"Anything you can do I can do better," says speculative literature to realism

An interview with Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

In this second installment of RUSSIAN FANTASTIKA reading list I am thrilled to present – an interview with Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, the power couple responsible for some of the absolute best writing in Russian-language fantasy literature of the last two decades. As coauthors, Dyachenkos published 26 bestselling novels, dozens of novellas and hundreds of stories, and received numerous prestigious awards. In 2005 they were inducted into the European Science Fiction Society Hall of Fame at the Eurocon in Glasgow.

Born in Kiev (Ukraine), they’d lived in Kiev, Moscow (Russia), and most recently have made their home in California. They write in Ukrainian and Russian. Below, Marina and Sergey give us by turns earnest and whimsical overview of their writing life, their craft, and the place of speculative literature in the Big Scheme of Things.

[The following interview was conducted in Russian and translated into English by me with the help of Dyachenko’s English translator, Julia Meitov Hersey. Julia will join us in the second part of the interview to talk more about Vita Nostra.] 

JS: Which one of your books would you recommend to a first-time reader?

BOTH: Our novels The Scar, Age of Witches, Vita Nostra (as an e-book), and a novella The Burned Tower have been published in the US. We are expecting the release of the novel The Ritual, which is being adapted for the screen by Timur Bekmambetov (JS: known in the US for directing and producing Wanted, as well as his Night Watch and Day Watch franchise).

JS: What subgenre of the fantastika do you identify with?

MARINA: When they talk about subgenres, I always imagine an octopus brandishing its tentacles. And we are caught in those tentacles: we had started out with a child-like fairy tale for adults, then we "villainously" betrayed the genre, and finally "fell" as low as social and philosophical fantasy.

SERGEY: Personally, I christened our method “M-realism.” What is it? Open to interpretation. Maybe meta-realism, maybe magic realism. My definition: Marina’s realism. No, I am not trying to butter up my co-author here, I think she loves me as I am. It’s just that everything that we write is filtered through her heart. That’s where the romanticism comes from, and the stubborn humanism, and the hope for white magic and a better tomorrow. I am just spoiling all that by dragging in my psychology and every once in a while — psychiatry. She lives by her ideals and I — by my scars.

JS: What do your novels originate with — an idea or a character, or else?

BOTH: It depends. It can start with a discussion, or with a tapestry of impressions, fragments of phrases, movies. Quite often parts of narratives come in dreams as startling visual or sensory impressions. And of course life’s experience and memories force us to compare, analyze, project. Ah, if we figured out how narratives get born, we’d get a Nobel Prize in psychology.

JS: How do you manage writing as a family affair? Would you mind sharing some of your approaches?

MARINA: Early on Sergey was more like a teacher and I — more like a student. But by now we have equality. We invent a story together, then I write it down, and then Sergey makes everything come together as a whole. It’s sort of a one-actress play where I am the actress and he is the director.

SERGEY: I’d say I might be more in charge of the dramaturgy and Marina — of the language and style. She’s got a gift, and I still marvel at it: how precise, how fine, how poetic. A woman is wiser this way. She is made of magic.

JS: What inspires your creativity?

BOTH: If we may say so — the creative process itself. It’s our highest reward. It’s somewhat like a Perpetual motion machine. We actually have several projects going at once, one is finishing, another in the middle, a third is just starting. All of them catalyze one another. You know, it’s like in the morning you step on a treadmill, the belt moves, and there is no stopping. And it gives you such a high! If some misfortune happens and the belt stops — this feels like a physical breakage, a disease. Writing, quarreling about writing, lamenting one’s uselessness in finding a solution and then seeing the said solution and rejoicing — all of this is a source of endorphins for us. You know, the happiness hormones of the brain.

We find inspiration in spending time with our daughter Anastasia (she is now a student at the USC SCHOOL of CINEMATIC ARTS), and with our relatives and friends. For twenty years we had a favorite coauthor and a Muse— our black tomcat Duchess. What else? Traveling. We traveled half the world.

JS: Some would say that a writing a novel and a screenplay are different occupations, even different frames of mind. Yet you work in both simultaneously. How do you switch back and forth?

MARINA: But that’s what Sergey is, a screenwriter. He lives and breathes cinema.

SERGEY: And Marina lives and breathes literature. So we are like a DNA double helix, we wind around one another. If needed, we divide by mitosis, and then rebuild our double helix. Except that our bonds are better than chemical.

JS: Tell us how you became writers.

MARINA: I began to make stories in kindergarten, before I learned to write. A thank you goes to my parents – I dictated and they lovingly transcribed it in a quadrille notebook. These notebooks are in the family archive now — A “Tale about a steam locomotive” and “A Thief’s jaunts”.Then I went on writing stuff in high school and in the Theatre school, but didn’t show it to anyone. My entry into real writing happened when I met Sergey. At that time he already was an accomplished writer.

SERGEY: That was 21 years ago. I was wooing Marina. I saw her acting talent, her beauty and intellect, but her literary gift caught me unawares. When I got to read her first novella, I was thrilled. The Burned Tower – it was by no means perfect, but it had the style and the originality, and she nailed the details, and above all it just radiated kindness and harmony. Ever since then fiction and cinema had become part of our lives and I thank my lucky stars for that.

As for me, I too started telling stories as a kid, to my playmates. I spun tales at playgrounds and in back yards, in woodsheds and basements. And preferably at night, so it would be spookier. Once, at a critical moment in a tale, when an evil Martian trained a gun on a brave Earthling, I pulled a trigger on a homemade BB gun, and there was an earsplitting bang. One girl fainted on the spot… Well, later my dad gave me a whipping, but that did not purge a passion for story-telling from me.

I always dreamed about movies but followed in the family steps and went to medical school. I have degrees in psychiatry and genetics. Then as an adult, when I already was a faculty at a research institute in Moscow, I went to study at the National Institute of Cinematography (it was the only such school in the country, and it was well-regarded internationally). I wanted to become a screenwriter. My first book and first films were about the tragic times in the Soviet science when the Stalinist government prohibited teaching and studying genetics. Yes, in the late 1940s – up to the early sixties, genetics in the USSR was branded as a “slave of imperialism,” many geneticists were suppressed and persecuted, even executed by a firing squad, whole research institutes were depopulated. For decades it was Middle Ages in science, barely educated charlatans and swindlers ruled the roost. I brought back from oblivion the name of Nikolai Vavilov, an outstanding plant geneticist who would not forsake his ideas and died of hunger in prison as “an enemy of the people.”

Vavilov had created a unique seedbank, a collection of genetically diverse agricultural species. Twenty tons of grain seed from all five continents. Imagine — Vavilov’s students and colleagues preserved it all through the Second World War during famine in the blockaded city of Leningrad. They had to passage the specimens, plant the seed and grow plants and let them go to seed, hold the grain in their hands — and all the while they were starving away. Many of these scientists perished of famine but the collection was saved, and later it became the basis of the so called Green revolution in agriculture, where they created many new cultivars of wheat and other grains through crossing existing varieties with Vavilov’s seedbank specimens. This feeds millions around the globe now. What Vavilov’s followers did was an act of selflessness and heroism of the highest caliber, I literally do not know any other examples like this in history. So that’s what my diploma project screenplay was about. That was in 1980 — the time when you could not speak out the truth about Stalinism and its crimes, it was an absolute taboo. One popular playwright, a member of my graduation committee accused me of anti-Soviet views and they nearly expelled me. It took years for the screenplay — and the novel about Vavilov to become acceptable and accepted. The novel earned me a membership in the Writers’ Union and the movie based on the screenplay won a State award. So as you can see I used to be a hyper-realist and had a chance to suffer the wonders of censorship and persecution on my own hide. But after I met Marina, I became a fantasy writer.

[JS: want to know more about Vavilov and persecution of science? -----read here]

JS: Why speculative fiction? What role does it play in your books? In the society?

BOTH: Fantastika (i.e speculative fiction) can do everything that a regular literature can do, plus a bit more. It has extra possibilities. They have to do with seeing life in a paradoxical light, juxtaposing the un-juxtaposable. It’s a possibility of the impossible. If literature is — doctor’s offices and hospitals, ambulances and maternity wards – and life without them is impossible, of course —then fantastika is a research lab. Yeah you can do without it, but where will the progress come from?

Fantastika lets us perform experiments with the future, she searches for future even in the past. Fantasika writers can travel through galaxies and through wormholes of the subconscious. Fantastika rules, she has no bounds or boundaries, she is the freest genre. She is the highlight that transforms a drab and dusty house into a magic palace by night. A while ago we came up with this tongue-and-cheek Fantastika Manifesto for our workshop. It goes like this: