It's a Complicated Russian Novel (Part II)

Thumbnail Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

Read Part I here!

Are these great numbers? No. They’re the markers of someone who’s too wrapped up in editing rather than mechanically and methodically putting words on the page, assuring myself that I can fix it later. It is my fatal flaw as a writer and in addition to inadvertently writing too closely to myself, this nitpicking is what keeps me from ever finishing any projects. I keep retreading over well-trodden land, get the soil nice and soft for planting, but when I move forward to a new spot, and have to till and toil the earth all over again, it wears me out. Discourages me. Then the work in progress remains just that — in progress.

I pulled together a 32,000 word masters thesis in three months, but masters theses are supposed to be barely legible — the end result of too many coffees, too much self-doubt, too many highlighted papers, too much stuff going on outside your thesis. A good thesis is a done thesis. However, a done novel draft does not make a good novel draft, and I, unfortunately, do not have a Damocles sword of new semester in tuition danging over me. I am blessed with time. But come hell or high water, I will get this draft done.

I am very pleased though, that in this abundance of time and under constant tilling, I have created fertile soil for a strong character. I’m thrilled to finally introduce you to the girl who’s been living rent-free in my head since January 2021. Everyone, meet Artemiy Lvovna Poznanska.

Pathologic is a story of tradeoffs.

A deadly disease descends upon a town in the middle of nowhere with limited resources and no ability to call on outside help. As conditions deteriorate, you will be tasked with objectives you cannot possibly meet under parameters that are almost comically restrictive. You can’t save everyone, not even yourself, so what and whom do you chose to prioritize?

For me, there is a particular Scene in Patho 2 that I won’t spoil. It was such a pivotal moment that there’s entire segments of the game I won’t interact with because [redacted] is my number one mission. I see the number of people die from the disease increase at the end of every night’s dice roll, and I don’t care. [Redacted] is why I play the game.

Whether you start the Haruspex route in Patho 1 or jump straight into Patho 2, Artemiy’s story always begins with a letter. His father is urgently calling him home, fearful that something big is coming that will require his son’s help. Artemiy is the son of Isidor Burakh, the menkhu, or spiritual leader of the Kin — the indigenous community to the town— and the town’s only physician. Artemiy has been away at the Capitol for many years for school, so he must take a long train ride across Siberia to make it back home. Unfortunately, by the time he arrives, his father is dead under mysterious circumstances, and worse still, the town thinks that Artemiy committed the crime. He’s a man on the run, from those who wish him harm and in pursuit of the person who actually committed the murder. These are his — and yours, as the player’s— main concerns as the disease known as the sand pest breaks out and all hell breaks loose.

In his Patho 1 route, Artemiy uses his knowledge of Kin traditions and medicinal herbs to pursue his end to the plague. However, Patho 2 raises the internal stakes by making him a reluctant hero. Artemiy has been away from his home for so long that upon his return, he finds them to be backward. In the wake of his father’s demise, and the Kin’s need for a new menkhu, he does not want to rise to the call. He mentions that his mother, who died in childbirth, wasn’t Kin either. So, in addition to a medical and murder mystery, we have a little Prodigal Son sprinkled on top, along with the tension between tradition and modernity, belonging and unbelonging.

And stabbing. The Haruspex does a lot of stabbing.

I don’t mean to imply that our dear Bachelor Dankovsky is not a complex character in his own right. Artemiy is just complex in the ways that make my brain tingle. Unfortunately for me playing the game, and fortunately for you dear reader, a lot of those brain-tingling themes aren’t explored to my own satisfaction. So, enter stage right, Artemiy Burakh.

Before we move forward, let’s address the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about gender (lightning strikes, thunder crashes, and an old organ somewhere groans ominously).

Why flip Artemiy, when the trope of father/son tensions as a stand-in for generational differences is well staid and the Prodigal Son is a two-thousand year old staple in Western canon. Why not Dankovsky, the iconoclast, the one who has to demand space for himself in a hostile environment, both in the Capitol and in the Town? As a straight yourself, don’t you worry that flipping one but not both characters’ genders makes the main pairing heterosexual, thereby undermining the integrity of fandom’s natural queer space?

I’ve been reading a lot about craft since starting this newsletter/blog thing, moreso than I’ve ever done actually. It’s about as close to an MFA as I’m probably going to get (I think my husband might kill me if I sunk god knows how much money into such a program). The one I’m reading right now is Alice McDermott’s What About the Baby: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction and it’s absolutely brilliant. In a chapter about writing to address the world’s ills (or rather, the dangers of it), she says:

She quotes Flannery O’Connor, “Remember that you don’t write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character (emphasis mine).”

I sympathize with the impulse that exists largely in fandom spaces to be critical of the environs that stories come from, to keep asking the question of who is left in the shadows when the spotlight is on a particular subject and why is the spotlight here in the first place? These are important questions to ask and I do think that a mature artist will ask them plaintively and address them in good faith. Be intentional. However, this position can be a tourniquet made of silk. If you try to create with this binding on too long, somewhere eventually a limb will die.

Artemiy the girl came to me first and she demanded her story be told. She came to me not as a hyper-feminized version of the canon character (though there’s nothing wrong with long hair and done-up makeup), but with short hair and a sharp gaze, rage bubbling just below the surface of her skin, her name remaining the same. A very early working title for this story was, “A Cafe Called Wonderbull and a Girl Called Artemiy.” It didn’t last.

She said, “I am being forced into a role I do not want, but I am dedicated to my family and my community and will do it because I must. Tell my story.”

And I said, “Okay. Bet.”

I never had a clear faceclaim for her the way I did for Daniil. I knew her figure—tall, naturally bulky both in fat and in muscle, large bust and long legs—but her face always floated between several others I’d seen before.

If Dankovsky is motivated by The Future, then Artemiy is motivated by The Past. More than anything, she wants to go back to before she left for university. It was a simpler time, and she didn’t have the weight of her people and the world on her shoulders. We first meet her in the town’s history museum, sketching what she thinks the Polyhedron might have looked like, if it existed at all one hundred years ago, based on stories from an ethnography written by her great-aunt.

Her narration is steeped in nostalgia, which also seeks to build the world of this modern AU, to show the effects of communism and Russia’s haggard reform in the 90s and backsliding in the 00s. She tries to pick up relationships where they left off, but five years is a long time. Her ex-girlfriend, Lara, has moved on, and Stakh, who has returned from his military duty, is resentful of her to the point of contempt.

Artemiy is back in town after five years in school—not in the Capitol (Moscow), but in Chicago, Illinois, USA. I chose Chicago because I wanted to make her sudden journey back to her hometown to be as long, complicated, and miserable as possible. It was a nightmare for me getting to Kyrgyzstan from Austria; adding two halves of a continent and the Atlantic Ocean ten years ago would make the journey all the more excruciating. Upon her arrival, things are different. Her town has changed and, well, so has she. One of the ways I show this unconscious change is in her morning runs.

Running for recreation is something I associate with the metropole. I don’t ever remember seeing joggers in rural Wisconsin or Mississippi in all my time being there, and even though I was there in the dead of winter, I doubt there were many getting their KMs in in the Kyrgyz village, where I visited my Peace Corps volunteer sister. I hone in on the strangeness with some dialogue from an unnamed kid (who also drops the story’s ticking clock, an event at the solstice Artemiy needs to prepare for).

So fundamental is this activity to demonstrating how Chicago has changed her and how it has put her out of step with the town and her community, that I chose it to be her opening scene in the ofic manuscript:

Her character arc is driven by a need to accept that she at 24 can’t fit into the same mold she existed in at 18—and that that’s okay. It is hard work, but she must mourn for what was, what was lost, and come to accept that she must to do right by herself and by her people.

Ironically, the cafe I am writing this in is in the Polish city of Poznan. The circumstances that led me here weren’t even a consideration when I selected this surname from a random generator.

A lot of Artemiy’s character and her story beats cross over from the fic:

In mapping out her arc, I’m still using K. M. Weiland’s character models. To refresh:

Artemiy’s story is about taking that first terrifying step into the unknown and accepting that what is past is simply that, past. It’s one of those subtle stories where nothing happens, but everything happens. Everywhere. All at once.

Leave your comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on such a deeply internal character arc.

If you like hearing me yap about writing, check out these other beehiivs.

Until next time. Take care of yourselves and each other,
Sarah K.