The English translation of the title, A Dog’s Will, comes from a motif in the opening narrative arc, just after the protagonist, a wage labourer from Brazil’s Northeast Region, has accidentally killed his boss’s dog. To avoid incurring his boss’s wrath, he must trick the local priest into blessing the dead animal. The priest only agrees to do it when he hears that the dog bequeathed money to the church in its (the dog’s) will. A rich man comes in separately, seeking a blessing for his sick daughter, and somehow gets entangled in the mess. All these lying, fast-talking characters quickly get muddled about whether they are discussing the dog or the daughter, leading to a cascade of jokes involving the word cachorra (‘bitch’).

Clever, yes, I thought at first, but what else? Then the plot continues to expand, weaving in more and more debauchery until, halfway through the film, everyone is abruptly shot dead, and the story cracks open to become one of the funniest, most movingly serious films I’ve ever seen.

O Auto da Compadecida is a redemption story with a difference. These days, the term ‘redemption arc’ is everywhere in online discourse, especially discourse on self-improvement (I suspect unconscious influence from Hollywood). I think when people say redemption they actually mean, most of the time, revenge. Revenge is when you equalise the hurt you received. Redemption is when you transcend it.

In revenge stories, characters are wronged and get an equivalent compensation, either a just retribution against the ones who wronged them, or a personal reward commensurate with the size of their loss. The primary spiritual movement is backwards and outwards: you keep a log of debts and eventually repay them by either inflicting damage on the outside world or drawing prizes from the world, such as riches or praise. In redemption stories, characters may also have been wronged, but somehow recognise that all suffering causes pain of infinite size, a debt impossible to square. The only recourse is to move forwards and inwards, to ensure, through personal reconciliation, that your suffering doesn’t define the future. Revenge is about changing the world; redemption is about being changed by the world.

Some people think revenge stories are inherently comic while redemption stories are tragic (or is it the other way round?). Perhaps the ancient Greeks would have thought this way. For them, comedy was a simpler, more material thing, full of satire and (sometimes raunchy) political drama. But tragedy was something subtler and more abstract, full of moral ambiguity.

I think both revenge and redemption stories can be either comic or tragic.

Certainly, revenge stories have more sharply-drawn features. It’s pretty easy to tell who is good or evil, and whether the hero succeeds at equalising the harm done to him. Odysseus, for example, is good and successful: in the end he defeats all the suitors overrunning his palace, reunites with his wife and son, and returns to his rightful place as the benevolent king of Ithaca. So is Ali Baba, who, with the help of the beautiful slave girl Morgiana, avenges his brother’s death by killing the forty thieves, and gets both treasure and a new daughter-in-law as compensation.

Both The Odyssey and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves also happen to be comedies in the Shakespearean sense. In Shakespeare’s world, a comedy is when it ends happily; no one important dies, and there is always some kind of neat, contrived ending, often a wedding. Tragedy, put simply, is just the opposite, a failure: everyone dies. Sometimes the hero of a revenge story doesn’t succeed, and then it’s a tragedy: the Count of Monte Cristo, for example, takes out all his enemies and gets everything he wants except for the most important thing, the pretty girl Mercédès. Or Heathcliff, who, for all his success immiserating everyone who once made him miserable, doesn’t end up with his dream girl either.

Perhaps we like revenge stories, especially the comic ones, because they align with some notion we have as children about how the world should be, a notion that Hollywood and Christianity never bother to disabuse us of. The bad guys may wrong the good guys, but the good guys will eventually win. Later we learn the opposite of that — the world isn’t fair — but that’s just the flip side of the same thing: the concept of fairness still exists, but sometimes you’re just unlucky, so you don’t get what you deserve.

Redemption stories inhabit a separate universe altogether. They make an entirely different claim: in this world where so many things happen, where there are so many types of harm and so many ways to cause harm, how do you count up what everyone deserves? Who owes what to whom? And who counts as a wrongdoer, anyway? Dostoevsky, in his big novels, asks precisely these questions, and so his stories are classic redemption stories. Both Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov, for example, ask: if you murder a ‘bad’ person, are you good or bad? Dostoevsky was a genius, and he answered these questions, or probed the limits of their answerability, very well.

In one sense, O Auto da Compadecida is clearly a comedy. By the end of the film, the best friends have been reunited, and Judgment Day has come and gone with no one condemned to Hell. There is even a literal wedding. In another sense, it’s a tragedy: over and over, trickery and selfish motives lead the characters to inflict petty humiliation and bodily injury on each other until, halfway through, a thuggy gang leader drops into town on a killing spree and shoots most of the main characters dead.

But then the film delivers a surprise: it doesn’t end. We follow the characters into a waiting room in the afterlife, where they await judgment by Jesus and the Devil. As the Devil reads from a ledger of each person’s good and bad deeds, the verdict for each soul seems obvious until, just when things are looking truly grim, the trickster João Grilo throws a literal Hail Mary. And once Mary — the Compadecida — really does appear, the story suddenly shifts from a revenge plot to a redemptive one. Mary cites the good she can see in each character, even if it’s just a single moment from their lives. She convinces Jesus to grant them each a salvation commensurate with the goodness they have demonstrated.

The question of whether people are capable of real moral change is one that philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and lawmakers have disagreed on through the ages. Dostoevsky, in his parable of the onion, gives one possible answer; the original Christ story, of course, offers another. In the film, Mary distinguishes those free to transcend their baser nature (the priests, the husband and his promiscuous wife) from those bound by their past traumas (thuggy Severino, trickster João). Interestingly, her compassion for them all is unwavering, because she truly believes they are all fundamentally good. But their ultimate salvation — heaven, purgatory, or resurrection — depends not on the severity of their crimes but on their willingness to change within the degrees of freedom they were given. And it’s in this distinction that the story becomes heart-stoppingly, gut-wrenchingly redemptive.

As for the humour:

I’m sure I missed a lot of brilliant wordplay in this film, since I don’t know Portuguese. But even through the language barrier I could tell that my friend Orfeu was right, the humour really was very clever. There was, of course, plenty of room for the simple and absurd: in the unserious relationship between Jesus and the Devil, for example, who continually slag each other off throughout the judgment scene; or in how, when the Devil gets impatient with Mary blathering on about salvation, we see him casually doodling with blood in the margins of his ledger, like an inattentive schoolchild.

But there was also a kind of pleasing, symmetrical geometry in all the gags contrived by João Grilo. Two suitors separately want to fight João’s best friend Chicó for the beautiful Rosinha; but Chicó, conflict-avoidant, cowers; so João first goads Chicó into fighting both of them, then maneuvers a last-minute duel to get the suitors to kill each other. João’s cleverness and sincerity put him in a league with a long tradition of literary pranksters that includes Hermes and Sun Wukong, Tom Sawyer and Shakespeare’s Puck, all of whom have a talent for orchestrating symmetrical rearrangements of objects and human desires to make things go their way. Like all good tricksters, his cleverness exceeds both his authority and his power. He can’t make the rules, and he can’t break the rules outright. Instead, what he does best is to see, through navigating the system of rules imposed by others, how he can still get what he wants.

At risk of unfairly flattening an entire, diverse people and culture, I do think the film pulses with a distinctly Brazilian energy. The Brazilians I know may not be outright tricksters, but they all have a kind of wily resourcefulness. Many great Brazilian intellectuals, including Suassuna himself, are startlingly funny; perusing the digital sphere, you quickly get the impression that Brazilian netizens are at once serious — politically engaged, passionate — and a population of relentless, meme-making trolls. O Auto da Compadecida may have been released in 2000, long before the peak of Internet meme culture, and the book written even earlier, in 1955. Yet this same tone of unseriousness in the face of profundity, without losing a fundamental understanding of the situation’s gravity, infuses the story.

João Grilo is often terrified, with good reason: as a peasant from the Northeast, a generally deprived region of Brazil, he knows that any person of even low-level status or authority could easily condemn him to humiliation, hunger, death. So he fears everyone, from his temporary employers, the local bakery owner and his wife, to the rich man with the pretty daughter, to church leaders, military generals, gang bosses and the Devil. He is also, touchingly and improbably, intimidated by the profoundly good: by Jesus and most of all by the Compadecida. But he is, after all, Brazilian, so his fear doesn’t stop him from sassing all of them anyway.

João’s brazen sincerity, his refusal to be anything other than himself, is both his great gift and great flaw. He is hopelessly human; and so we can’t help it, we just care about him. After Mary returns João to his old life, one of the first things he does with his second chance, upon passing a mysterious beggar on the road, is to call him a racial slur. We are left to wonder: why are any of us placed on Earth, either for a second time or for the first time? Maybe not to score moral points, or even to be good or brave, but simply to become ourselves.

No modern-day Western reader, observing the blatant political corruption and egregious wealth inequality all around us, could be blamed for finding the behaviour of Belyaev’s protagonist completely implausible. I mean, come on: who even believes in working hard for the common good any more, much less sacrificing your time and energy — in a meaningful sense, your life — for some abstract civic ideal? But the collectivist sentiment that runs through Belyaev’s short story is a genuine one, and one that permeates not only all of Belyaev’s work, but also the work of that whole generation of Soviet sci-fi writers.

This is certainly understandable considering that Belyaev’s literary career took off in the 1920s and was roughly coterminous with the founding and consolidation of the Soviet Union. Though the Soviet zeitgeist lurched crazily between the golden idealism of those first few years under Lenin to the increasingly oppressive outlook under Stalin, several values remained constant. Atheism, for example, a core tenet of Communist policy — and, in the absence of traditional religion, the elevation of science to a kind of culty religious status, a means to both social progress and power. In fact, reading about the frenzy of industrial and agricultural developments in the Stalin era, or even about life in the gulags (a.k.a. ‘corrective labour camps’), you also get the sense that work itself was held as something of a religion: virtuous, ennobling, a service to society.

Of course, it wasn’t only the Soviets who regarded work as holy. The sixteenth-century Calvinists (of ‘Protestant work ethic’ fame) leap to mind, as does, for example, Simone Weil — a French philosopher I first encountered thanks to a bookish, devoutly Catholic college roommate who used to proselytise by strategically sneaking paperbacks onto my desk with enticing bookmarks left in certain pages. This temptress friend was the reason I read C. S. Lewis (Surprised by Joy, anyone?) and Teilhard de Chardin (a Jesuit priest who was also, improbably, a palaeontologist). At the time, I held intellect as the highest virtue — a bad habit that, unlike my atheism, I have since outgrown (well, kind of) — and in retrospect, I can only laugh in admiration at how she weaponised this weakness to lure me into the trap of Christianity.

Anyway, in one of her best essays, Simone Weil says that engaging in serious academic study (which the kind of work I wrestle with these days, in the throes of the PhD) is already a religious act because, in a beautiful application of the transitive property, ‘the real object and almost the sole interest of studies’ is the ‘development of the faculty of attention’; and (she says elsewhere) ‘[a]ttention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.’1 My best friend in Oxford, Ravindra, has a different, not-unrelated angle on the whole concept of work-as-worship. From the Bhagavad Gita comes the idea of karma yoga, he likes to remind me whenever one of us starts panicking about what our supervisors are going to say at the next meeting, or about how slowly our PhD work is progressing. I’m not sure I fully understood his explanation — Hindu thought is in general a bit abstract for me, full of untranslatable concepts — but what I did get is that karma yoga is about doing your ‘right work’, ideally in a state of flow, with complete focus on the honesty and direction of your effort and — critically — without attachment to outcomes or consequences. (Your ‘right work’ is defined as whatever is in line with your dharma, which I think is something close to duty or calling; I suspect it’s also what the poet Mary Oliver meant by ‘our endless and proper work’…)2 In effect, it’s about offering up your work to some conception of God (‘Ishvara’?), as a form of surrender, thereby achieving a kind of spiritual purity.

One thing that surprised me in these glimpses of both Christian lit (Simone Weil) and Hindu scripture (Gita) was how closely work is tied to the concept of love. For Weil, this means love of the work itself. In the same essay on study-as-prayer, she says that intellectual work in particular must necessarily be rooted in joy, rather than suffering:

‘Will power, the kind that, if need be, makes us set our teeth and endure suffering, is the principal weapon of the apprentice engaged in manual work. But, contrary to the usual belief, it has practically no place in study. The intelligence can only be led by desire. For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work. The intelligence only grows and bears fruit in joy. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.’ [emphasis mine]3

I confess that the idea of ‘pleasure and joy in the work’ has always been a thorny issue for me, especially with respect to science. I was raised in a household of scientists — actually, my entire extended family is chemists, physicists, and a smattering of biologists going back multiple generations — and add to that the child-of-immigrants thing and perhaps you can understand why it was never really an option to become anything other than a scientist (or, at least, some equally rigorous, employable thing). In other subjects like foreign languages, music or literature, I can remember the precise moment in my education when each cracked open to me for the first time and started to bloom. But I don’t remember a single ‘origin point’ like that with any scientific subject: at some point in my chemistry education, for example, I just grew conscious of the fact that I was already conversant in the nomenclature and serious about my studies, experiencing, the entire time, a fluctuating ratio of liking and dislike, pleasure and pain — because can’t it be simultaneously true that you were pushed into something and also that you actually secretly liked it, or grew to like it, as well? (Perhaps not unlike a kind of intellectual BDSM?) All through undergrad and graduate school, then, even as I changed fields from synthetic organic chemistry to evolutionary microbiology and plant pathology, I’ve been circling the same few questions without reaching any point attractor of lucidity: What does it mean to love your work? Are there types of love that differ in kind, not just in degree? When multiple intellectual interests vie for time and attention, how can you tell which you love more, if that even matters? Does love of your work automatically increase if you think it was freely chosen, and decrease if it becomes your professional obligation? If so, does that mean your love isn’t genuine? Can you choose what you love? Can you love something even if you had to choose it? Basically, which comes first: the choosing or the loving?

But while Simone Weil says that doing good (intellectual) work depends on loving the work, the Gita emphasises perhaps a less confusing concept, the necessity of loving other people. Essentially, it’s only possible to achieve the truly selfless actions that comprise the practice of karma yoga if you have compassion for those you are serving through your work, if you see those people as manifestations of the divine:

‘Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer as oblation to the sacred fire, whatever you bestow as a gift, and whatever austerities you perform, O son of Kunti, do them as an offering to Me.’ 4

I suspect the Soviets would have agreed with that outlook, divinity notwithstanding.

These days, the idea of your individual work somehow serving a greater good is still kicking around, albeit more quietly, even in the capitalist oligarchies we inhabit. Cue one of those sexy-cliché inspirational quotes about work that makes its rounds on the Internet every so often, for example this one, widely attributed to Frederick Buechner: ‘The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.’ I think quotes like that get re-tweeted because many of us would really like to believe this: believe, in other words, that our work is somehow a service, slotting into some greater social purpose. We may even claim that we chose our professions because of the potential impact of our work. But is that really anyone’s actual motivation? As the the philosopher Thomas Kuhn has pointed out in the case of scientists (but of course we can also ask the question of doctors, politicians, artists, software developers, etc.):

‘A man may be attracted to science for all sorts of reasons. Among them are the desire to be useful, the excitement of exploring new territory, the hope of finding order, and the drive to test established knowledge. … Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well…’[emphasis mine]5

So scientists work, says Kuhn, because they get high off solving puzzles. I’ve always wondered: if other people in intellectual professions were also forced to say the quiet part out loud, to admit their real motivations, what do you think they would say?

I think, deep down, most of us are driven by some material that fissions at our core like a uranium fuel rod: some existential factor we’re either running toward or away from. At least, such radioactivity seems vital to power the ferocious intensity of most of the workaholic crazies I know: for example, all the first-generation immigrants who, in order to establish themselves in harsh, resource-poor conditions, work long hours, eking it out like mosses and lichen extracting nutrients from bare rock. The writer and immigrant Weike Wang, for example, writes that for her, fear — ‘fear of poverty and fear of regression’ — is her primary motivation to work so hard. ‘I worry that, the moment I stop having money to save, an anvil will fall from the sky onto my head,’ she says. She and many immigrants, then, are fuelled by such a fear, from which they are always running away.6

From watching my own immigrant parents, I can attest that the fear of regression is a significant, lifelong thing. They had each come to a new country speaking broken English, carrying two pots and forty dollars; and they had both ended up obtaining PhDs, becoming naturalised citizens, and raising two American children for whom they wanted even better. Or, if I did no better, at least I could not do worse: couldn’t not-graduate with an advanced degree from an elite university, then get a stable, high-paying job…In ecological succession, each generation of organisms takes root in a richer soil than the previous one had: the grasses have it better than the mosses and lichens, the softwood trees better than the grasses, and so forth for successive generations of intermediate species leading to a diverse, flourishing climax community. It’s worth noting that the soil grows ever richer in large part due to the decomposing organic matter of previous generations.

My own reactor core, in case you were wondering, is an alloy of different fears. In addition to the inherited fear of regression, there is another, somewhat tautological fear: I work with desperation because, well, I like to work and am afraid of not being able to do it, which sometimes unpredictably happens when I get depressed to a point of total paralysis (a ‘kinetic end state’) or suicidality (‘thermodynamic end state’). This is clearly a ‘running away’ motivation. I do know people, however, who seem to work out of a desire for immersion. On the surface, it can seem like they are also motivated by fear: fear that their limited time on earth is going to be taken away from them before they’ve gone deeply enough into their craft or investigations. But I think this is a ‘running towards’ motivation because it is fundamentally driven by love: by the ‘pleasure and joy’ Simone Weil insists upon. (In the last year or so, I’ve noticed that I’m gradually moving toward a higher gradient of these people, a sort of positive chemotaxis towards love, which is also why I think I’m finally on the right track in my life.)

Fundamentally, I’m pretty sure all my fears are tied to a vague, perhaps toxic ambition that itself stems from a fear of not mattering — a fear that I am, to use the technical term, unlovable. Sometimes I think that’s why the idea of work as a selfless act is so appealing: for those of us too timid to confront our own psychology, it’s the easiest cop-out solution to feel like you matter to others. Of course, the irony is not lost on me: to feel you matter as an individual, you have to do something for the world, contribute to the collaborative social enterprise. And you have to work even if you know that the work will ultimately decompose you.

Which brings me back to Belyaev’s story, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps.’

After Dr. Wagner has thoroughly stunned the reporter with his inventiveness, he laments his egregious lack of time — all the subjects he won’t have time to learn! all the projects he won’t have time to complete! — citing this as the reason for undertaking his sleep-related investigations. (The whole story is mostly Dr. Wagner ranting about or mansplaining one thing or another, the hapless reporter serving as a placeholder character who just eggs him on.) Although the professor is clearly having some kind of manic episode during this speech, I think all curious, ambitious people can relate to his general sentiment. (American writer Annie Dillard once expressed it in a particularly moving way: ‘But time is the only thing we have been given…All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.’)7 And of course there is the matter of how a sleep treatment could benefit all of society by giving millions of people their precious time back, eight luxurious hours every night:

‘…such extraordinary prospects, such opportunities! How many great works would great thinkers have given us yet, if they’d been given whole nights for creativity? How many unfinished masterpieces would have been completed! How much progress would have been made! A worker, having fulfilled his obligatory hours at the daily grind, could spend the night on reading, or serving the community. We wouldn’t have any illiterates. Everyone would have had the chance to become fully educated. What gigantic strides we could make as a society!’

Finally, he gets to the point and reveals his greatest invention yet: a chemical treatment that can neutralise the toxin responsible for sleepiness. The toxin is fictional, of course: these days we know about neurotransmitters and key hormones like melatonin that regulate the circadian rhythm. But it’s interesting to note that some animals, such as migratory birds (e.g., geese) and aquatic mammals (e.g., dolphins), really can stay awake for long periods by practising a behaviour called unihemispheric sleep: half their brain sleeps while the other, awake half regulates motor movement (flying or swimming), scanning for predators, etc.8 Perhaps if Belyaev had known this, he could have imagined a more plausible mechanism for Dr. Wagner, who, by the time he sets about his sleep research, has already managed to train each hemisphere of his brain to work separately.

But the most moving part is when Dr. Wagner explains what it’s like to pass the sleepless hours, alone and working, night after night (‘But this continuous, unending workday — sometimes with the sun outside the window, sometimes beneath the dark shroud of night — had a strange effect…’). Though he doesn’t dwell on it, I could already understand what the disorientation he describes must have been like. In the last month of my mother’s life, she’d lost the ability to call out for help and could only whisper, so we took shifts sitting close by in order to hear her. Because I was the only one not working at the time (I’d just graduated from university that spring, but my sister was still in college and my father was working full-time), plus I was the best at staying up late, I took the night shift. As an inveterate procrastinator, I’d pulled countless all-nighters in college and even managed to take midterm or final exams on zero sleep directly after a long night of cramming. So I remember thinking: no big deal; all those nights in college were just practice for this.

But they weren’t the same, not really. The nights with my mother turned out to be not only scary but also lonely in a way I’d never felt before, and time passed in a different way, leaving you permanently disoriented because the numbers that represented the hours were completely decoupled from the rhythm of sunrise and sunset. I think the hardest part was the uncertainty: that this way of living wouldn’t end on any definite day you could count down to, but would just go on into the foreseeable future, which could be weeks, months, even years…or, in Dr. Wagner’s case, the remainder of his lifetime. That Wagner is willing to forgo not only sleep, but also synchrony with the rest of society, for the sake of doing work he thinks will accelerate societal progress, is a testament to his true selflessness.

I guess that’s why I think work, in addition to being an expression of love and worship, really is a kind of sacrifice: you can’t just do it for one joyful day; you have to give your life.

One day last month, in typical fashion, I was meant to be preparing for a PhD milestone exam but somehow ended up on a wild procrastination bender that caused me to translate a short story by the Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev. You can find the story, called ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps,’ here (both translation and original). As far as I know, it’s the first time this story has been translated into English.

For three main reasons, it just seemed like a good time to get back to Belyaev, and to Soviet sci-fi in general. The first was simply that, after more than a decade of sci-fi sobriety, I had the taste of it in my mouth again and was craving more. In the preceding months, I’d been working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Red Mars trilogy: three marvelous novels that imagine, in stunning scientific and psychological/sociological detail, humanity’s colonisation and terraforming of Mars. (Before you cringe: the books were published between 1992 and 1996, so they have a more ‘organic’ feel than whatever messianic crowing you’re probably used to hearing these days whenever the topic of Mars missions comes up among the Silicon Valley ‘broligarchy.’) Anyway, there’s a scene near the end of the second volume, Green Mars, when the inhabitants get together at a conference to debate the structure of a new Martian government. In the heat of the moment, one of the colonists flings out an accusation of socialism, which so inflames another that the second colonist snaps:

‘The socialist countries [on Earth] were under assault from capitalism without and corruption within, and no system could survive that. We must not throw the baby socialism out with the Stalinist bathwater [emphasis mine], or we lose many concepts of obvious fairness that we need.’

I’m a big believer in letting your current reading project prefigure your next one, and this seemed like a pretty clear fingerpost.

***

I was especially glad to be reunited with science fiction in general because I had abandoned it for such a stupid reason in the first place. In undergrad, my best friend was a spunky, gorgeous English major who loved poetry and Russian literature, and I quickly fell under her magical spell. At some point we were comparing our favourite books from adolescence, and I think she listed titles like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Jane Austen’s Emma; I remember naming H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Isaac Asimov’s Robot books. ‘I think we’ve established that I read all the “girl books” and you read all the “boy books,”’ she concluded, which for some reason made me feel ashamed. The transmission between how they said it and how I heard it is famously lossy: and the way I heard it, she was implying that children who’d read the ‘girl books’ metamorphosed into literature scholars who could appreciate the delicate, character-driven richness of Woolf, Chekhov, and Joyce, while those of us who’d snarfed up the ‘boy books’ were fated to become mere scientists or engineers who could only drool, mouths agape, over the plot-driven ‘bro’ fiction of Hemingway, Agatha Christie, or David Foster Wallace.

I tried my best to emulate my friend, but I couldn’t help it, I just preferred the ‘bros’ to the ‘hoes’: Melville over the Brontё sisters, Dostoevsky over Tolstoy. (You’ll notice that although these characterisations rely on gendered stereotypes, I’m applying them only to the writing, not to the writers, and not even as a value judgment: in fact, in my humble opinion, you’d be hard-pressed to find a ho more bodacious than Tolstoy…)

And before you ask how Dostoevsky, whose stories are stuffed with mercurial characters and philosophical layers, could possibly be a ‘bro’: I think it has to do with a certain quality of his writing style, which I hypothesise is the result of his education. Dostoevsky wasn’t exactly trained in literature or fine arts; he went to military engineering school, though apparently he was writing the whole time and quit working as an engineer as soon as possible after graduation. Which is, honestly, relatable. As anyone who has recently completed a STEM degree will tell you, no matter how much we may have liked our respective subjects, we all tend to escape a little traumatised from the experience. Ironically, then, no matter how much you distance yourself thereafter from your scientific training, you’ll always carry the telltale scent of a scientist in your outlook and therefore, necessarily, in your writing. Dostoevsky’s novels are all philosophical and psychological experiments: he proposes hypotheses about human nature, invents characters with a controlled set of relevant traits, plops these characters into some trial conditions (a murder, a love triangle, etc.) and watches the dynamics unfold until he has enough data to evaluate how generalisable his hypotheses are. Both The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, for example, are essentially murder mysteries — quintessential left-brain exercises. And although, in both novels, the reader already knows from the get-go whodunit, the fun is in watching the other characters gather clues and make logical deductions until they either disprove or fail to disprove their hunches. What is any of this but the scientific method?

Of course, poor Dostoevsky does try to render his characters with the type of complex interiorities that would populate the worlds of ‘high-brow’ (a.k.a. ho) literature. But his efforts are mocked because his writing still isn’t, shall we say, voluptuous enough for the ‘real hoes.’ The writer and literary critic Vladimir Nabokov, for example, in his famous Lectures on Russian Literature, slams Dostoevsky this way: ‘Dostoevsky is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one — with flashes of excellent humor, but, alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between.’ And he even trash-talks readers basic enough to like the guy:

‘…not all the readers to whom I talk in this or other classes are experienced. A good third, I should say, do not know the difference between real literature and pseudoliterature, and to such readers Dostoyevsky may seem more important and more artistic than such trash as our American historical novels…and suchlike balderdash.’

In some sense, Dostoevsky’s hypothesis-driven storytelling approach is not so different from what goes on in science fiction, and dismissals of science fiction as somehow inferior to ‘real literature’ seem to follow similar lines of logic as dismissals of Dostoevsky in favour of a whole cadre of modernist/realist/literary writers supposedly asking the ‘actual’ core existential questions that underlie human experience. In addition, possibly because so many sci-fi plots are set in a futuristic, speculative context, people sometimes think that the whole point of the genre is to predict the future — which, even I agree, would be a shallow, uninteresting motive, if it were true.

‘[B]ut that isn’t true,’ Kim Stanley Robinson points out. ‘[S]cience fiction is more of a modeling exercise, or a way of thinking.’1 And Ursula K. Le Guin, another titan of American science fiction, drills down on exactly what this thinking is about. The point of imaginative literature, she says, is to question our fundamental assumptions about the world, i.e: ‘[D]o things have to be the way they are/the way they are here and now/the way I’ve been told they are?’2 And this requires thinking of the individual, the society, and the world all together, as one large complex system. Robinson again:

‘Let’s say you want to write a novel about what it feels like right now…It’s not going to be about an individual wandering around in their consciousness of themselves, which modernist novels often depict…there’s the individual…and also society and the planet. And these are very much science fictional relationships. … Science fiction is the realism of our time.’ [emphasis mine]3

The second reason for my renewed fascination with Belyaev had to do with the man himself. Belyaev had one of those lives that captures the imagination: full of high drama and pathos. As a child, he lived through the death of two siblings (from cancer and drowning); as a young adult he suffered a bout of tuberculosis that kept him bedridden and in pain for six years straight; and finally he died of starvation and was buried in a mass grave. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, and the death of my mother, I’ve been thinking a lot about what constitutes a ‘good death’: and somehow Belyaev’s death feels especially cutting in its random tragedy, in the same way that incidental deaths due to illness (mental or physical), government crackdowns, traffic accidents and war feel fundamentally wrong, insane. These are somehow a completely different type of tragedy than dying by duel or assassination, where at least the cause of death was aimed specifically at you. But maybe this is a personal oversensitivity, especially as someone fortunate enough never to have lived through, say, a war on my homeland, or any deprivation in a real sense.

The third and perhaps most significant reason for my renewed interest in Belyaev’s short story arose purely by serendipity. The story caught me at a rather existential moment vis-a-vis work, not only because of my milestone exam, which I ended up passing (sort of — a story for another time), but also because, in a larger sense, the entire odyssey of my PhD so far has felt like one long existential moment, fraught with questions about the purpose and dignity of work; questions about how to find your ‘right work,’ whatever that means; and, of course, ever-present anxieties about the future: what should my next job be, and where, and to what end? And I was surprised at how much this particular Belyaev story, though written in 1926, tugged so immediately at all these threads.

Also — and this was another surprise — the story was extremely fun to read. (‘Surprise’ because, for some reason probably reflective of my implicit bias, it feels slightly unnatural to put the concepts of ‘Soviet’ and ‘fun’ together…) Belyaev was known as the ‘Soviet Jules Verne,’ and his stories have much in common with the famous French sci-fi author, including a delightful inventiveness, a sense of exploration, and a proclivity toward scientific accuracy (at least, relative to the science of their time). Their stories are also touching in their attention to both the mechanistic details and the ethical ramifications of the technical inventions they describe. Perhaps all these traits have contributed to Belyaev’s enduring popularity: apparently, nearly a century after his stuff was first published, Russian children are still reading his most famous novels in school, including Professor Dowell’s Head («Голова Профессора Доуэля»), The Amphibian Man («Человек-амфибия»), and Ariel («Ариэль»).

I’m not a child, but even I can’t wait to read Professor Dowell’s Head (which, luckily, already exists in English translation), because of its bizarre conceit. Apparently it’s about a surgeon named Dr. Kern who kills his mentor, the genius Professor Dowell, in order to pursue research on let’s call it organ perfusion — though that’s not exactly apropos, since organ perfusion is an ethical practice for keeping organs alive before transplantation surgery, while Kern basically just wants to reanimate individual body parts for fun. After reviving Professor Dowell’s head, Kern exploits the head as, essentially, his personal chatbot, using its intellectual power to guide him in performing more illegal Frankenstein surgeries on other people. Kern’s assistant and Professor Dowell’s son eventually collaborate to take down the perverted operation. So much horror, scientific plausibility, and dark humour! Don’t you love Belyaev already?

But the short story I translated, ‘The Man Who Never Sleeps’, is somewhat lighter fare. The protagonist is another academic — this time named Professor Wagner, a biology professor — who at the beginning of the story is standing trial because he was caught nabbing stray dogs off the street for scientific experimentation. During the trial, a rumour begins to circulate that Wagner has completely overcome the need to sleep and in fact no longer sleeps at all. This prompts a nosy little reporter to come over to interview him, and the rest of the story details the interaction between professor and journalist: Wagner explains how and why he does it, then tries to justify why he needs experimental dogs for his innovative lifestyle.

To be honest, I did a pretty crappy job with the translation, if you believe ChatGPT, whose critique I relied on in the absence of any literary-translation friends to check with. (I’ve appended the chatbot’s full critique to the end of my translation.) Among other issues, I seem to have inadvertently misrepresented the main character’s personality, mutilating the originally ‘tragic Promethean figure’ Belyaev intended into a merely ‘quirky inventor or…eccentric.’ This is a major failure! And I’m not sure why it happened, though it reflects, at minimum, a lack of proficiency in both language and close reading skills. But some of it was also deliberate: even to the extent I could perceive the impassioned idealism in Professor Wagner’s Russian, I still found myself rejecting his lofty tone in favour of a more plainspoken translation. Maybe a lifetime of listening to politicians say they are (in the US) fighting ‘for ordinary, hardworking Americans’ or (in China) ‘为人民服务‘ (wèi rén mín fú wù, a Communist Party slogan that conveys a moral imperative to ‘serve the people’) has a way of inuring you to any whiff of collectivist bombast.

Nevertheless, if you check out my translation I hope you will hear, beneath the jaded clunkiness, at least a tiny bit of the professor’s desperation to do good for society, and not just to be eccentric for the sake of it. This distinction is important because one of these mindsets reveals a deep underlying sense of connection to the world, while the other betrays an appalling dissociation. It reminds me of something smart my friend dfucci once pointed out, about the difference between ‘normal’ behaviour and a psychotic break. Even in a state of psychosis, he said, your thoughts still have internal logical consistency — it’s just that they’re no longer congruent with reality, like a theoretical model without empirical validation. (Which, by the way, is why — pro tip! — if you ever feel like you might be having a psychotic episode, it helps to try grounding yourself.)

(Read on for Part 2!)

The second time I thought about Kazakhstan, I was searching for a language-practice partner online. Жанара (Zhanara) and I called twice a week for half an hour to practice simple conversation: on Wednesdays we spoke in broken English, on Fridays in broken Russian. She was from Astana, in the north of Kazakhstan, where it was much colder than in Almaty, the country’s capital. Kazakhstan was primarily an oil country, she explained, so like a lot of her countrymen she was employed at one of the big oil shipping and export companies established there. She used to work as an engineer at her company but had recently been promoted to translator, which was why she needed to practise her language skills.

Over the course of our conversations, I built a limited-scope, but high-resolution picture of this woman’s modern Kazakh1 life. Жанара was a single mother who lived with her ten-year-old son and a little cat that her son had named Adjika, after a spicy Georgian chilli paste, because of the cat’s tendency to bite. I thought it was a perfect name. She told me the story of how she had found Adjika on the street one day and brought him home, where she had promptly given him a hot bath to wash off the fleas and worms. As we spoke, the little thing leapt from one corner of the room to another, a grey streak in the background of her video screen.

‘Why do you want to come here?’ she asked me with genuine curiosity. I tried to explain but faltered. I have immigrant blood, I began helplessly, thinking of my parents, who left China a quarter century ago to settle permanently in America — and of my grandparents, who left rural 浙江 (Zhejiang) for the metropolis of Beijing a quarter century before that. Why had they moved? The story I heard as a child was always pretty much the same: because there was abundant food, space, and opportunity in the new place, where they felt it was possible, perhaps for the first time, to really live. Only many years later, after age and my own maturity had tempered their inhibitions, did I hear the more complicated version that also featured poverty, political unrest and personal tragedy each of them had left behind. Somehow, as a young stupid child, I’d just never thought to ask whether the new world was really such a Shangri-La or whether it gleamed precisely because the world they’d come from was in some way unlivable.

But it’s often that way with immigrant narratives: not distinguishing between wanting to and having to move. At first I chalked this up to a kind of airbrushing (or, to use the psychological term, ‘denial’). But in the few years since making own my first overseas relocation, I’ve met plenty of other immigrants roughly my age — I’m applying the term ‘immigrant’ loosely here, since not all of us think of ourselves as ‘here to stay’ — and I’ve started to understand just how much your narrative can affect your very survival. Some immigrants may be running toward something, while others are running away, but in all cases an unwavering, single-minded resolve is required to persist in the new place. And the fact is, I was quickly realising, at some point the narrative of ‘running away’ becomes too enervating to sustain, while the one of ‘running toward’ buoys you, a spiritual current that carries you through the slog of daily existence toward a bigger, more joyful horizon. So it’s understandable that immigrants would unconsciously edit their source code to produce whichever narrative is most conducive to survival.

One person who seemed to have a ‘running toward’ mindset, with respect to both biology and Kazakhstan, was the professor E.J. Milner Gulland. I knew her from her stint as head of the Oxford Biology Department, back when I’d first started my PhD. In a department with so many researchers, you get used to having minimal contact with the department head, so I remember being surprised when E.J. organised a huge coffee and cake session for all the PhD students and postdocs, where she sat us down in a huge circle and asked us one by one what changes to the department would improve our daily lives. Something about her face touched me: a certain expressive lightness, the way her smile lines crinkled and stretched as she listened to our requests, however piddly. ‘More bookable meeting spaces,’ she’d nodded, earnestly taking notes. ‘More forks in the break room, okay.’ Sometimes at lunchtime I saw her emerge from her office in a rain jacket and running tights, pulling a small furry dog on a lead.

All this belied the fact that E.J. was, to put it mildly, a big deal. In fact, she was something of a public figure, and had even been knighted by the queen (I’m pretty sure her official title was Professor Dame E.J. Milner-Gulland). She was a professor of ecology with a special interest in the conservation of large mammals; in recent years she’d run several non-profits focused on wildlife conservation, huge undertakings involving scientific research, policy work, and international collaborations across Africa, Central Asia, and Europe. Her special interest in Kazakhstan stemmed from a lifelong interest in a certain large mammal endemic to that region, the saiga antelope.

To be honest, I usually have a pretty muted interest in the origin stories of young ecologists. Not that they’re inherently boring, but after hearing it a few times you kind of get the gist: kooky young person with idiosyncratic interests — most notably a completely unreasonable, yet totally endearing fixation on this or that animal or plant species — simply fails to outgrow their adolescent fixation the way other people do, and eventually grows up to discover, to their surprise, that there exists a career track for people like them which maybe isn’t totally remunerative in terms of gobs of money, but gives them lifelong proximity to their beloved [insert organism]. I think maybe my tone here is a bit too snarky, so I want to counter this by pointing out several cool collectives in the Oxford biology department that are staffed by this kind of quirky person: OxNav2, a group that studies how birds and fish navigate, both in terms of flight/swim mechanics and cognition (I’ve never met a group of people so obsessed with birds); WildCRU3, whose whole thing is big mammal research and conservation; and my own Social Evolution lab group (many of whose members just never stopped liking ants and other insects and got more, not less, fascinated by their genetics and social structure as they got older).

For this reason, I was just barely paying attention when E.J. told the audience, at a lecture about her life and work4, that she’d become an ecologist because she’d always loved big mammals. Probably because she was British, I automatically pictured the Big Five, those five iconic mammals prized by colonial-era hunters in Africa (cape buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion, and rhino). And just when I was getting ready to affectionately roll my eyes in that ‘here we go again’ way, she told us about what I’ll call her ‘flashpoint animal,’ the one she fell in love with so deeply that she wanted to make a career out of its study — and proceeded to put up a picture of one of the ugliest animals I’ve ever seen.

Though saiga antelopes had populated large swaths of Central Asia as recently as fifty to a hundred years ago, their populations had been affected by the construction of railroads and fossil fuel pipelines across Kazakhstan as the country had industrialised. These geographical disruptions impeded the saigas’ natural seasonal migrations, which traditionally spanned huge distances between the north and south of Kazakhstan. And things had only worsened after the Soviet Union collapsed, when people in their economic desperation had started poaching saigas and selling their horns as medicine. Apparently, the poor animals then suffered another a huge population crash in 2015 due to some kind of infectious disease. After so many blows, the population was decimated and E.J. had spent the last few decades leading efforts to conserve the saiga, which naturally involved spending a lot of time in Kazakhstan.5

But the part that interested me was how she’d even heard of this animal in the first place. How was it that a little girl growing up in England could fall in love with an animal endemic only to Kazakhstan? As it turns out, E.J.’s father was Robin Milner-Gulland, a scholar of Russian language and culture who had also studied at Oxford, and E.J.’s interest in Central Asia had evolved from an initial fascination with Soviet history that came from growing up around her father’s Russian books. I was sympathetic to this story because I know from first-hand experience how the stuff of books had a curious way of leaking into tangible reality (‘And the Word was made flesh…’ - and that’s the last time this atheist will be quoting the Bible in this essay, I promise!)6. I come from two generations of chemists and have early memories of using certain books as footstools as a youngster, like my mother’s copy of Organometallic Chemistry by Robert Crabtree, who was later my inorganic chemistry professor at university; and my father’s copy of E.J. Corey’s The Logic of Chemical Synthesis, which only after doing the ‘flashpoint’ undergrad research project that made me want to become a scientist, did I finally open and start to read.

Funny how everyone seems to come to Kazakhstan via the Russians, I thought. So had Wayne Vucinich, the American historian who wrote extensively on Eurasian history and co-founded Stanford University’s Slavic studies department7; and so had I, in a way. Kazakhstan was the compromise my then-boyfriend and I had reached about going somewhere Russian-speaking; but the interest in Russian language had itself begun with a taste in Russian literature thanks to my best friend Louise, a comparative literature scholar who in undergrad had pushed me into taking a class on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. (It was my first time reading either author, and while losing my Russian-lit virginity to The Brothers Karamazov I got to have the weird experience of loving something so much I felt angry: angry that I could have let 22 years pass before discovering this essential book, angry at how much time I’d have saved in rumination if I’d only found it a bit earlier and gotten some answers to the big existential questions via Dostoevsky’s maniacal genius, angry that I didn’t know a book was allowed to be a hagiography, a Bildungsroman, and a murder mystery/crime novel at the same time…!)

Part 3 coming soon!

Last month, while staving off another panic about my (lack of) PhD progress, I read a collection of short stories called To Hell With Poets by the Kazakh author Baqytgul Sarmekova.1 The stories portray scenes of modern life in Kazakhstan. As in, really modern: they were all written between 2015 and 2019 and published, first in Kazakh in 2020, then in English in 2024. I would guess the stories are based on the author’s personal experiences: Sarmekova lives and works in Kazakhstan, and the narrators in her stories all seem to be roughly her age, with personal memories that extend back to post-Soviet Kazakhstan and grandparents who can remember life in the 30’s.

Kazakhstan has featured in my escape fantasies for a few years now, but I’m getting to that. Those without a personal or academic connection to Kazakhstan might wonder why such a book would be worth their time. For one thing, it’s not actually very much time. Most of Sarmekova’s stories are only 3-4 pages long, printed in a nice big font (if you read a physical copy) with generous spacing on the page: the perfect length for a bedtime story or with a cup of tea. And in case you were worried, she skips the moralising so often found in other stories of that length, such as the Aesop fables or parables from the Bible. You can read the whole book in like 2 hours. So it might be worth giving the book a shot if only for that reason: it doesn’t take long to get a taste.

But be warned, you’re likely to end up enamoured of both the storytelling and the prose style. In terms of how much plot the stories have (not a lot), they bear closer resemblance to Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches or Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry than to the short fiction of, say, Turgenev or Chekhov. Picture a child asking their parents for a story about their parents’ childhood: ‘Tell me what it was like!’ The child is after a picture of the setting, a feeling for the time, place, and mood — and this is exactly what Sarmekova delivers.

The clipped, dryly humorous prose in this book is as much a testament to the translator as to the author. To Hell with Poets is translated by Mirgul Kali, a specialist in Kazakh-to-English translation. This practice itself is apparently quite rare: because of Kazakhstan’s Soviet history, what little of Kazakh literature that even makes it into English usually arrives secondhand via Russian. I found the book moving, beautiful. If awards mean anything to you, Kali won the English PEN translation award for this work in 2023.2

Disclaimers before you continue reading:

1. Spoilers for the following stories: ‘The Black Colt,’ ‘Dognity,’ ‘To Hell With Poets,’ ‘The Warmth’

2. Mentioned, but no spoilers: ‘Armangul,’ ‘Möldir,’ ‘To Hell with Poets Part Two,’ ‘In Search of a Character’

Escape to Kazakhstan

In the first year of my PhD, I met a Politics student at a party and ended up dating him for nearly a year. It was an intense, sometimes explosive relationship. I’d never met someone so restless. He spoke seven languages and bits of many more and was hungry for world travel, though not for the usual places. Most of my hodophilically-inclined friends dreamed of going either to continental Europe (Rome! Berlin! Amsterdam!) or to tropical places in the developing world (Bali, Cancún, Casablanca). He was, by contrast, obsessed with cities which in my ignorance I’d never heard of, in countries I rarely thought about: Chad, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan…His desires stemmed partly from a generous curiosity for the Global South and partly from a mystifying anger at what he called the ‘hegemony of the English language.’ He lusted after places where spoken English was nonexistent or exceedingly rare, and certainly not a lingua franca. England, we agreed, was a useful waystation while we finished our educations, but we both felt an unmistakable urgency to flee further afield as soon as possible. I wanted to settle in Europe; he wanted to live in places where racial discrimination against East Asians was less severe than in the West — which ruled out Europe.

Russia? I suggested. (This was before the war.) If we had to pick somewhere outside the West, then I wanted to go somewhere I could practise one of the foreign languages that excited me. (I was learning Russian and German at the time.) We eventually compromised on a post-Soviet country in Central Asia. Maybe Kazakhstan, he said, where the people look most like us. I didn’t know if that was true, so I typed ‘Kazakh people’ into Google Images. The historian Wayne Vucinich, in his preface to a Soviet-era book called The Kazakhs, summarises their characteristics this way: ‘The Kazakh ancestors were a mix of Turkish tribes…and the Mongols who moved into the region in the thirteenth century. Today the Kazakhs speak a Turkic language but have Mongol physical features.’3 I studied the men and women on the computer screen: their expressive faces, pale skin, and dark hair. Which of these were ‘Mongol physical features’? Did they look like me? It was all kind of hard to tell: they looked at once foreign and familiar, and each more beautiful than I was.

To be clear, we weren’t looking for a holiday: we wanted to make a big, permanent move and live somewhere, abandoning our existing friends and everything we knew. Looking back, it seems clear that we were both crazed from sorrow and uncertainty and, to use the lingo of therapy, ‘enabling’ each other. But at the time I believed in our pledge to live by the principle 破釜沉舟 (pò fǔ chén zhōu), a Chinese expression that meant to break all your vessels and sink all your ships. (Because of his hatred of English, we spoke mostly Chinese to each other.) And being without my own bearings at the time, so recently after my mother died and I moved countries and changed fields of study, I took one look at his determined expression and lined up behind him in the tradition of Old Testament women. (‘And Ruth said, “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go.” ’)4

With the Kazakhstan decision made, I felt better. I I was years away from finishing my PhD and thought I’d worry about jobs when they loomed more on the horizon. For now, my peace was punctuated only by a mild anxiety that caused me to lose an occasional afternoon Googling ‘biology jobs Kazakhstan’ or ‘Kazakhstan universities science departments.’ What did people even do there, what was life like? Researching the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences, I read a TripAdvisor review apparently written by a British tourist who had visited in 2017. After describing the exhibits of taxidermied indigenous animals, palaeontological and archaeological displays, he had continued to describe the liveliness of the place: ‘The rest of this vast, empty and beautifully elaborate building…’

During the Soviet era, Kazakhstan had apparently flourished as a scientific centre. The Baykonur Cosmodrome, the launch site for all Soviet space missions, was established there in 1959 and is still operational today (though today it is managed by Russia). And Vucinich wrote in 1986 that ‘What has been accomplished in the economy and technology of Kazakhstan has been matched by progress in the fields of learning, arts, and sciences.’ A national university was established in 1934; the Academy of Sciences in 1946; and the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1957.5

I posit that there are more people secretly harbouring escape fantasies than it would seem from the stoic faces one encounters on a normal school day, workday, or bus commute. My old friend Liam, whose rocky adolescence isn’t apparent in a life trajectory that includes graduating from Harvard, getting happily married, and quickly establishing themself in a high position at a job they love, told me how, in high school, they used to drive themself to the airport in the middle of the night and just sit there, with all the other people waiting for flights, until it was time for school. Meanwhile I remember seeing Liam at school every morning, just another kid half-asleep in maths class. They were comforted by just sitting there, Liam said, where you could distract yourself with the trivia of each plane’s make and model number. Where you could absorb the feeling of transience, the anticipation of going somewhere, of finally getting away.

In graduate school I finally got a sense of what this felt like. Once, on a really bad day in Oxford, I lost my keys or ran out of money on my phone plan or dropped a flask in the lab or something else equally small and suddenly started openly, uncontrollably weeping. When I called my boyfriend, he didn’t ask me any questions and just said, ‘I’ll be at the train station in 20 minutes.’ We took the train to London and walked from Paddington Station to the end of Pall Mall until we found the Embassy of Kazakhstan. It was closed, but we stood outside for a long time, studying the promotional travel posters and making up stories about what we would do, what we would eat, and how we would live, someday when we got away from all this. Around the corner in Trafalgar Square that night, I remember that a large crowd of protesters sang the Ukrainian national anthem and waved blue and yellow flags. The leader of the protests shouted the Lord’s Prayer into the microphone in, oddly, Russian. Was it an act of defiance, shouting at the enemy in the language they could understand?

It was pouring rain, which I found gratuitously dramatic. I was basically clinging to the boyfriend, which I never do because I find it undignified. Listening to the anthem, I was suddenly struck by a sense of how big the world was and how hard it would be to make it. I remember thinking the lyrics were so strange for a patriotic song: the first three words were ‘Ще не вмерла’: not yet perished. We’re not dead yet, I caught myself thinking, like a soldier puffing himself up with patriotic aspiration before he actually goes to war. Did I already know it would never happen? That we’d never go?

Read on for Part 2!