Fiction
Autobiography: The First Two Weeks
by David Vseviov
One morning, the midwife Maria Ivanovna Sidorkina wakes up to her downstairs neighbor’s cries that Maria’s cat Barsik has killed a man. After an investigation by the Soviet militsiya, the grotesque morning (which lacked any human victim, regardless) transitions smoothly into a similarly absurd birthday party for Maria’s mother that is attended by terrible guests, and during which the woman’s husband Vassily makes a joke that falls horribly flat. To mitigate his wife’s displeasure, Vassily promises to start studying Estonian using the local newspapers. Thus, a Stalinist periodical with a peculiar attitude towards reality becomes their Estonian textbook. In 1944, the Soviet Union occupied Estonia for a second time in fewer than five years. Vseviov, an historian, depicts the ways enigmatic Russia strengthened its foothold in the country and how life profoundly transformed. Complemented by extensive photographic illustrations, the novel paints a picture of people’s everyday lives in Tallinn over the course of two spring weeks in 1949, shortly after the end of World War II. Newspaper-reading and the reporting of current affairs in a way loyal to the regime are central topics throughout the book. The narrator of Autobiography is a precocious newborn who comments on the situation from his own unusual perspective. One major setting in the novel is the multinational hospital maternity ward, which brings together the stories of women born all across the Soviet Union who have relocated to Estonia. In the second week, the infant moves home to a room in a communal apartment in the city center, where the mother receives visitors with stories that are just as fascinating. The protagonist is born into a mixed Estonian- and Russian-Jewish family; the languages spoken at home also include German and French. This crossroads of cultures and conflicts doesn’t necessarily entail collisions alone, but also queer cultural intertwining and interpretations. The humorous parallel reality conjured up by the newspaper articles (which an alarming number of the Soviet-minded characters do not doubt in the very least) highlights, in fact, the grotesque that could be found in those terrifying years – an era of genuine fear. The reality of Stalinism in Soviet Estonia is woven into the author’s historically accurate yet exaggerated characters. Reviewers have called Vseviov’s Autobiography an historically and politically comedic work of reference. At the same time, it is a high-spirited parody of autobiographies. The tiny narrator discovers parallels with events that will occur later in life, relating episodes with roots that extend (sometimes mockingly, other times with dire seriousness) into these first two weeks. The nature of compulsory Soviet military service, for example, is revealed all in its unadulterated absurdity. Autobiography: The First Two Weeks stylistically resembles Ilf and Petrov’s The Twelve Chairs.
