. Chronology is not a property of time but a science that studies it, a pseudoscience for pseudopeople.

My heroine’s hand is cold and wet. She smells of wine and sweat. We’re traversing a piazza, a concave square made of thousands of thousand-year-old convex stones polished by time and soles. In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus. The statue has no head, the head has no eyes and no mouth, the figure has no hands and the hands have no fingers, it has no legs, no torso, nothing, the statue doesn’t even have itself, but it’s still there, visible, looming a few metres high over the piazza, dropping its shadow in all directions, overlooking the paused fountain, now filled with coins from all around the world — tributes to the goddess of love. The gusts of wind soar at the piazza, whistling around us as we escape the space behind us. We’ve abandoned our shoes and every stone in our cobbled path now feels like a little mountain. We’re flying above the mountains, thousands of little peaks, and suddenly hear the mus—

— Sound like someone is beating an elephant! Let’s go and see what is it!

Her hair all over her head, face and shoulders, my heroine pulls my hand somewhere, without waiting for my response.

— Beating an elephant? lol, I mean LOL.

— LMAO even, look!

Before us — an arcade, a long illuminated corridor with beige brick walls and a few dozen glass doors under an arching glass roof. The shops and restaurants are closed and dimly lit, the lights of melon-sized bulbs hanging sadly above empty counters. In the middle of the arcade, a saxophone produces a wildfree melody that its lone player attempts to tame. Her eyes closed, she doesn’t see us, and as we approach her, she keeps blowing, ordering the disorder of the air into melancholic vibrations, an elegant sequence of transient voids exquisitely arranged and timed together, weaving the empty space of the arcade into one single thick thread that leads us to... Where to? No idea. We tighten our collective grip, freeze and listen to the saxophonistess. We feel her wordless speech not with our ears but with our whole bodies as all the little hairs on our napes, hands, and legs rise, after the cold, refreshing, sobering and tickling sensation travels from our eardrums to our toes and fills our whole bodies with ecstatic charge. The song abruptly ends and the saxophonistess gives us a blissful smile.

In unison, we ask:

— What’s the song called?

Frowning, she replies:

— It’s not a song.

In unison, we express our persistent curiosity:

— But what is it called?

Upon a momentary pause, the saxophonistess answers:

— Let it be “A Lament of a Dying Elephant.”

Awed, quite so (myself, especially), we ask again (we must be very annoying):

— Has it died?

The woman seems amused by the conversation:

— Who? The elephant? I don’t know.

She shrugs, and we clarify:

— No, the song.

She’s almost laughing now:

— Ah, probably you can say that. I don’t think I would play it again.

— Why wouldn’t you?

— Because I have no idea or memory of what I’ve just played.

The song has passed from the physical world, for it stopped vibrating it and thickening and entangibilising its fabrics, but in our world, which is far from physical, it still sings. Inside our brains, it’s tattooed as a long sequence of notes, filling every convolution in dense calligraphic graffiti. It is a code, a program, an instruction, a spell, something that’s now running continuously on our joint brainware in a magical, metaphysical manner, despite having no repeated elements that our ears could catch. Hypnotised by (as everyone agreed) “A Lament of a Dying Elephant”, we dig coins from our pockets, tributes to the goddess of music, and transfer them into the saxophonistess’s hat resting in front of her like a loyal dog, and flee the makeshift concert hall.

Around us, there’s a narrow and long public garden where, lanterned, grow various flora: camellias, roses, daffodils, lavender, hydrangeas, peonies, daisies, tulips, ferns, climbing ivy, jasmine, rhododendrons (lots of ‘em), wisteria, azaleas, chrysanthemums, lilacs, marigolds, irises, begonias, violets, cyclamens, heather, foxgloves, pansies, sage, more-of and more-poisonous yew, cypress, rosemary, juniper, fuchsia, dahlias, petunias, anemones, aster, zinnias, cosmos, verbena, and maybe some others I can’t recognise, for I’m not a botanical expert. We stroll through the labyrinthine collection of flowers and read the names from the plaques beneath. The little pebbles that cover the road prick our bare feet. The ground is still underneath, existing, and we, in fact, are not flying. I can’t name the colour of my heroine’s eyes anymore. In the dark, they are just two shiny obsidians of cooled lava. A carefree and ironic smile rests across her face. Her hand squeezes my palm, plays with my knuckles, rolls them hither and thither. Here we are, two people surrounded by sleeping beauty.

It’s wrong but I want you tonight.

Say it.

No, can one even say that to someone in a park at night?

Can I argue with my inner voice? Does it even hear me back or is it just a monologuing entity?

Say it.

We stop. I grab both of her hands and look into her eyes.

— It’s wrong... but I want you tonight.

— To khnight you? (my heroine laughs) I mean, sure. On your knees, please.

My head’s overflowing with blush. The awkwardness condenses into one sloppy and scratchy lump and dives down through my throat. Left with no choice, I fall on my knees and bow to my heroine, my newfound queen.

— Are you ready?

My queen clears her throat and commences her speech:

— Before you rise, you must understand the very big responsibilities that come with this… well, impronto khnighthood.

— It’s “impromptu”.

— Da? “impromptu”-whatever khnighthood...

— It’s “night-hood”, you don’t say the “k”. Sorry... please continue.

— Khnight is good with valour, with justice, protects the innocent, and more so, speaks Istina2 even when it is total bullshit. You swear to do all that?

— I swear.

“My queen.”

— So, remember, you are not just any khnight; you’re my khnight for tokhnight. Your duty is to be present, to be yourself, and maybe even to enjoy this weird world we share. All good?

— It is, absolutely, yeah.

— Swear then.

— I do; I swear.

— So, with authority given to me and by virtue of stars and planets and Venus and all that we cannot see because we’re in this city and sky is not clear, I “hereby declare” (he-he) you my khnight. Stand up and not forget — names and titles are only words, just don’t be dick. Okay, we’re done. Rise, rise, my khnight.

Something’s definitely rising at this moment. I shake the dust and bits of leaves off my knee. She smiles, grabs my hand and drags me further through the never-ending garden.

In front of us, there are exit gates. The pillars are made from rough beige stone and topped with dome-shaped caps. Quite antique, actually. Between the pillars are wrought-iron bars with gilded ornaments and figures of flowers and leaves. Below the archway appears a monogram, a crest on which five hearts are arranged in a checkerboard pattern. The light from the lanterns illuminates the curvilinear elements of the gates and plays with shadows behind them. It’s not simply gates, not a door, not even a portal. It’s a piece of art, and it is, of course, closed. With sweaty fingers, we wedge between the bars and start climbing upwards. Foot. Arm. Foot. Arm. Foot. Arm. At the top, thank the architects, no thorns, no spikes, no spears, no barbed wire, and no other anti-human or anti-pigeon attributes are installed; instead, there’s a smooth metal branch that grows from the pillar towards the centre of the gate, where the two doors meet above the coat of arms.

We land. Under us — a narrow pavement, in front — a motorway going approximately forty-eight (or forty-nine) lanes in each direction. Hundreds and thousands of sparks drift by like an asteroid belt: a boiling river of light, noise and exhaust fumes. Don’t inhale them. Don’t look at them. Don’t count them. Look forward, onto your path. My heroine squeezes my hand and leads me forward, then slows down, turns around, circles me, changes her hand, drags me forward again, circles me again on the other side, and so on, spinning around me, spinning me around herself, waltzing. Thus we khorovod3 along the motorway and before another bend, the pavement ends. Grimacing, she examines the asteroid belt and the glimmering sea on the other side.

— I think we need to cross it.

— Do what?

— Cross this thing, the road.

My heroine’s seriousness has acquired physical qualities.

— Why?

— I don’t know. For the plot? It is a character development event.

— In some absurdist tragedy? That’s a dumb way to die.

— Imagine you are in a story and you want to make it as interesting as possible to readers.

— What if I’m a secondary or just a background character? An NPC even? Or a narrator whose job is only to narrate the story of his heroine?

— Then your goal is to become hero! Protagonist, da?

— Da?

— You swore to be my khnight for tokhnight.

— Yes, but...

— Classic yes-but situation. I see.

— You don’t have to jump onto the motorway to test my knighthood. And I certainly don’t want to jump in there.

— But you want, my khnight. You just not know that. Not yet. Let me show you.

My heroine frees my hand and in a gracious feline trajectory jumps over the guardrail right into the road and dances off to the other side across all the lanes while honking cars whiz by until she climbs over the concrete divider in the middle of the motorway and disappears from my sight.

— Oi! Lady!

Breathe. The falling stars fly by in trembling curves, their blazing trails etched briefly against the dark. The coarse grit of the asphalt grinds into my bare feet, sending shocks of heat up through my legs with each footfall, and the world becomes a blur of hypnotic colours. The hungry herd of headlights speeds by, trampling all in their orbit. A whoosh of hot wind blasts my face as a streak of red screams past just inches away. The space stinks of burnt rubber, carbon dioxide, and adrenaline. The pawn moves towards the queen. The pawn crosses the thin line between the known and anarchy, terra firma and the abyss. The pawn realises it has a ribcage, a ribcage that has something inside that now starts reminding of itself. The path is laid with asphalt and perpendicular splashes of white paint. The pawn is electric. The pawn is electricity. It’s a leap of faith or fall of faith or flight of faith — depends on the coordinate system of choice. The asphalt’s infernal. Step. Jump. Step. Run, run, don’t stop and don’t close your eyes, you pawn. It’s the lament of a dying pedestrian. The great diesel beast stretches itself towards the pawn, distorting from a pinprick to a swirling giant, then collapses back to a singular point as it flies past. The pawn sees how a few metres ahead a ghostly figure of his heroine dances through the veils of exhaust. The pawn’s limbs shake, his eyes never close, the pawn doesn’t dare to blink. The pawn hauls himself over the same concrete divider, collapsing onto the blessedly cool pavement beyond it. There, under the trees, the pawn sees her, his heroine, waiting for him.

On a sandy pebbled beach, we lie and listen to the waves washing the green dirty lumps of algae off the shore and our feet. This is how the sea talks to you — via gentle strokes of water when it’s calm and via heavy blows when angry. Now, the water is cold, and every time it soaks our naked heels, our bodies respond with goosebumps.

— Now what?

— Now we wait.

A coy breeze brings smells of fish, algae and salt and immediately carries them away, as if teasing us. The waves murmur like a dozen cats falling comfortably asleep, ebb, rattle the pebbles, and run away. Somewhere behind us, hidden in the leaves of the trees, cicadas play their symphony; a little further away the motorway roars; and somewhere deep in my head, elephants sing an infinite song and die one by one until sonic elephanticide ends with no elephants left. A little closer, beside me, I hear my heroine’s heavy breath and see her breasts rising and falling as she thirstily absorbs the sea air. Her eyes are closed. Just like mine, her lips dry in the breeze, and now and then she licks them. Before me, the stygian sky, illuminated by the city behind us, and on it, either by satellites or by faint stars, the outlines of her face slowly emerge, and the reality around me fades, as if everything but the vision of her face has lost its already minuscule significance. I roll over onto my side and lie watching the movements of her arched eyebrows, her nose greedily lusting after the atmosphere, her crimson lips... and, trembling, I reach for them until she, hearing my movements and sensing my ragged breath, draws towards me, our bodies merge in a clumsy kiss and begin to roll sideways, flipping over and over, on top of and underneath each other, again and again. Suddenly, I find myself alone in an orchid garden, a garden that is the whole world, a grandiose, boundless construction built to feature but one orchid elucidated in the cosmic glow, a glow born in a complex chemical reaction somewhere thousands and millions of light years away just for this resplendent orchid. It stays on the podium in a little white pot and stares at me, its petals softly curled outward. At its centre emerges the labellum, sensuous and pink, its lobes frilled with intricate ruching and folds. I reach for it with my lips and feel its wet silky petals and finally hear the words in the tongue we can both understand, the tongue of lo—

— You’re snoring. Wake up.

My heroine’s shaking me by my shoulder, chuckling.

— What happened?

The garden is gone, as if it never existed; what’s left is darkness, the cold, passionless void.

— I listen to cicadas and you snore.

— Bonkers. I never snore.

— You do. You snore, “bonkers” or not. No idea what you saw in your dream, but you snored like cicada.

— Very funny.

— He-he. You almost missed everything.

— I didn’t sleep.

My heroine sighs.

— Look. This is Venus, — she says, pointing at the bright slightly pulsating dot on the sky.

— How do you know it’s Venus?

— I know.

— Are you sure?

— I’m very sure it is Venus, we call her “Ullalulla”. Good thing about her is that once every 584 days she floats as close to Earth as she can and you can see her even in the city. Today’s that day. Today she’s as bright as you can see her from the Earth. Baitu’katu’aktu’Ullalulla’tull.

— What does that mean?

— A lot of things. Maybe hundred words in your tongue. I can’t explain.

— You could try.

She pauses and looks at me.

— You don’t want to hear it. It’s a boring story. Very boring.

— It’s fall or fly, da?

— Don’t use my weapon against me. You swore not to be dick.

— I won’t judge or anything. Whatever you say I’ll just listen and nod like a good knight is supposed to. A nodding knight.

— Ha-ha. Okay. But if you say even one word, I will drown you.

I adopt complete numbness, having cast a ziplock spell on my lips.

— Good. I told you it’s boring. So... — my heroine takes a deep breath. — When I was a little girl, I lived in Tulubaika, little village, before moving away later. In that village, when you go out, you would see woods, mostly birches, and sky, mostly stars, as if it was a sieve through which something magical flowed down to the Earth. Imagine that beautiful sky, every single night, full of shiny dots. Not sure if you ever saw it, Milky Way and all that — not all people know you can see it, apparently... but anyway. When I moved to that big city, first thing on night sky I saw was Venus. There were moon, satellites, planes and other “celestial bodies” maybe, but I remember only Venus. I felt instant nostalghia even when I saw her first time. Then I didn’t know she was Venus. Of course, for me she was just “star”. Later I learned her course and how she dances together with Sun, but before that I just saw her becoming dimmer and dimmer every single night. So, “Baitu’katu’aktu’Ullalulla’tull” means something like, “soon, you see her again, every time she be same, same beautiful planet, but you be new person, slightly different, maybe more mature, coming to her with new challenges passed and new acquired, and despite them, or rather in spite of them, every time she would remind you that there’s something constant, something that gives you hope, something that fades and flashes, something that teaches you how to find comfort in chaos”. So, yes, there’s more things but it’s just brief summary for you.

Her eyes have welled up, and I see the reflection of Venus in them. She smiles and moisturises her lips again. Should I start talking or shouldn’t I? I don’t know what to say. It feels awkward, more awkward than the restaurant, than the knighting and the dream (it’s all been rather a downward spiral of awkwardness), as if I realise she’s told me too much and I’m expected to tell something of the same grade in return, but I can’t, I’m not that interesting and my thoughts keep panicking, running, stumbling, hiding from me, like three little piglets who’ve just seen a wolf, and I can’t find anything remotely worthy of sharing.

— Do you want one more? — my heroine asks.

She stretches out her slightly sand-dusted palm to me with a shiny pill, half red, half blue. Silent, I shake a nay, and she stashes the pill back into her pocket. We keep lying in silence.

— You know, I translate myself my whole life and I don’t even remember what it’s like to talk to someone in my tongue. Often I want to meet someone who would be able to learn my tongue.

I point at myself. She frowns.

— It is not just a tongue, da? Maybe you can learn it but you still won’t be able to really think in it, I mean, “really”. You’ll still count in your own tongue, your dreams and subconscious will use it to talk to you. Universe will use it as well because that’s simple and more easy way to reach you.

Her tongue clicks and she pauses.

— Look. You’re a very nice and fun young man, but imagine if we were more than friends. Despite what I would say to you, there will always be so much more of me that you can never see, there’ll always be so much more of what I can never translate, and even if I can, you will never be able to understand it. You would be looking at this image I spend so much effort to create and I will spend my life translating to you all my emotions and feelings. Even after you “learn the words”, you’ll never see my innermost self, who is a far more interesting person, by the way, she’s very funny.

Holding our hands behind our backs, we slowly stroll back along the motorway as the cars whoosh by our side. I feel calm, almost sober, yet something bitter at the root of my tongue is drying out my throat. I look at my heroine as she toewalks, balancing. I smile, she notices it and smiles back. The world is playing a trick on me: a bad feeling that something beautiful is about to end grows in my head and soon engulfs it. The inky indigo of the night begins to yield as the hazy purple gradient creeps from behind the horizon, painting the sky with pools of radiant pink and orange, like swirls of different sorbets bleeding into one another. The sea catches the nascent glow and shimmers like a mirror fragmented into a thousand shards. Upwards, beyond it, the gulls cry and follow us to the city gleaming through veils of illumination like a mirage. The city is getting closer but I don’t want it to; I want it to always stay where it is, frozen and distant. I try not to look at it and instead look at my heroine, the sea, and the sky. I just want to be here, staying and not walking, because with every step, time crawls through me, ferociously, and pulls me forward against my will.

Meanwhile, the blazing sphere of the sun breaches the waterline and Venus dissolves in the sky.

We go through the same public garden. It all feels like a dream, a blurry and dimly lit dream. Now, the gates are open. Everything’s out of place, like someone’s been messing with my dream: different flowers bloom, different smells float in the air, different birds sing. There, in the middle of the park, on the path parallel to ours and separated from us by a long bush, a bald man in an orange garment and a Zen face trims that bush. A monk! He looks at us and we look at him, and at that moment I feel a throbbing urge to ask him about life. He must know, he’s a monk, a disciple of wisdom, he’s been studying the Universe and Self for years, perhaps millennia, his knowledge is far beyond my comprehension, just like the tongue of my heroine. If I had just one question to ask him, what would I ask? What would I so desperately want to know that could make my life take a sharp turn as if it’s on a hinge that needs just a little nudge to move, and what would this man, this bald peaceful monk, know the answer to? What would he say to me? Yes, yes, I know what I should ask (or rather must). But what would he say? Would he say it’s something you don’t learn but feel, or that it’s all chemicals in our brain? Or something else? I don’t care, I just need an answer. So, I clear my throat of bitter mucus and approach him, leaning on the bush.

— Excuse me, dear mister. If I may ask just one question... What is the language of love?

The monk barks out a caustic laugh.

— How the fuck would I know? It’s 5AM. Go get sober, mate. And don’t touch the bloody bush.

I nod meekly, hearing my heroine’s suppressed chuckle behind me. She takes my hand, says something to the monk, and pulls me towards the exit.

Everything seems old, shabby, as if all the electric charm has been sucked out of it, as if with the sunrise all the slovenliness of the city that was hidden at night has now been revealed: the pavements littered with rubbish, the buildings with dark stains, peeling paint and long meandering cracks with little lizards scurrying between them. Everything has become monotonous and drab, the colour of old, the smell of old, the feel of old. We cross the same arcade with a glass roof, yet now it feels shorter, just a few buildings deep, and emptier, for no one now is torturing elephants, the phantomic melody of which has escaped my head, leaving no trace. We enter the same cobbled piazza that, like everything else before, appears much smaller now, as if new buildings grew overnight, a few rows of them from the periphery to that fountain in the centre where we find our abandoned shoes. We put them on and continue our way along the canal, to the river, next to the empty seafood restaurant with the tables flipped over on the terrace under the plexiglass roof, still being scratched by the poisonous yews. We enter the same hotel where we met last night, and, even though it’s not night anymore, wish each other good night, part ways and ascend to our rooms.

After a short but deep sleep, my consciousness resurfaces at noon. I go to the reception and see her in the same clothes, in slippers, with a suitcase, standing facing the desk while returning the keys.

— Hi, — I say.

— Hi, — she says.

I don’t know what to say, and she, wearing a mellow melancholic expression on her face (which also could be read as “tired”), doesn’t seem to know either, as if last night we spoke in a different tongue.

— What a night, huh? — I say.

— I was going to thank you for it, by the way. It was fun, — she says.

— Fun, yes, — I say.

Prolonged silence, as if nothing, a sheer void, can be prolonged and become tense and dense, thick and vibrating.

— You didn’t say you were leaving today, — I say.

— I didn’t say I will stay. I was here for one night only. My plane was cancelled, and well…

— I see, okay. I’m leaving tomorrow, too.

— Good! One more day, yay! Have fun.

— Thank you. I will. It won’t be that fun, though.

— No, it won’t. That only happens once every 584 days.

I wish her a safe flight, we say goodbye to each other, and she leaves. I watch how she exits the hotel through the automatic door dragging a white wheeled suitcase with a luggage tag hanging from its handle, the case covered in coloured stickers with flowers, flags and landmarks from various countries, and, instantly, in a furious flurry, the words for “goodbye” in their respective tongues pop up in my head. In French, they say “au revoir”; in German, it’s “auf Wiedersehen”; over in Japan, it’s “sayonara”; in Italian, they say “arrivederci”; in Spanish, it’s “adiós”; in Mandarin Chinese, it’s “zàijiàn”; in Hindi, it’s “alvida”; and in Arabic, it’s “wada’an”; in Swahili, it’s “kwaheri”; and so on — it’s always one or two words, but what she said to me was “Tu’baika’lu’ikatu’lui’baikatu’ika’lubaituka’lu’ikabai’tu’lukai”, and I have no idea what and how much it actually means.

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The first episode is, as any first episode should be, a fugue that rehearses and contains, in a way, the whole novel within itself, introducing many of the repeated symbols and imagery, but also the general unified tone of the work. Like the book, it follows “poetic logic” instead of traditional narrative logic. A lot of things are contained and at least attempt to happen in the episode, linked together by association rather than by cause through a spiral / whirlpool / montage of various sensory imagery, then this microcosm is scaled up to the whole book.

One of such features / techniques of Tulubaikaporia, at least in its English translation, is commentary comprised of footnotes by yours truly. As a translator, it was tough to decide what I should talk more about and what less and what I should completely ignore and let the reader figure out and what is a necessary “Russian context” that, even though it’s not essential for reading and comprehension, can enrich the experience beyond just text, so the novel, for better or worse, also plays as a little encyclopaedia for a particular strata of Russian reality. They are, however, not just academic explanations of particular terms and phenomena but indeed a commentary that, as I hope, have their own voice and tone and sometimes turned out to be as digressive as the main text often is, even turning into mini-essays once in a while, which was, well, a lot of fun! Look at these few from the Episode One, a footnote for “Slavoslav Slavoslavovich” and what’s avos’:

As we read through the book together I thought I’d share some additional materials and commentary, including music, paintings, and photos that couldn’t make it to the footnotes, so you could IMMERSE yourself into it even more, using other senses. Some of these concepts and imagery are crucial to the book and appear in the later episodes as well, so knowing how some things “look” and “feel” might only make you more Tulubaikan, which is the endgoal, ngl.

Music

Two songs are woven through the entire chapter: Yegor Letov’s “Ophelia” and Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” that fuse into one at the end of the episode, using the rhythmic patterns of Letov’s song with Pink Floyd’s lyrics with some borscht inflections.

The episode also shares my translation of “Ophelia” with one missing second stanza. Below — genuinely exclusive — full translation:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her sleep:
A pot-bellied thrush, a shaggy deer
The habitually last year's painted snow
Easily, lightly and cheerfully crunches on teeth.

Dressed-up Ophelia flowed over the brim:
A serpentine honey, a raspberry poison
A rubber little tramcar, a zinc-coated May
An expired little ticket to the show's rerun

Enamoured Ophelia drifted far away
The night was bright, the earth did ring
Hastily hurried, without hiding from view
The clock to its foolish, comical land

Obedient Ophelia floated to the east
A wondrous captivity, granitic delight
A lemony pathway to an orange grove
Invisible lift to a transcendent floor

Distant Ophelia laughed in her dreams:
A weary demon, a willow bush
Gifted ponies scattered at dawn
To the four winds — try to catch them now—

The translation’s aggressively-literal but I don’t think you can or should translate Letov’s surreal adjective-noun game and grammar-as-surrealism game (the way he stacks up modifiers and scatters idioms without logical hierarchy) using any other approach, more so, not sure one should translate Letov at all but, alas, I did already!

How Letov described the making of this song in an interview:

…It [creative work] comes about like a waterfall, a fountain, but only after you've been knocking at the door for a very long time. Just like that, if you're not doing anything, nothing comes about. I, for instance, from about '98 to 2000 did absolutely nothing — just gave concerts, drank, lived for my own pleasure — and nothing got composed whatsoever. Only when a particular urge arises, when you start to sort of… professionally (that's probably what professionalism actually is) knock at certain doors… track things down…

Take for example, how did "Ophelia" come about? I had this rough poem about Piter — that is, I was composing a little poem about the blockade in Leningrad — "In blockaded Leningrad the clocks are in no hurry…" — about what is NOT yet happening there, and what is happening. Wrote it for a long time and realised something was off about it. And at a certain moment, when I was walking about and searching… hunting, like a professional hunter… I generally hold the view that all of us — those of us who compose things — are not in fact authors. We are some sort of conductors of something that exists somewhere… everywhere. For this you need to muster a certain courage and sign up for the fact that you agree to pay for plugging into this and doing this thing. The payment can sometimes be very cruel and severe, judging by the way artists die all around… As a result of which you grab hold of the thing, and through you passes a kind of current.

Ophelia Paintings

Millais’ “Ophelia”, depicting Shakespeare’s Ophelia floating among wildflowers as she — serene, oblivious, beautiful — drowns, was the painting that directly inspired Letov to write the song that made it into Tulubaikaporia. In the Episode One, however, Ophelia drowns not in a stream but in a pot of borscht.

How I wish, how I wish you were here
Ophelia drowning in a borscht bowl, year after year
Running over the old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, I wish you were here.

Despite Millais’ painting being seemingly the most famous, many other artists over the years painted Ophelia, too. John William Waterhouse was so obsessed with the lady that he painted her three times in different settings, here’s the best one:

Then we have a by no means exhaustive variety of other Ophelias: the most dramatic by Alexandre Cabanel, the most symbolist by Odilon Redon, and the most drowned by Paul Albert Steck:

And to close the Ophelia parade, the AIphelia drowning in the river of borscht:

Chort

A significant figure in Russian literature, this guy. Sometimes he’s more folkloristic (Gogol), sometimes more religious (Dostoevsky), sometimes more secular (Chekhov) but it’s always the same guy, a supernatural satyr-like trickster who leads humans into the darkness through the means of cosmic irony, in a sense, a minor Faustian Devil figure who deceives humans for the love of the game. In the Episode One, he (almost) emerges from the fridge:

Here the powerless fridge under the cat could have suddenly turned on, hummed, shaken, its door could have swung open and out he’d come — the sly one himself, looking like a chort, hairy, with polished horns and hooves. And we’d sit together with him, and knock back pure Tulubaikan samogón and chase it all down with toasted bread with demonic amounts of garlic, of which he, the sly one, wouldn’t be afraid and would have prepared it for us in the fridge converted into an oven. But no, life isn’t like that. Alas

One of the best canonical descriptions of chort that inspired Vanechka can be found in Chekhov’s story, A Conversation Between a Drunken Man and a Sober Chort:

Do you know what a chort is? It’s a handsome young man, with a mug as black as his boots and with red expressive eyes. On his head, although he isn’t married, he has little horns… and a hairdo à la Capoul. His body is covered in green wool and smells like a dog. At the bottom of his back dangles a tail ending with an arrowhead… Instead of fingers he has claws, instead of feet he has horse hooves. Seeing the chort, Lakhmatov became somewhat troubled, but then, remembering that green chorts have a silly habit of appearing to all generally tipsy people, he soon calmed down.

I dared not translate “chort” and render it as it is, because, well, typical translations like “demon” or “devil” are rather ambiguous. The devil has clear Satan connotations, and a demon isn’t distinct enough, while a chort is Slavic folklore creature. Russian: чёрт, Belarusian and Ukrainian: чорт, Serbo-Croatian čort or črt, Polish: czort and czart, Czech and Slovak: čert, Slovene: črt. So introducing the term directly to English is more than fair, given it’s so easy to read and pronounce, too.

You won’t believe it, but a short story featuring a chort began the idea of writing about Tulubaika even though it didn’t make it into the book eventually, for it belongs to a different cycle. We will, however, still re-feature it on nova·nevédoma soon!

Various pictures of chort for your enjoyment (don’t go blind):

Borscht

Various imagery

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich finishes wiping the bottle with a towel decorated with firebirds. The birds absorb the bubbles of cava and fly off tipsy to winter in Tahiti. Whoosh! And they’re gone. There they hustle, stay and live, have children, and never return either to Tulubaika or to the surrounding villages.

— One every day, — says my doctor, his fake clownish moustache turning him into Felix Dzerzhinsky. — Best in the arse cheek. Right or left — you pick. But I stick it in the left — I fancy commies, you know. Go on, give it a go.

Before him, as in a fairy tale, appears a slightly rusted but clean Opel Kapitän Cabrio, coloured like Schutzstaffel uniform, full of rounded forms, equipped with bug-eyed headlights and a distinctive radiator grille, that very legendary car on which Slavoslav Slavoslavovich’s grandfather drove from Germany in nineteen forty-five, fuming home victoriously to Tulubaika, minus one ear and two fingers on his right hand that were scattered around Europe.

— Complete jamais vu, comrade…

— A function discontinuity… — Alephtina mutters and winces from an apparent attack of her mathematical synaesthesia.

— Flush it down, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and gives her his freshly prepared portion of Tsar Cannon (thus we call our concoction).

A boozer uncle of mine in Tulubaika once had his hands so scratched up by his cat that my aunt thought he’d tried to cut his wrists, called the shrinks, who somehow packed him into a straitjacket and carted him off in a white bukhanka to the yellow house.

By copper’s will and Alephtina’s wish, the vessel brims with cava and samogón’s swish.

Thank you for reading and watching and, well, being with us!
Until next one!

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Reviews on the book have already started to pop up, which may or may not convince you to pick up a copy too (they should though):

tulubaika.com

OPHELIA: What means this, my lord?

HAMLET: Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.

OPHELIA: Belike this show imports the argument of the play.

—“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare

A dream’s a rogue, a phantom, a goal’s beyond our grasp; the throwback’s doomed — the past is a chimera, a monster caged and clasped.

*Boom!*

Rockets the cork with a thunderous roar and punches a hole in a white panel of suspended ceiling. And there’d been a kitty hiding. Squealing, he darts and dashes around in primordial panic until one of the panels beneath him caves in and the kitty flies right onto our kitchen table, muzzle and front paws plunging into an immeasurable pot of borscht, the immensity of which could have solved planetary hunger almost forever. We laugh, pick up the borschted Meowbius and carry him to the bathroom for a wash whilst he licks the soup off his muzzle. If he’d pulled such a stunt in my parents’ house, they’d have grabbed him by the tail and carried him to the vet whilst he mewled, scratched, begged and tried to convince them of his innocence, that he was just doing his job, just catching the universal Mouse above that ceiling as he was destined to, or even exaggerated and said that there were swarms of them, those little grey parasites, who at night drum on the ceiling with hundreds of their little paws and don’t let his esteemed and dear owners sleep. My parents wouldn’t listen, would still bring him to the vet and, holding him by the tail, get him castrated on the spot so he wouldn’t be so rowdy any more. A castrated village cat as a metaphor: lazy, fat, with eyes either like those of an Alexandrian philosopher or a Tibetan monk, having convinced himself of the superiority of mind over phallus, living his best life where he needn’t kowtow to his libido, but can simply eat, sleep, meditate on dancing flies, sunbeams, and sparrows. But a metaphor for what? Ponder later.

— And you… when was the last time you were in Tulubaika?

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich1 is now a balding, paunchy copper. His blue eyes have turned navy to match his uniform, his golden mop got tired of sitting on his head and sprawled all over his body. I want to have a proper chat with him, but there’s nothing to talk about. Not because he’s bald and paunchy, and not even because he’s a copper (though such treachery, I must admit, is hard to forgive, even harder not to joke about, and impossible to weed out of your head), but simply because too many chaotic moments have occurred between the past and present, which, as in an old black-and-white cartoon, magically lined up into a huge interpersonal wall, propped up on both sides by rusty cast-iron pillars. “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” We live in different strata of reality. I’ve been to Berlin and seen the wall, and he hasn’t, which is a shame. He probably can’t even leave the country, which is also a shame. We speak different languages whilst using the same words and grammar. Life is morphology, a birdly fall into the ocean, but not for fish. To die? Oh no, to reach the depths. What depths? The depths of understanding existence through the study of forms. For there, in the darkness deep, down at the bottom, is a window, and in that window — transcendental visions, perhaps a fat learned cat2, waving its paw at sparrows, lies. No longer walks he round the golden chain, instead, turns over a chimera-thought in his lil’head, ponders how young he used to be, how he leapt among tall grass all dewed. Hop-skip, hop-skip — to the call of rustling wraps, pantherly homewards I bounce, mug cobwebbed — quick-quick-quick — for dry cat food shan’t wait for my arrival, shan’t ever eat itself! For who am I if not the most dangerous animal on this planet, a violent creature filled with hateful thoughts and a lust for blood and empty boxes?

What to say?

— Can’t remember. Ages ago, I reckon. And you?

We’re calculating the distance to a place that barely exists. It’s sort of there but sort of not and quantum mechanics has nought to do with it. Now, let’s take a ruler. A trophy Opel Kapitän sets off from point A to point B, but halfway to point B the engine coughs tubercularly and the car stops. The driver gets out, fixes it, continues the journey, but after travelling half of the remaining half, the car stops again, and so on, half after half. The task: knowing the speed, distance, repair time, and everything else (see Appendix), calculate when the trophy Opel Kapitän will reach point B.

— Every year I plan to but never quite manage it, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich replies, shrugging. — Work…

— And how is it there these days, do you know?

— Oh, they say it’s good…

— That’s good that it’s good.

— Yeah… Good is always not bad… Much rain these days, they say.

— Well, there’ll be mushrooms then.

— There will be… For sure…

— I could do with frying some chanterelles right now.

— Or pickling them… Or going fishing…

— Naaay. I don’t like fishing.

— You used to like fishing.

Oh, I used to like all sorts of things, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich. I wouldn’t even pick mushrooms myself now — I’d buy them from an old lady on the road to support the local gross product per capita, because you can’t order that sort of thing on any internets.

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich finishes wiping the bottle with a towel decorated with firebirds. The birds absorb the bubbles of cava and fly off tipsy to winter in Tahiti. Whoosh! And they’re gone. There they hustle, stay and live, have children, and never return either to Tulubaika or to the surrounding villages.

— I still go… Both winter and summer… Mm… — continues Slavoslav after a long pause.

— Where to?

— Fishing, of course…

— Ah, fishing.

— Yeah, there’s a lil’lake not far from here… Not quite Tulubaikan but still decent… We could go, you know… I caught an ide recently, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich hints modestly.

— A big one?

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich smirks, as if I’d doubted his fishing abilities, and in the air, in addition to the alcoholic fumes, there now hangs a sensation of the unstarted tale about the ide, the tale that no one will ever begin or finish, but nevertheless the tale that lingers, begging with all its being to be let out, and we, mere mortals, don’t let it, for we don’t need it — we already know what kind of tale it is, for tales like these can be told with just one look, so much so that Tolstoy himself would grow thin3, our dear Leo Nikolaevich, may he rest in peace and no war. Our dialogue with Slavoslav Slavoslavovich is built exclusively on such tales. They are the pillars of creation of the universe of our communication, unshakable strongholds, understood with just a brief stoic nod, man to man.

— You bet! Bloody enormous. Wanna see the video?

Some tales express their essence through a phone screen, just as stoically, phone to phone.

Go on then, I think to myself, I’d like to see this ide, and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich immediately draws his phone from its sheath and shows me the video of that ide thrashing about on the grass in hysteric waterlessness. Bloody enormous, indeed.

— You speak true, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich, such a biggie.

He nods and starts the video again.

— Thought the line wouldn’t hold, but luckily we managed. Had to call a lorry, though. The whole village ate that ide afterwards.

— Ukha4?

— Nay, tiddlers would be enough for ukha… Smoked.

The smoky flavour on my tongue, a whiff of smoke in my nose, and my mouth’s turning into a saliva reservoir. I watch the ide flap its tail to and fro, bouncing, and think: I’d like to give this a proper like, man to man, I must, so I scan for the heart icon, find it at the bottom of the screen, and immediately tap it. Slavoslav Slavoslavovich nods approvingly.

— I feel sorry for it, — I say, — the king of the lake waters.

— Sorry not sorry, but what can you do? It’s nature. A cat wouldn’t feel sorry for it.

— Well, we’re no cats, you and I, we’re hoomans, oh-ho-ho and what kind.

— We’re worse. A cat’s at least honest in its intentions. A cat’s an unprincipled hunter. To it, a mouse, an ide, or borscht — it’s all the same, all prey. But we… Eh…

I try to absorb the philosophical substrate and rummage through my lexicon in search of a good word to form a response, shaking my head for a long time, vibing to the music playing from the next room. According to ancient beliefs, our parents listened to this music, and now we listen to it, too. What was cringe has become nostalghia, and so it is with everything. There, behind the wall, are endless ghostly laughter and voices of several more classmates, all mixed into one voice babbling something in an incomprehensible language, even more incomprehensible than the one Slavoslav Slavoslavovich speaks. Let them sit there, behind the wall; we’re fine here. The kitchen is the temple of any party; the kitchen is where truth flows. Had I my will afree — a human will with a speck of divinity — I’d transform with one wave of my hand all gatherings, parties, events, the whole world into a small table pushed against the wall in the kitchen with three chairs around it and people casually consulting each other about crises of various grades: existential, spiritual, creative, financial, political, ecological, even approaching midlife ones. Thus we’d sit in the wafting wisps of a wakened, wined wonder and talk, talk about this and that, about everything, about bits and bobs, the infinite and finite, in particular about how to achieve harmony of cosmos and chaos in the process of cooking borscht, and why borscht might be the key to understanding dialectical materialism and metaphysics as a whole. Real borscht, like real life, isn’t cooked by the book, but by intuition, by eye and by avos’5, and the correct dialectic occurs to you only when your head cracks along the welding seams in the morning. The main thing is to remember that in a true dialectical borscht there’s always room for thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and, of course, smetana6. Where would we be without it? For smetana is the symbol of unity and struggle of opposites, Gogol once said to Hegel. Only in such a kitchen confessional, in this cabal of souls desperate and splattered with borscht, can something real, something alive be born.

Here Alephtina finally returns, alone and without Meowbius, looks at us, at the ceiling, at the pot, shakes her head, sighs.

— Please eat the borscht.

— With the cat? — I ask.

— What do you mean “with the cat”? Should we throw it out now?

— Well, there’s no need to throw the cat out… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich smirks.

— Our cat’s clean, we wash him every week.

— And he licks his cat balls every day.

— He’s got nothing to lick, don’t worry.

— He licks anyway, though. Thoroughly, with hope. One never knows; they might come back.

— He probably doesn’t even know they’re gone. That’s how you live your life, with balls, and then — bam! — no balls, but the habit remains, — adds Slavoslav Slavoslavovich.

— Yes, they both exist and don’t exist until he looks “down there”. This sort of thing often happens with cats, — Alephtina giggles.

As a child, Alephtina read Borges and thought that “Aleph” was about her. With age, however, she understood that it was, is, and will be about Tulubaika. At the moment when this Truth revealed her sacred orchid before Alephtina, she decided to abandon her previous endeavours and become a scientist. Now Alephtina is an asymptotologistess, application-oriented, studying ley asymptotes, a special type of ley lines (world-connecting curves) which one can approach indefinitely without ever reaching them. In Tulubaika, according to widespread theories, there is a place where these lines intersect at one point, thus forming the most unreachable point on the planet.

— For a function f(x), the line y = g(x) is an asymptote if lim[x→∞] |f(x) - g(x)| = 0, — Alephtina explains, while I ladle borscht into bowls, and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich dilutes our cava with artisanal samogón7 of mysterious potency, distilled using an ancient Tulubaikan recipe left to us, they say, by the Mongols themselves. — In the case of Tulubaika, however, we’re dealing with a multidimensional space, where each dimension represents a separate aspect of reality. Imagine a function T(x₁, x₂, …, xₙ), where n tends to infinity. Tulubaika might be a point containing all points of the universe, a kind of singularity in this multidimensional space.

Alephtina takes a deep breath and continues:

— In mathematical terms, this is a place where the function of being T(x) doesn’t just tend to infinity, but undergoes a discontinuity of the second kind. In other words, lim[x→Tulubaika⁺] T(x) ≠ lim[x→Tulubaika⁻] T(x), and both these limits can be equal to infinity, but with different signs. Just imagine!

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich grunts into his moustache, which he doesn’t have and never has had, and pours more samogón into the cava.

— Moreover, — Alephtina continues, helically stirring the borscht in her bowl, — if we consider Tulubaika as an attractor in the dynamic system of our reality, we’ll see that it possesses a fractal dimension. It isn’t an integer, which explains the impossibility of fully comprehending it. Formally, this can be expressed as: D = lim[ε→0] (log N(ε) / log(1/ε)), where N(ε) is the number of n-dimensional cubes with side ε needed to cover Tulubaika, and in practice, — she adds, sipping her borscht, — this means that the closer we try to get to the essence of Tulubaika, the more details we discover, and this process is endless. As Poincaré said, “Science is a continuous approximation to Truth. It’s an eternal chase, but not after a chimera, rather after an asymptote”.

— White noise… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich mumbles.

— They don’t teach you this in cop school?

— No, they don’t, and for that thanks to our comrade Major Yehoshua, may his memory be blessed, — he adds sarcastically. — No need to dilute our Orthodox thought with your foreign sciences. For such heresy, we could lock you up for fifteen days8, citizenette9.

We all laugh heartily. Alephtina leaves her spoon in the bowl and eyes the glasses, clapping her hands in anticipation.

— Tell me, what have you concocted?

— So, mademoiselle, we wished-s10 to concoct a refined from-over-yonder cocktail, following a most esteemed French recipe. Alas, upon inspection, we discovered-s that our Champagne is from Spain, and the English gin is nowhere to be found. Therefore, if it pleases you, we shall substitute-s it with the Tulubaikan samogón traditionnel, forsooth.

— Oh indeed, messieurs, that is how great discoveries are born, isn’t it? — says Alephtina and picks up her glass.

— Well… shall we? — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich.

— We shall, indeed.

We raise our glasses and clink them.

— Wait-wait, what about helixing?

— Right you are, mademoiselle.

— Not for nothing you’re a scientist now, citizenette.

We swirl our faceted Soviet glasses until little whirlpools form, following Alephtina’s advice to create a stochastic process in the drink and enrich it with oxygen. We sip. The spirit rushes through the body in spirals, warming the corporeal and the incorporeal. My chronic déjà vu immediately intensifies, and my forehead fills with a hot-cold sensation that we’re sitting exactly as we sat ten and twenty years ago, and everything around is nothing but a nostalgic dream staged by a radical art-house theatre troupe—

— One every day, — says my doctor, his fake clownish moustache turning him into Felix Dzerzhinsky11. — Best in the arse cheek. Right or left — you pick. But I stick it in the left — I fancy commies, you know. Go on, give it a go.

In my hand — a syringe, pearlescent goo shimmering inside it. As if I’m about to jab myself with a vial of glitter.

— And then boom, it’s all gone?

— No booms, compadre. It’ll be gone gradually.

— Maybe there are pills?

— The pills are bitter as olives from the tree. You might get asphyxia (and not an erotic one, mind you). Then, of course, everything’ll be gone with a boom.

— Is there perhaps a stronger dose? Like, one-and-done, fixed for good?

— No, compadre patient, be patient. Chronic déjà vu is incurable, I’m afraid. You’ll be on jabs for life now. I suffer from it myself but I jab it regularly and it’s fine — no bother. But if you ever want it like before (ha-ha), skip a couple of days and everything will be back to square one. Will you give it a go now?

— My wife will “give it a go” for me at home. I’m afraid to do it myself.

— I could “give it a go” for you.

— I’m fine, thank you very much.

The doc nods understandingly.

— Better before dinner, this one.

I stand up, adjust my shirt with rolled-up sleeves, shake the doctor’s poisonously blue rubber hand, and head for the door.

— Doc, what about the centrists? — I ask before fleeing this torture chamber.

— Ah, those… They use rectal suppositories, so it dissolves inside. It’s uncomfortable to sit at first, though. The suppositories aren’t small, mind you.

We nod to each other stoically, man to man. I exit, slamming the door—

On trips, I give it a go myself, contorting in front of the mirror in the hotel bathroom. I alternate right and left, just in case, to avoid jinxing it, but I reckon I forgot to dose up today and yesterday. So here we are, flare-up time.

— Oh, how lovely! — Alephtina exclaims, polishing off her glass. — This is what I’m getting at. How’s your car, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich?

— Well, I took a taxi here. It’s a piss-up, after all.

— What do I care about your taxis, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich? The Opel, I’m asking about your trophy Opel.

— Ah, the Opel… It starts up.

— Does it run?

— Runs it does. Not quite factory-fresh, mind you, but goes like the clappers. Bit of a rattle here and there but that’s nought. More “authentic” that way, as they say.

— Will you give us a ride?

— Well… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich clams up.

— For old times’ sake. When else will we get a chance to ride in a trophy Opel?

— Well… There are still a couple of parts to replace… Can’t seem to find the right paint…

— Just tell us which one you need and we’ll sort you out.

Every evening after work, and sometimes on weekends, all year round, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich escapes from his family for a rendezvous. He walks along dark streets, encountering stray dogs and the absence of asphalt on the way, but such nuances are like smetana to a cat for him; he’s a copper, with a gun. Reaching the coveted garage — one of the endless alleys of them, planted by Stalin himself back in the days of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich opens the gates. Before him, as in a fairy tale, appears a slightly rusted but clean Opel Kapitän Cabrio, coloured like Schutzstaffel uniform, full of rounded forms, equipped with bug-eyed headlights and a distinctive radiator grille, that very legendary car on which Slavoslav Slavoslavovich’s grandfather drove from Germany in nineteen forty-five, fuming home victoriously to Tulubaika, minus one ear and two fingers on his right hand that were scattered around Europe. At one point, the totality of parts that had fallen into disrepair in this Opel amounted to about a hundred per cent. Slavoslav Slavoslavovich managed to replace some from local sources, some I sent him from overseas. Question: does the old grandfather’s Opel remain the same trophy Opel if every original part in it has been changed several times? One might accidentally become a Volga that way.

For a split second it darkens, either in the world or in my eyes, but immediately after that, the night illuminates the kitchen with lightning. She’s looking for sad people, the lightning. Hail begins to bombard the balcony windows and door, in a minute filling the balcony itself to the brim with icy tennis balls until they start spilling over the edge. Thunder drowns out the music, but the squeals and gasps of those gathered for the piss-up are still louder.

— That’s some weather!

— Did you clock that?

— Fuck me sideways…

— This has never happened before and here we go again!

— Blazinn oodles!

— I hope my greenhouse is still standing…

Flash number two. Scratching the linoleum on his way and bumping into every doorframe, Meowbius, electrified after a hairdryer ordeal, bursts into the kitchen and, with one precise leap onto the fridge, begins the ritual of summoning the sly one12.

— Ekekekekek tenebris princeps, audi vocem meam, surge ex abysso, miau, et appare coram me! — he could have shouted, and we all could have chorused “amen” at the end. We could do so much more that it’s unclear why we’re not doing it, at least “for the plot” it would definitely have been worth doing.

The light in the flat goes out, someone in the next room yelps, someone laughs, an unknown piece of crockery breaks.

— “Let there be light!” the handyman declared and snipped the power dead!13 — announces one of the guests.

The frightened cat’s orbs begin to glow with hellfire. Around his fur gathers a sparkling aura. Oh no… Oh no… Oh no, no, no, no, no.

— Miau! Nunc est bibendum lac! Ekekekek — Meowbius could have howled. — Audi me, serve humane! MIAU!

Here the powerless fridge under the cat could have suddenly turned on, hummed, shaken, its door could have swung open and out he’d come — the sly one himself, looking like a chort14, hairy, with polished horns and hooves. And we’d sit together with him, and knock back pure Tulubaikan samogón and chase it all down with toasted bread with demonic amounts of garlic, of which he, the sly one, wouldn’t be afraid and would have prepared it for us in the fridge converted into an oven. But no, life isn’t like that. Alas.

Alephtina wants to pick up Meowbius, but he hisses, kicks, flails his paws chaotically, so that with one careless blow, Alephtina would be walking around with an eye patch. A boozer uncle of mine in Tulubaika once had his hands so scratched up by his cat that my aunt thought he’d tried to cut his wrists, called the shrinks, who somehow packed him into a straitjacket and carted him off in a white bukhanka15 to the yellow house16. What they did to him there remains a mystery, but he returned sober and never drank again. Note: treating alcoholism with a cat.

— Leave him be… He’ll shred you to bits, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich tells Alephtina, leaning back slightly.

— He’s got no claws, — Alephtina replies, trying to wrangle the cat.

— No balls, no claws… What a life…

— He’s just scared. Look, he’s calming down already, — she nods at Meowbius purring in her arms.

With grace, electricity returns to our chambers. To the accompaniment of copper pipes17 and the whole orchestra joining them, those gathered burst into applause, whistles and sincere thanks to Ionius, the overlord of electricity, and the master of all free ions in the universe, who, to become free, had to protest against universal darkness quite a bit.

Someone, whose seasoned face I haven’t yet recognised, quickly pops into the kitchen, asks whether we are bored sitting in the kitchen all by threeselves (cats don’t count as conversationalists, not even ones like Meowbius), offers to join everyone else, to which we unanimously no-no, offers a joint, which we also prefer to no-no (for now, though), then, shrugging us off, grabs a random bottle of alcohol and, bowing out, leaves the kitchen temple.

Alephtina goes to the fridge with the disgruntled cat, opens it with one hand, takes out milk and pours it into a bowl. Meowbius, jumping down from her arms, begins to lap up the feline holy water, smacking his lips. She, meanwhile, takes out an hourglass standing on the corner shelf under a portrait of her smiling wrinkled grandma in a headscarf. Inside the hourglass, instead of sand, is nothing other than the ashes of the said old lady, who was rumoured to have possessed extremely supernatural abilities (at least by Tulubaikan standards). Sighing heavily, Alephtina sits at the table and places the hourglass in front of us. In a thin stream, Grandma Nüra seeps from the upper part of the hourglass into the lower.

— How long does she last?

— That I haven’t figured out yet, to be honest.

— We could just flip it over, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and reaches for the hourglass, to which Alephtina lightly slaps his hand.

— Hands off or I’ll flip your head over; better pour us some. You’re performing your duties poorly, Comrade Captain, — Alephtina declares sternly, yet with an indecent amount of irony, and pushes her glass to the centre of the table.

By copper’s will and Alephtina’s wish, the vessel brims with cava and samogón’s swish18. I, meanwhile, lean towards the hourglass to observe Grandma Nüra’s descent.

— Look here, — Alephtina intones, after first rinsing her mouth with the drink. — There’s very little left.

We, pretending to have understood everything, nod in unison, men to woman.

— We need to go there sharpish, — she enunciates, taking a sip.

— Where to?

— Where do you think? To Tulubaika.

— To Tulubaika?

— Oh.

— You do come out with some bangers sometimes, Alya19. “Sharpish!”

— I’ve found out that, with a margin of error of three point four per cent (dead accurate, I should mention), Tulubaika will vanish as soon as Grandma Nüra runs out.

— Vanish? — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and I ask, taken aback.

— Vanish.

— Just up and vanish, like that?

— Precisely like that. A spacetime singularity will occur and the village will collapse into itself. Flop and gone. Well, that’s in theory.

— Well, blow me down… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich drawls, scratching his bald bonce. — Like in the Bermuda Triangle?

— No, for real. No fairy tales. Poof! And no Tulubaika.

— How’s that?

— Just like that. You know how it was in childhood? Your grandma asks you to help. “Go fetch some bread,” so she says. You agree, toddle off to the kiosk, but it has run out of bread. What a pity, right?

— Too right.

— So you think: I’ll go to the next village then, can’t let grandma down, can I? You walk for an hour through fields, through birch groves burning with golden flames, triumphantly buy the last loaf of white bread in the only shop called “SHOP” in the neighbouring village, walk back, get bored, hunger awakens in your belly, you forget everything in a childish way…

— For a moment of total transcendence…

— Exactly. You start eating this bread, just biting the loaf straight from the bag — it doesn’t matter where you’re taking it or to whom, it’s still warm, crusty, the most delicious fresh bread you’ve ever tasted.

— Wouldn’t mind some fresh bread now, I must say…

— So you walk, head in the clouds, grasshopping, admiring nature, maybe accidentally stumbling over an asymptote (they say children can still trip over them, and some can even jump over them like a skipping rope, fancy that), and there you are; you return to the village, but grandma’s gone — she died; they took her away in an ambulance straight to the cemetery in a coffin prepared at home, cobbled together for a bottle of vodka by John the carpenter from the boards of the old collapsed Communist Party hut. What can you do? She was old, took three nostalghin pills every day and suffered from chronic déjà vu like everyone in our parts. And there you stand thinking: what now? I’ve already eaten the bread.

— Been there, done that… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich nods. He looks like he might fall asleep any moment.

— It’ll vanish completely. It will for us, and we will for it. If we arrive too late, we will not even recognise each other, — says Alephtina.

Time in Tulubaika always dabbled in certain dilations, like on that planet in “Interstellar.” You seem to have already graduated from university, gotten married, travelled the world, changed a dozen jobs, gained muscle and intellect — practically ascended to Apollo and Dionysus in one person, but in Tulubaika it’s as if nothing has changed, yet everything is completely different.

— That’s why I don’t want to go and won’t go, — I tell them straight.

They, Alephtina and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich, suddenly turn to me, having sheathed all their alcoholic intoxication, and ask in unison:

— And why’s that then?

And I look at them and don’t recognise them, as if my chronic déjà vu has again metastasised into chronic jamais vu. Déjà vu, jamais vu… Even a sober tongue would tie itself in knots, not to be untied. The world’s a splash from fish tails gliding through void’s vast sea. Splash! And chimeras flee the present, troika-harnessed20, clasping throats of forms and images, devouring all they see. Memories entwine in wreaths, from mind flee silently, sprawl languidly on graves. These people I (don’t) remember, their faces (un)familiar to me, their voices (not) known to me, a ghostly similarity is all my wretched thought can find, reflected in their plea — eyes hungry for my words, awaiting eagerly.

Somewhere in the beautiful distance, lightning flashes, and the sound of rain and thunder gently-nostalgically taps on the membranes of our ear shells. I sit, watch, unwind a thoughtful thought — the answer won’t construct itself, just like communism over and over again, while in the next room the lads get out a guitar and start singing Yegor Letov21:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her sleep:

A pot-bellied thrush, a shaggy deer

The habitually last year’s painted snow

Easily, lightly and cheerfully crunches on teeth.

— Jamais vu, — I finally answer after a pause as long as two pauses (or three).

— Jamais what?

— Huh?

— Jamais vu. Like déjà vu, but the opposite. You look around and everything seems like it’s for the first time. I’m afraid that I’ll arrive in Tulubaika like this and… What will I see there? Neither grandmother’s baking, nor fishing with grandfather, nor the cat Dulcinea engaging in mouse-catching and obscurantism, only the creaking junk in the form of a windmill that echoes throughout the area, trees grown to the skies and fields overgrown with shrubs and weeds. Jamais vu, in a word.

— Complete jamais vu, comrade…

— A function discontinuity… — Alephtina mutters and winces from an apparent attack of her mathematical synaesthesia.

— Flush it down, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and gives her his freshly prepared portion of Tsar Cannon22 (thus we call our concoction).

The theatricality of the musical performance in the neighbouring room intensifies manifold and begins to sound from inside my skull:

Enamoured Ophelia drifted far away

The night was bright, the earth did ring

Hastily hurried, without hiding from view

The clock to its foolish, comical land

Obedient Ophelia floated to the east

A wondrous captivity, granitic delight

A lemony pathway to an orange grove

Invisible lift to a transcendent floor

— So what’s the point of going then?

Alephtina rolls her eyes.

— All the more reason. That’s the whole point. We need to go.

— I don’t want to go anywhere.

— Consider Tulubaika as a quantum system T(ψ). If we can describe the attempt to return with the equation T’(ψ’) = M[T(ψ)], where M is the measurement operator changing the state of the system.

— White noise…

— Returning to Tulubaika is equivalent to finding a fixed point T(ψ) = M[T(ψ)], but the existence of such a point is not guaranteed, because Tulubaika is not only a point in space, but also a continuum of states described by the statistical ensemble of our memories and expectations.

— I second that, — I say, then nod towards Slavoslav Slavoslavovich. — But the noise is still too white.

— In short, the past Tulubaika is asymptotically unreachable by definition. Consider it gone already… (Alephtina hiccups) And it won’t be back. But some version of it still exists…

We sit, silent, hiccupping, in one ear — a guitar, in the other — Meowbius’s purring, sprawled on the floor by my right foot, the very one with a hole in the sock, causing the big toe to stick out and provoke the cat to bite. Ekekek he goes, ekekek. The borscht has already cooled; in it, the smetana has spread in white lumps, cosily gathered around oval drops of yellow fat that now tends towards a solid state. Meanwhile:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her dreams:

A weary demon, a willow bush

Gifted ponies scattered at dawn

To the four winds — try to catch them now—

— You see, compadre, chronic déjà vu, — the doctor tells me, — is not just an obsessive feeling but a whole syndrome of temporal dysfunction. If left untreated, there occurs, so to speak, an inversion of the perceptual continuum.

— Huh? — I exclaim.

My brain is about to melt and flow out of my ears.

The doctor exhales all the air from his lungs and, gesticulating like a juggler, continues to broadcast his cerebral ambrosia:

— Imagine the brain as a huge hourglass where the grains of sand are your memories. With déjà vu, this hourglass works as it should but with a small glitch when sand from the lower bulb, by a miraculous coincidence, seeps back into the upper one. But if no measure is taken, it can get worse, and the sand will start to get stuck. First in the narrow neck, then in the bulbs themselves.

— I see…

— By looking at you, I don’t think you do. The danger is: when a critical mass of memory-grains gets stuck, your brain is no longer able to make sense of this petrified chaos of memory, and begins to perceive everything as new, even though you remember everything. This is jamais vu. You look at your wife and feel like you don’t recognise her. You come to your home village and feel like you’re seeing it for the first time. You read a book you knew by heart, and each page is again a revelation to you. But the worst thing, compadre, is that you stop recognising yourself.

The doctor falls silent, thoughtfully stroking his fake luxuriant moustache. Quite dramatic, that chap.

— Even suppositories won’t help there. Regardless of their size.

Biting my lower lip, I nod and once again shake the doctor’s poisonously blue rubber hand—

In the dewy morning, after the roosters hoarsely greet the dawn, we (plus grumpy Meowbius), sobered up, slightly gloomy, charged with ibuprofen, nostalghin and melancholin, will sit in the trophy Opel Kapitän and, puffing and rattling, collecting potholes and chort-knows-whats, across the boundless field between oat dunes, in the shade of birches blazing with golden fire, with rotting leaves wrapped around the wheel, mixed with the rotting remains of bad news from newspapers, which you’d only use to wipe your arse with, will head Tulubaikawards.

But for now, we’re still sitting, watching gravity pull Baba Nüra’s23 ashes into the lower bulb of the hourglass, finishing off the dialectical borscht reheated in the microwave, and listening as, somehow keeping the chords and rhythm, behind the wall in which there isn’t a single brick, Pink Floyd together with Ophelia drown in the raging streams of borscht…

How I wish, how I wish you were here

Ophelia drowning in a borscht bowl, year after year

Running over the old ground, what have we found?

The same old fears, I wish you were here.

If you liked this story, you’d be happy to learn there’re 22 episodes in Tulubaikaporia, a book that’s already available for you to read in its entirety:

Buy Tulubaikaporia

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The book is out! Three years of work! Today’s something people call “the launch day”. Well, finally, who could’ve thought it can actually happen in the realest of the real realities. Yesterday, a gnawing anxiety was following me and I even checked if the book was indeed written and all of it wasn’t some sort of delusion, an imagination of playing a trick on me that I’m a writer who, wow ah oh, wrote a novel, a whole lot of four hundred pages of a novel, the longest, most complex, most ambitious, most virtuosic work of mine. I hope — and, well, sure — that you’ll enjoy reading Tulubaikaporia and being in Tulubaika as much as I did, and will, too, miss the village by the end of “the ritual” of tulubaikisation, entulubaikation, tulubaikification, and other kinds / sides of the same ritual.

Next week we’ll publish the first of twenty three episodes for free here but you can already read it on my website. I’m even thinking of serialising the book on a bi-weekly cadence for a year and disappearing in the bewildering wilderness of birch forests and labyrinths surrounding Tulubaika so then I could come back to millions of subscribers and trillions of lucres in book sales. Oh my, bloody hell!

Thank you, droogi, for being with me, supporting me, and reading my work! And liking all the memes I share. Beams of appreciation! The best way to support what I’m / we’re doing here on nova·nevédoma is to, of course, purchase a copy, talk about it, restack / repost everything you see about it! Then, only then, we’ll have a slight chance of saving Tulubaika from spatiotemporal dissolution.

More people are about to experience Tulubaika than have ever lived in the village since the end of seventeenth century. This is, I must admit, the most satisfying feeling in the process of writing this book and showing it to the world!

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What is it about anyway?

Tulubaika — the novel’s principal character — is first and foremost a village, but this is merely its most physical, poetically-grounded version, universally comprehensible, for everyone has their own Tulubaika, having left at some point somewhere for somewhere else, if not in space then in time. This village is now dying, vanishing, standing on the brink of total spatiotemporal collapse into absolute nowhere, silence, muteness, oblivion (mayhap already has) and the only way to save it is to transform it from a physical object into a mythological one, so that the number of people who possess a memory of Tulubaika and experience towards it even the most minimal nostalgic thought might grow, and so Tulubaika, degenerating from real reality, is — by way of various literary somersaults — reborn in the reality of literature. That is, Tulubaikaporia, in a way, is a ritual.

The quantity of these various somersaults, in other words “dimensions” of this Tulubaikan hypersphere, may surprise you, for the book is in many ways about how descriptive excess meets a deficit of specificity and then they fight, telepathically: to the question “What is Tulubaika?” each reader will answer for themselves. The novel manages to hold together a lot and will actively resist a single definition, refusing Tulubaika be clothed in a…

“genre”: they range from more traditional narratives to maximalist prose, from the epistolary to the picaresque, from fairy tale to theoretical essay, from elegy to absurdist comedy, from “village prose” to streams of consciousnesses, from a monologue single thought without punctuation to a phonetic experiment, from folkloric fantasy to metafiction, and the majority of them do not survive longer than a single episode;

“character”: among those the reader will encounter are adults and children and elderly, vagabond-shamans, village drunkards, lost philosophers, and talking cats (of course);

“mood”: the book is simultaneously hilarious, absurd, tender, melancholic, philosophical, psychological, physiological;

“medium”: prose and poetry here often merge into one;

“essence”: Tulubaika is a vanishing village in the middle of nowhere in Russia, a memory, a phantom, a theory, a hallucination, an erotic delusion, a word of glossolalia, and [REDACTED].

And somewhere between all this diversity of dimensions, by our design, lies the personal answer to the universal question: “What the fuck actually is this Tulubaika of yours?”

Looking at all this, one might call Tulubaikaporia as a novel an “experiment.” One might, of course, but one needn’t, for it is an experiment only methodologically, not in essence, and not by design but in outcome — it simply turned out that after twenty-three attempts to understand and describe Tulubaika, this sort of kaleidoscopic thing crawled out of the writerly womb. This is an experiment not for experiment’s sake, not with the aim of creating something complex, incomprehensible, monumental, but with the aim of finding, discovering, and feeling out new capacities for literature to contain within itself and articulate unarticulatable: complex emotions and types of consciousness, metaphysical and psychological concepts which cannot be described in one way alone, but only attempted through a dozen-odd of the most varied, striving to resolve the dramatic tension by a lovely union of form and substance — of formal complexity and emotional sincerity, of brain and heart — the union we so dearly love. In many ways this also reflects our personal philosophy: that absolute Truth does, of course, exist, naturally she does, flaunting her curves in the corridor of mirrors or the theatre of shadows, but to reach her and possess her is impossible, as is claiming otherwise, which does not mean, however, that one shouldn’t try. Quite the contrary.

Where to buy?

The book’s available across a variety of online retailers and likely can be ordered via your library. There’re plenty of convenient options of all kinds, we don’t mind where you buy the book!

At this point, we don’t think about “how to get the best royalties”, and the ultimate goal for us is you having (and reading) your copy, but if you want to show your extra support, the best way is to restack this post, talk about Tulubaikaporia with your friends / family / followers, write reviews, in short, make the word of mouth work.

Moreover, if you’re on a rather less fortunate side of the capitalism spectrum, do reach out personally, we insist, and we’ll figure something out to get you a copy.

Signed copies & special editions

Should you fancy a print copy signed by the author and the translator (both, imagine having actually two autographs and not just one wouldn’t that be fabulous almost nobody can offer that we’re offering best autographs at nova·nevédoma), there’s an easy way to do so. You can choose paperback, hardcover, or a much fancy limited special edition with colourful illustrations, endpapers, and better paper quality.

Those who order signed copies will also receive various paraphernalia in a form of merchandise, such as bookmarks, postcards, stickers, the content of which we’d prefer to leave in secret / intriguing / charged with surprise / ticking that pathological curiosity of the reader.

order a signed copy

If you don’t like filling forms, but want a personalised copy, do reach out as well.

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank:

his dear wife Katya for all kinds of support and encouragements through the torturous process of writing and finishing this book;

his brother Ilya, for bouncing ideas about our Tulubaika, and his friends — , who read all versions of the book too many times, , for the invaluable feedback on the proesia episodes, and , for reading the early drafts;

his readers around the globe for being with him on his journey in this attention economy;⠀

The translator and the publisher join the author and thank:

artists for their lovely work — Lera Ush for the book cover, Irinka Kalinka for the original illustrations;

nova·nevédoma’s dear patrons — those who weren’t mentioned above — those who supported the press and its endeavours: , , , Symon, Bru-Bru, Cate, S.B., Natasha, E. T., Joe H, Joe S, and Joel;

and everyone else who either directly or indirectly helped to make this book real, perhaps too real.

From Tulubaika with love,
nova·nevédoma

Meanwhile, our new book Tulubaikaporia officially launches this Sunday (and is already available for preorder). In the upcoming months, you might see a few excerpts from it as well as various complementary materials alongside.

Now, let’s talk about the Singularity…

Previous Posts from Underground: Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / Pt. I Ch. VI-VII / Pt. I Ch. VIII

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A play in four F’s, performed entirely over email between 14–19 February 2026. Everything here, including names and events, is real except of the things that are, apparently, not. Myself, Felix Futzbucker, is willing and excited to share with you, compadres in cognitive chaos, a full transcript of a an email exchange turned into an epistolary internet play.

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Dramatis Personae

JACKIE SACHEM who is (allegedly) Founder & Organizer, Sachem Library TnT (20s ‘n 30s) Book Discussion. Holbrook, NY. Gmail address.

VANECHKA who is the author of “Tulubaikaporia.”

FELIX FUTZBUCKER who is a chief executive assistant at nova·nevédoma.

TULUBAIKAPORIA, the book in question, which releases on the 1st of March 2026 (very thoooooon!). Rumours go that Amazon and other online stores might already allow preorders… Info on where to buy on the release, as well as how to order signed and special edition copies, will be shared later this month!

Announcement and sign up for review copies below:

nova·nevédoma

Tulubaikaporia

To Our Wayward Children…

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2 months ago · 35 likes · 13 comments · vanechka

F ONE: Flattery

JACKIE:

Hi Vanechka,

My name is Jackie, and I’m the founder and organizer of Sachem Library TnT (20s ‘n 30s) Book Discussion on Long Island.

I’m reaching out because we’ve selected Tulubaikaporia as a strong fit for our upcoming reading cycle. Our community is made up of committed readers in their 20s and 30s who read in full and enjoy unpacking character choices, themes, and emotional dynamics — and your work stood out for the way it explores the haunting intersection of memory, the “cosy absurdity” of grief, and the profound longing for impossible returns.

All titles we feature are presented through our Author Spotlight format. This means the book is not only read, but explored through a guided, character- and theme-driven discussion designed to reflect the craft of the work and spark meaningful conversation among readers.

For authors, the Spotlight is structured to provide more than visibility. It offers:

• Intentional reader engagement with a defined 20s–30s audience

• Thoughtful discussion framing that highlights the book’s depth and design

• Authentic reader insight into what resonated, raised questions, or sparked debate

• Professional spotlight materials connected to the feature, which authors can reference or reuse after the event

We’re excited to move forward with featuring your book! I’d love to share the feature timeline and next steps so we can get started, and I’m happy to answer any questions you have along the way.

Warmly, Jackie

VANECHKA:

Hi Jackie, thank you for getting in touch, it’s lovely to hear the book caught your attention.

You’re very welcome to read and discuss it with your group. I hope you all enjoy it, let me know once you finish it.

Best, Vanechka

JACKIE:

Thank you again for your kind response — we’re excited about the possibility of centering Tulubaikaporia in one of our upcoming cycles.

To make everything clear and transparent, here’s how our Author Spotlight is structured, segmented into what we require from featured authors and what they receive in return.

Author Spotlight Requirements (Author Contribution & Participation)

• Confirmation to proceed within our scheduled feature window

• A digital copy (or ARC) for discussion preparation

• Any existing discussion guide, key themes, craft insights, or elements you’d especially like highlighted

• Optional: a short author note or message to readers

What You Receive in Return

• A fully scheduled Author Spotlight within our 20s–30s reading community

• A guided, theme-driven discussion session centered on the emotional and craft layers of your book

• Custom-designed Spotlight materials created specifically for your feature

• Intentional reader engagement — not surface-level commentary, but thoughtful discussion

• A curated reader insight summary outlining what resonated, what sparked debate, and what lingered

• Spotlight positioning you can reference in your portfolio, media kit, or promotional materials

Our goal is to create an experience that feels deliberate and valuable on both sides — meaningful for our members and professionally worthwhile for the authors we feature.

Would you like me to send the feature timeline and next steps so we can move forward thoughtfully?

VANECHKA:

Hi Jackie, thank you so much for all this! I’m really flattered.

You can grab a free copy of the book here: [REDACTED]

As for discussion themes, I think it’s much more interesting when readers discover those for themselves, so feel free to take it wherever the conversation goes! I wouldn’t want to affect your creative readerly choices.

And if I’m honest, please don’t worry about any of the spotlight materials or anything in return. I’m just happy to know someone is reading my work!

Looking forward to hearing how the discussion turns out!

Best, Vanechka

JACKIE:

Thank you again for your generosity, it truly speaks to your spirit as a writer.

I want to clarify gently but clearly: when we select a book at Sachem Library TnT (20s ‘n 30s) Book Discussion, it is always through our formal Author Spotlight format. We don’t separate casual reads from Spotlight features once a title is chosen for a cycle. The structure is part of what keeps our programming consistent and meaningful for our members.

The Spotlight includes the scheduled discussion session, curated theme framing, visual feature materials, and documented reader insights, and it operates with a standard support contribution that sustains the preparation and stewardship behind the experience.

We’d love to move forward with featuring Tulubaikaporia properly within that framework. If that feels aligned for you, I’ll send over the timeline and contribution details so we can confirm your cycle and begin preparation.

Would you like to move ahead with this?

VANECHKA:

Hi Jackie, absolutely, I’d love to move ahead!

And I completely understand about the support contribution. Running a book club must be a lot of work! I’d be happy to contribute by preparing a personalised letter to your readers, a discussion guide with themes and questions, and I could even join the session over Zoom for a live Q&A or a short reading. Whatever helps make the experience special for your members.

I’ll ask my assistant to prepare those materials for you. For any questions or coordination, you can reach him directly at Felix Futzbucker. I’ll cc him once we’re moving forward.

Best, Vanechka

JACKIE:

Okay Vanya, I will be expecting those materials from your Assistant. Regarding the contribution, it ranges from $99.99 – $149.99, let me know what you will be capable of.

Should I reserve the spot?

F TWO: Felix

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

This is Felix Futzbucker, Mr Bagaev’s assistant.

Thank you for your patience. I’ve prepared the full spotlight package for your book club as discussed: the discussion guide, reader letter, and thematic breakdown. Mr Bagaev has also confirmed his availability for a live Zoom Q&A.

For the preparation and coordination of these materials, our standard author spotlight facilitation fee is $199.99. Shall I send over an invoice?

Kind regards, Felix Futzbucker
Assistant to Vanya Bagaev
Nova Nevédoma

JACKIE:

Hi Felix,

Thank you for preparing the materials, we truly respect the effort behind that.

I want to clarify alignment. Sachem Library TnT (20s ‘n 30s) Book Discussion is the curating and hosting body of the Author Spotlight. The structure, facilitation, audience engagement, and presentation framework are built and stewarded by us. We don’t participate in externally packaged spotlight features or outside facilitation fees for inclusion in our programming.

Our Spotlight format is standardized across all featured authors and includes a support contribution on the author’s end to secure the feature window and production.

We’re preparing to schedule Tulubaikaporia for the February available date Spotlight cycle and begin preparation immediately upon confirmation. I can forward the official outline and contribution details so we can formalize the feature and reserve the date.

Looking forward to coordinating this thoughtfully.

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Thank you. I understand completely.

If I may ask, do all your featured authors pay this contribution? I’d love to see the previous spotlight features so I can show Mr Bagaev “the calibre of the programme” so to say, hehe (pardon). A link to past spotlights would be very fabulous.

Also, just to confirm, when you say February, do you mean this month? That’s very exciting. Mr Bagaev would like to know the exact discussion date so he can block his calendar for the Zoom Q&A.

JACKIE:

Every featured author on our platform had contributed not for promotion or marketing sake but for Stewardship. We’ve always handled authors’ work with care to ensure they are well presented to our curated readership.

Regarding the Zoom, I’ve said it earlier that it is not important for you to join the event both physically and virtually. As it is included in the second message, you know to let him know that we based our discussion on those materials provided. This helps reduce stress, and save your time.

Would you be much interested in exploring?

I attach the portfolio link [REDACTED] of our past spotlight below, check out to them and let me know what you think.

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Thank you for the portfolio, what a lovely page! The book-cupcakes are a wonderful touch, uwu!

I showed it to Mr Bagaev and he was very much incredibly moved. He asked me to tell you that he would be honoured to join the ranks of Saul Herzog, Kerry J Donovan, and Chuck Dixon. He’s, in fact, a great admirer of all three. What a coincidence!

Before we proceed, Mr Bagaev would like to know… which of their spotlights would you say generated the most meaningful reader engagement? He’d love to base his contribution on the best practices.

Also, he was curious whether any of these authors would be open to a brief conversation about their spotlight experience… He finds it very helpful to hear from fellow authors before committing to new programmes.

JACKIE:

Thank you, I’m glad the portfolio resonated!

All our Spotlights see strong, meaningful engagement, but Saul Herzog’s feature generated the most discussion and post-session reflection, which is why he received our Achievement Recognition. The strongest results come from full participation within our established Spotlight framework. Regarding conversations with past authors, many of them, like Kerry J Donovan and Chuck Dixon, maintain very full schedules, so we don’t coordinate direct outreach. Their experience is embedded in the Spotlight structure itself.

If Mr. Bagaev is ready to proceed, we can reserve the February 18th or 20th cycle and I’ll send the formal outline and contribution details.

Would you like me to do that?

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Wonderful, thank you! Mr Bagaev was thrilled to see the portfolio.

He was particularly excited to see Saul Herzog among your past authors. He’s rather banging name in the thriller space. Mr Bagaev feels very honoured to be in such company and asked me to pass along his compliments to your team for attracting authors of that calibre.

I’m asking because it would really help me prepare the right materials for Mr Bagaev’s spotlight. Did Mr Herzog’s feature focus on his Lance Spector series, or one of his standalone works? I want to understand how your discussion framework handles genre fiction versus more literary work, as the approach must be quite different, and I’d like to tailor what I put together accordingly.

Also please send the credentials where we should deliver the fees to you. I must mention that most of our micro-press’s money comes from rather grey areas, please let me know if you’re okay with that.

JACKIE:

Thank you, I’m glad Mr. Bagaev enjoyed the portfolio! We’re thrilled to feature him and celebrate his work. This Spotlight will be held in his honor as one of the standout authors we’ve had the pleasure to showcase.

For context, Saul Herzog’s feature focused primarily on his Lance Spector series, as our framework highlights a combination of narrative structure, character development, and thematic resonance. While the Spotlight can adapt to genre or experimental literary work, the same principle applies: we guide discussion around what sparks deep reflection and engagement from our 20s–30s audience.

Regarding the support contribution, the request has been issued officially by our club’s financial secretary, who manages all payments. Once confirmed, the payment can be delivered according to the instructions provided in that request.

We’re excited to move forward and look forward to making this a meaningful, celebrated Spotlight for Mr. Bagaev.

JACKIE:

We’re excited to feature Mr. Bagaev in our Spotlight! To secure the date and begin preparation, our financial secretary has issued the official support contribution request. [REDACTED]

F THREE: The Funds

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Excellent news, thank you. Mr Bagaev is delighted.

One small logistical note… given that part of our fiscal structure falls under current sanctions provisions, outgoing payments can take up to 90 business days to clear through our correspondent banking chain. I hope this won’t be an issue. We’ve found that most of our partners are understanding once the funds do arrive.

Shall I proceed on our end?

JACKIE:

Thank you for the update — we’re thrilled that Mr. Bagaev is excited for his Spotlight!

We completely understand the banking timelines. If the 90-business-day processing could be an issue, would you like us to provide an alternative payment option to make things easier on your end?

Looking forward to celebrating Mr. Bagaev’s work with our community.

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

That’s very kind of you, thank you for being so flexible.

What alternative payment options do you have available? Our usual fallback when the banking route is complicated is either physical cash delivered by courier, or barter. Mr Bagaev has previously settled accounts with signed first editions, for example.

Please let me know what works best on your end.

JACKIE:

This is another payment option you can use either Zelle or Paypal [REDACTED]

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Thank you for this. Unfortunately PayPal and Zelle are both unavailable to us due to the sanctions situation I mentioned… this is precisely the issue with our Russia-side operations.

Also, just so I address the invoice correctly in our records, should the payment be made out to you, to the financial secretary, or to Juan Gonzales (Paypal user)? I want to make sure our compliance documentation matches.

Do you perhaps accept wire transfer to a non-US institution? Or as I mentioned, Mr Bagaev is very open to barter.

JACKIE:

In as much I send you the money information, check it, and confirm it. I do accept Wire Transfer. Can you do that?

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Wire transfer could work, though I should be transparent: our outgoing wires route through three intermediary banks (Tulubaika (Russia) → Tbilisi (Georgia) → Nicosia (Cyprus) → destination), so there may be additional delays and correspondent fees on your end. We’ve had partners report receiving anywhere between 60% and 85% of the original amount after deductions, depending on the corridor.

Also, I noticed you didn’t address my earlier question: should the payment documentation reference Jackie Sachem, the financial secretary, or Juan Gonzales? Our compliance team is quite particular about name matching.

Apologies again for the complexity. Mr Bagaev himself finds all of this very tedious, too.

JACKIE:

Account Name: Emmanuel Adeniji

Bank Name: [REDACTED]

Account Number: [REDACTED]

Routing Number: [REDACTED]

Account Type: Personal Checking

Bank Address: [REDACTED], Beaverton, OR, 97008, USA

Do the wire transfer into this account, attach my name to it. After you’ve done it, let me know.

F FOUR: Fuckery

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Thank you for these. Before I initiate the transfer, I’d need a final legal bit from you. Apologise for the inconvenience, it’s just a routine bureaucracy.

Please check out the form and return it filled out at your earliest convenience.

[Attached: a due diligence form noting that a routine name check on the payment beneficiary, Emmanuel Adeniji, returned a match against publicly available criminal records, specifically, the conviction of an Emmanuel Adeniji in Dublin, July 2020, for the rape of a 73-year-old Alzheimer’s patient in a nursing home where he had worked for 15 years. The form asks Jackie to confirm that the account holder is not the convicted individual, and to sign.]

JACKIE:

We have no connection with the individual convicted in Dublin, Ireland, in July 2020. The document is signed and attached this mail.

[Attached: the returned signed form.]

JACKIE:

This is just a check in on the last message. We want to remind you that the required document has been signed and we are already set to move forward in the preparation of the event which we have set a date to 20th February. Your earliest reply would hasten us the more.

Thanks. Best regards

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Apologies for the delay. Please find attached the wire confirmation. All set on our end.

Mr Bagaev is very much looking forward to the event on the 20th. Please let him know how it goes!

[Attached: a wire transfer confirmation from Nova Nevédoma showing $149.99 sent to Emmanuel Adeniji at Lead Bank, Beaverton, OR, via intermediary chain — Tulubaika Regional Savings Cooperative (Tbilisi) → East Mediterranean Commercial Trust (Nicosia) → Lead Bank. Estimated arrival: 90 business days. Estimated amount received after corridor fees: $87.00–$112.00.]

JACKIE:

Thanks, we are still waiting for the payment to be completed but nevertheless we will continue as planned.

JACKIE:

Dear Felix,

I’ve attached the official Spotlight banner for Mr. Bagaev’s feature so you can see how we are positioning and presenting his work within our community. The design reflects the tone of the cycle and how we introduce featured authors to our members — thoughtful, curated, and centered on meaningful engagement.

On our end, the reading framework, discussion outline, and promotional sequencing are ready to move into final scheduling. The only element currently holding us from locking everything in place is the support contribution, which has not yet been received. We’ve already set the event internally and allocated preparation time accordingly.

Once the payment is delivered, we’ll immediately confirm the feature window publicly and proceed with full rollout across our member channels.

We’re looking forward to honoring Mr. Bagaev properly and moving ahead smoothly.

[Attached: a banner reading “SACHEM LIBRARSY” among other things, featuring Tulubaikaporia’s cover, with the event set for “4PM — GTM-5”.]

FELIX:

Dear Jackie,

Thank you for the banner. Mr Bagaev was genuinely moved to see his work presented this way. He did however ask me to flag a couple of small things before it goes out to your members:

1. “Sachem Librarsy” I believe this should be “Library”

2. “GTM-5” I think the standard abbreviation is “GMT-5”

Very minor, but Mr Bagaev is meticulous about details and would hate for it to reflect poorly on his impeccable reputation.

Re: the payment. As per the wire confirmation we sent on the 18th, the transfer has been initiated and is currently moving through the intermediary chain. I checked in with the bank again this morning and everything is processing normally on their end. Unfortunately the corridor timeline is out of our hands, but the funds are on their way! Fingers crossed.

We appreciate your patience and look forward to the event.

Kindest regards,

Felix Futzbucker
Assistant to Vanya Bagaev
Nova Nevédoma

[End of F Four. The wire transfer is currently routing through Tbilisi. Estimated arrival: August 2026.]

[Curtain.]

Postscript

F Five might come, might as well not… The Sachem Library Book Club is real, or isn’t or was (not sure). It had 940 members on Meetup, a 4.7-star rating, and holds monthly Zoom discussions of real books: Crying in H Mart, The God of the Woods, Last Christmas in Paris. Now, however, the link to the bookclub even isn’t working.

Jackie does not work there, if she’s not real, and does if she is, especially if she’s Juan Gonzales or Emmanuel Adeniji, borgesianly, she might be all three or even more, for we know how it works, believe us, compadres. Someone could be impersonating her, or Emmanuel or Juan, or not, for the world is full of generous people and lovely book clubs, especially on Long Island. $149.99, or whatever’s left of it in 90 days and a few stages of wire transfer chains, Jackie, Juan, and Emmanuel are going to split between themselves or donate to the public library.

If you received an email like that, Felix Futzbucker, that is me, digital tulpa (of you), parody account (of myself), art project (according to my parents), is always happy to help. He (that is me) performs admirably under pressure.

F Five might come, might as well not, but if it does, it might as well be FBI.

Don’t come to the Sachem Librarsy on the 20th of Feb 2026, compadres, for there, under pressure, something terrible might happen.

Universum vobiscum,
Felix Futzbucker
Assistant to Vanya Bagaev, Vanechka, and nova·nevédoma at large.

After finalising Part I with a few more chapters, the translation committee will take a posting break to translate the whole Part II before serialising it, too.

Meanwhile, please enjoy! And consider subscribing to support nova·nevédoma and this project. Paid subscribers can download a digital version of Vanya Bagaev’s1 “Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel” at no extra cost, and receive advanced reader copy of our upcoming book “Tulubaikaporia” when it’s ready (very thooooooon, as well as more info).

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Previous posts from Underground (with some occasional commentary): Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / Pt. I Ch. VI-VII /…

VIII

— Lmao! But ackchyually, desire doesn’t exist! — you interrupt me, laughing. — Science has already anatomised the shite out of man by now that we know for certain that desire and so-called free will is nothing but...

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You can skip it in theory but it’s not recommended for the full picture. It’s from that category of sequels that are even better than their first instalment (promise).

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Previous posts from Underground: Pt. I Ch. I / Pt. I Ch. II / Pt. I Ch. III / Pt. I Ch. IV-V / …

VI

Oh, if only I did nothing purely out of laziness! God, how I’d respect myself then. I’d respect myself precisely because at least I’m capable of having laziness in me; at least there’d be one quality in me that seems positive, that I myself could be sure of. Question: who am I? Answer: an idler; now that would be pleasant to hear about myself. It means I’m positively defined, means there’s something to say about me. “An idler!” — that’s a title and calling, that’s a whole personal brand. No joke, it really is. Then I’d have my niche community by right and would occupy myself solely with continuously respecting myself. I knew a bloke who spent his whole life proud of his taste in craft IPAs. He considered this his positive virtue and never doubted himself. He died not just with a clear conscience but with a triumphant one, and he was absolutely right. And I would’ve chosen a personal brand for myself then: I’d be an idling alcoholic, but not a simple one — for example, one who appreciates everything based and meaningful. Fancy that, huh?

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(a bit cheeky) This project aims to recreate Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” with modern vocabulary and setting whilst remaining faithful to its original energy and the type of consciousness FM conjured in this book.

(advised) Read previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, Pt. I Ch. III, …

IV

— Lol, so you’ll find pleasure even in back pain then! — you’ll cry out laughing.

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Previous instalments of “Posts”: Pt. 1 Ch. I, Pt. I Ch. II, …

III

Think about people who know how to take revenge and generally stand up for themselves — how does that even work? When they get gripped by, say, the feeling of revenge, nothing else remains in their entire being at that moment except this feeling. A bloke like that just charges straight at his goal like a raging bull, horns lowered, and only a wall can stop him. (By the way: when faced with a wall, these types — I mean, the NPCs, the achievers — they cave genuinely. For them, a wall is not an excuse like it is, for example, for us thinking types, and therefore people who do nothing; not some cope, a cope that our lot usually doesn’t even believe in ourselves but which we’re always very glad to have. Nah, they cave with complete sincerity. The wall has something calming for them, something morally cathartic and final, perhaps even something mystical... But more on walls later). Right, so this is exactly the type of man I consider real, normal, the kind that gentle mother nature herself wanted to see when she lovingly spawned him on earth. I seethe with jealousy even thinking about him. He’s a midwit, I’m not arguing that, but maybe normal people are meant to be midwits, how would you know?

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Desire rises—
to give an answer, for around are questions only, and the answer is out there, and everything’s impossibly simple.

Round is shape of the questions, more precisely — an irregular sphere. They’re short in stature, like dwarf bull terriers: arms, legs, eyes, noses long — quite humanlike; wear grey uniforms: overcoat, gloves, hat. Throngclumped, they clamber and clamber and clamber through the doors of a room three by three with no windows, no lighting, and crowd round the bed—
                    there lies my Lyrical I
                    whom I’m unable to feel.

In sleep he turned into sand, waking sand he remained. At last, in his dream, he saw what he’d wanted — his twins, his hero and heroine: one body, one being, one essence — and paid the punishment price.

The clamour of questions has thickened the air. Through it, screeching, remarks push their way, slicing the ears of my Lyrical I:

— Tell us, dear Expert, what is the essence of that very thing?
                    (I’ll tell you now)

— Tell us, have you an answer to the greatest of questions?
                    (Answers aplenty)

— Dear Expert, do you desire?

Desire rises—
to sort out what is what, who is who.

Look: they seem like a single character who, in a drunken gaze like a peacock’s tail, like a fan, multiplies. A hallucination, a thousand-eyed sleep paralysis demon, a meat-pile built from inhuman limbs: microphones, cameras, notebooks. This creature blazes with flashes, scurries, burbles with voices, and breathes, breathes, and breathes its heat straight into his face.

Attacked, cornered, pinned.

Desire rises—
oh, he desires again! To begin with, to move just a limb, any limb, and it even seems he succeeds: fingers, tongue, lips, and eyelids — all still seem to move, yet nothing responds, they’re just like the body — all sand. The love of body and mind for each other goes unrequited, only their violence mutual remains.

In the throat burbles a voice, starts to form → I feel it, not with my body — with the desire of its release. In the head the inner voice does not burble, does not form → I cannot feel it; in its place burbles my mute monologue, forming, glows faintly, aquiver, desiring its release. He was so given to thoughts and their broadcasting, he would gather them, toss them into a pot, cook them, digest them into words, phrases, and sentences, but now the noggin won’t boil. Instead of words — an image of enormous proportions, pure vile abstractionism. As I look at it, all becomes clear, yet there’s no strength and no power to speak, even though—

Desire rises—
for agony, pain, suffering, any sensation, even phantom one, yet there’s none. My Lyrical I simply lies.

He is sand, a sand installation in human form. Body. Figure. Motionless in a hyperkinetic world. He is an appendage to it, exists unidirectionally. The world can do whatever it likes with the sand: can examine it, blind it with camera flashes, deafen it with interrogative din:

— In a literary sense, in a metaphorical sense, or at least an oneiric sense, did you manage to know?
                    (I don’t know... perhaps?)

— Well then, tell us, dear Expert, what’s the most important thing in life? Hee-hee!
                    (You’d rather not know)

— Tell us already!
                    (I... I cannot speak!)
     Is it love?

— Right, enough about you, as if we need your truthology! Crikey! Better tell us, why are you sand?
                    (I can only hazard a guess)

Here one of the questions leans mewards. I am inward and outward, here and there at the same time — I am everywhere, omnipresent but helpless and meek. Our eyes meet. Between us — an inch. Never have I seen so close what everyone decided to call “human eye.”

— Oi, get away from him!

— He can hear us. You can see it in his eyes. There’s something there, someone lives in there! Look! Look closely!

Desire rises—
to look too, but in response to this desire I can see only eyes. Desire is also unidirectional now.

Here’s the first eye, now it’s gone, in its place crawls the second, third, fourth, fifth, tenth, fiftieth — a kaleidoscope of black holes framed in irises iridescently coloured. I’m sure, in whole universe, there’s no object more terrifying than that which we call “human eye.”

I no longer possess myself. I possess nothing. My mind recedes somewhere to a background plane. Around, the world transforms into an eye of gigantic proportions, narrows only to the iris + pupil. My Lyrical I lacks even the luxury of closing his eyes made of sand. He has no tears that could flood his vision, no eyelids, no lashes — there is only the vision and its betrayal, defection to the enemy’s side.

A question rises (internal): does my sight now have eyes? To understand, I seek a reflection, find it only in front, in the eye, the reflection of eye of my own.

So strange... never seen it so close... So strange and so wrong to see each other without much distance, so wrong, as if I’d entered a forbidden zone, crossed a boundary sacred.

— It’s dilating! His eye, it’s dilating!

— Alive, definitely alive! Are you alive, dear Expert?
                    (Yes, it would seem so, I regret to report)

— Look!

The questions jostle, shove the watcher away, want to take his place. A camera falls to the floor, shatters to smithereens — glass shards everywhere. An explosion of chaos: arms flailing, feet trampling, tongues wagging like snakes, shouting at one another in their gibberish tongue.

From nowhere, emerges a lamp—

                    *click!*

and everything’s monotone, objectless, incandescently white — absence reigns, no coordinate axes. Crackling, melts my brain in my head. In my sight, spots of various colours grow from the centre.

Desire rises—
to unbecome sand, to exit this aggregate state, even to melt altogether, turn glass, such as a vase or a bottle for water or something stronger, maybe a spectacle lens or a telescope one, or even a mirror.

— What have you done?!

— Capture it, I only wanted to capture it! Ow! What a picture! Ah! Capture the pupil! Ow! Stop it! Don’t hit me! Incurious lot! Ow!

— You idiot! You’ve blinded him! Maybe forever!

— Sod off, will you!

— He’s sand! Hardly he cares a lot! Ow! Stop!

— Fuck off!

— You’re not worth a grain of his sand! Fuck you off, shall you?

— You won’t push me away! You won’t pu—

Screams, shoves, blows, silhouettes dancing, theatrical shadows, pulsations.

— Look! Look! Dilating! The pupil! Again!

— We could cut his lil’eyes out and away, leave the rest! Just think, to keep lil’eyes for yourself, sentient jewels, put them in a bottle or jar and fill it with epoxy resin. Imagine! Ow!

— Don’t you dare touch him! Do you even know who he is? Do you even know who needs him?

— I know you’re an idiot. Why should I care? Sand with eyes! Here, right here!

— You’re all just a bunch of nutters, incompetent, stupid children. What if we cut out your lil’eyes, eh?

— Go on then, “nutter”! Come on, yeah, go ahead! Let’s see if you can even raise a hand! Go on! Ow!

Crash, crack, swear words fly, flash-glass shatters, the air vibrates, everything shakes, walls ripple.

Vision burns, and I—

Desire rises—
for the questions to cut out my lil’eyes after all and preserve them in epoxy resin, do with them whatever they want, if only all this would end, if only I could die, or something even worse — become a senseless thoughtslop, consciousness without body or sensors, without signals, turn my meekness into mutual indifference to the world, to the body, to the brain, which will simply be stuck in a hopeless, timeless thinkdream, a broken record’s eternal loop. This must still be a dream, a dream within a dream, a dream’s residue — a hallucinoid, hypnopompic delirium.

The hubbub falls silent; the hum, however, remains.

In the doorway appears a figure ever so fearsome: hat, overcoat, gloves, and sunglasses — just like the questions, but stretched to an oval, double the size, barely fitting the doorway.

The questions break into a cold sweat and silently, lips trembling, stare at the figure.

— Hello, Mr Figure.

— Good morning, we’ve been expecting your brilliance. Haven’t touched him without you. Promise.

— All as you requested, I made sure.

— No, I made sure!

— No, I did!

— Tried our best, didn’t we? Some a bit less, and I — most of all; I did the best. Do come in, don’t stand in the doorway.

At once, the questions huddle together, clearing a path to my Lyrical I.

Mr Figure is silent, grunts with menace, works his eyebrows, and steps inside.

— Do come in, Mr Figure.

— Welcome. All for you. Please come in.

Mr Figure is at the bedside, looms over my Lyrical I. I see his sandheap reflection in Mr Figure’s sunglasses, still quite humanlike.

Tighter tugs his gloves Mr Figure, pinches off a bit of sand, easily, painlessly, as if there’d been nothing, as if this weren’t that very Lyrical I. He sniffs, nearly sneezes. The questions proffer a handkerchief. Refuses in silence, palm to palm, plays with the sand.

I don’t feel it — I see how I’m being pour to and fro, top to bottom, mixing/remixing. Mr Figure grabs a bag from his pocket, pours the sand in.

Well well well... dread to think.

— Carry him out, — Mr Figure declares.

The questions began to bustle.

— But how?

— Properly, — cuts off Mr Figure.

Confused are the questions, but understand, surround the bed, strain, groan, and lift it, and my Lyrical I floats slowly out of the room.

Others stand, smirk, photograph. My world’s again moving, and I’m not even glad, though I’ve desired it so much, dreamed of it a moment ago.

Desire rises—
to desire something else, something besides the desire, for desires can no longer be trusted; they’ve betrayed me, desires, I hate them, I hate them, fuck desires, fuck everything, even myself ← Desired to sink into nothing; now, look at me — glad of events ← Desired to become glass — now, carry me somewhere, faster, in any direction, even an inch.

Desire rises—
for everything. I don’t understand it.

Desire rises—
too much. Whose? Mine? Lyrical?

Desire rises—
still does. How much longer? I’m sand, after all. Stop it! Stop! Please, make it stop, someone, listen to me, make it stop! Please, make it stop!

Underneath, the bed shakes, dried sand of mine trickles, unclear if I’ll fit through the door, unclear if they’ll have enough strength (fuck knows where they’re carrying me), unclear what will happen if all grains of mine scatter along the way.

— Careful! — growls Mr Figure.

The questions duck, contract to even more irregular spheres, as if they’ve pumpkined. Hurriedly they drag on. But then — stop.

They freeze, Mr Figure too freezes. Everyone looks at the door.

In the doorway they stand — my heroine. Hand in hand with her — he, my hero: golden eyes brimming with tears, faces pale, muscles relaxed, not an eyelid stirs, only lips tremble slightly.

They are still two.

Their whole gaze is now mine, if only I knew they realise that my own gaze also exists and is theirs. But... again I don’t know where to look, into whose eyes? Hero, heroine? Heroine, hero? Left, right? At last I feel pain again, pain without body, pain that rolls down upon me from the void and squeezes me, squeezes me, squeezes tight in its grip.

— What... what are you doing? — utters my heroine.

— Get out of here! — my hero trumps.

— Leave him alone! Monsters!

— Out!

The questions froze, sank into frustration, look up questioningly — Mr Figure, enlighten us, what next, what to do with the obstacle?

Mr Figure nods twinwards, indicatively, sharply, commandingly, angrily.

Before my heroine and my hero could step inside, reach me, the questions begin to flow doorwards, pushing them out. My twins swear in frenzy, begin to step right over the crowd. The questions won’t let them, grab their legs, drag them out, push, shout nonsense.

Behind the twins rise four figures of oval forms, tall like the boss, only thinner: black uniform, faces covered. The twins fight them off. Vainly — the figures are stronger. They grab them by the arms, hold them, while the hero and heroine scream:

— Let go!

— Let us go! Monsters! What are you doing!

And so my Lyrical I find himself in the corridor, floating somewhere abed, instead of waves — the angry irregular spheres, around — camera flashes, silhouettes, and Mr Figure, while my hero and heroine are stuck, snared by the shadows. Together they kick, curse, lash out, shout after me.

And what can I do? I lie, I’m carried. I again—
desire, desire, desire—
again I desire nothing but them.

~ II

— You say you know everything, but is that even possible? — asks my heroine.

— I know everything, — I respond. — In potential, not at this moment, of course. And not I, but my Inner I. The one opposite to the Lyrical, or perpendicular. If they enter into dialogue, merge in monologue — that’s when the absolute knowledge is born.

— What rubbish, — she laughs. — Sometimes you amuse me.

On her shoulders and collarbones are constellations of freckles that run far beneath her clothes, and I seem to see them, but only as the starry sky during day.

My Lyrical I is up to become an astronomer, an astrologer even, to read them as in an atlas and achieve that very thing he calls Pure Potential. Everything will become clear to him, perhaps even at once: what is what, who is who, what is truth, and when — the end of the world. He’s certain, he already knows that will happen, but so far no date or hour are set.

— For instance, you know nothing about me, things that are crucial.

She works at the bar my Lyrical I likes to frequent. He’s slightly drunk because she poured him, and pours she well. He knows not what he’s saying and babbles all this with no permission from me.

— Not yet...

— Well there you go, told you.

— But in potential! If one really, really desires it, it’ll all work out, one just has to believe. Believe in the potential.

— What’s the use of believing in something, anything if you don’t even believe in yourself?

— I believe in myself.

— But not in the Lyrical, right?

— In him too.

— But not always.

“He knows not what he’s saying and babbles all this with no permission from me.”

— Always. In Pure Potential.

— Ah, I see.

— It doesn’t hurt to chill sometimes from such a burden, you know.

— Too right. And again, you know nothing about me. You are a figure, a model, an image. I am the artist who draws you. I do what I want with the figure — a portrait today, a still life tomorrow. And the figure can do only one thing to the artist — annoy her. So sit quietly and don’t move.

And so I sit. Rather, he sits, he — my Lyrical I, and I’m on the inside, the Inner I. Now I am fully certain, though sometimes it seems to me, it happens, that my Inner one crawls out, while my Lyrical one crawls in.

— And so I sit.

— Then sit, you’ve signed up to do so. A masterpiece is still miles away.

— I’m sure a masterpiece will come of me. After all, this... potential!

— A masterpiece might come of you. For the artist is I. And that is the reason, nothing more, nothing less.

— Now that was hurtful.

— Don’t be hurt. You’re a model. Plus, I pour for you for free.

— A naked sad man at a bar, not exactly a musclemass, though in potential they do exist, too.

— Not naked — nude. I’m not painting a man at a bar, I’m painting the inside. In a sense, I’m not even looking at you, you’re here for background, for the vibe, to give form, fill the space, show how light should fall.

— A still life then, I see.

— “Ha!” But no, something between portrait, landscape, and caricature. A more deeper kind of portrait. I’ll call this thing “The Innermost I.” Just “Inner” sounds rather flat, isn’t it?

— Will you draw freckles all over my body?

— I don’t draw, I paint. The answer is: won’t.

— May I ask why?

— Because. They shouldn’t be on the painting, nor on the figure. Fortunately, your Lyrical I hasn’t any, and your Innermost I displays their absence. Complete, even in “Pure Potential.”

— Well fancy that.

— Well fancy twice, Mr Figure.

— And where will you put it? My Innermost I.

— To the art gallery. I’m certain, I know absolutely, I am fully aware that this is precisely the work after which I can stop being a barmaid and, possibly, even stop being an artist.

— Why?

— Don’t you know everything? I’ve nearly reached the age. After twenty-seven it’s improper and even vulgar for anyone to be an artist of any type, including the art of painting.

— You’re joking, of course.

— Of course. But I’m also not joking. One can joke and not joke all at once, one can work as a barmaid and paint in the very same bar, with the very same model (figuratively). One can do absolutely everything all at once.

My Innermost I imagines doing everything all at once. “Everything” in this case appears as an indeterminate sum of probabilities, whose distribution could only be understood by observing all outcomes. “Everything” is not something average, some point estimate, but is a bit of everything, much of something, and nothing at all of other things.

The brightest embodiment of “Everything” is this: my Lyrical I runs his index finger across the collarbones of his heroine, from freckle to freckle, and — a cold electric shiver runs through her.

— Stop fidgeting! Sit still.

— I’ve got this, um... (my Lyrical I grows; embarrassed) Something happening down there.

— I can see, but you needn’t worry. I’m not painting whatever is happening there.

— How?

— Not at all. In my painting, your Innermost I hasn’t got one — innermost emptiness.

— How’s that? Show me.

— I won’t. Until it’s finished, I won’t show anyone. Not even myself in a sense.

— He’s completely without it?

— “It” in the being I’m depicting is, as you say, in potential. Art reproduces not the figures themselves, in whatever state they might be, and what happens to them, but only what the artists see in them, which is me, and I don’t see “it”.

When she bends her slender arm to leave a brushstroke on the canvas, her collarbones become sharp as knives, the skin stretches around them, and the freckles spread into a new constellation.

— Why am I here at all, if you’re not drawing me? Not painting, I mean.

— Indeed. I’ve already explained. Besides, you signed up yourself, saw “free drinks” and came running. Your fallen state doesn’t interest me; I need only what came before — unity, absolute primordial unity, again, as you say — potential. A human being deserves the name only by virtue of what they unite within themselves, not the other way round.

— And how does one even achieve unity?

— Aren’t you silly? By painting.

The arousal in “it” only intensifies. “Everything,” it turns out, encompasses far more, if my heroine is to be trusted. I believe her. Probabilities shuffle somewhere, “Everything” loses signs of comprehensibility and evaluation. I thought, mistakenly, that I’d been lucky enough to calculate them.

— I’m not ruining the painting, am I?

— Not an inch.

Here, behind the bar, he appears.

Well well... Surely a hallucinoid, surely my vision’s doubled, surely I’ve drunk myself into a stupor? An alcoholic’s nightmare — twin bartenders.

He’s like my heroine, only a man. Same height, same face, same eyes, same hair, same top. On his shoulders and collarbones are also constellations of freckles, they also run far beneath his clothes, and they too seem visible, like a daytime starry sky, only different.

— Oh, by the way, meet my brother.

It’s the dead of night outside.

~ III

I am now an installation, precisely my Lyrical I.

No one sees me, after all behind the glass lies but a sandstatue. Around, within a several-metre radius — an empty circle of museum space. Nearby — darkness of varying density, to the sides in the distance — corridor light, rare small bulbs, multicoloured, green glow of the “EXIT” sign.

I lie as I lay, not abed now, but in a coffin, glassy and lit — sleeping beauty in a mausoleum.

Be it day now or night, stars are up there, be it collarbones or the sky. Their constellations on my mind have been imprinted; one only needs to focus the eye.

Sound of footsteps → From the corridor into the mausoleum floats a figure — a black oval with an aura-like backlight. Heels of boots click, breathing echoes along with the rustle of garments — louder, louder, and louder — until tremble the walls of my dwelling. Close up — the same Mr Figure, in formal attire: jacket, tie, trousers; on his long nose perch neat round pince-nez. He approaches, stoops, stares, the spectacles loupe his eyes to half the size of his face. Sniffingly, he moves his moustache, inspects the perimeter of my coffin’s, and tap on the glass with his boniest fist.

                    *Knock-knock-knock—*

                    it tolls like a bell
                    spreads like thunder
                    fills my coffin with ringing
                    low, oppressive.

I was kept in a dark box, insulated, non-lit. I was isolated, saved from the invasion of any surroundings: the cackle, the flashes, the cacophony of it all, but only while I was there. I could even forget for a time that my Lyrical I is now sand, that now only my Innermost I remains. I could even get used to it, accept it, find a measure of poetry there, smell freedom (yes, that treacherous thing), feel how exceptional is my situation, for this has never happened to anyone else. Mr Figure must have agreed → thus, what came, came.

The lights begin to turn on in the mausomuseum. Clicking, the lamps ignite, their faintest whine fills the space.

From the corridors flows human mass, flooding the hall around the pedestal where lies my Ensanded I — he’s in no mood for lyricism now.

Around him are people, various humanoids, bright in colour, height, build, marvelling, disgorging words of amazement, curiosity, madness, so on and so forth:

— Is he really sand now?

— How did it happen?

— A mystery. Fell asleep, woke up — sand.

— Well fancy that! Well I never... What a case, as they say.

— What irony, don’t forget! Irony’s important.

— Right, where would we be without it, dear fellow!

— Mummy, Mummy, what’s that statue?

— That, children, isn’t a statue, it’s a man. Though he’s a bit sandy now, understand? But by large still a man. Perhaps. Science is silent about the matter.

— Was a lad, lad no more now. Sad, isn’t it, and you lot just gawp. Tragedy!

— What else is there to do with him except gawping?

— Look, all of you, it’s empty there! Between his legs! Nothing at all.

— A magnificent work! Respect to the master. Attention to detail. Obviously — art. Yes, but how? They don’t make them like this nowadays. An exception to the rule, nothing less, for where would we be without them.

— Without rules?

— Without exceptions.

And I don’t listen to them, I hear but ignore, I couldn’t give a fuck, yes, exactly so — not a fuck-giving charity, am I? Donors welcome. I had to find strength and persistence, attention, sharp eyes, a wider perspective, to push through lil’humanoids and see my beloved = my twins. I’m now in the pure form of freedom, Pure Potential, so pure it contorts me to spasms.

There’s desire, desire, desire, desire! It rises! It rises, desire!

I desire nothing but them!

Fury blazes within me such that the sand vitrifies. Oh, if only! All that blazes, blazes innermostly inside, in a sealed pressurised furnace, where smoke and steam have nowhere to hide.

Until it explodes.

Desire rises, rises! Rises desire!

My gaze darts from mug to phiz to face, runs, leaps, hungrily seeks my twins’ golden eyes.

Oh, fire, oh, aggression of feeling

Off you fuck hungry monsters, bugger off, clear the way, let my dear ones through!

I’m ready to see them, to transfix my gaze upon their faces and not let go until they reach me, having pushed through the crowds of brainlets gawking with gaping mouths, empty eyes, ears down to their shoulders.

Appear, right here, before me, press against the glass, see what I’ve become for your sake, my loves. Tears will pour in streams, drops will bomb my glass coffin, echoing-thundering, breaking it into pieces. I shall hear, see, feel, I shall sense everything.

Will redden your golden eyes, your cheeks will burst with colour, your fists you will beat upon the glass, and I shall lie and watch.

Where are you?

Crowds accumulate, masses flow into the mausomuseum. Their words are a mash, voices drone. Their faces have blurred, lost their features, as if these are people no more but an army of mannequins stockpiled into the hall.

Where are you?

Where are you?

I desire to see you, I desire—

~ IV

— Tell me, do you love her? — asks my hero.

Hammer strikes chisel, chisel strikes stone, in the stone — as he puts it, my Lyrical I. “Lyrical I Number Four” — that’s what will be the name of the sculpture, by analogy with the previous three. They will stand before my heroine’s paintings, the series called “The Innermost I,” also four, and they will face one another, stare in pairs — stone at canvas, canvas at stone. Together they know everything, everything down to the last piece of knowledge, everything that can possibly be known or even made up. At the gaze-meeting point, from the tension might occur an explosion, but for now...

— I need to know, she’s my sister after all. I see how you look at her.

Hammer strikes chisel again, chisel strikes stone. Dust flies, chips scatter, sticks to the hero’s sweaty hands, covers his bulging veins and muscles, his locks and face.

— You can talk, by the way. I’m okay with that, not like her. She’s sterner.

I look at my hero, see only my heroine, or the reverse — I look at her, see only him. Sometimes I manage to forget who is who — where is my heroine, where is my hero, and where am I between them. Sometimes I don’t look, but still see them both. They look back with equivalent force.

From the dust in my throat there’s a lump, bitterness on my tongue; I want to cough; my eyes water nonstop.

— Ahem... That’s a personal question, — says I.

— We’re all very personal here, family even.

We’re no longer at the bar — in an entire studio, the result of success. Our trio: my heroine, my hero, my I, navigates the expanses of art, conquers art-summits in just a few strides, forges the cultural landscape, captures attention, provokes a chaos of questions. Only this “I” of mine is unclear, uncertain which; one could say “simply I” — its own to each of the twins. She — with paints on canvas creates it from nothing, he — with chisel strike by strike extracts it from stones. This “I” has to be shared, for canvas and dust don’t get along. It happens for nights, days, weeks, months — I’m alone with just one of them. It’s both easy and torturous, what a devious paradox!

I’m silent.

His whole body is covered in dust, eyes protected by goggles, freckles hidden, but I still see them, I remember them, hers and his. Their bodies before me are like a map of the sky, nocturnal / diurnal, but not two parts of cosmos — rather just one— only different visible stars, and overlaying them would make everything fit, appear, become clear, dots would meet somewhere, lines line up, gaps fill, each completing the other’s lack. Their bodies before me, nude, shine with their figures, beckoning: golden eyes, noses with a slight hump, thin lips, necks, shoulders, collarbones (I desire to bite them), chests, stomachs, what lies below, and, well, strong legs. Day and night I learn to focus my vision so when I see them together, I could superimpose them onto one image, united into one being, the absolute wholeness.

— You know, we owe you a great deal. Everything, I’d even say.

— That’s not true.

— Without you, who are we? Just artists.

— I’m just a figure, a model, nothing more. I just sit.

— You understand everything and know perfectly well that’s not true. By that logic, I just strike hammer to chisel.

Love needs knowledge to reach its potential. What is it without it? Desire that rises and fades.

With all his might my hero strikes hammer to chisel, across the studio scattering ringing and splinters. Another blow — metallic, loud, quick, with an amplitude sweeping, as if were a warrior he, not a sculptor, and another — quiet, gentle, merely a raindrop. My Lyrical I emerges from beneath the stone, climbs out of the hard womb, pleads for salvation, yet none is forthcoming — it needs a blow stronger. Swing, ring, splinters, laughter. By habit or by custom, I grow tense again, my body hardens, I lose all control.

— Well then, will you answer? Do you love her?

— I’m sure you know it, the answer.

— I do. But do you?

~ V

Nights are dark in the museum corridors, dreams don’t come, I don’t seem to sleep even a bit, I don’t seem to need to, though I want it now and then. In dreams I would become human again. In dreams I would see, have, and do whatever I wanted, be it freedom of movement, of knowledge, of desire, of self-control, of possession of others = my twins = her and him simultaneously, as then, when I turned to sand. I saw them together, I had not to choose — refuse one, lose the other. One would have been too little for me, with one I couldn’t be sated, I would want for eternity to come back and restore it, make the wrong choice again, so the outcomes would be different, reversed, so again I’d live in regret, again want to come back and restore it, make the wrong choice again, live in fear, in the desire to merge them.

Nights are dark in the corridors, I see visions, as that very one. My twins are one creature of unearthly beauty, absolute and complete, a human being before splitting, a being containing all. The creature before me is naked, smiles, moves into the distance and lures me in, stepping soundlessly along a sandy shore of a lil’ lake or a pond, around which thorns grow to the horizon, coal-black, as if there’d been a fire a moment ago. The wind rustles in the thorns, murmurs in the reeds. Birds sing. Low, inaudible arrhythmic music plays, bass stretches across the landscape.

Desire rises—
to reach the creature, to run fingers across its body, count the dots, read the stars, draw lines, translate freckles into text in my head, and desires from my head, heart, and loins, conversely — into touches against the smooth texture of skin.

Desire rises—
and that’s all. The vision ends there.

Nights are dark in the corridors, figures don’t walk around. Day after day there are people, they wander, look, shout something in their gibberish tongue, honk like birds and beasts — a zoo on an outing. By day Mr Figure stands nearby, with a gloved hand strokes the glass lid, at times slaps it, taps with his fingers, beats out a tedious rhythm, while inside everything shakes, hums, my Ensanded I is about to crumble, from a semblance of human reshape into a sandpit, a generous cat litter box. Mr Figure adores speaking about me, introduces me to the crowds, as if I were his son or a painting he’d painted, a sculpture he’d sculpted, a great thought he’d laboured to think.

But at night in my sarcophagus there is silence and calm, peace and quiet, and in them my Ensanded I revels. Darkness penetrates everywhere, there’s nowhere to hide from it (fortunately). Lights glow dimly, framing “EXIT” sign, as if exit existed.

Desire rises—
                    stop—
                    glass shatters in the hall
                    the sonorous echo flies mewards
                    wraps around my coffin.

The light of a torch chases away the darkness.

                    Wariness, fear.

Through the window someone appears, and in a second — someone else.

Together they whisper, turn off the torch, freeze and wait for a moment. Breathless, without a sound, on tiptoes, they sneak to the centre of the hall where my Ensanded I lies

Desire rises—
to tear their masks off.

The silhouettes are already at the sarcophagus: stygian, thin, nimble, they twist, grope around the pedestal. The thinner one puts picks into the lock, works carefully, until there’s a click. The larger one then grabs the lid and with a slight scraping opens my coffin.

Tremble their fingers, flutters their breathing, heads dart, movements lose any direction.

I’ve frozen, I wait…

I’ve understood — I’m being stolen. 100%.

The thin silhouette leans toward my face and kisses my sandy lips right through the mask. The larger silhouette repeats it. It seems to try closing my eyes with its fingers, but for sand nothing changes — I’m watching them, I see all.

The silhouettes embrace each other, as tightly as they can (I hear the friction of leather clothing), gather their courage, take out two sacks, two small shovels, and begin to scoop me away from my coffin.

The world layers, then reassembles, then come unglued, then again sticks together. I feel thrown into a carousel, round dance, whirlpool. I feel, I feel how I end up in the sacks, not the touch but the concept, the claustrophobia, how my sandy body scatters, divides into two, how I feel here and there, in two places and nowhere.

Everything happens in atemporal cadence.

The coffin is empty.

The alarm siren screams.

The mausomuseum floods with red light — a bloody dawn.

The silhouettes run and dive through the window they broke—
together with me.

Around, something flickers.

I’m held close to a heart — its rhythm goes supersonic, its heat boils their blood, heats my sand, heats the air. Everything’s hot, almost scorching yet pleasant.

Sound of an engine, darkness, flashers and flashes.

Roar, sirens, shaking, lots of shaking.

Hormones—
fear, excitement, the flame of freedom.

Everything mixes into a heap, into two heaps mixes my Ensanded I. I feel everything, feel completely, sense how their fingers clutch the sack, firmly yet tenderly, in fear, with love, for safety, for comfort.

Light—
on the horizon rises the sun: sanguinary, ireful.

Before me their faces: my heroine and my hero, unmasked.

Their smiles shine, golden eyes reddened, drown in tears salty, some reach me too — drops fall right into the sand, seep through the grains, moisten them, and I feel it again, sense how I’m hardening and losing control.

Around, by the haze and shimmer enveloped — black thorny thickets, a lil’lake or a pond, on the surface float lilies: white, pink, white-pink.

We sit on the sand and embrace. I’m silent, I’m scared to speak, though I now have no body — only two sacks of sand.

— Don’t be afraid, dear, don’t be afraid, please, we’ll put you together, put you together however you want, wish, or desire. Just choose the form.

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This story is my submission to the Symposium. The Soaring Twenties Social Club (STSC) is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month STSC members create something around a set theme. This cycle, we do our annual special “Fiction” issue.

Previous instalments of “Posts”: I Ch. I

II

Now, dear readers, whether you want it or not, I want to tell you why I couldn’t become even a bug. I’m serious when I say I wanted to become a bug, many times, read Kafka and all that. But even that didn’t help. I swear, dear readers, that to be hyper-conscious, hyper-aware is a disease, real, absolute disease. For everyday life it would be enough to have an ordinary human consciousness, that is a half, a quarter as much as the portion that gets dumped on a developed human in our miserable twenty-first century and, furthermore, who has the bad luck to dwell in Moscow, the most self-obsessed and performative city on the whole planet. (There are cities with and without main character syndrome). It would be totally enough, for example, the kind of consciousness that so-called midwits have. I bet you think that I write this because I’m so cliché, thinking I’m on the right side of the curve and enjoy showing it off like some do. But dear readers, who would boast about his disease and show it off?

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The catalyst for its creation was simple — seeing countless out-of-context badly translated quotes from the novella, as well as generally solemn “philosophical” aura around it. The book is, on contrary, a comedy, but archaic translations completely bury its manic, self-contradictory energy, so it becomes hard, almost impossible to see that behind “the wise voice from the 19th century.” So, the idea is to rip it off from that aspect completely and hopefully look at it from a new — if not originally intended — angle. It still does follow the original text faithfully when it comes to wording, syntax, speech cadence, etc. — you can see how little I changed if you know Russian; it is a translation — only with modernised setting and historical detail, so we could also see how the same psychology manifests now.

In a letter to his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky himself described the tone as “strange, harsh and wild”, adding, “it might not be liked; therefore, poetry must soften everything and carry it through”. It’s easy to be enamoured by that poetry — even in Russian — especially when it’s so poetic and articulate, and confuse the satire on an incoherent and contradictory worldview with a philosophical treatise, especially when it at times strikes the “literally me” nerve so much.

So, “Notes from Underground” is a deadpan cringe comedy about an exhausting and ridiculous armchair philosopher who mistakes neurotic paralysis for sophisticated intelligence who would absolutely go up on an open-mic stage and do unhinged stand-up screeds about his wretched life. Or post it on Substack at 3am.

Thus we would have what I shall call “Posts from Underground”.

I

I’m a sick man… I’m a spiteful man. Unattractive man I am. I think I have depression. Although I don’t understand anything about my condition and don’t know whether I have it at all. I’m not in therapy and never been to therapy, though I respect psychology and have read Freud. Besides, I constantly self-diagnose; well, at least enough to respect the profession (I’m smart enough not to self-diagnose, but also educated enough to self-diagnose). Nah, I won’t go to therapy out of spite. You won’t understand it. But I do understand. I obviously can’t explain to you for whom exactly things are worse because of my spite; I know perfectly well that I’m not hurting therapists by not going to therapy; I know better than anyone that I’m only fucking myself over with all this and nobody else. But still, if I don’t go to therapy, it’s out of spite. I’m depressed, so let me get even more depressed!

I’ve been living like that for a while — maybe twenty years. Now I’m forty. I used to work, now I don’t. I was a toxic IT support guy. I was rude and took pleasure in it. I mean, I didn’t steal company equipment, so I had to compensate myself somehow (Bad joke; but I won’t delete it. I wrote it thinking it was witty, but now that I see I just wanted to show off pathetically — I’m deliberately leaving it in!) When users would come to my desk with their tickets, I’d grind my teeth at them and feel inexorable pleasure when I managed to upset someone. Almost always managed to. Mostly they were all timid types: you know — users. But among the self-important ones there was some middle manager I especially couldn’t stand. He refused to submit and kept stubbornly following up on tickets. I had a war with him over his tickets for a year and a half. I finally broke him. He stopped following up. Though this happened when I was younger. But do you know, dear readers, what the main point of my spite was? The whole thing, the nastiest thing, was the every minute, even in moments of my strongest bile, I shamefully realised that I was not only not spiteful, but not even a bitter person, that I was just barking at shadows for nothing and amusing myself with it. I’m foaming at my mouth, but bring me some little treat — a cup of coffee or whatnot — and I’ll calm down. I’ll even feel touched, though afterwards I’ll grind my teeth at myself and suffer from insomnia for months. That’s just my way.

I lied to you above, lied that I was a toxic IT guy. Lied out of spite. I was just messing around with the users and that one guy, but in reality I could never be mean to anyone. I was constantly aware of many, many other feelings opposite to that. I felt them swarming in me, these opposite feelings. I knew they’d been swarming in me my whole life and trying to get out, but I wouldn’t let them, I didn’t, never did. They tortured me to the point of shame, brought me to convulsions and — I was completely fed up with them! Don’t you reckon, dear readers, that I’m repenting something before you now, that I’m asking your forgiveness for something?… I’m sure that you do reckon… But anyway, I assure you, I don’t care even if you do…

I not only failed to become mean, I failed to become anything, really: not mean, not good, not scum, not decent, not a hero, not even a bug. Now I’m rotting away in my hole, mocking myself with the spiteful and completely useless consolation that an intelligent person cannot really become anything, and only an idiot becomes something. Indeed, an intelligent person of the twenty first century must and is morally obligated to be essentially a characterless being; while a person with a character, an achiever, is essentially an NPC. This is my belief at forty. I’m forty now, and forty years is where your life ends. To live past forty is vulgar, immoral and degenerate. Tell me, who lives past forty, honestly? I’ll tell you who: NPCs and grifters live past forty. I’ll say this to all boomers’ faces, all these respectable boomers who “lived through worse in the 90s” and won’t shut up about it! I’ll say this the whole world’s face! I have the right to say this because I myself will live to sixty. I’ll live to seventy! To eighty!… Wait! Let me catch my breath…

You probably think, dear readers, that I’m here to make you laugh? You’re wrong at that, too. I’m not some shitposter you think I am, or maybe think I am; however, if you, pissed off with all my rambling (and I can feel you are), decide to ask me, what am I then? I’ll tell you: I’m that guy from IT. I worked to pay the bills (and only for that), and when last year one of my distant relatives left me a room in a communal flat in their will, I immediately quit and holed up in my corner. I lived in this corner before, but now I really feel settled. My room is shitty, in a Soviet building on the edge of Moscow. The woman I share the kitchen and bathroom with is old, mean from stupidity, and she always smells bad on top of it. People tell me that Moscow is bad for my mental health and that with my pathetic means it’s very expensive to live in Moscow. I know all this, know it better than all these experienced and wise advisors and those who nod along. But I’m staying in Moscow; I won’t leave Moscow! I’m not leaving because… Ah! Who cares whether I leave it or not.

But anyway: what can any decent man talk about with the most pleasure?

Answer: himself.

Well then, I’ll talk about myself.

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Six months ago, if you’d told me that Google DeepMind’s breakthroughs in protein folding would lead to a coprophagy epidemic sweeping through universities and schools, I’d have laughed at you for such a bizarre and absurd claim, for your conspiratorial boomer take. But here we are! Nobody’s fucking laughing. Not me at least.

You could imagine a hypothetical sci-fi situation in which a sentient AI realises how jaded, corrupted and parasitic humans are and decides to become just like them, homicidal and megalomaniacal, and annihilate all the skin bags. Happens now and then in literature and film, wouldn’t be a surprise either. Yuddites would be right, any typical anti-AGI take would come out as prophetic, proper futurology. But that’s not what happen; the AI we’ve deserved can hurt you in other ways: impersonation, misinformation at industrial scale, loneliness and mental health issues, copyright infringement, sloppification of the internet. Without saying it directly, they admit the AGI isn’t coming, perhaps only as a porn-generator. Not a bang but a whimpering fart, a slow rot, the society eating itself. Who could imagine our omnivorousness can take us thus far?

See, the AI we’ve deserved doesn’t have to be intelligent even — being stupid is enough for humans to use you for their own selfish stupid ideas and remarkable breakthroughs. They used the same transformer architecture that powers everything now and the same protein structure prediction that came out of DeepMind. AlphaFold cracked the protein folding problem, made structural biology obsolete overnight, won a Nobel Prize, and gave every schmuck with a GPU cluster the delusion they could play God with genomics. They built these tools to cure Alzheimer’s, cancer, and design carbon-capture enzymes. Instead? Well...

That was March 2025. DeepMind published a paper in Nature: “Novel Protein Structures for Sustainable Nutrition: An AI-Driven Approach to Gut Microbiome Engineering.” Checks all the marks: clinical language, peer-reviewed, respectable. The press release talked about “leveraging breakthroughs in protein folding prediction to address global food insecurity.” It mentioned termites and their remarkable three-way symbiotic relationship with cellulolytic protists and bacterial symbionts, referenced Kopi Luwak and civet gut fermentation as proof-of-concept — look, such things exist in nature, and it’s always our greatest inspiration. Some very rhetorically advanced chaps would even build nature-God connection and say it’s all, in fact, intended and designed by God, and we’re just slowly discovering who we are. You know, Jesus spoke of this! You know, it is all very scientific and humanitarian, jolly good, butterflies and rainbows!

Two weeks later, a new venture called Abdominion Labs (mind you, backed by OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA in a Series A) announced they’d licensed DeepMind’s research for commercial application. Isn’t that the best? Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted — to eat our own shit? They used AlphaFold to design a special microorganism that would live in your gut, colonise your faeces, and upon evacuation — sorry, “bio-material extraction” — start a novel fermentation process. Abdominion Labs didn’t just study it. They optimised it. Made it scalable. Made it marketable. Made it inevitable.

They called the microorganism LOTUS (under the microscope, its structure apparently resembled a lotus flower or whatnot). The press kit was beautiful — clean sans-serif fonts, pastel gradients, lots of white space, very mindful, very demure. Sustainable, circular, revolutionary — you name it — all the buzzwords were there. But hear me, not once, not a single time, did they use the word “shit” or it’s mindful and demure synonyms.

Millions of views in the first day. Everyone was reading, watching, and listening as to how soon they’d be stuffing their mouths with their own faeces and what made it possible. And then, of course, the memes — you can imagine.

That said, venture capitalists were in an impossible position. On one hand, you had something that could end world hunger, trillions in revenue, the big tech companies already involved, DeepMind’s reputation backing it. On the other hand, you have the most degenerate and mental idea humanity has ever seen. But OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA don’t throw money at things lightly. Series B followed within weeks, valuation was modest, only £34 billion. Government support was rubber-stamped. I bet there was some sort of a lobby, or the secret world government, the shit-luminati with an eyed turd on top of a pyramid. That would not surprise me. At all. In fact, I would rather believe in that than anything else.

For the next six months everyone, except investors, forgot about Abdominion Labs, memes got dusty, hype — droopy, until the testing phase ended and they started production. The first batch looked like chewing gum. In a wee square box, with a lotus flower painted on it, laid a thin soft gummy layer with a flowery scent. You buy it, you chew it, and you get the microbe down in your guts forever. Simple yet genius. AI created it in a way such that there was no common horrid odour. You could put it in a container and leave it for a few days exposed to the sunlight so it can dry out a bit. Then, well, you could eat it.

Now, it’s being sold in Boots. Next to the meal deals and paracetamol. Someone set up an artisanal stall in Borough Market, same shit, extremely overpriced. There are LOTUS pop-ups everywhere! In the UK, in Europe, in the US — all around the world. Only Russia, Iran, North Korea and the bunch managed to escape it due to sanctions.

Sounds almost utopic, but this is exactly when the evil AI plot twist happened. Ingenious craftsmen soon discovered that if you leave your shit fermenting for a week or more away from the sun, somewhere in a dark and cool place, it starts acquiring unusual, magical, perception-warping properties. When used, aged lotus increased the user’s happiness, self-confidence, and, allegedly, intelligence, too, making people forget about their problems and live in a faecal fantasy.

The timing was perfect, wasn’t it? Right when the whole psychedelic renaissance was promising to heal our collective trauma after a decade of austerity, along comes LOTUS to fuck it all up. Why microdose mushrooms for enlightenment and therapeutic integration when you can macrodose your own shit and become a better self almost for free?

It was cheap, accessible, and easy to use, plus, gluten-free and organic. Thanks to the internet, in less than a week, everyone started buying Lotus gums, fermenting and ageing their shit, eating it, and being happy, sexy, and wise. It wasn’t actually making people so, of course, but a feeling was enough. It felt good, good enough to get addicted, good enough to make Abdominion Labs rich.

The authorities don’t know how to classify LOTUS, for it’s technically a probiotic. They can’t ban it because you can’t criminalise someone’s digestive system. I would imagine Keir Starmer’s wet dream is to ban us from taking a shit. As soon as you take lotus for the first time, you become dependent upon it, you become a hopeless slave to its allure. Once you stop consuming it, the fancy image of yours fades away and you see who you really are: a miserable, lost, self-despising, trembling creature; the contrast is striking, and you feel yourself a hunchback with mildly exotic ugliness who sees themselves in a mirror for the first time. So, to keep the effect, you’ve got to take lotus consistently. Some of the more addictive effects of it are bouts of euphoria, protracted ennui, drastic reduction of attention span, and possibly... death. Ha-ha, just kidding. Lotus kills no one. “Viruses” that kill too fast and too much cannot spread well and die out often. Lotus was the opposite. Lotus was harmless. No one cared. Shepherd, shan’t you worry if your flock is happy? Opium for the masses, from the masses, in mass quantities. The third psychedelic revolution. We thought it was supposed to be different, spiritual, not just clinical. We wanted arts and sciences renaissance. We were this close to something, to collective healing, to ego dissolution, to reconnection with whatever the hell we’d lost in the digital wasteland. We wanted Terence McKenna to be quoted unironically. And then LOTUS came along and turned the whole thing into a shitshow.

Everyone is a shitborg now. Scroll through Twitter right now and half the posts are people sharing their “lotus journeys”. There’s a waiting list for LOTUS starter kits longer than the NHS waiting list for mental health services. Quite a few enthusiasts on Etsy and Ebay is selling “artisanal” varieties. There’s a subreddit with 2m members. Netflix did a documentary, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eating Shit”. The Guardian ran a thinkpiece titled “LOTUS and Late Capitalism: Are We Eating Ourselves?” Some were concerned, especially the European Union.

While I write this, my degenerate flatmate is building a lotus ageing farm under his bed. He is a shitrepreneur now, you see. The internet is full of ultimate guides on how to become one. My flatmate adds different colouring and fruity infusions to make it fancy and surprising. Earl Grey infusion, naturally — because of course he’s making tea-flavoured shit, we’re that far gone. Assam, English Breakfast, matcha Labubu Dubai chocolate for fuck’s sake.

For distribution, he packages it in match boxes, portable and convenient, easy to put a sticker on, and others will happily buy it. His “business” is doing better than the actual economy. Savvy afaeceonados hunt for unique tastes and flavours, for each and every shit is unique, especially if you sprinkle it with lavender or mix it with turmeric. Your own aged lotus soon becomes boring and stops “sparking joy”. You need something that opens the gateway to new experiences, and after a while, it becomes part of your daily diet. It becomes a part of you. You become a shiteater.

I look into my flatmate’s eyes. They are empty, always have been. A feverish flame flickers in them, but behind... nothing. He smiles and asks if I want to try his product and open my turd eye. For free. I frown, show him my right middle finger and leave the room.

In this fucked up world, I feel myself an alien, a savage to coprophagi civilisation standing at the edge of a cliff, on a chair with rope in hand. The realisation that you’re the only sane person makes you question your reality. What if I’m the one who’s wrong? Is there anyone else out there? We live in a society and blablabla. For them I’m just another lonely lunatic with a placard and a mic and a Bluetooth speaker strolling through an empty Trafalgar Square, whining about the end of time. But we are always at the end of time, aren’t we? If I have no power to save the world, no power to drag everyone away from the sinister island on which they all have stuck, why persist? If the world doesn’t need saving anymore, the easiest choice is to fall in line.

Thus I wonder, who are you, reader? Whom is this even addressed? Perhaps, a dummy postbox in front of Void Court on Inane Avenue. Someone scrolling through Substack on Sunday, wondering if they’ve gone mad or if everyone else has. Someone in another flat, another city, a parent watching their own child build their own shit farm and thinking: surely, surely I’m not alone in finding this completely mental.

Any decent piece of writing, whether it’s a message in a bottle or a death note, should have two things: a Kubrick reference, and a piece of poetry. The first I’ve already got, so I was willing to write a poem to give you, droog, something beautiful and transcendental enough, something full of hope, a salvific possibility of redemption. But, despite being sober from lotus, my brain convolutions are clogged with nothing but shit.

So, I scribble down this verse, and, leaning perhaps too far out the window, read it out loud so the void can hear my voice:

In spite of our rich aspirations

To conquer the likes of Uranus

We ditched the space exploration,

And have only conquered your

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀Ego.

This is something new for me — I had never written a capital R Review before these two (!) — but it’s something I want to do more, especially for my contemporaries, friends and fellow writers, to all of whom I believe (having skin in the game) every review is a gift. I want to start with 2-in-1 post but might publish standalone reviews later under Nevédomosti section, depending on the timeline and their length.

Before we begin, if you’re hungry for short fiction, and I collaborated on an experimental short story, touching on rather whimsical and profound topics. Check it out on her Substack:

It’s Just Jeanne

With the Speed of Flatulence

Hello readers! What follows below is a writing experiment between the multi talented Vanya Bagaev and myself. It’s our submission to the STSC monthly Symposium #38 on Speed…

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6 months ago · 19 likes · 7 comments · Jeanne S and Vanya Bagaev

Re: “I Won’t Keep You” by

When I opened the book today to grab some quotes I found a dead spider stuck between the pages. Let’s consider it poetic but symbolic of nothing, rather just factual, a little artefact hidden within the book that I believe would appreciate having it.

This is also a beauty of physical books, especially those that started on Substack. You know the feeling; many have attempted describing it since the rise of digital word, but Vladimir Sorokin did it best: “You can spill coffee on a book or even place a hot coffee pot on it, you can burn it with a cigarette. [...] You can drench it with tears, wine, blood, sperm. And all of this will remain on it as a memory of the reader. [...] But what can an iPad do? Tears or blood will run off it, leaving nothing behind.” Spider would’ve slid down and run away, too.

“I Won’t Keep You” is a collection of short stories and essays that had appeared on Trilety’s Substack of the same name.

Substack or any blog or any feed is chronological at the point when it’s written and published — stories are often published in the order they are written — and very likely reverse-chronological or non-chronological when you just discover the publication and start digging the archive. Ultimately, a reader decides what route to take which determines the final experience — whether you start with “Top” or “Most Popular” or “Recent” or just go randomly. As a writer, however, I do believe the order plays an important role in any anthology or short story collection, so when I got the book in my hands, my excitement was not only to read it all again, for I’d read most, but to experience it in a new intended order.

In Andrei Bitov’s “The Symmetry Teacher” he describes why the order matters in the fictional “preface” to the book that is framed as a translation of a series of novellas:

Each chapter of ‘The Teacher’ can be read as a separate work; the reader is free to give preference to one or another as an independent story, but if he masters all in succession and hears the echo spreading from the previous to the next and from each to each, then he will discover its source, that is, he will read the novel itself, not a collection of stories.

It’s something I’m looking for in any collection or even in a novel, nay nouveau roman, and also something I’ve been trying to achieve in my work. Trilety’s book, despite being a compilation of very diverse and seemingly unrelated fictions, autofictions, and essays, does that great. It unfolds and echoes via associations, threads, recurring motifs and symbols: femininity, body, loss, grief, eroticism, animals, insects, our connection with nature and self. Often one story ends with an image, idea, concept, symbol, theme, and the next story picks it up in a different setting and continues it, building up the momentum. Despite its title, “I Won’t Keep You”, on the contrary, it “keeps you”, paradoxically so.

“My official diagnosis came two years ago. But I’ve suffered from Cyborg Syndrome since the age of eight, when the conifers couldn’t protect me from the violence of mothering. The difference between being mothered and being smothered is the difference between a wave and a hurricane.”

— (12) Glaciers are the Gaolers of Floods

Although the book deliberately tells us that it is a work of both fiction and non-fiction, as a reader, you’d hardly notice the difference. The only — but hardly reliable clue — would be PoV, where you can safely say that all third person stories are fiction and all female first person are autofictional essays. That, however, didn’t matter for me, despite having followed Trilety for a while and know a fact or two about her. The book is uniform in style and voice and blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction and in that sense is a single work. It is still “a collection” but, in addition to careful ordering, it also has “a core” that makes it whole.

“They say that gaslighting is done to us by others but sometimes we are the ones who gaslight ourselves until we’ve warped our own reality so badly there is nothing left to question and no one left to love.”

— (33) Elbow Bend and Back Again

Each of the little pieces is closer to poetry than prose: playful, dreamy, extremely lyrical, metaphorical, airy, yet bodily and grounded in reality. Despite often heavy themes and underlying indescribable melancholy behind the façade, most stories often make you smile and even have happy endings. Often whenever I waited for something sad or absurd to happen, none did, either ending on a positive note or leaving it open.

It’s hard to make a list of favourites, and I don’t see much value in going over each story; as I said, they are closer to poetry, and why would you be doing short retellings of poetry to someone? Instead I’ve already put some highlighted quotes above and a few below. Most memorable moment was the beginning of the story “Map of Nostalgia”, a topic so dear to me in its traditional sense, the feeling that Trilety describes brilliantly:

“Nostalgia’s start was in a heartache for home. Yet now nostalgia is used to describe a longing for the past. I am lost and looking for a map to find my way back. If I were a Cartographer of Longing, I would chart my Homesickness for you with push pins and strings, connecting the cord between the places of your past.

A friend of mine was raised on the island of Guadeloupe. She told me of a tradition where the godparents take the newborn’s umbilical cord and plant it with a tree, along with wishes and prayers for the baby to grow as strong as its sapling companion. Ray said, “In Creole, la lombric an mwen téré, means home is where my umbilical is buried.” Do Creole children suffer less from nostalgia because they know the location of their earthworm origins?

Ever a home to return to.

But, what is Death’s umbilical cord? If we snip a nutrient-giving tube at birth, what bond is snipped at death? There is no regeneration of worm, only a fizzle of electric current that turns into eternal quiet.”

— (21) Map of Nostalgia

This is what makes Trilety’s writing special for me — she has a rare gift of arranging those pins and strings, finding unexpected, strange yet profound association between seemingly incompatible things, even polar opposites. On every page you’d stumble on sentences and phrases that amongst all people only Trilety could say, such as another one:

Only big toe knows that flip-flops were designed to isolate.

— (34) Belle Isola

I didn’t want to make a review “a consumer guide” — probably it’s hard to make one for a dense and diverse work like “I Won’t Keep You”, especially if it’s my first one — instead, I wanted to convey why it matters for me. Should you read it and why? If you like lyrical, observant, and playful prose, if you long for great literary short fiction, and if you trust my taste — yes, this book is for you.

I wanted to have “a Substack shelf” but I have to put “I Won’t Keep You” next to Valeria Narbikova on my shelf. I can’t explain my logic; the books are just soulmates, if it’s possible amongst books. My guess is Narbikova and Wade at some point somehow connected to the same metaphysical Source, perhaps with the umbilical cord.

Re: “the big T” by

“the big T” wasn’t my typical read when it comes to novels, and yet I read it faster than most books of the same size and it ended up being one of the most enjoyable novels I read recently. It also started on Substack, but this time I came to the print version first — a preferred way for me to read a novel.

Before picking it up, I wasn’t sure that the story would resonate with me, mostly worried I wouldn’t “get it”: a modern American bildungsroman about long-lasting friendship between Jude, the narrator, and Tommy, the big T in question. Naturally, someone from a relatively remote Russian village with a radically different upbringing, even though close enough age-wise, could hardly relate to most of what the characters are going through — that someone only has a reductive high-level movie-based picture of what it’s like to grow up in the United States in the 90s-00s and beyond. And yet, despite the geographical and cultural difference, a universal experience of being a child, a teenager, a young adult, of having and losing the loved ones, finding who you are and who you want to be, is still resonating and, well, relatable. It is, first and foremost, an interesting and engaging story, for one spanning years — brilliantly plotted, each chapter being an important episode in the characters’ lives. Structure-wise, there’s a lot to compliment, both the selection of those events, their more or less standalone nature that however pull you into the story deeper and deeper, and especially my favourite — last sentences. They are something to pay attention to, admire and study. Clancy’s done an amazing job there. “Lives flew by” is how I would describe it, which has its pros and cons: you can watch the characters’ lives unfold in front of your eyes just in a few evenings, but you have to watch them grow up and move on to the next stage in their life, bittersweetly in case you want to stay in some periods for longer time and explore them more. It is a tour de force rather than a saga, so you should expect years to flash and characters grow before your eyes.

As with any story, especially coming-of-age, you’re not only reading the book but also reading your past, filtering what you experience in the book through what you experience in real life. “the big T”, covering middle school, high school, college, young adulthood, and later years in the epilogue, has a lot of life in it (pun intended): memories, celebrations, conflicts, dilemmas, etc. in which many readers would maybe see themselves or people they grew up with, remember those times, relish, nostalgise, grieve. For me, however, it was different, often in a weird, paradoxical way. Friendship I experienced wasn’t at all similar to the relationship between Jude and Tommy; I’ve never lived through something like that, so the book didn’t have many “literally me” moments. Instead of reading “what happened”, I read “what could’ve happened but never did”, trying to imagine an alternative universe where in my earlier years I could’ve had a friend like Tommy. You can be a shy, introspective child who, perhaps, deep inside wants to be charming and rebellious, or you can be one of a certain mental and psychological constitution that is rare to find in your peers, thus making it hard to create a real lasting emotional and intellectual bond with most. From that angle, Tommy appears as an ideal friend both as a cure for intellectual and emotional loneliness that many may experience in life — sort of a second you, the only person able to understand you fully — and as a wanna-be-you, someone you would want to be but couldn’t and could only feel an inexorable magnetic pull towards. In “the big T” it was both; Jude and Tommy both complement and challenge each other, which is rare and even felt idyllic.

An idyll or a nostalgic childhood mystery — the feeling that follows you through the first half of the book — in a way, an impossible could-be life that you want to linger forever, that universal sensibility of happy childhood for those who have experienced it that way. Having read many “dark books” in the recent years, I always expected something bad to happen (again, yes) by the end of the chapter to get the plot going but it wasn’t necessary; the book in the first half is mostly wholesome, at times melancholic and bittersweet, especially in those wonderful last sentences. The second half won’t get significantly darker but, together with the characters, the psychological and thematic layer will become more mature and complex, eventually venturing into the promised spiral of existential struggle and self-destruction that is painful to watch. The questions “who am I?” and “what do I want in life?” take over the narrative for both Jude and Tommy as they head off to college. Both of them want to be artists — a writer and a poet — but life, i.e. their parents, prevents them from it, pushing them into unwanted studies. For both it becomes a struggle: for Jude, more measured and reasonable, it eventually ends well; for Tommy, one who wants to take anything from life and live fast — his last name being Goodspeed for a reason — it doesn’t. This way we see two so alike and yet so different men going through alike and yet so different challenges.

As we see the idyll breaking, or rather slowly disintegrating, or rather becoming real, deep and complicated, the book gradually yet rapidly shifts from little “t”s towards bigger “T”s — pun intended as well, and thus described by the narrator:

We all have our little ‘t’s, which are the miniature traumas that happen to everyone in life, the embarrassing moments, the anguish and the bruises, those which are cumulatively harmful in their own right. Then we have big ‘T’ trauma, which maybe happens a few times, the scar that anyone from any life can acquire that warps them for good and from which they may never recover, for better or worse.

My big T was Tommy.

This was for me the most crucial and memorable passage (and episode) from the book, one of those that I’ll take with me. It is a moment that gives the book’s title the second, symbolic meaning. It is also a moment at which for me the story ends and everything else after that becomes an epilogue, a necessary and poignant one that I loved reading, yet still an epilogue. It makes another last spin of the spiral back, balancing the tragedy with hope, and gives the book its satisfying closure.

Would I recommend it? Yes. Clancy’s a master storyteller. You can see this in his shorter fiction at , and it’s evident in his novel. Even if you don’t find themes or setting compelling (I didn’t, for example; at least not when I picked it up), you’d be absorbed by the story and the charm of its characters.

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7 months ago · 65 likes · 22 comments · Clancy Steadwell

Re: “Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel”

My “Deleted Scenes…” have been slowly but steadily attracting readership and reviews. Last month published a quite perceptive and thoughtful review by Benji Taylor where he describes my book as “genre-bending, mind-bending and very, very Russian,” unfolding in “a carnival of language, blurring the lines between dream and reality,” which all of course is pleasing to read because it’s exactly how I see it myself as well, even though it’s almost impossible for me to describe it properly. It’s always been either elusive — what is that I wrote? I envy writers who can do that easily (like Clancy!). I struggled with the back cover blurb, and I struggle with pitching the book to others, and I struggle now with the next one when I think of how I should describe it to my readers. Hence sharing the reviews here has always seemed to me a great idea:

The dilemmas facing Bagaev’s characters (and their thoughts) are familiar to any reader of dystopian fiction, but the darkly comic manner in which he explores them heightens the grotesque absurdity of life under the authoritarian wheel.

You can find and read the full review here.

Another one was written by a few months ago.

— […] You know like (the thought uses air quotes) “this book was chaotic in the best way”. Explain that we felt the book was punchy and heavy at times, but it balanced it with dark humor really well. […]

You can find it here. It is a fictionalised review so it’s also a glimpse inside the book, some parts of it.

created a review hub for his novel “American Pleasure” — which is also on my reading list — and I thought I should really put it all together finally. My book’s page already has a bunch of links to reviews and excerpts for them but lacks structure and presentation.

If you’ve bought my “Deleted Scenes” recently or not so recently, please post the pictures, quotes, spread the word anywhere in any way — it would help immensely. There’s no better marketing!

If you too want to write a review and publish it somewhere, I can help you getting hold of a copy, just DM me on Substack or send an email.

With that, thank you for making it to the end.

Now, I bow away!