Wound

Wound is the prose debut of the poet Oksana Vasyakina. It is a documentary, autobiographical text that unfolds around the author's journey with her mother's ashes from the Volgograd Oblast to her native Siberia. From Volgograd to Moscow, from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Irkutsk by plane with layovers, and then a fourteen-hour bus ride through the taiga to the small town of Ust-Ilimsk, where all roads seem to end.

This long route forms the backbone of the novel, around which the narrative of death, dying, and farewell, accompanied by nonsensical bureaucracy, is centred. The journey to her birthplace is also a journey towards understanding her own sexuality, femininity, and how to talk about these topics today. In her reflections, the author turns to a number of her predecessors, including the writer and Gulag prisoner Anna Barkova. The novel's passages are intertwined with essayistic ones, the present with the past. In its focus on family memory, the novel is close to the prose of the Russian poet and essayist Maria Stepanova's In Memory of Memory (Pamjati pamjati 2017), and in its blending of the intimate world with reflections on literature and art, to the prose of the British writer Olivia Laing.