The opening lines of Svetlana Satchkova’s debut English-language novel, The Undead, see the protagonist, Maya—an unassuming woman in her 30s, making her directorial debut with a horror movie—eating a delicious fig. “[It] felt like pure happiness, making her forget, at least for the time being, that life was full of disappointments and nasty tricks,” Satchkova writes.
This exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos, characterizes the rest of the novel. The Undead—out January 13 from Melville House—follows Maya’s personal and political journey as her film inadvertently arouses the ire of Vladimir Putin’s repressive government in the years after the Russian invasion of Crimea. Maya’s initial apathy towards the crackdown on dissent amid politicians and creatives both reflects a prevailing sentiment in Russia early on: She views instances of repression as anomalies rather than the norm, and is at first unable to imagine that her film—in which Lenin’s revitalized mummy attempts to take control of Moscow, zombie apocalypse-style—might be construed as controversial by the Russian state.
Part künstlerroman and part thriller, deeply grounded in psychological realism, The Undead, dedicated to the political prisoner Alexei Navalny and other victims of Putin’s régime, explores what it means to be an artist in a country inching from authoritarianism to totalitarianism and veering towards a second Cold War.
As a journalist and writer who left behind a lengthy career at Condé Nast in Russia to rebuild her life in the United States, Satchkova sought to embrace her Russian sensibilities while also making her ideas accessible to American readers. She had experimented with working in English before, translating parts of her novel Teeth while taking a class at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But where Teeth—the story of a Russian dentist bringing up two daughters on his own—received enthusiastic responses from agents, they ultimately struggled to find a niche for it in the US.
The experience of translating Teeth prompted Satchkova to write her next novel, The Undead, in English. The frame of mind that the process put her into appealed. “When I first started writing in English, I felt like a completely different person,” Satchkova says. “Your whole mentality changes with the language that’s inside your head.” By that point, Russia had invaded Ukraine; the repression of dissidents had intensified; and independent news outlets had been forced to close as Putin forbade people from criticizing the war effort.
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