The Vital Needs Of The Dead: Chronicles

By Igor Sakhnovsky

Love, death and memory breathe in unison in the first novel by Igor Sakhnovsky. A boy is growing up in a small Soviet town beyond the Urals. There is a person in his life whose unobtrusive devotion will stay with him and see him through all hardships.

This semi-biographical story of ‘sentimental education’ of a young man in a Russian province chronicles his life from childhood to university years, with his first love to an older woman, his attempt to break out of the provincial morass and the choices he has to make.

The book leaves the reader sensing that there is ‘nothing more terrifying, beautiful and fantastical than the so-called real life’. The book was highly acclaimed in Russia and firmly established Igor Sakhnovsky as one of the most interesting Russian writers of today. The novel gained Sakhnovsky the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship (other winners have included Ian Rankin, Alasdair Gray and Hilary Spurling, among others).

***

This title has been realised by a team of the following dedicated professionals:

Translated by Julia Kent,

Edited by Nina Chordas,

Maxim Hodak - Максим Ходак (Publisher), 

Max Mendor - Макс Мендор (Director), 

Yana Kovalskaya and Camilla Stein.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glagoslav
• Release date: Aug 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909156197

Book preview

Igor Sakhnovsky

THE VITAL NEEDS OF THE DEAD

Glagoslav Publications

The Vital Needs Of The Dead

By Igor Sakhnovsky

First published in Russian as

Насущные нужды умерших. Хроника

Translated by Julia Kent

Edited by Nina Chordas

© Igor Sakhnovsky 1999

© 2012, Glagoslav Publications, United Kingdom

Glagoslav Publications Ltd

88-90 Hatton Garden

EC1N 8PN London

United Kingdom

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN 978-1-909156-19-7 (EPUB)

ISBN 978-1-909156-20-3 (Kindle)

ISBN 978-94-91425-52-3 (EPUB, The Netherlands)

This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

A Chronicle

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Chronicle

My relationship with this woman resembles the parched proverbial link between a slave oarsman and the galley that is chained to him. However, in our case one could argue about who is chained to whom, the more so because even when she was alive – and also afterwards – we had to take each other’s place more than once. Particularly afterwards.

I am not used to saying out loud her name which is florid and slightly embarrassing, for I never, not once, addressed her by her name.

She had the same surname as me, which is Sidelnikov. She was Rosa Sidelnikov. For a long time this quite mundane fact seemed to me an inexplicable coincidence.

What is hardest for me now is to speak about her in the third person. A doctor who comes to visit a terminally ill or mentally unstable patient, asks the confused relatives in a business-like manner, ‘Has he been sweating like this all the time? What has his stool been like?’ Or he enquires with lazy furtiveness but audibly enough, ‘Has he stopped screaming about the attempts on his life? Well, you’d better not remind him.’ The family stunned by hopelessness and fear naturally reply in the desired key. And then the fleeting reek of betrayal permeates the medicinal stuffiness of the room. Henceforth, the human being in question is defeated in his last remaining rights. The loved and cherished you disappears forever from that clammy hateful bed and only he remains, abandoned to its own devices.

Calling Rosa she now, I can hear the condescending silence of a person present but detached from us all by the same status of complete incurability – or insanity. Except that her illness is simply called death.

CHAPTER ONE

After so many other Augusts that have rolled away yonder like overripe apples, those particular August nights and days continue to glow and their radiance hurts my eyes. Here is my first memory of Rosa, my earliest naked and nocturnal recollection of her.

The day was ending, inopportunely as usual. I never felt sleepy and perceived the night as a forced interruption of the breathtaking life of the day.

Rosa made her bed on a narrow couch, covered with black leatherette, and then made my bed on an iron bedstead by the opposite wall. Whilst undressing, I was absentmindedly listening to the garrulous life of our neighbours. Beyond the thin partition of the shared flat, the large Baronkin family was getting ready for bed.

Their settling for the night was as long and thorough as if they were seeing themselves off on a long journey. The head of the family, Vassily, was giving the final evening instructions to his wife Tatyana. Every now and then, their children, with their bare heels pounding on the floor, would run to them with detailed reports and complaints about each other. Every other minute, Vassily would put in the short, only four letters long, yet pithy expletive denoting the utter hopelessness of everything. Incidentally, it was the same word which, since the end of last summer, anybody wishing to do so could see written in enormous letters inscribed in tar on the yellow stucco facade of their two-storey block of flats in Shkiryatov street.

Flushed after washing her face, Rosa was brushing her hair in front of the mirror with the moulded institutional frame. That rectangular mirror, on the wall next to the window, seemed to me a second window that was also open, although not out into the yard but inside, from out of the yard full of darkness into Rosa’s half-empty and brightly lit room.

I had already got under the woollen blanket and was listening to the neighbours’ radio, big-heartedly blaring out the Saturday request concert. This song is to honour a beloved weaver, decorated with an Order, a mother and a grandmother who unselfishly gave up many years of her life. The singer had the voice of crazy red-haired Lydia who lived on the ground floor:

Oh Samara, little town,

I am restless, oh so restless!

Would you calm me down!

Without turning, Rosa suddenly enquired whether I was hungry. I was imagining how the little town of Samara would rush as fast as its legs would carry it to calm down the unsettled imbecile. No, I wasn’t hungry. By the way, Lydia from the ground floor was quite placid and did not require any calming down. For days on end, she strolled to and fro in the yard in a faded loose-fitting sundress that was very cute, but for some reason always had a hideous greasy stain underneath her belly.

Then it was some sullen robust fellow’s turn to sing:

There were only three of us

Left out of eighteen lads.

How many of them fell...

After Tatyana’s heavyish steps, the radio shut up abruptly and Vassily pronounced his farewell a-ha, he, he-he he-he! and then all the Baronkins, as it were, instantly departed.

In this brand-new space of stillness, Rosa’s and my silence at once became clearly discernible, our usual and not at all burdensome solitude of the two of us together. One could say that we almost did not take notice of each other - which is the everyday lot of the most needed people and things when they are constantly next to you.

Rosa always slept naked and she made me used to doing the same. I liked her habits. I knew that in the next moment after the dry rustle of her palms rubbing in the cream from the bottle with the inscription Velvety and after the click of the switch, I would hear, ‘Go to sleep, dear,’ uttered with her inimitable cool and crisp intonation, and even before my eyes became used to darkness, she would pull the house-dress over her head and quietly lie down on the narrow sloping couch.

‘Go to sleep, dear.’

But the darkness and silence would not come. My reluctance to sleep was encouraged by the cicadas trilling with such demented intensity that their shrill chorus came literally crashing through the narrow opening of the window. The whole room was flooded with luminous lunar juice. In the middle, the oilcloth on the dining table shone like a little round pond. The walls turned into screens for a night film-show starring the yard’s two largest hackberry trees. A bulky shadow was snuggling in the corner by the wardrobe; his back split by the border between the wall and the ceiling, his head hanging dejectedly on a thin neck. Opposite him, almost on the floor, another shadow sat heavily, stocky and immersed in himself. From time to time, there was the sound of a gusty, leafy inhalation and at that instant, the stooping one would fly out of his corner with clumsy determination in order to fall down on his knees before the seated one. But each time the latter would move away imperviously and it was only during the exhalation that both returned to their original positions. This desperate scene would repeat itself over and over again and no-one could foresee how it might end. The tall shadow was still hoping to obtain pardon by his pleading and continued to prostrate himself at the other’s feet. I was waiting in hope that the short one would at last relent or at least would not be able to move away quickly enough, but he was always on the alert...

There were two questions I had to mull over which were almost a secret. In any case, there was nobody I could turn to in order to discuss them.

First, I noticed that if I screwed up my eyes a little, either in the light or in the darkness, my eyes would turn into something like a microscope and I could immediately see an innumerable multitude of tiny round creatures in transparent shells, with minuscule nuclei inside. They were always on the move, sometimes as if reluctant and sometimes fast, closely surrounded by even tinier creatures, also diaphanous and shimmering. All in all, the whole air (if I could believe my screwed up eyes) was replete with these small fry who lived their own, mysterious lives. But discerning any details of that life was beyond my powers. I decided to entrust this task to scientists, should they ever become interested in the peculiarity of my vision. A special device must be invented to enable the scientists to observe with my eyes from inside of me the creatures that I had discovered. Anyhow, thinking about the scientists was boring and I turned to the other conundrum.

Actually, this other question was puzzling me much more. I needed to understand – who on earth was Rosa? I just realised that I knew almost nothing about this woman. She doesn’t seem to have any friends. She doesn’t go to work. She lives alone in this square room with bare walls. In her plywood wardrobe painted with floor paint, there are hangers with two or three dresses and a coat. On the whatnot in the same colour as the wardrobe, there is a radio that looks like a military transmitter and a pile of literary monthlies from the town library. She has neither a fridge nor a television, nor a little rug depicting a seated beauty, nor portraits on the walls like those that the Baronkins could boast of (yet they always complain to each other about lack of money). Compared with them, Rosa in my opinion is very poor, almost destitute. But she never complains about anything and, on the whole, talks very little.

The most perplexing part is her attitude towards me, her silent, constant and dogged care that is simply inexplicable. Calmly and diligently, she watches over my wellbeing and the correctness of my every move, and it seems that there was or is no other purpose in her life.

I suddenly felt hot. The scratchy blanket was burning my skin. The odd expression watches over got stuck in my head and grew a sinister sprout: watches over – by order. So, does it mean that… somebody must have secretly chosen me to be their tool... and Rosa is entrusted with leading and directing me towards the required purpose? What would she do if I spoke my thoughts aloud? Most likely she would...

At that moment, I was so startled that I bit my lip. Something white flickered in the dark abyss of the mirror aslant from me, and another shadow rose between the two which kept scurrying over the wall.

But in an instant, it became clear to me that Rosa had risen from her bed and was moving towards me. Her face was shaded by thick darkness, yet her body, smooth and thin, was almost translucent in the night’s silvery glow. Barely having time to shut my eyes, I felt the wave of air, warmed by her body and, through my lowered eyelashes, saw a small sinuous belly right in front of me. It was shaded by her breasts, which looked like two tall pitchers.

Why does this long gone uneventful night continue to beam so powerfully the radioactive rays of terror and rapture that reach and affect my present self? Indeed, can one seriously, without a smile, elevate to the rank of an event a thing like that: one person’s getting up in the middle of the night and

Reviews for The Vital Needs Of The Dead

[ladyambrosia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My first thought with Vital Needs of the dead when I started reading it was that not everyone is going to understand this book. As I continued reading I continued to feel that way. For those born in a privileged western world that have not had to deal with the experiences of something like Soviet run Russia they cannot always identify with what is going on.

Now I am one of those who was born in the Western world but I have done a lot of reading of this era and like to think I can connect with what is being told. Igor Sakhnovsky writes a very detailed story that is full of images that seemed to speak of me. Gosha is a character that I could really connect with and so I was interested in his story and what was happening to him throughout.

Some of the translation could be a little bit rough but for me that did not really take away from the book. A lot of times I think you have to read a book in its mother tongue to get all of the subtle nuances of what is being told. I would recommend this book to someone who is willing to take the time to understand what the story is telling you.

[fuzzy_patters · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was hit-and-miss for me. I really liked some of the visuals and the way they were described by the author as well as some of the relationships and their dynamics that felt both interesting and real to me. Yet, overall, I found most of the novel to be pointless. There are several themes running concurrently at different times without any real central theme at any one time to give it all meaning. It doesn't work as a coming-of-age story, a story about youth in Soviet Russia, or as a story about dealing with the loss of a loved one, although it does come closest to the latter.

[melkor81205 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was a tough one to swallow. The book felt like it began nowhere, and ended nowhere. "The Vital Needs Of The Dead" is the tale of a young man's coming of age and becoming a young adult during the stagnation of the Brezhnev Era. He is neglected by his parents but is close to his grandmother who dies. Thats about the jist of it.Now, I do not wish to sound overcritical or harsh but there was just not much doing here. I would have to concur with the other reviewers here, and say that it is probably the translation that did the book in. There are glimpses of hope and interest throughout the book, but over all the story just does not flow and at one point it seems the narration jumps from the late seventies to the mid-nineties.My wife who is bilingual in both Russian and English, recently asked a family member to bring "The Brother's Karamazov" from Russia. While we have the English version as well, she said "it is probably a good translation, but it won't compare to the original language." Unfortunately "Vital Needs..." is not "The Brothers Karamazov" and the translation seems pretty bad.

[noveltea_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A slim book of literary fiction that took a very long time to read. The beginning was slow and didn't give this reader any desire to continue reading. The (autobiographical?) story, not so much a plot as a chronology, did get sporadically less uninteresting as it went on, but I can't recommend this translation to anyone. (It's GOT to be better in the original Russian.)

[morwen04 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The Vital Needs of the Dead gets across what it sets out to do. The reader gets a picture of what the tumultuous period between the end of Stalin's Soviet Union and the gangster/oligarchy run Russia of the 90s was like. In a way this book belongs to the Russian version of the beatniks. It has the same stream of thought that a lot of beatnik poetry shares. That sort of lost generation, breaking apart from their parents', or in this case grandparents', lives but not yet having established an identity as a generation. Of course, this also hurts the novel because it isn't poetry and so the prose can be difficult to pay attention to and the plot was nebulous at periods.

[mabith_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is less a novella and more a random collection of incidents mostly in chronological order that someone would eventually turn into a novel. It never really goes anywhere, there are a number of random bits which have nothing to do with the central theme, and the characters never really move on or change.While this style of book is never really my cup of tea, I think even the people who do like this style would have problems with it. It's not quite magical realism, as there's nothing really magical or unreal (in the sense of fantasy) in it, but it feels like that was the aim.It follows an older teenager and his life as a mostly independent unit, along with a series of implausible and brief love affairs. He is so apathetic about most things that I found it hard to keep reading (let alone understand why any woman would just randomly initiate sex with him). There were also a few highly ridiculous things, like the fact that he was apparently hospitalized for multiple days because of a broken nose. It's difficult to judge a translated book, because a poor translation can ruin even the best novel. Some of the writing felt awkward in a way that didn't fit the general style. While this edition doesn't specifically say it's a pre-pub, there are some editing issues as well - the main thing being that punctuation was always left outside of the quotation marks.

[steventx · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The Vital Needs of the Dead is a coming-of-age novel, probably autobiographical, set during the final years of the USSR and Russia's subsequent transition to capitalism and gangsterism.Gosha Sidelnikov lives in a city in the Urals, mostly with his grandmother Rosa who is the guiding force in his life. After her death, as Sidelnikov finishes school and goes away to college to study literature, Rosa remains a voice in his head and in his dreams, attempting to guide him out of harm's way. She is only partly successful, as Sidelnikov gets involved in a prolonged love affair with an older woman, several quickie romances, and spends a wild and tempting night with a group of black marketeers. The dingy atmosphere of decay, apathy and corruption as the Soviet Union nears its collapse is memorably depicted, and is this short novel's chief attraction. Sidelnikov himself isn't particularly appealing or interesting, and our introduction to Rosa, the grandmother, before her demise is too cursory to explain why her memory has such mystical importance for her grandson. Rosa's appearances in Sidelnikov's dreams border on magical realism (the only non-Russian author mentioned, albeit misspelled, is Gabriel García Márquez), but are out of place in an otherwise bleak, existential story.Perhaps the point of the novel is to ask what it is that guides our actions and shapes our decisions: chance, fate, or the "needs" of the dead--those "needs" being the sense of place, propriety and purpose that we derive from our upbringing. But this novel is too short, fragmented and uneven to carry such a weighty theme with any success. (An unpolished translation may be to blame for some of this.) For the most part it is just vignettes of drinking, sex and adolescent angst in various dirty and dilapidated tenements. It is the settings themselves which make The Vital Needs of the Dead worth reading for someone interested in a realistic picture of life in a typical Soviet city during the 1980s.

[sirroger · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was interesting. It's written in a realistic style, and follows the coming-of-age story of Gosha Sidelnikov. Gosha, as we find out after a few chapters, is developmentally slow, so we see the world through his particularly naïve eyes. He is closer to his grandmother Rosa than to his mother, and after Rosa's death, she continues to visit him in his dreams, providing him with guidance as he grows into the world. The story is interesting, but just that. I did not find it compelling. 2 stars.

[chocolatedog_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Vital Needs of the Dead is a hard novella to love. Sidelnikov, a teenager in an obscure Urals town, seemingly sleepwalks through his life. His passion is submerged, making it hard to care one way or another about him. And yet… he observes the events that seem to flow over him with both a dry poignancy and occasional inadvertent hilarity. I suspect this book has lost a bit in translation -- the phrasing in English is sometimes awkward. If you can see past that, I think this book has its merits. A worthwhile read if you're interested in recent Russian history.