Astrologers proclaim the Year of Tulubaika
Population of the village centuples (Nevedomosti №7)
Tulubaikaporia is one month old today and so far described by readers as “entertaining, intelligent, poetic, funny, strange, anxious, witty and charming” amongst other words, for which we couldn’t’ve been more grateful! Cheers to everyone who has read and reviewed the book! Cheers to those who’re yet to do so! We can’t thank you enough!
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 Denise S. Robbins’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!
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!
Now, we humbly bow away to see you in the next episode….
ALSO — THIS IS NOT AN APRIL FOOL’S JOKE!!!!!