'The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia' by Svetlana Satchkova
The Undead is a novel about filmmaking that gets the details down: the on-set bustle, the conflicting angles of vision, the struggle to stay under budget, the egos of bankable stars, the hyperbolic media. Svetlana Satchkova’s The Undead is also about the perils of filmmaking in a particular time and place, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, circa just before his full-tilt invasion of Ukraine.
Satchkova’s protagonist, Maya, is bright, multi-lingual and a bit muddled. In her mid-30s she abruptly changed careers and has just graduated from Russia’s top film school. Uncertain of herself, fearing her ideas are insufficiently deep, she writes the screenplay for a horror movie set in contemporary Moscow. To her surprise, a producer likes it and based on her student short subject, assigns her to direct it. Next stop, Cannes? However, maybe a movie about ghouls linked to the waxen corpse inhabiting Lenin’s Tomb is found to run into problems in Putin’s oddly nostalgic Russia.
Maya navigates a well-depicted terrain of fake friends, deranged suitors and male industry gatekeepers. Resolutely apolitical, she doesn’t keep up with the news and refuses to participate in protests. Her clean record only goes so far after someone denounces her to the Investigative Committee for the Investigation of Especially Important Cases, an agency Kafka could appreciate.
Satchkova immigrated to the U.S. in 2016 with bad memories of Putin’s rise to power. She’s a writer who found a home at New York University’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Her first English-language debut novel is a brisk, vivid page turner that evades mere polemics. The dissidents Maya encounters are less than exemplary, and she is immersed in a fully developed network of relationships. What feels distressingly familiar to contemporary Americans is the regime’s conscription of history, bleaching out inconvenient facts and ironing out contradictions. “The sticky sensation of being watched” becomes palpable, and the cops who burst into Maya’s apartment are masked.
The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia is published by Melville House.
