Kateryna Sylvanova And Elena Malisova On The Rapturous Romance At The Heart Of Their Novel
Elena Malisova and Kateryna Sylvanova’s Pioneer Summer is a decade-spanning, deeply felt romance set in an unlikely location, a Soviet-era summer camp. In 1986, Yurka is a rebellious, sharp-witted sixteen-year-old dreading another summer at Camp Barn Swallow. At a loss as to what to do with this maverick camper, the camp director assigns Yurka to work on the camp’s annual theatrical production. Plunged into the world of theater, Yurka not only encounters a field that sparks his creativity, but also meets an unexpected love interest, the thoughtful and pragmatic Volodya, a slightly older teenager working as a counselor. As the weeks progress, the two teens are drawn inextricably closer even as both recognize the costs of their relationship, which is illegal under Soviet law. Twenty years later, Yurka returns to the now abandoned Camp Barn Swallow, where he makes some unexpected discoveries that answer long held questions about what happened to his long-ago love. With Pioneer Summer, Malisova and Sylvanova have written an impeccably crafted romance that has captivated readers and already spurred two follow-up novels. We talked to Malisova, Sylvanova, and their translator, Anne O. Fisher, about creating complicated characters, the incredible amount of trust required to co-write a novel, and mining family history to recreate 1980’s USSR.
This is such a moving story and I wanted to start by talking about the couple at the center of it. Yurka is such an endearing character. He’s headstrong, opinionated, and very sweet. Can you talk about what intrigued you about exploring such a character as he makes his way through a love story?
Kateryna: For us as writers, the most interesting thing is to take two characters who are very different and bring them into some kind of conflict. Yurka is this way, and Volodya is very different. Then we bring them into conflict and see what happens.
Was there one character that you started with and then created the other character in reaction to him?
Elena: We came up with Yurka right away. He was the main person we thought of. But then we also thought of Volodya pretty immediately thereafter. Our goal is to bring these two very opposing characters into conflict. But with these two different characters, we wanted to show two very different approaches to or attitudes to LGBTQ—well, I should say LGBT because there was no Q at the time—LGBT relations at the time. We wanted to contrast these two different approaches.
We tried to show the challenges that each of these approaches faced in dealing with the attitudes towards LGBTQ people. Yurka is so genuine. He’s so sincere. He’s so kind. So it was important for us to show his approach in trying to resist meanings and attitudes from the outside world. Whereas Volodya, of course, has a very different approach. So it was important to us to show these very different reactions.
The story takes place at the summer camp where the two teenagers meet, a Pioneer camp called Camp Barn Swallow, and you really immerse the readers in the life of the average teenage camper. Can you talk about what life would have been like at such a summer camp in the USSR in the 1980s?
Kateryna: We were not in a camp like that ourselves, because we were born after the collapse of the USSR, although Elena caught the very end of the USSR when she was a baby. So this is not our own experience.
Elena: It took a lot of very serious research.
Kateryna: I can say that a lot of the Barn Swallow came out of my own personal experience. When I was a teenager, about 11, my parents and I went to Kharkiv Oblast, the area around Kharkiv, and there was an abandoned camp there. I wandered around this camp when I was young, and I soaked in the atmosphere of this broken down, abandoned camp. When Elena and I started writing the book, I remembered this camp from my own experience. I wanted to see it not as this abandoned place, I wanted to bring it back to life and hear the children running around and laughing and see all the brightly colored buildings. That’s one of the reasons that we put the camp by a small village we called Horetivka, because that’s where it was in real life.
For people who wouldn’t be familiar with what kind of camp Camp Barn Swallow is, can you explain what the purpose of such a camp was, and how it might be different from someone in North America’s experience with summer camp?
Elena: The first thing I want to point out is that all these Soviet Pioneer camps were built on the same plan, so they’re all very similar. Maybe there were a few that are a little bit different, like Artek was kind of the flagship Pioneer camp, so it was maybe a little bit different. Or if camps were next to the ocean or the sea, they might be a little bit different. But basically, they were built to one standard all over the USSR.
So all these camps had the same things, the same buildings. There was a mess hall in every one. There was a main square in every one where you would have the morning assemblies or dances, like the dances that you read about in the book.
What makes Soviet camps different was that you had to have a specific schedule. Every child had to be busy, doing some specific thing. We make a comment towards this at the beginning of the book, when we have a character say that Yurka has to be kept busy. That’s why he needs to be put into one of the clubs, because somebody has to be watching over him and be responsible for him. There was also an ideological education aspect to Soviet camps, where everything was geared towards getting all the kids to think about building communism, and hastening the moment that communism was achieved in the country, and this sort of Soviet education was a major part of it.
It just seems that the fact that they have to be kept busy all the time would make it almost impossible to conduct a romance of any kind, especially like a secret romance, the way that Yurka and Volodya have to keep their feelings for each other hidden from everybody else.
Kateryna: That’s the conflict between the two worlds of LGBT and Pioneer camp, because the Pioneer camp is designed to be standard. It’s designed for everybody to be the same. They’re trying to not just standardize the physical environment of the camp and everybody’s schedules, but also the people. That’s why everybody has the same uniform, the same little red necktie, the same outfits, the same little shorts and everything. In that atmosphere, anything that’s “different from the norm” is especially difficult to achieve.
The reader gets a sense of what life would have been like for teenagers, particularly LGBT teenagers in the 1980s in the USSR. Can you tell me about your research process in terms of getting all those details so accurately?
Elena: Research! Yes, it’s a whole science. And history is a science. And the study of this science was our hobby, but I was especially interested in it. For ten years before we even started writing this book together, I had this hobby of studying history. So we already came to the writing of the book with a lot of historical knowledge. A lot of our work, the research that we did for the book, was more just double-checking our facts and double-checking that we had everything right.
There is one detail that I want to point out about being LGBTQ in the USSR, and it’s the most complicated detail, because the theme of being LGBTQ was so taboo in the Soviet Union that people didn’t write about it, even in their private journals. So we had to read a little bit between the lines.
Kateryna: Despite the fact that we weren’t actually in the USSR, it’s still our most recent history. It came right before us. But we did a lot of surveys and asked a lot of questions. I asked my mom, “Tell me what it was like to be a Pioneer.” I asked my grandma, “Describe to me how you gave the Pioneer oath.” Without necessarily explaining what it was all for, we surveyed all of our family members. So we got lots of photos of family members wearing the little uniforms and everything.
Elena: We asked questions on the internet, asking people that we know on forums, or people that we happen to be in touch with over the internet. We read biographies—for example we read Nureyev’s biography.
I’ll just go ahead and answer a question in advance: “Did you have prototypes?” No, we didn’t. We just kind of collected the two characters together from all these little bits of information that we gathered throughout our research.
I don’t get a chance to talk to many co-authors. Can you talk about your writing process and how the two of you write your books together?
Kateryna: I should first say that we aren’t just co-authors, we’re friends. We’re very close friends. We know each other really well. I get the impression we can finish each other’s sentences, and I sometimes feel like Elena can read my thoughts.
As far as the way we start out, it’s always just brainstorming. For Pioneer Summer, we just got these ideas and we talked a lot about them. We write out a detailed plan, but we don’t write out a plan chapter by chapter. We write out a plan of scenes, and then we hash out or polish up these individual scenes.
Then when we sit down to actually write the text, we don’t sit down and do it chronologically, scene by scene, we just decide what we feel like working on that day. Elena will say, “Oh, I feel like writing the bit with the show, their big performance.” And then I’ll say, “Oh, I feel like writing the other scene, at the dance.” So that first text that we sit down and write out individually is really, really rough.
Where the co-author magic begins is when we exchange the things that we wrote. Because we sit down and we pretty much rewrite the scenes using our own words, our own formulations. What happens as a result is that both of us have done work on all parts of the book. Our text doesn’t work the way some co-authored texts do, where you can tell person A wrote these parts, and person B wrote those parts. With us, you can’t tell who wrote what part.
What’s important in our work together as co-authors is that we have so much trust for each other. What we are giving to each other when we exchange these first drafts is raw, it’s unfinished. It’s not that strong at this early point. So we trust each other not to launch into critiques. And we don’t compare the rewritten texts. We don’t look at the other person’s rewrite of our text and say, “Oh, well, my text was bad, and now it’s been corrected.” We see it as us writing these texts together, and the story is bigger than our individual writerly personas, or egoism, or anything like that. The story is more important.
The hardest part is the editing. That’s where we take this bad, clunky first draft and turn it into polished, literary language. The way we do that is we read it out loud to each other. I usually do the reading just because I like to read. Elena, on the other hand, is very good at processing language through hearing it. So she’ll hear things that are uneven or things that stick out. Reading it out loud to each other and then editing on the fly as we read is that final step in the co-author process. Having a co-author who you can trust that fully, and who can help you make this into a treasured, beautiful, polished thing is really valuable.
I wanted to ask about the two other books that continue the story of Yurka and Volodya. At what point in the writing process did you decide to write more books? Did you always have a sense of how and where Yurka and Volodya’s story would end?
Kateryna: This is a really interesting question. Actually, it was just one book at first. Oh, it got popular. There were readers, our internet readers. There’s a website for putting up fiction online in Russia called FicBook. We had the first book up on FicBook, it got very popular with our readers, and they actually were the ones who asked us to continue the story.
At first we didn’t want to write any continuations, because [Pioneer Summer] is such a warm, bright, luminous, happy, fun story about teens and first love. It was so fun and so easy to write and we didn’t want to get into something harder than that. But then we got lots of comments online. I don’t remember who exactly it was, but it was pretty clearly a grown-up guy, who wrote to us and said, “Well, what you wrote is easy. Now you should write something hard. You should write something about how twenty years later they get together, and how, as grown-ups, they actually try to make it work.”
Elena: Our book is this bright, warm story with lots of positive energy behind it. But our readers said the story wouldn’t let them go, and in just the same way, our characters wouldn’t let us go. When we were getting these comments from people saying they’d like to read about how grown-ups build their relationships, that’s when we started thinking, “Well, that’s actually a good idea, because we have everything ready. We have these characters. We have their backstory. We also see them getting to meet twenty years later.” We were ready for this next step, so we decided to do it.
Anne, I’ve never gotten to talk to a translator before. Can you talk about how you approach translating a novel and how you view your role in terms of bringing this story to life for a new audience?
Anne: I have two challenges that I thought of that were specific to this novel, which is synonyms to make sure that the especially homophobic words are conveyed in a way that will land just as harshly with the US English audience. The second thing is voice. These are teenagers. They’re snarky, they’re snippy, they’re mean, they’re goofy, they’re hurt, they’re vulnerable. So how do you make sure that juicy, full-color, 3D teenager-ness lands in English?
For example, there are four words that really made me think a lot about my word choices, because they’re all words that come up in Volodya and Yurka’s mind or in their conversations to describe attitudes about being gay, or what society thinks about being gay, or being homosexual, or being “a homosexualist” (an outdated, pejorative term that some characters use in the book). These four words are protivny, gadky, merzky, and podly. All of these words are negative, but they convey slight changes or variations of negativity. One means repulsive, one means disgusting, one means atrocious, one means despicable. So which one is more physically repulsive, like “it’s going to make me sick,” versus which one is morally repulsive? It’s also a challenge trying to find vocabulary in English that would come off as contemporary, because you can’t say “vile.” “Oh, that’s such a vile thing to do.” It sounds too old-fashioned. That idea of something being both disgusting and morally opprobrious, it took some time to figure out English versions of these: how to correctly convey all the many nuances of homophobic disgust? It’s not a fun task. But it is a necessary one because if it sounds harsh in the original, it needs to sound harsh in the translation, too, otherwise you’re hampering the text’s ability to do its job (which, in the case of these words, is to accurately reflect the norms of the society these characters live in).
But something that was fun was replicating the all the kids’ voices. One interesting challenge was the speech of one character, a little boy named Olezhka who has a speech defect. And it’s a very interesting choice by the co-authors to do this because Lenin, grown-up Lenin, also had the same type of speech defect. It is a way of pronouncing the letter R that is seen as wrong, as not correct Russian. Olezhka gets teased by the other campers for having this speech problem. In the original Russian, it’s very evident when Olezhka is speaking, because he pronounces every R in every word as L instead, and every word is written that way. You can’t miss it. This becomes an important plot point when Olezhka is cast in a play: how will he deal with all this public speaking? So our two heroes decide to try to make it easier on him by rewriting his lines in the play to have fewer words with Rs, which is one way at the beginning of the book that they start to spend so much time together. And near the end of the book, when the campers put on the play, Olezhka suddenly produces these beautiful rolling Rs and it’s such a big moment for him. But in at least one translation of the book into another language, the translator or the editor or the publisher decided to keep the plot point of Olezhka having the speech defect, but without showing the defect in his dialogue. So Yurka and Volodya are talking about helping Olezhka with his speech defect, but when you read Olezhka’s dialogue, he doesn’t have one! And his moment of victory during the play also becomes a non-sequitur.
I think it’s important to keep that cultural texture, that specific circumstance, and to adequately represent Olezhka’s speech problem. But then here’s another twist: I can’t make all his R’s into L’s the way the original Russian does, because that particular “R-to-L” pattern already has an established cultural association in US English. And that association is extremely derogatory. So I gave Olezhka a slightly different speech problem in English, where he says W instead of R. This is just one example of how I was always choosing whether to keep as much of the original texture and flavor and all these little realia of camp life as possible, or to skip over it. This even goes for describing what the outdoor camp wash basins are like—there was nothing like that in my experience going to camp in the midwest in the 80s. It’s not something that the American reader will immediately understand, but I decided to keep it and explain it in a stealth gloss because that wash stand is part of the texture of this book’s reality. When you lose that, you’re losing a little bit of the color. And you don’t want to have a full-color original, but a black and white translation.
And finally, can you talk about what role the library has played in your lives?
Kateryna: This question really hit a nerve in a very, very good way. In first grade, there was after-school care, because our parents couldn’t pick us up right when school was over. We sat in after school care in first grade doing homework, and one of the options that was offered to us was you could go to the school library. Not all the kids wanted to go to the library—not that many, actually. But I’m seven years old, I go to the library, and they have these special little thin books for first graders. I would sit there and go through all of these little, tiny, pamphlet books. I remember also that I was so excited to get to repair the books because they were all ripped up since they’d been used a lot. I loved to go and get glue— because they didn’t have scotch tape back then—and glue these things back together. I also remember that we had such an excellent librarian. This process of going to get a book, to check out a book, was something that I started then, and it stayed with me through all my school years. That process of getting a book was something I really loved.
Elena: I don’t know how it is in other countries, but in my experience, it was my home library that was the most influential for me. In Soviet and post-Soviet times, a home library was this status symbol. Even if you didn’t read any of the books, having a big home library was a big deal. My mom collected all these books, and we had just shelves and shelves full of books at home for our home library.
But here I was, eleven years old, and my family didn’t really have a lot of children’s books. So at eleven I started out just reading grown-up books, and the first book that I really latched on to was by Gerhart Hauptmann, The Whirlwind of Vocation . I didn’t actually need to go to any libraries until I went through everything that I wanted to read in my home library. So external libraries weren’t that important at first. When I went through my own library, the first place that I went to was my school library. There was a stereotype that came true, which was that my librarian was sort of a strict and mean person. (laughs) But she liked me and was nice to me, because I always turned in her books on time.
Kateryna: (laughing) One reason why I got along so well with my librarian when I was so little is because I was gluing together the books and fixing them. So of course we had a good relationship!
Elena: At a certain point the school library became small and boring for me, because I wanted to read Goethe, I wanted to read these grown-up books. Even though I didn’t understand everything that was happening in them, they were so mysterious and they were very clever. These books were always referring to each other and having this conversation with each other.
I eventually went and got my city library card. I liked going there because there was this mystical sense of all these stories being around you, all these characters, all these people who—just your whole life isn’t enough to get to read all of them, to get to know all of them. The library, for me, is kind of a strange place. I mean, it’s not a church, exactly, but it’s this sort of mystical place. It’s a place that’s full of ghosts.
