Wound

It is heartening to see public recognition of Vasyakina, a feminist activist and a lesbian, whose work does not hide but rather publicises her orientation and her politics…Elina Alter does justice to Vasyakina’s style, whose clarity and unpretentiousness results in a work of great inner power – EUGENE OSTASHEVSKY * author of The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi *
Wound is a poet’s novel, structured like “a pebble dropped into water” … a primer on feminist thought for readers with Pushkin in their veins * European Review of Books *
From very personal experiences, Vasyakina has written a frank text about memory, her own sexuality, the relationship between mother and daughter * Forbes Russia *
Wound is a story about how wounds can heal. To do this, they need to grope, understand and speak. This is not just an amazing novel, extremely frank, extremely accurate and extremely addictive, but, perhaps, a book about finding happiness * The Blueprint *
This book is impossible to swallow or read in one gulp. I, who always read very quickly, only needed twenty pages. Then I had to step back, catch my breath, look at the surrounding objects, return to the familiar world - which, it seemed, would never be the same again. There is such density, concentration of thoughts and feelings in the text, that one wants to live and realize each fragment separately * Snob *
It is the rare and therefore especially valuable ability to see the forest, while distinguishing individual trees in it, and to generalize without falling into the sin of superficial simplification, which makes Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound one of the most important texts published in Russian in 2021 * Meduza *
In this moving, poetic autobiographical novel, family trauma is inseparable from national history. Returning to Siberia with her mother’s ashes, a daughter revisits the primal scenes of four generations. In the process, she invents a new way of existing as a queer woman from the Russian provinces – SOPHIE PINKHAM * author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine *
Deeply moving, Wound flows from a faith in the emancipatory power of literature that has become all too rare. One of the most refreshing young voices I’ve encountered in contemporary literature – JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS * author of The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors *
Acutely necessary. Wound is a bold, human, powerful meditation on how a language of love and death takes shape – POLINA BARSKOVA * author of Living Pictures *
In Vasyakina’s magnificent Wound, a woman goes on a pilgrimage to bury her mother’s ashes in the small Siberian town of her birth, a place where lesbians ‘didn’t exist.’ Urn under arm, the prodigal daughter returns: a queer in Putin’s Russia, a poet who first glimpses herself whole-‘soft and agape’-in the gaze of her girlfriend. The narration pivots through time in Elina Alter’s resonant translation. ‘Poetry is my method of forgetting in such a way that what I forget becomes known to others.’ I remain awed by the expansive emotional geography of this book, which reads like a novel yet tastes like a poem. – ALINA STEFANESCU * author of Dor *
Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound is a rare work of towering honesty and lyricism. Few writers can hold such poise amidst the wilderness of human emotion and render language both brutal and magnanimous – Yelena Moskovich
Lyrical and profound, this one is a truly special book by one of Russia’s boldest voices * Glamour *
raw and hypnotic * New York Times *
A seriousness of purpose is explored through prose, poetry and an essay on the links between weaving and writing with some comparative thoughts on the difficulties of mother/daughter relationships… Only an author of great skill could hold such disparate material together while also questioning her own method throughout the process. But Vasyakina successfully folds the untidy past into the unsettled present, demonstrating how inseparable they are to the person she is… – Declan O’Driscoll * Irish Times *
This is a study of grief and an accounting of a coming-to-consciousness as a queer subject in a repressive state. It also left me feeling joyful, grateful, enlightened - and lighter…. [Wound] is a novel to savour and to recommend to queer and straight friends alike, precisely for how it explores the possibilities of discontinuity * Times Literary Supplement *

Oksana Vasyakina is a poet, activist and novelist. She was born in 1989 to a working-class family in the Siberian city of Ust-Ilimsk, Russia. In 2019 she was awarded the Lyceum Prize for her poetry, which appears in English translation in n+1, in the collection This Is Us Losing Count and in PEN America’s Verses on the Vanguard: Russian Poetry Today. Her autofictional debut novel, Wound, won the prestigious NOS literary prize in 2021, and was additionally chosen as the Critics’ Academy Choice.

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