The Man Who Couldn't Die

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I met Olga Slavnikova in 1987 or 1988. Back then we both lived in Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg); she worked as an editor at Ural, the local “thick” and respectable literary magazine, and I was publishing my first articles in it. She had just finished a journalism degree at Ural State University (my alma mater too) and was launching her literary career, both as a prose writer (her first novella, A Freshman Girl, was published in 1988) and as a literary critic. We had many common interests—primarily the culture wars that were roaring around us—and quickly recognized each other as like-minded. The circle of young literati to which we belonged was mesmerized by the newly discovered continent of Russian underground and émigré modernist and postmodernist literature—from Vladimir Nabokov to Sasha Sokolov and Venedikt Erofeev—which started to appear in print after decades of censorship and about which we talked all the time.

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