Matvei Yankelevich

Susie DeFord Your new book Boris by the Sea reads like part poetry, part play, part children’s story. How did you conceive the idea for Boris?

Matvei YankelevichIt was an accident. I started writing a kind of abstract theater piece. There were English parts and Russian parts, and they approximately translated each other. It wasn’t always clear which was coming first, which was the translation and which the original. Somehow they were saying the same things, redundant in a way, but somehow different from each other. It seemed to me at the time (long, long ago—in the ’90s) that the tension between the two languages was dramatic, theatrical. The name “Boris” fit this work because it would be pronounced one way in English and another in Russian—the stress would fall on the first syllable when it was in English and on the second syllable when it was in Russian—though it was the “same” name.

It’s actually not an “idea.” I mean, there’s no idea to Boris. It’s just a certain way of writing that I was trying out and got accustomed to. It may seem like there’s a narrative, or a bunch of narratives. They are only facades. I like the form of the beginning of a narrative, of a story or novel. I also like the ending as a form, and even sometimes the middle. But I don’t like trying to go from one to the next and, frankly, I’m not good at it, or it doesn’t sit well with me. There’s no forward motion, yet I kept coming back to Boris for a long time, about 10 years, here and there. Then it seemed I wasn’t coming back to it, or it felt strained if I tried. So, I looked at all the pieces, picked them up, and tried to put them together in a way that wouldn’t harm their fragmentary quality. I’m not trying to build up the fragments to create a whole. In fact, I want the holes to be visible. They’re part of this awkward fabric—the “o” in Boris, I guess, or the holes in a sweater that are there so you can put your head and arms through and wear it, without looking at it. The “Borises” (as I have come to call them because they don’t seem to belong to any particular genre but do seem to belong together) might be a bunch of theatrical gestures—or writing gestures—taken out of the context of a play, even happening on different stages at different times. They are little writing events that took place, or take place, when I read them again.

Some of the pieces were written first in Russian (which I don’t usually write in, nor feel I can seriously write in) and then translated fairly literally into English—I was trying to keep some dramatic tension in the language by placing it somewhere in between my two (fairly native, but not quite) tongues. In the end, I took out any parts that were actually in Russian: they didn’t feel necessary any more—they had become part of the gestural tone.

The children’s side of it might come from that too, because it’s like learning a language. Or it might feel like Boris is learning the language of the world around him, but it’s not natural to him. I wanted to keep it simple, since I was looking for a more abstract or, rather, to use Malevich’s word, “non-objective” (similar to “non-representational”) kind of writing: the way you just paint a square and see what that is.