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The Russian-Speaker
Born in Tashkent in 1985 to a Russian-speaking family. Exiled to Russia at fourteen. Returned to work the hotel lobbies, the transformer plant, and finally the American embassy of a country that watched him from the day he was born.
12 chapters54,883 words224 min readmemoir fiction
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About This Draft
Ruslan was four years old in the courtyard between blocks twelve and fourteen in Yunusabad, watching ants carry a grain of bread into a crack in the asphalt, on the afternoon his country had two years and seven days left. He did not know this. The adults on the fifth floor where his mother was wrapping bread for dinner did not know it either. This is what before means. It is the word for the time when you do not know.
In 1991 the country disappeared. In 1999 the bombs went off in Tashkent and the city closed its hands. At fourteen Ruslan went to St. Petersburg, then to Moscow, where the police looked at his face and asked him where he was really from. He came back. He worked a hotel desk in Tashkent. He worked the floor of the Chirchiq Transformer Plant. He walked into the American embassy on a morning in 2007 and had his photograph taken for a badge.
A novel of categorical homelessness — not Russian enough for Russia, not Uzbek enough for Uzbekistan, fluent in both and at home in neither. Based on the life of Ruslan, written by his friend Frank, with his permission and care. Comp shelf: Bezmozgis, Krasikov, Hemon, Ismailov, Matar, Alexievich. Scaffolded in a single parallel dispatch via /arcanea-author — the proof that this command holds worlds outside its own canon.
FrankX · creatorRuslan · co-authorArcanea Author Council · co-author
This is a live draft. Chapters are published as they are forged.
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Ratings & Reviews
Chapters
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Before the Fall
> **Author note.** The protagonist's name is withheld on the page until the author chooses it — see `[NAME-TBD]` flag. Sections marked `[CONFIRM]` are scaffolding from the Council...
3,245 words13 min read
Independence
The first thing that changed was the television.
3,461 words14 min read
The Long Adjustment
The money came undone in the spring of 1993, which is to say, it came undone more completely than it had been coming undone, because by then it had already been coming undone for...