Ballgowns and Existentialism

A review, sort of, of Vita Nostra and Deathless

I spent the weekend traipsing through subways in a waterlogged ballgown, which got me thinking about what it is to live, which is also the question of what it means to be mortal. 

The Russian classics, which I’ve been reading through over the last few years, have much to say about life and mortality. I might someday add my meager piece to all that has been written about them, but this post is about two of my favourite modern fantasy novels in a similar vein — one Russian, and one about Russia. They are both troubling, and to me they are better-done representations of coming-of-age than realism. 

I’m not going to summarize or spoil either book here — and nor can I completely endorse either of them¹ — but will provide quick summaries below. 

Vita Nostra is by a Russian-Ukrainian couple, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, with an English translation by Julia Meitov Hersey. It begins with a very normal and happy fifteen-year old girl, Sasha Samokhina, on holiday at the seashore. One day, she sees a strange man who tells her to swim away and back; when she returns, she coughs up gold coins onto the beach. All summer is like this — challenges, swimming, running, coughing up coins. The coins, it turns out, are Sasha’s currency into a very strange boarding school. 

When she gets to the school, she notices that there is something wrong with the older students, something almost machine-like, something strange in the way they move and act and think. This is the book’s genius — you experience the brutal school alongside Sasha and her classmates, and in the first year nothing at all makes sense. But when she is old, and she has become like she once saw her seniors, harder and stranger and almost all-knowing, you think, of course — how could it ever have been any other way? 

The protagonist of Deathless, a retelling of Russian folklore by American Catherynne Valente, is Marya Morevna, who as a young girl sees birds turn into men and come to court her sisters. Because of this — well, because she is doomed and destined to be the sort of person who sees and touches magic — she embarks on all sorts of terrible adventures in other worlds and in ours, falling into a twisted relationship with Koschei the Deathless. 

Marya asks herself at one point, as she has become older and sadder, as she has experienced battles and horrors beyond comprehension — who would I have been if I had not seen the birds? Who would she have been indeed? Maybe her life would’ve been different, had she not seen them so young. But she would never have been able to escape death forever. 

Both books capture a fundamental truth: Growing up is the realization that you and everyone you love will die.

I grew up the year I turned 23, when I was living and working in Zambia. It involved both elements that seem so strange and otherworldly to the average American that I try not to talk about them, and the quiet tragedies that must happen to us all. 

My favourite review of Vita Nostra observes:

“In a very real sense — more real than most so-called "Young Adult" novels — Vita Nostra is a novel for young adults. It's about becoming an adult, and discovering truly hard tasks where failure actually has consequences, and doing so amidst the swirling temptations of song, dance, parties, alcohol and sex. It's about the confusion of not knowing what you're going to be when you grow up, of seeing yourself as a free-willed individual with choices lying ahead of you and then discovering that you are at the mercy of forces you cannot control or negotiate with. It's about trying not to lose the parent-child bond even when you are forced to let go […]”

“What’s the matter?” now Portnov sounded worried. “Sasha?”

“You are not human,” Sasha whispered.

“So? Neither are you.”

“But I had been human. I had been a child. I remember that. I remember being loved.”

“Does it matter to you?”

“I remember it.”

In my 23^rd year, I wrote that I once was human, but I couldn’t remember it. By the end of that year, like Sasha, I had become inexplicably charismatic and scarier. I was more stoic: I didn't really need regular food and water in the way I had before. I was far less whiny and far less apt to rely on others for help. 

The world is stranger than one person can ever understand. You think you've understood one corner, and then you go to the next city over, or halfway around the world, and realize the paradigms with which you saw the world are completely subjective and malleable, and you might as well be and have been living in some fantasy world with utterly subjective rules. It is humbling, and a challenge. Vita Nostra viscerally takes you on this journey at this weird magical school where none of the lessons make sense. Deathless transports you from the senseless otherworld into the senseless brutality of our own. 

These are both two of the most beautifully-written and evocative fantasy books that I’ve read. There is a feeling that the worlds of the books are more glittering and dark, more terrifying and expansive, than anything that our world has to offer — they draw you in, and make you want to live in that possibly-doomed world… 

Some reviewers really dislike Deathless. No one dislikes Vita Nostra, but I think that’s because the people who self-select into touching something this weird are the people who would like it anyways. The bad reviews of Deathless ultimately come down to a few things,² the most salient of which to me is that the book is too negative, there is no hope; Marya, from the time she sees the birds, seems resigned to her fate. 

That's why Vita Nostra is the better book. Is it dark? Yes. Is it confusing? Also yes. But there is hope, and there is agency. The hope comes in both small pockets at the boarding school and as Sasha begins to understand and act in the world. Sasha learns that language can shape the world; she comes into her own great and terrible power even as she comes to terms with what fate has given her. Both are necessary; and Vita Nostra, like the great Russian novels, gets the balance correct. 

The knowledge of death is fundamental to finding one's place in the world. Young people think they are immortal; slightly-less-young people know this is not so, and only then can they answer the question of: “what shall we do and how shall we live?”

Sometime in the December of my 23^rd year, I started to remember again. After coming-of-age, I learned to live more. I had always loved life, but by the time I learned to be human again, I only grew to be more grateful, to shape it with language, to love it more. I took every long-distance train in the Western United States. I traveled by myself through the Himalayan foothills. I run miles and miles in the sunset.  I don’t count time when with family and friends. I spent the weekend traipsing through subways in a waterlogged ballgown. I keep doing my work; I continue to write; I continue to care about justice. 

Insofar as I have had a life philosophy, it began to cohere when I was 24:

“My answer to why I want to do what I want to do has started to be something like this: I want a world in which anyone can sit watching a Delhi sunset, even if they are women alone. That they can spend time with their families without worrying how to feed them. That they have time and resources to explore the physical traces of their histories and the paths of their spiritual beliefs. That they have no constraints to putting on their good clothes and going to a dance. That they don’t die of pollution or malaria before they are old enough to grasp these things […] you don’t work in sanitation for the sake of sanitation or vaccines for the sake of vaccines, you work on them so humans can thrive.”

And in life, as well as fantasy novels, things came upon me, come upon you — the coins, the birds, the reminders to live in the shadow of the reminder of death. A few days before Easter, the subway had been early, and I walked out of the station — was it fate, or free will? — into a shop, and when I opened the door the shop was full of crucifixes and candy and birds, but more than anything, delicate, painted eggs everywhere, lining the windows, hung from the branches of a large tree, some heavy and jeweled and glittering, others light and pastel and flowery, all together giving the overall feeling of being in a large, light-filled jewelry box. The signs were all in a language that I didn’t understand; I had never so much felt like the door had been a portal to another time, another place. I bought three eggs. I keep them in my living room.

Edited by Surbhi Bharadwaj and Emily Lin

1.  They are both troubling books; I do not remember enough to give comprehensive content warnings but there are many in both, one of which for Deathless I will go into a bit more detail in a footnote below. Beyond content warnings, Vita Nostra is an extremely confusing book that essentially throws you headfirst into the absurd world of the story. If you don’t like the first 30 or so pages you will probably dislike the whole book. Deathless’ sections are very different in tone, so you might really like the first 50 pages and then start hating it as it starts documenting more and more of human destruction.

2. The other main points in the negative reviews are 1) cultural appropriation, which I can’t speak to; and 2) that the relationship at the center of the book is abusive, which I completely agree with and recommend you do not read if that bothers you. That said, abuse portrayed as love absolutely will cause me to quit books, but with Deathless I simply didn't read it as a love story or think that the relationship was being condoned (a portrayal of something is not endorsement)! Instead, I saw it as a mirror for the brutality of life and the inevitability of death. I could be wrong here, but I really hope I am not.