Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

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Stargorod and The Institute of Dreams (two books published separately in Russia, but joined together in this English volume) are two parts of one whole. For me, they are not collections of short stories, but a single world; a single expansive story, woven by a great multitude of voices. This is why the book is subtitled as “A Novel in Many Voices.” The world around us always speaks in voices, in many tongues, but it is always talking about the same things. A writer’s task, then, is to create his own world, one in which all of those he loves and hates could live and suffer. Without a world of his own, a writer becomes a journalist – and that’s a completely different, although in its own way also wonderful, profession.

I was not the first to use the name Stargorod. I stole it from one of the best Russian writers, Nikolai Leskov, who lived in the nineteenth century. Leskov, in turn, was also borrowing, in part, from Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, a truly titanic figure in Russian fiction, wrote a collection of short stories he titled “Mirgorod,” after a real town. Gogol’s Mirgorod, however, is vastly more than an aging smattering of buildings under the hot Ukrainian sun. The first part of the name, Mir, means “community,” “all of us” – it is a force that holds people together as a part of a larger world, that makes them a sliver of the universe that reflects, like a shard of the broken mirror, all the small but telling features of humanity.

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