![]() A plastic bag dangled from each of her hands. An old woman walked down one street, the closest buildings small behind her. The buildings in Vorkuta are spread out, as though the town is trying to compete in breadth with the sky, so its pedestrians are left with long distances to cover. I saw litter, graffiti, cell phones clamped to ears, the price of popsicles, pastel dumpsters, and the trash truck emptying them. I saw the Palace of Culture, an empty playground, the stack of a coal plant, satellites clustered on rooftops like mussels at low tide. I wandered around Vorkuta for hours, past the fading Soviet propaganda painted on the ends of buildings, past last year’s snow heaped in the center of parking lots. It was Google Street View, of course, a function I had used a few times for apartment hunting, but which had only just come to this region of Russia. On a stoop to my left, a pair of brown rubber boots leaned against the rail. I clicked further up the street, and with a lurching sensation-a feeling of movement in both space and time-I was deposited on a corner next to a man in a leather jacket who was changing a car tire. A couple was frozen, mid-stride on the pavement in front of Continent, the woman pushing a child in a stroller. My Russian was good enough to sound it out and guess the translation: Continent. One had a red metal door, and its windows were papered with advertisements for jeans, cheese, and washing machines. ![]() The shops were painted jaunty colors in defiance, it seemed, of the grey concrete amassed above them. A car headed toward me in the opposite lane, bright blue and decades old, its headlights on though the sun was up and sparking off rivulets of melting snow. The road was flanked by spindly trees and scabbed snow and squat apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor. It was a walk he’d done thousands of times before, his commute, and yet I couldn’t get him to do it. The main character, Ilya, was supposed to walk from his apartment building to his school. I was adrift in a chapter a third of the way into the book. Since I’d begun the novel, LA and Berlozhniki had felt like circles in a Venn diagram that intersected at a single point in my imagination, but somehow the circles had begun to assume mass and momentum, like planets straining to pull away from one another and break that weak bit of contact. I had established the facts of Berlozhniki, but in the process, I’d lost its aura. It establishes tone, conveys feeling, holds a character’s history in its planes and shadows. Setting is, of course, so much more than place. I love research-the accrual of infinitesimal bits of knowledge, the cobbling together of a larger understanding-but at some point, a year or so into the drafting of the novel, the research began to overwhelm the fiction. I ventured into the thicket of transliteration systems and took Russian classes every Wednesday night from a teacher who loved to remind us that in Russian, the letter “Я,” which is also the word “I,” comes last in the alphabet. I read everything I could get my hands on about Russia in the 90s and early 2000s: political histories, oral histories, memoirs, and, of course, novels. I traveled to Russia as a teenager in the mid-90s, during the upheaval of the Yeltsin years, and then again in 2008, on a grad school-funded research trip. When I tell people about the novel’s setting, they say, “You must have done a lot of research.” And I did. Here, the temperature varies ten degrees from January to August. ![]() If I park in the right space at the grocery store, I can see the Hollywood sign. I live in Los Angeles, a block from Melrose Avenue. Berlozhniki is a mining town, snowbound, part of the Gulag, a place where, on the winter solstice, the sun doesn’t rise at all. For five years I worked on a novel set in a fictional town in northwestern Russia called Berlozhniki.
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