Olga Kushlina

Born in Samarkand into a family of exiled intellectuals. That is how I began all my autobiographies, which once cost me a job offer. Having spent a total of about ten years in Moscow and then about the same amount in Petersburg (not a single day in Leningrad), I still consider myself a provincial, apparently by temperament. I studied, and then worked, in Dushanbe at a university department with the astonishing name “General Literature”; I taught general literature there, despite the fact that even in my youth I did not feel any need to teach anyone anything. I lived between two cities, since the archives and libraries were in the capital of the then “universal” motherland (postgraduate and doctoral studies at the Institute of World Literature, internships at Moscow State University, summer months at Lenin Library, and so on). For entertainment, I ran the section for archival publications in the local magazine Pamir, taking advantage of the fact that the censors knew not only nothing of Mandelstam-Harms-Kruchenykh, but simply did not know Russian. Then our miserable little magazine was praised on BBC for something, and the freedom ended. But soon the times changed as well, I moved to Moscow for good, and then to Petersburg. From my Turkestan years I retained a fondness for epistolary writing as the most correct form of communication. When it became possible not only to write but also to publish in a free style, it turned out that the genre did not matter to me—article, review, essay, short story, autobiography (for the first time I am writing one that is not official). It is an external and conditional оболочка; in fact, it will still turn out to be a letter, a message addressed to a specific recipient. Now the one reader for whom I used to invent all sorts of stories, simply to amuse, or to explain certain subtle things that are hard to grasp directly, has been gone for a year already, and I cannot write prose, although plots overlap and someone inside me is constantly speaking in different voices. But perhaps that is why I decided to publish. It is hard to speak into emptiness. (c)