INTERVIEW:Sana Krasikov's fresh stories about what happens after emigration are informed by her life - she grew up in Ukraine and Georgia before emigrating to the US aged eight. She gives voice to the 'good people who don't always have the luxury of being virtuous', LOUISE EASTmet her in Dublin
EVERY NOW and then a work of fiction comes along that reads like a series of urgent dispatches from a newly minted territory. Sana Krasikov’s first collection of short stories, One More Year, is such a book. Its subject matter is as fresh as a breaking-news scroll, its writing timeless and leisurely.
Krasikov’s characters are all around us, but we don’t always get to hear from them. A paid companion in New York funnels money back to Georgia to buy a Playstation for the son she has not seen in four years. A woman follows her Wall Street husband back to boom-time Moscow only to watch him fall in love with a hermit. Tormented by her husband’s second marriage, a westernised woman from Uzbekistan moves continents, only to spend every night on the phone to her husband.
“They’re good people who don’t always have the luxury of being virtuous,” says Krasikov of her characters. “They aren’t struggling to adjust to the culture; those aren’t their conflicts. The stories are about what happens after emigration. To me, it’s really a book about class – the émigré context allows me to talk about those things.”
Several of the stories probe the uneasy links in the care-giving chain that loops the globe – one woman supporting her own family by caring for another woman’s family in a richer country. Krasikov is disinterested in judgment, but she has a keen eye for complexities.
“A lot of money is changing hands but what’s being bought and sold is something you can’t really put a price on,” she says of one particularly poignant story, Maia in Yonkers. “It’s really a story about the outsourcing of familial responsibility and caring.”
Krasikov frequently flips the equation too. With the former Soviet Union figuring in both her own biography and that of her characters, Krasikov is interested in what happens when the country people leave for reasons of poverty suddenly changes.
“If your motive for leaving your home country is mainly commercial, it’s a bit like marrying for money and then discovering you haven’t married for enough,” she says wryly. “Over the past 15 years, so much has changed in the Soviet Union and the US. The question of whether it’s better here or there has become a lot more difficult. I’m sure Ireland has faced a lot of similar questions in recent years. I mean, do all Americans thrive? Not necessarily.”
At the core of all Krasikov’s stories is a fragment of truth – a tale she has heard or something that has happened to a friend of a friend. “Once the universe knows you’re someone who’s a storyteller, the stories find you.”
In the absence of a “dual-processor brain” she only works on one story at a time and tries to write every day. When One More Year was completed, she worked out that each story had taken her four months to write. “It takes a long time because I really conceive of them as mini novels,” she says. “I’m interested in the shape of a life.”
Undoubtedly, the shape of Krasikov’s own life has informed the writer she has become. She was born in Ukraine, the daughter of two computer engineers, and brought up in a grimy railroad town in Georgia, spending summers in the country with her grandparents. Even after the borders opened in 1987, the family’s exodus to the US looked unlikely.
“There was this crazy law that if you wanted to emigrate you still needed your parents’ permission. That was how they limited the number of emigrants. My mother’s family refused to give her permission because they had this little homestead my grandfather had built with his own hands. He’d planted all the trees and he was so proud of it. He said, ‘No, no, stick around, you’re going to inherit this’. But then Chernobyl happened and his goat milk, the poppies and the apples were all uneatable. There was no value to that land any more, so he said, ‘Okay, I’ll let you go now’.”
For Krasikov, who was eight at the time, moving to the US was a big adventure. Everything that didn’t fit into two large suitcases was given away or sold, and the proceeds used to pay an English tutor who taught her teenage sister to speak like a character from an Agatha Christie novel.
Krasikov was considered young enough to pick up the language by herself. Falling asleep in the back of a car driven by new American friends, she suddenly knew which strange word was coming next, without having the faintest clue what it meant.
“There’s only so many ways that people string together phrases. You absorb that. You don’t learn it as an adult does, which is why English is, at this point, my stronger language.”
Writing in a language that is not, strictly speaking, her mother tongue (as did Vladimir Nabokov and Samuel Beckett) informs her prose style in a faintly contradictory way.
“You don’t take language for granted. People tell me I’m a master of idiom, but that’s only because I’m actually aware of it. I had to master idiom consciously, and even though it’s natural to me now, I’m still on the outside of it a little bit.”
New England, where her parents chose to settle was, she says, “incredibly immigrant-friendly”. The biggest shock, for her mother at least, was how rural and folksy it all was.
“It seemed so strange, because we had this idea of America as a very futuristic place when in fact everything was much more natural and less developed than in the Soviet Union. It was more green: lawns and bushes and white picket fences. We were like, ‘This is the United States? This is the future?’”
Similar contradictions and ironies of emigration fill Krasikov’s fictional world. As she observes drily, “stories in general offer us essential truths and one of them is that expectation is really the key to whether one is dissatisfied or not”.
Unusually, it was not fiction that first triggered her own writing but an undergraduate course on the essay, taken at Cornell University. “Joan Didion, EB White, Aldous Huxley – I felt like I was connecting with these people through the chasms of time. They were dead but they were speaking right to me. A lot of us get converted to art by art.”
On leaving Cornell, she worked first as a journalist, then as a paralegal, before finally making a bargain with herself: if she wrote before work every day for a year, she could apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, generally considered the top creative-writing MA in a country loaded with them. By the age of 24 she was enrolled at Iowa, under the tutelage of the late Frank Conroy, and a year after she left, while in Russia on a Fulbright scholarship, she sold her first collection.
“I love short stories. They’re like poems. You read them once and you have one impression. You read it again, it’s a completely different story. I’ve read stories and it’s years before I really understand them.”
Once this publicity round is done, she will return to her Spanish Harlem apartment (where the subsidence is so severe her chair drifts from her desk unless securely tethered), to her boyfriend, and to a novel she reckons will be a three- or four-year project. She fishes out a notebook to show me a complicated tangle of notes in different-coloured ink and it’s clear she’s dying to get back to work. “I remember Frank [Conroy] said a thing I loved; that it’s okay to be orderly and somewhat boring in your life, because when you’re an artist your work is where your drama is. I feel like every day, incredibly dramatic things happen, but they just happen in my head.”
One More Yearis published by Portobello Books, £10.99