One does not enter the back alleys of literary Substack and not know Vanya—if one has discerning taste that is. Vanya quietly lurks the Substratosphere by spending his days posting memes, but within them lurks the Vanya who wrote the book Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel— perceptive, quietly pessimistic, as though quietly stands in his corner and mocks the rest of us, ponders about Russia and totalitarian regime ; satiric, with dialogue that pulls you into his dystopian world and its hallucinations, lunacy (his words) and surrealism, Vanya is someone to look out for in the years to come.
Vanya Bagaev is a Russian-British writer of experimental and speculative fiction. He writes about weird characters in whimsical situations, employing a lot of unhinged dialogue, absurd, dark and dank humour, dreamlike sequences, hysterical surrealism, magical realism, sudden philosophical and psychological romps, stylised prose, often infused with poetry, witty comedy, poignant twists, Russianness, logic and lunacy, literary anarchy, magic degeneracy, and many other sublime matters. "Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel" is his first novel. Vanya's other work is available on his Substack Nova Nevédoma.
Here, we discuss Vanya’s book, Russian and East European Literature, the plight of the world amongst other things.
More from Vanya and Deleted Scenes on his website
Hosts:
Hyun Woo Kim is a translator and fiction writer from South Korea. His Three Hundred Tang Poems is a collection of Chinese poems from the Tang Dynasty(618-907). It was first compiled in the 18th century, and contains a bit more than three hundred poems.
A finalist of the 2023 Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Award and 2024 River Styx Prize, Hyun Woo specifies that his first name is Hyun Woo, not Hyun. He is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Buku Sarkar is a writer and photographer from Calcutta/New York and Paris. Her first collection of stories, Not Quite A Disaster After All is due to be released in the US on September 18 and her first collection of stories, My Dead Flowers is due out in India in January ‘25.
Her first monograph— Photowali Didi was published in Dec. ‘23 at Paris Photo. Her work has appeared in NYRB, N+1, ZYZZYVA, Sewanee Review (recipient of the Andrew Lytle Prize in fiction) and helped write the screenplay for Shameless, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard in 2024.
If you are not a paid subscriber, you won’t be able to access the full interview unfortunately.
This Artist to Artist conversation series appears once a month (in no fixed order). Previous episodes:
TRANSCRIPT:
So English is not your first language, huh?
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No, Russian's first language.
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So when you're writing, are you thinking in Russian when you're writing?
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It depends.
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I think both can be.
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I started writing online in Substack specifically in English as I moved to the UK.
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almost seven years ago.
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And at that time during COVID,
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I started writing and also kind of trying to improve my English at the same time.
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So I started reading in English,
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writing in English,
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and I could say I was probably thinking in Russian first,
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but
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as I was writing more and reading more,
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I guess,
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I started thinking about many things in English.
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Not all the things, but some of them.
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This book?
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This book was kind of nice.
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It's beautiful.
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Who did the cover?
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So I did a collage, and a friend of mine, Craig,
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Craig Burgess made letters for it from the Soren 20 Social Club.
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So it's kind of joint effort, sort of.
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Like a collage.
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Yeah, like collage.
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kind of an idea in mind.
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I did some things generated in Generative AI,
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and then I did a collage of those with some of the public domain images,
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some generated,
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and some I just created myself.
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So it's like... Like the woman with the TV on her head?
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Where is that from?
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I think,
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I don't remember,
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I think I found it somewhere in the archives,
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but the TV itself,
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she had no TV and I had a TV on top as like,
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PNG or something like that.
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This is why your note this morning about the Echo Borg reminded me of your book.
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That's why I asked.
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I don't know if you're going to publish the audio only or are we going to publish
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the video too,
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but just in case,
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if you want to,
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I'm just going to show this so that everyone else can see what you're talking
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about.
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We can do snippets.
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We'll see how it turns out.
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If everyone wants the visual, we can do the visual.
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I look horrendous, but it's OK.
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We look fine.
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You look better than last time when we talked.
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Because Buku messaged me yesterday, and she told me that she was feeling unwell.
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And so I asked then, should we postpone the interview?
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And she just says, I'm always unwell, so that's fine.
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I'm always sick so what can I do like I can't like wait to get better I've been
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waiting like 15 years now you know fuck it so I know how it works I knew I we had I
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had to do it 1 p.m.
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Paris time so I wake up at eight o'clock this morning and all the bad things that
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have to happen to me happen for a few hours and then it comes down well well we're
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happy to hear that
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But I need to change smoke as a result.
Oh, no.
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Like, everyone smokes here, right?
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No?
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No.
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Really?
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You're the first person I know who does not smoke.
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I never smoke.
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Not a single cigarette.
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Oh, really?
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Yeah, only weed a couple times, but I don't think it counts.
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Now my perception of you is so different.
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Yeah, I'm like...
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Your mention of never smoking a secret just broke my mental image of Russia in general.
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Yeah.
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It completely broke my image of you.
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I think my generation,
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many of my friends,
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people I know,
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they either gave up smoking or never smoked or just do it when they're too drunk or
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something like that.
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But I don't have many.
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people my age from Russia.
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Maybe it's just my, you know, eco-chamber social.
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But yeah, for some reason, it's not that popular.
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As for example, when we went to Serbia, everyone smokes in Serbia.
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Or in Turkey, my colleagues from Turkey, almost all of them are
