Autumn 2025: There Was No Light Like This in the World Before N’s Appearance By Oksana Vasyakina – Оксана Васякина, Такого света в мире не было до появления N.

to k. and to s. – thank you for your words, thoughts, tenderness, inspiration and care. it’s a miracle – to exist, write and think  in your light; there was no light like this in the world before.

at a palestine encampment, sitting on a the cold and bubbly paving stones, warmed by unexpected sun of the weekend in the middle of the working week, i am having a call with my friend k. after quick updates on everyday topics of my heartbreaks and quick anger as political instrument, we began are talking about my essay (as a form of gently checking how i am had been doing mentally, of course, and i am was doing surprisingly just fine)

k. tells me stories of his funny philosophical adventures with our beloved anarchist publishers in tbilisi. i imagine a warm, bubbly paving stones party: drinking chacha, petting some dogs and asking why autofiction tendencies in russian-speaking contemporary literature became so annoying and boring at this point! what can be an the answer?
“i am not writing with my fucking vulva!!!”  – i hear from my phone.

we are speaking in russian, and it feels like i am sitting in a real bubble: on a temporary, fragile liberated street, a beautiful mischief of taking your voice back; pronouncing the words that no one around understands. our call is interrupted – it’s a break for 5 minutes of us shouting “free, free palestine; but let’s get back to our discussion. 

so, in tbilisi they’ve been talking about one thing: how an attempt to retell your life in fictional form, from all the emancipatory potential that it has, also brings a disturbing side effect. a bubble can become a box that locks you inside; and the walls are not transparent. An obsession with strongly individualistic, indeed ego-centric vocalization of your own life snatches you in a shadow theater of your doubled perception; easily commodified — convenient form, that perfectly fits on a supermarket shelf. readers ask: maybe there is something more interesting in literature, than centering your writing around the Genius of an author.

after this talk I couldn’t take the argument out of my head – since I am trying to write about the most well-known and influential Russian autofiction writer of 2020s. of course, when talking about an autofiction scene – one is talking about her; or – about the language, tradition and field of questions that she opened.

her name was mentioned already (i almost forgot to properly introduce her – so obvious it seems to me!). her name is oksana vasyakina; she is a feminist writer and a poet; she is 35 years old; she is a lesbian; she has a chihuahua; she still lives and publishes in russia. i know a lot about the life of oksana, since her most famous work is an extremely personal autofiction trilogy, three big novels: “wound” (2021), the first one is about oksana’s mother, who died from cancer; “steppe” (2022) is about her father, who died from aids; and “rose” (2023) is about her aunt, who died from tuberculosis. this is just a number of dry, bureaucratic facts about oksana’s books. what are they actually about? one can say many things: they are about oksana vasyakina, womanhood, gender, family, body, precarity, syberia, 90s, love, space, time or the nature and effect of writing. i would say that they are about all these things, and this is the magic and the power of vasyakina’s texts: they invite a reader to enter a very particular story of an individual that very soon turns into the investigation of how the individuality is actually created by the world around it. as in classics of autofiction (i am thinking, for example, about annie ernaux), the personal becomes the sociological without any disconnection from a lived experience: an evidence of power structures, shimmering through every random, small or insignificant element of someone’s life, observed, felt and cried out. and the theme of it – is gender, class, and metaphysical, but very much real voids of precarity, in which oksana vasyakina lived all her life.

a cynical reader (an annoyed facebook comment) could ask: what to do, when you’re running out of dead relatives that you can write about? for me this question never made any sense because i believe it’s not something to be annoyed about. but this question/it takes me to another one, more complicated problem: the (im)possibility of healing from the wound: can you bury a ghost forever? can writing about yourself be a healing ritual – or is it rather a curse of repetitive retraumatizing? the last question was the hottest, angriest point of most of discussions that i heard: why should we, as readers, choose to hurt ourselves again and again? why should we, as writers, lock ourselves in our pain? what else can there be, outside of the forcefield of trauma?

in her new book, there was no light like this in the world before N’s appearance, not a novel, but a collection of 12 short stories (or 11 short stories with a final autotheory essay in the end), oksana vasyakina gives provides us with an answer to it. and the writing itself is, of course, her main answer. in my text i am going to talk about the last essay titled  “i have twenty-nine books left”: it works as an interpretative key, a meta-comment on all the remaining stories in the collection. in this essay, vasyakina decides (and makes a public promise to her readers) to measure her life through books rather than through years or other abstract forms of time. it is not a metaphor but a system of control: by counting the books she plans to write before she dies, she transforms uncertainty into structure. this act of measurement links to a story about a yoga master who believes that the body is limited by the number of breaths it can take. both gestures — the slow breathing and the careful, embodied writing — express the same desire to manage the passage of life within its physical boundaries. instead of romanticizing death or transcendence, vasyakina translates finitude into a daily rhythm: writing, breathing, existing, all within the frame of the body’s measurable time.

this way vasyakina’s answer arrives not as theory, but through form: writing is as inevitable, as breathing. this time, instead of another novel, she turns to a shorter, more fragmented way of writing  — fragmented meditations on growing up as a girl in  provincial russia. the change of form is political: the position of main character (so – self), and the figure of Other that influences a story of a character, still exists, but becomes decentralized. in every short story the narrative structure is similar: main character enters different ages, spaces, interiors, settings – and the Other is dispersed into different women, that come and disappear, leaving the trace of a memory behind them.  

a novel demands a single voice, a unifying “i,” and this time vasyakina doesn’t speak alone. she scatters her voice among other women — teachers, brides, teenage girls, anonymous classmates. men never enter the space of the book as characters; only – as invisible and most of the times violent actors of the plot and the environment of a woman’s life.

but how does the path of growing looks like for vasyakina? “i turned thirty-five last year,” she writes, “there’s nothing good about youth. it is a painful transformation, it is a confinement.²”. this opening line sets the tone: instead of romanticizing youth, she writes from the distance of ripeness, of bodily awareness, of aging. her “maturity” is not a triumph but a garden of fallen, rotten pears, apples — a world where sweetness and decay coexist. what she builds here is a counter-autofiction – perhaps, to her own tradition and previous method of writing. it is an attempt to escape the narcissistic centrality, and it takes form of a text that only exists through others. for vasyakina, a childhood memory of collecting fallen fruits becomes an allegory of early dependence: “childhood is like a night vigil — you lie in the dark, listening to the dull thud of apples on the ground³”. the line sounds innocent, but it’s suffocating. there’s no space to move; time stretches. youth becomes a cage, and adulthood — not freedom, but just another room in the same house.

this sense of confinement returns in her description of a wedding she attended at fifteen. “I had the feeling that what was happening was flattening the space, I was suffocating, but not from the heat….⁴”. the scene — a wedding in a soviet school canteen — becomes an ethnography of gender performance. women are not characters here, but functions: the bride, the mother, the bridesmaid. and the teenage narrator observes this ritual of transformation — from girl to woman, from subject to social role — with horror and fascination.

this episode represents the main interest of the whole book: vasyakina turns banal, almost folkloric settings into sites of analysis. in “i have twenty-nine books left”  she describes the bride removing her white shoe so that the groom can drink champagne from it. the act feels grotesque, tender, humiliating, sacred — all at once. her feminism, thus, works not through manifestos but through slow witnessing, through making the ordinary visible again. the position of an observer, of a self is a place inside of the experience and outside of the position of analysis,; outside of agency, choice and reflection on the experience, simultaneously.

and, nevertheless, even in moments of apparent distance, her text comes back to bodily memory, which is insecapable. in one story, she remembers herself playing an old witch in school theater. “i liked this makeup,” she writes, “i liked my role… we appeared out of place and led our lives parallel to the main action⁵”. the rehearsal of aging becomes a liberation: to wear the mask of decay is to momentarily escape the demand of beauty, the demand to fit in and the demand to put yourself into narrow boxes of identity. here, aging appears not as a decline, but as a conscious act of exploring yourself — a quiet queering of time.

in this sense, “i have twenty-nine books left” is less about biography and more about temporality — about what happens when the linear structure of “before” and “after” collapses. by scattering her subjectivity into fragments, vasyakina, for me, does the opposite of what she is being criticized for: she refuses the teleology of trauma. her earlier trilogy was built on loss and mourning; this book is built on observation. it asks: what if we stop narrating our pain and start watching how it forms us and our relationships?

and yet, the political urgency remains. to write as a queer woman in contemporary russia — to publish, to address, to speak publicly — is already an act of defiance. but vasyakina doesn’t perform resistance through slogans; her resistance is formal, linguistic, and incredibly autobiographical: pain is not a performance, but just an inescapable state of the reality. her sentences switch between analysis and pure presence inside the setting that she never chose. that’s why she speaks about class – another central theme for all her writings, without sociological distance: “while adults were picking handfuls of cherries on the ladder, i gather the fallen, dirty ones from the ground.⁶” this is not just a memory; it’s a class position, a lived and embodied metaphor of always being at the lowest step; always left out, alone.

so what is left after the trilogy, after the wound, after exhaustion of the self? 

maybe — attention. not to oneself, but to the tiny mechanisms that build the self: shame, envy, curiosity, smell of dust, taste of champagne in a shoe. vasyakina’s writing, as feminist and queer writing, claims: autofictionality can exist not only as affirmation of one’s identity, but as a way to explore, re-shape and queer borders between self and outer world.

when i return to my conversation with k., to the question of autofiction’s fatigue — its ego, its bubble — i realize that vasyakina’s work answers it quietly. she doesn’t destroy the bubble, she makes it porous. her writing leaks into others; her “i” dissolves into “we.”, and then returns to the subject – as the surface of everything that is life. this is what feminist literature can do when it rethinks its own narcissist reflection: it is a space to speak through listening closer.

and maybe this is the only kind of maturity we can encounter: not peace, not closure, but the ability to stay inside the black, chirping garden, listening to scary noise, that is leaking through my headphones on a bubbly, liberated street.

1. all the translations are mine [gintonik]. the book was published in summer of 2025, in a fiction series of one of the most important humanities, anthropology and cultural history publishing house Novoye Literaturnoye Obozrenie (NLO). (Vasyakina, 2025) ↩︎
2. in russian: «в прошлом году мне исполнилось тридцать пять… нет ничего хорошего в юности. она — болезненное превращение, она — заключение». ↩︎
3. in russian: «детство похоже на ночное бдение — ты лежишь в темноте, слушаешь ветер, глухой стук яблок о землю». ↩︎
4. in russian: «у меня было чувство, что происходящее сплющивает пространство, я задыхалась, но не от жары…». ↩︎
5. in russian: «мне нравился этот грим, нравилась моя роль… мы появлялись невпопад и вели свою параллельную главному действию жизнь» ↩︎
6. in russian: «пока взрослые на стремянке снимают вишни горстями, я сгребаю грязные, побитые ягоды.» ↩︎