Your story, “Siberian Woods,” concerns a group of Russian immigrants living in New York, reinventing themselves in terms of relationships and careers. The female narrator’s husband has been married four times, and the other central male character has been married six times. What do you think is the reason for such a high turnover rate?
I do know people who have been married four or more times, but that’s unusual. Two or three times, though, is pretty common—almost a norm among my Russian immigrant friends. My generation tends to get married very early (probably because we take sex too seriously), before our personalities are fully formed, before we know what we want in life. Of course, many of these marriages were doomed. Immigration creates another form of stress for couples. Our old world is gone; we have to adapt to a new world and evolve in the process, and often the two halves of a couple go in completely different directions.
The central character of the story, Daria, is a somewhat mysterious figure who keeps inviting herself to other people’s homes and stays until she is forced to leave. What do you think drives this behavior? Why is she avoiding owning her own home – especially given her fantasies about marriage and motherhood?
Dalia is an idealist and maximalist in every way. She believes that the perfect family life does not exist in reality. At the beginning of the story, I suggested that Dahlia’s childhood might have been troubled, so her behavior and desire to be “adopted” by other people may come from a subconscious need to fully experience the perfect childhood – people give her unconditional love, and Not before she’s an adult, she’ll ask for anything in return.
Daria and Sergey bond in part because of a shared love of Siberian birch trees. Is there really something special about wood from Siberia, or should we take this (and the title) less literally?
The Siberian birch in the story is a fictional combination of two of my favorite trees: the pliable Karelian birch and the mighty Siberian pine. The idea for the title started as a dick joke; I needed to turn to blue humor during dark times. But then I realized that the title had a greater symbolism, so now it serves as the key to the story, bringing all the themes and characters together.
Why do you think the narrator is so infatuated with Dahlia? Did she see some version of herself in Dalia – some path not followed?
Dalia’s life is built on an unwavering idealism that most people, including my narrator and myself, abandon as they grow older. I think my narrator has had to make a lot of compromises in her life, so she admires Dalia deeply, and she finds a way not to. But, to me (the author, not the narrator), Dalia’s most fascinating quality is her fearlessness. In recent years, I have been overwhelmed by fear, mainly of the people I love. I find that when making decisions, I’m often more influenced by fear than anything else. I’m writing a novel inspired by fear. I would love to learn how to be fearless!
The characters in “Siberian Forest” left Russia decades ago, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. They are not contemporary Russians who left to protest the war in Ukraine. But the current situation is still hard not to cloud the story. Did you think about it when you wrote this article?
Of course I’m thinking about war as I write this! It’s hard to think of anything else since the war began. Most of my family is from Ukraine, and even though I grew up in Moscow, I am still horrified by the war, still confused and terrified. That’s why I can’t write it yet. I can’t write a novel based on raw emotion alone. I need to be able to handle these events in the first place, which refuse to be understood.
The idea for this story came before the war, so, when I wrote the story, I decided to set it in a parallel world where the war hadn’t happened yet and where the people CoronavirusThe -19 pandemic remains the worst disaster my character has experienced in recent times. ❖
