Anne O. Fisher

TRANSLATION TASTER: From Chapter 6, The Churov Blues. (Posted with Ksenia Buksha’s permission.)

Churov was walking along a single-track railroad line overgrown with fireweed while his dog, an eight-month-old German shepherd named Chief, loped behind him. Churov was going out to sell the dacha.  

Back when his mom was alive, they’d start going to the dacha at the end of April. They had a set routine for everything: what to bring, what to eat, what to do. Churov loved the dacha, as well as—

            —the commuter train departure times of 5:36 pm from Baltiysky Station on Friday and 7:03 pm to go back home on Sunday;

            —the dacha itself, that little cabin with its bark beetles rustling behind the wallpaper; its dry moss working its way back out of the seams between logs, so Churov had to rechink them with oakum, hammering it in with a special little wooden chisel; its ceiling which sent down errant sprinkles of the charcoal his grandma had laid, way back when, on the plywood dividing the ceiling from the attic;

            —the garden, once lush and dense, where every bit of their plot’s six hundred square meters had been planted, where the carrots didn’t get those little flies that made the carrot tops wilt and curl, and where the beets grew extravagantly large;

            —the potatoes; Churov loved laying the potatoes out to dry in the dark storage room after he’d dug them up, and then turning them, and tapping off the dried earth, and storing them in their spot under the floor;

            —those endless hours under the blue sky that he loved spending with his mom, squatting and digging in the dry-as-dust earth, to the perky chirping of the radio;

            —firing up the banya, gathering the bundles of leafy twigs for steam-baths, going mushroom-hunting or raspberry-picking; and sealing jars of freshly pickled cucumbers in the raspberry-red August twilight; and soaking little circles of paper in alcohol and laying them on top of the blackberry jam (to keep it from going moldy).   

Churov loved everything here, every single object, from the old felt hat in the ancient banya to the clover’s tiny trefoils by the weather-beaten front gate. Now all that life would have to die, along with mom; and mom had died, as luck would have it, at the beginning of April. 

Mom had died at the beginning of April, and now one of Churov’s frequent pastimes was going over the specifics, the details of her last three days, composing a kind of saint’s life, a “passion,” which was especially significant for Churov as a specialist in cardiology because she’d died after a heart operation that was unavoidable, and that she didn’t survive. But if his mother hadn’t had the operation, she’d have died just as inevitably, only the dying would have taken longer and she’d have suffered more.

It turned out the operation was bound to help her, one way or another, although mom hadn’t reckoned with that particular “another,” of course. 

It wasn’t that Churov grieved so very deeply, it was more that he was lost in thought. The exact way to put it would be that without mom, life had run dry. Like the water had dried up and you could see the bottom. Churov had been envisioning for so many years what would happen to him once his mom died. He was about six when the idea of his mom’s death first sank in, rendering him a permanent orphan-to-be. It was a sadness vaccine that both increased his happiness in being with his mom, heightened it, and also decreased his future grief (like deducting depreciation on equipment).

So once his mom really was gone, Churov grieved no more. He’d met his grief, and faced it, and paid it off in full.

The Petersburg writer Ksenia Buksha is a literary phenomenon. She won the Russian NatsBest prize (for the best novel of the year) back in 2014 for her tenth book, The Freedom Factory, when she was just 31 years old. She was the second-youngest writer, and the youngest woman, ever to win. She was also shortlisted for the Big Book Prize for Freedom Factory, and now has been shortlisted again for Churov and Churbanov, making her one of only two writers—and the only woman—ever to be shortlisted for the Big Book twice before the age of 40. She is also the youngest person ever to be shortlisted for the Big Book. 

The English rights to Churov and Churbanov are available, and I am actively seeking a publisher for my translation. Please contact me at anne DOT o DOT fisher AT gmail DOT com, as well as Ksenia Buksha’s agent Alexander Klimin, to inquire: klimin@elkost.com

Author bio: Poet and fiction writer Ksenia Buksha was born in Leningrad in 1983. Trained as an economist, she has worked as a business journalist, copywriter, and day trader. Her first book, Ernst and Anna, came out in 2002; a dozen years—and books—later, The Freedom Factory won Russia’s 2014 National Bestseller award, making her the youngest writer ever to win. Her latest novel Churov and Churbanov (2020) was recently short-listed for the 2020 Big Book Award. Other recent books include the short story collection Opens Inward (2018) and the poetry collection Barrel Organ Meat Grinder (2018). Buksha lives in Saint Petersburg with her family.

Churov and Churbanov is a classic Petersburg tale in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Gogol, and the city’s atmosphere is palpable in every scene. The book is also a family drama; a riff on the Gothic theme of the double; a laugh-out-loud adventure novel; a sly triumph of speculative fiction; an elegy on growing up (and old); and a portrait of two familiar types: the awkward, hard-working nice guy (Churov, a pediatric cardiologist) and the life-of-the-party woman magnet (Churbanov, a two-bit wheeler-dealer). Their dissimilar lives begin to entwine after they discover their hearts beat in unison. This seemingly pointless synchrony has a side effect: a pair like them can sync other people’s heartbeats to their own, thus saving the lives of patients with serious heart conditions. But there’s a downside: when one of the original pair dies, all those whose heartbeats the pair synchronized die, too. Churov and Churbanov must follow their hearts, so to speak, in deciding what role their arbitrary gift will play for those around them. Buksha proves we depend on each other more than we realize, and we can save (or destroy) lives even if our hearts don’t beat as one.

Interviews with Ksenia Buksha (all in Russian, although I’ve translated a couple of good bits):

• Esquire, June 2020 (this is a really good one - fascinating to read about KB’s reading habits and her early love for Virginia Woolf)

• Afisha.ru, February 2020 (this is a joint interview together with Maria Galina; as a translator who LOVES KB’s language, I love what KB says here: “I think the most important thing is not to imitate language. Any text is composed not of ideas, but of words, and how those words are put next to each other is important. […] If you just make something up, it goes rotten immediately, it’s like forget-me-nots that don’t last at all in a vase. They wilt as soon as you’ve picked them.”)

• Sobaka.ru, June 2018 (this is a little older but still excellent; KB says, “On the whole, perception is a narcotic. Life itself is a narcotic, essentially. We want more and more of it, but we can’t eat as much of it as there is to eat.”)

Articles about/reviews of Ch&Ch (also in Russian, except for Lisa Hayden’s lovely review in English):

• Lisa Hayden, July 2020 (“Ksenia Buksha’s Чуров и Чурбанов (Churov and Churbanov) is the first Russian book I’ve read and really, truly enjoyed on multiple levels during this whole bleak quarantine season. Churov and Churbanov captured me so much that I a) wanted to begin rereading as soon as I finished but b) don’t particularly feel like writing about it, lest I break the novel’s spell. I will tread lightly.”)

• Olga Balla-Gertman, July 2020 (This is THE smartest discussion of Ch&Ch I’ve read yet. I love what Balle-Gertman says about the novel’s hard-to-pin-down genre, ultimately deciding: “[It’s] a learned tract about how it’s impossible to know anything for sure, but it’s absolutely possible to guess, to discern the signs (that aren’t actually meant for us); it’s about how the world is constructed; it’s about that which exceeds our understanding and is not a consolation: the kinship of all that exists.”)

• Viktor Anisimov, February 2020 (“[The characters] Churov and Churbanov […] unify disparate pieces of human tragedy. Although the realism here is joined by the very occasional mysticism: the person who sits on the windowsill and smokes, but who is only seen by those who are near death, or the suspicious little fellow from the “Eggplant” store [yes, that’s really what it’s called! - AF] who seems like a refugee from a David Lynch film.”)

• Maria Bashmakova, November 2019 (One of the first interviews/discussions and a great one. “‘There is a God,’ opines Churov. ‘There is no God,’ affirms Agi [a childhood friend who works with Churov in the hospital - AF]. Yet both of them, who coincide neither in religious views nor in the rhythms of their heartbeats, did the exact same thing: they nursed the most helpless cases when they worked in the hospital. And they continued to be human beings the rest of the time.”)

• Maria Boyarkina, June 2020

• Sergey Kostyrko, June 2020