The Undead

"[An] exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos." —Vogue

In this gripping tale of contemporary Russia, a young filmmaker and her friends run afoul of a government that ruthlessly oppresses artists who dare to satirize the regime . . .

When Maya, a young Russian filmmaker, makes a low-budget horror movie with her friends, it seems like a promising start to a career in indie film. Little does she know that her jokey lo-fi film will soon attract the attention of the autocratic censors at the highest levels of the Russian police state.

What follows is a propulsive narrative of an artist being crushed by state power, and the choices that one makes within a system where free expression is literally illegal. Written with the undeniable voice of a emigre from Putin's Russia, The Undead is a tense, piercing story that serves as a parable, and a warning, about political oppression."[An] exquisite balance between contentment and foreboding, tranquility and chaos" — Vogue

"Chillingly examines the Russian government’s stranglehold on the arts and media industries .... a convincing cautionary tale of the dangers of political apathy." —Publishers Weekly

"[A] brisk, vivid page turner" — The Milwaukee Shepherd Express

"There is nothing supernatural about the zombies in Svetlana Satchkova’s savvy, frightening novel. They are all of us, wherever we are, who keep looking away when authoritarian forces crush expression. Witty and unsettling, The Undead is a cautionary tale about, among other things, never quite admitting where the danger lies until it’s too late." —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

"The Undead is a courageous and witty book about art and politics. With keen insight and wry humor, Svetlana Satchkova evokes a devastating artistic and moral reckoning. This fascinating, propulsive novel will stay with me." —Helen Phillips, author of The Need

"The Undead has the force of an undertow, pulling us relentlessly away from safety. Svetlana Satchkova has written a gripping, haunting portrait of a world coming undone." —Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

In The Undead, the career and well-being of Maya, a young filmmaker in Moscow, unravel in the most bizarre, realistic way, showcasing the insidious, absurd nature of a totalitarian state. Deeply informative and engrossing, The Undead examines how bizarre and horrific human nature can evolve under the pressure of the desire to live unharmed rather than free. A moving examination of the meaning of home, the horror of a dictatorship, the hilarity and joy of movie-making, and one woman's political coming of age in Putin's Russia. Truly important reading for our times." —Paula Bomer, author of The StalkerSvetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and writer who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She is an established arts journalist with bylines in the Rumpus, Newsweek, LARB, and others. She is currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, has an MFA from Brooklyn College, and lives in Brooklyn. The Undead is her first novel in English.Chapter 1
Maya reached for a branch where a ripe yellow fig was sitting, its honey-like juice trickling out of the hole in its bottom. It came off effortlessly, as if it had been about to fall, and she stuffed it into her mouth. She couldn’t get enough of these figs, the likes of which she’d never tasted before. They felt like pure happiness, making her forget, at least for the time being, that life was full of disappointments and nasty tricks. But she had to stop eating them, as dinner was in less than an hour. They’d been asked to come to the table at seven.

“Did you know that wasps can live inside these things?” Dennis said. “You don’t want to bite into it. Open it with your hands first.”

“You already told me this,” Maya said.

Around them, a sprawling fruit garden lay, buzzing with insect life. Dennis was sitting on the ground, his back propped against the old fig tree. Maya and Ksenia stood in front of him, their heads touching its branches.

“So anyway, I was saying,” Ksenia continued, fixing Maya with her intense stare. “I see her as this lost, trying-to-figure-things-out type. She has this job she doesn’t really care about. She broke up with her boyfriend. She has no idea what she wants from life. I can totally relate to her.”

Maya didn’t see how Ksenia could identify with this fictional woman she was describing. Ksenia was married to Dennis, who adored her. Also, she knew exactly what she wanted, singularly focused as she was on becoming the best actress of her generation—or at least the most famous. She already played leading parts at the Moscow Art Theatre and had appeared in a couple of movies that made a splash, but this wasn’t enough for her. When they met two years ago in their screenwriting and directing program, Ksenia told Maya that she’d enrolled so that she could make movies and star in them. She wasn’t shy about saying this out loud. “I’m not getting any younger, you know?” She was thirty-two now, which, Maya supposed, wasn’t that young for an actress. Maya was almost thirty-six herself but had no acting ambitions, thank god.
The fictional woman in question was Maya’s own creation. She’d made the mistake of letting Ksenia read the script she’d written. Somehow, Ksenia had decided that she would be playing the female lead and was now expounding on her interpretation of the role.

“You know there’s no producer attached yet,” Maya said. She had to leave herself a way out.

“Maybe it’ll never get made.”

Ksenia had already acted in two of Maya’s student shorts. She was undeniably gifted, but Maya resented the assumption that Ksenia would be starring in all of her films from now on, just on the basis of their friendship. There were other talented actresses out there. She was going at it all wrong, too—the Stanislavsky way, when it was really an action role.

“What’s that guy’s name? Belov?” Ksenia asked, taking a tiny bite from a fig she’d plucked and shoving the rest into the mouth of her husband, who dutifully swallowed it down. “He expressed interest, right? I have a good feeling about this. I’m sure that, when we come back, you’re going to get the call.”

She was relentless. This was how she’d gotten to where she was. Ksenia came from a small town somewhere down south and was ashamed of her family, who were, according to her, simple people. This probably meant they were uneducated and worked menial jobs, maybe drank heavily. At seventeen, Ksenia came to Moscow and applied to GITIS, the legendary theater institute, to study acting. She got in after several tries, two years later, and in the meantime worked as a waitress, sleeping on the floor of a roach-infested room with three other girls. Maya had never had to go through anything even remotely like this. Born and raised in Moscow, she didn’t have to conquer the capital. Her parents, though not rich by any means, had been able to buy her an apartment in the city center so that she wouldn’t have to worry about rent.

To steer the conversation in another direction, Maya asked, “What did you guys think of Stasik’s movie?”

Stasik was another one of their classmates. Last night, he’d sent them a link to his short film, but they hadn’t had the chance to discuss it yet.

Ksenia snorted. “Garbage! Don’t tell him I said so, though. Cat, you agree with me?”

Cat was her nickname for Dennis, who was stocky, round-faced, and balding. Maya thought it sounded obscene, for some reason. Maybe it was due to her own perverted imagination that this word coming out of Ksenia’s mouth conjured Dennis on all fours, meowing.

Dennis raised his arms, took hold of the tree trunk behind his back, and shook it. A few figs plopped to the ground here and there. “The camera work wasn’t bad.”

Ksenia winced. “But everything else? The plot’s ridiculous, I told him so when he first told me his idea for it. I thought he’d rewrite it, but no. And the acting—come on.”

She did an impression of Stasik’s lead actress learning that her boyfriend was injured in a freak accident involving a bottle of kefir, a pet ferret, and a dildo, dialing up her affectation a notch. Ksenia’s eyes rolled into her skull and her mouth quivered; her hands clawed at her hair as if trying to tear it out. Maya and Dennis burst out laughing.

“I mean, what’s the point of studying masterpieces of world cinema for two whole years if you then go and make something lame like that?” Ksenia summed up. Maya couldn’t help but feel that Ksenia wasn’t speaking only about Stasik and decided right then that she wouldn’t be auditioning Ksenia for her movie if she managed to secure the funding.

Dennis got up, and they started walking toward the main house, talking about their last seminar, when they’d watched and analyzed Roy Andersson’s You, the Living. Their class had divided nearly in half, with one group of people saying the movie was clearly a work of genius and the other claiming it was nothing more than a pretentious load of crap. Some strong opinions had been voiced (“rising tension between the banal and the essential”; “a cheap grotesque!”; “a series of tricks doesn’t equal a singular vision”), after which they’d all gone out to their usual haunt, where over burgers and drinks they continued the discussion that eventually devolved into a physical fight. A thin, quiet guy—some of them called him Broomstick behind his back—slapped a beefy loud one across the face, and they ended up rolling on the floor, smashing plates and even a chair.

This only went to show how passionate they all were about making art that mattered—not just to them, but to the people they were making it for.

The past two years had been the best in Maya’s life. During this time, she’d done nothing but talk about movies with some of the smartest and most talented people she’d ever encountered and create films of her own. For the longest time, she’d dreamed about this, but in a vague sort of way, never thinking that she would actually do anything to take this idea and turn it into reality. Then, at thirty-four, she’d abruptly quit her magazine job and handed over her savings to VKSR—the best graduate film program in the country—into which, to her own shock, she’d been accepted. Now, she had a whole different life and a whole different self. She was a film director! And, in an even more improbable twist, she was openly favored by her professors, who were certain she would go on to do great things. It was through their efforts that she’d ended up here, in the Italian town of Rimini at the estate of the distinguished writer and director Toni Morino, who was hosting emerging filmmakers from all over Europe for a week. During the day, the guests could do anything they pleased: wander his magnificent property, work in any of the common spaces, or swim in the Adriatic Sea. And in the evenings, they took part in long communal dinners over which Toni himself presided. Maya’s heart felt close to bursting from the implausibility of it all. She caught herself suddenly giggling in the middle of conversations when she was supposed to nod her head gravely at whatever her interlocutor was saying and reply with something equally weighty about the nature of art or the human soul.

At moments like these, she sometimes heard her mother’s voice say in her head, “The harder you laugh now, the harder you’ll cry later.” Maya’s parents had repeated this throughout her childhood, but it hadn’t occurred to her to question the logic of this maxim. The idea behind it was to make you live in a dull, lukewarm state that perfectly matched their colorless Soviet existence. And yet she’d internalized it to the point that her own happiness made her suspicious, leading her to expect some sort of retribution.

Maya was unclear on how Ksenia, who hadn’t particularly impressed their professors, had managed not only to come here but also to bring along her cinematographer husband, who had no connection to their program other than being married to her. Though Ksenia did have a way of making people do things they hadn’t planned on, which would undoubtedly come in handy for building an enviable career in the film industry. Maya herself had done a few things for her almost against her own intentions, like casting Ksenia in her student shorts and letting Ksenia’s friend stay over at her apartment for nearly a month, free of charge. Maya had hated the woman, who casually raided her fridge and left dirty clothes everywhere. She surmised that when she was out, her guest slept in her bed instead of the couch designated for her.
Presently, Maya’s phone rang. She signaled to Ksenia and Dennis to walk ahead without her, seeing that her best friend was calling.

“You’re still in Italy?” Lena asked.

“Four more days.”

“Your life is amazing! Don’t you feel any shame?”

“Your life isn’t too shabby either.”

Lena’s work as an editor at a women’s magazine allowed her to travel the world, stay at the best hotels, and meet international celebrities, sometimes having meals with them. Maya had gotten a taste of this kind of life before she decided to study screenwriting and directing. “How’s the new job?” she asked.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” Lena said. “I’ve only been here three weeks. But there’s this guy I like . . . He’s young, though.”

“How young?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Maya yelped, surprising herself and a bird that shot out of a tree, flapping its wings frantically. “He’s a child! Stop this at once!”

She could tell Lena was taken aback by her reaction.

“What are you, my mom?” she said. “I’ll do what I want. It’s not like I want to marry him! I’m thinking of a brief, casual relationship with no obligations. I bet he’ll like that.”

Maya didn’t know why she felt so strongly about this. She tried to reason with Lena. “Didn’t you tell me you read an article that said you shouldn’t have these easy flings with guys who aren’t a good match? Because you end up falling for them and getting your heart broken.”

“I don’t know if I believe that. Why would I fall for someone who’s only eight years older than my son?”

Lena was a single mother of a fifteen-year-old who was actively rebelling against her, causing all kinds of trouble. She said after a pause, “Anyway, you’re the last person I expected to get a lecture from.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well . . . you’ve never struck me as the moral compass type.”