Keith Gessen - A Terrible Country

Oleg mostly recovered from his injuries and then moved to Spain. Anton and Katya dated for a while and then broke up, and he also moved to Spain, to be closer to his ex-wife and son.

And Yulia—after writing to me that Sergei didn’t blame me for what happened, she had not written again. But I heard from Nikolai that she kept visiting Sergei, even after he was transferred to a camp in the Far East, and that in fact they had gotten married. In a way, I’m happy for her. She finally has someone who will not let her down. And I’m happy for Sergei too, if that is the word. He is doing what he always wanted. I just hope it doesn’t kill him.

My grandmother lived less than a year in her new apartment. She had been declining already; the move accelerated it. The last time I saw her, over my spring break, two months before she died, she could no longer have a conversation. She formed sentences but they were unrelated to anything that was happening. Emma Abramovna died six months before she did, and this closed her last connection to the world she had known.

On the day she died I was able to reach Seraphima Mikhailovna over Google Talk. She didn’t have video but she had sound and she brought her laptop into my grandmother’s room.

“Grandma!” I said.

She was moaning in pain. She had been for an entire day, according to Seraphima Mikhailovna.

“Grandma!” I yelled into Google Talk. I was in my office at the university. “It’s Andrei. Do you remember me? It’s Andryusha.”

She moaned back. I don’t think she understood me. She appeared to be in terrible pain.

“Grandma,” I said meaninglessly into the computer and wept. On the other end I heard Seraphima Mikhailovna weeping also.

My grandmother died later that day. In her final moments, Seraphima Mikhailovna told me, she kept calling for Dima.

We went to Moscow again and buried our grandmother.

I have not been back since.

I am deeply grateful to a small group of people who read parts of this book over and over and over again and were always encouraging and kind: Rebecca Curtis, Mary Hart Johnson, Eric Rosenblum, and Adelaide Docx. Chad Harbach read an early draft and wisely urged me to make it shorter. My father, Alexander Gessen, and his wife, Tatiana Veselova-Gessen, and my younger brothers, Daniel and Philip Gessen, allowed me to stay with them for weeks while I rewrote this book time and again. One could not imagine a more hospitable writing retreat, and my father caught a mistranslation of telka . My sister, Masha Gessen, made some timely corrections and was, as always, wise and generous with her counsel; her wonderful book, Ester and Ruzya , was a great help and in many ways an inspiration for this one. The final edits for this book were completed at the home of my very kind aunt, Svetlana Solodovnik, in Moscow.

I am immensely grateful to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for the opportunity to spend a year reading books about hockey, oil, and Russian history. The support I received there from the amazing Jean Strouse, Paul Delaverdac, Lauren Goldberger, Marie d’Origny, and Julia Parmagenta was invaluable. I am grateful to Carlos Dada, Ayana Mathis, and Michael Vasquez for staying late, to Megan Marshall for her conversations about life and literature, to Hal Foster for his humor, to Steven Pincus for explaining neoliberalism to me.

During two crucial moments in the writing of this book, Brian Morton gave me a source of income. I owe much to him practically, but even more to his example. I am honored to consider two of the greatest magazine editors of our time, Henry Finder and Cullen Murphy, my friends as well as my editors. The incredible group that has coalesced around n+1 , led by Mark Krotov, Rachel Ossip, Cosme Del Rosario-Bell, Nikil Saval, and Dayna Tortorici, continues to inspire me with its brilliance and commitment. Carla Blumenkranz is a genius. Mark Greif is present in everything I write. Ben Kunkel and Marco Roth are my ideal readers. Nell Zink sent me a note while I was writing this book that actually allowed me to finish it. Elif Batuman assured me that this was a novel. Eddie Joyce, himself a novelist, promised me that at least one person would read it. Christian Lorentzen’s commitment to literature, and to his friends, is unmatched by anyone I know.

In Moscow I could not have survived without my friends Igor Alexandrov, Scott Burns, Anatoly Karavaev, Lenka Kabrhelova, Leonid Kuragin, Kirill Medvedev, Grant Slater, Courtney Weaver, and Marina Zarubin.

I’m grateful to my bosses and colleagues at the J-School for letting me start a semester late so I could finish this. I’m grateful to my old teachers from Syracuse, Mary Karr and George Saunders, for three incredibly valuable years, and much support and encouragement.

The brilliant Allison Lorentzen is the editor of this book. Everything good about it is her idea, but the bad parts were written by me. I am grateful to Diego Núñez for altering his diet so that he could more authentically shepherd this text to publication. At the Wylie Agency, Sarah Chalfant and Rebecca Nagel have been incredible supporters and counselors.

I am grateful to my mother- and father-in-law, Kate Deshler Gould and Rob Gould, for helping so much with Raffi when he was little and I was trying to finish a first draft. Ruth Curry’s bracing monologues on tenant law and literature, as well as her unfailing generosity, were a comfort and an inspiration.

Without Emily Gould, who took a job she didn’t much like so that I could keep writing, nothing would be possible and nothing would matter. Without little Raphael Konstaninovich Gessen-Gould, all we would do is sleep.

Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and a founding editor of n+1 . He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history, Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl . A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books , Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and son.

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All the Sad Young Literary Men

VIKING

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Copyright © 2018 by Keith Gessen

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Translation of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem” by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward from Poems of Akhmatova (Little, Brown, 1973).

ISBN: 9780735221314 (hardcover)

ISBN: 9780735221321 (ebook)

ISBN: 9780525560913 (international edition)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.