The opening lines of Svetlana Satchkova’s debut English-language novel, The Undead, see the protagonist, Maya—an unassuming woman in her 30s, making her directorial debut with a horror movie—eating a delicious fig. “[It] felt like pure happiness, making her forget, at least for the time being, that life was full of disappointments and nasty tricks,” Satchkova writes.
This exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos, characterizes the rest of the novel. The Undead—out January 13 from Melville House—follows Maya’s personal and political journey as her film inadvertently arouses the ire of Vladimir Putin’s repressive government in the years after the Russian invasion of Crimea. Maya’s initial apathy towards the crackdown on dissent amid politicians and creatives both reflects a prevailing sentiment in Russia early on: She views instances of repression as anomalies rather than the norm, and is at first unable to imagine that her film—in which Lenin’s revitalized mummy attempts to take control of Moscow, zombie apocalypse-style—might be construed as controversial by the Russian state.
Part künstlerroman and part thriller, deeply grounded in psychological realism, The Undead, dedicated to the political prisoner Alexei Navalny and other victims of Putin’s régime, explores what it means to be an artist in a country inching from authoritarianism to totalitarianism and veering towards a second Cold War.
As a journalist and writer who left behind a lengthy career at Condé Nast in Russia to rebuild her life in the United States, Satchkova sought to embrace her Russian sensibilities while also making her ideas accessible to American readers. She had experimented with working in English before, translating parts of her novel Teeth while taking a class at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But where Teeth—the story of a Russian dentist bringing up two daughters on his own—received enthusiastic responses from agents, they ultimately struggled to find a niche for it in the US.
The experience of translating Teeth prompted Satchkova to write her next novel, The Undead, in English. The frame of mind that the process put her into appealed. “When I first started writing in English, I felt like a completely different person,” Satchkova says. “Your whole mentality changes with the language that’s inside your head.” By that point, Russia had invaded Ukraine; the repression of dissidents had intensified; and independent news outlets had been forced to close as Putin forbade people from criticizing the war effort.
Satchkova took a journalistic approach to the research required for The Undead, particularly when it came to navigating Maya’s new métier of horror filmmaking. The field provided wide avenues for exploring the heightened emotions and friendships that can blossom on film sets, as well as the sacrifices that artists make under Putin’s régime. Satchkova based many of the details on information she’d gleaned about the Russian film industry as a culture journalist. “People who get into filmmaking fall in love with it completely, and they find it very hard to leave that world, along with the intense intimacies they develop on set,” she says.
Most of all, The Undead examines the gray areas that ordinary Russian creatives are faced with: Given that most of the country’s films are funded by the state, and all require government permits to be shown, the question is not of whether an artist cooperates with the régime, but how much they do so.
“I was interested in exploring the different choices people make under these conditions,” Satchkova says. “There are different degrees of collaboration. Some people find it cringey to have anything to do with the state and basically go underground; some people take state money and don’t say anything because they are able to make their living that way. And other people take the money gleefully and make war movies that glorify the Soviet Union. As a writer I was interested in this: How do you live under an authoritarian state? What compromises do you make? How are you willing to live your life? Because I had to make those compromises myself when I lived in Russia.”
Ultimately, Satchkova herself became too frustrated with Putin’s march toward authoritarianism to remain in her home country. While many in the Russian intelligentsia were benefiting from the cultural and economic opportunities flourishing in Moscow, she felt increasingly unable to ignore Russia’s darker realities, from financial corruption to the repression of dissidents. Satchkova ultimately moved to the US in 2016, settling in Brooklyn.
“Most people know what’s happening,” Satchkova says, “But the reality is so terrifying that they can’t face it. Your mind adapts to it, and you tell yourself that as long as you stay low, you can live your life and not attract attention in your work or in your personal life. But then, something might happen to you, like it does to Maya, and then of course that person has to face [a new reality]; that’s where the transformation happens.”
