Ksenia Buksha
Born: 1983
Quick Study: Ksenia Buksha is a St. Petersburg-based poet and writer whose fiction combines humor, elements of speculative fiction, and, frequently, her city’s atmosphere. She’s also an artist whose work often appears in the pages and on the covers of her own books.
The Buksha File: Although Ksenia Buksha began publishing her writing in the early noughties, she began gaining broader notice in 2014, when her The Freedom Factory (translated into English by Anne O. Fisher) won the National Bestseller Award and hit the Big Book Award shortlist. This polyphonic novel, based on factual material, tells of a Soviet military factory in post-Soviet times. Her futuristic The Detector focuses on a group of people held on a remote island and her Churov and Churbanov, a very Petersburg novel that was also a Big Book finalist, describes two classmates with similar names and intersecting fates while considering what might happen if hearts could be synchronized. Buksha’s diverse portfolio of publications includes poetry and story collections, and other novels, as well as a biography of artist Kazimir Malevich; she has also worked as a journalist.
Psssst………: Buksha began writing as a teenager, finishing her first book when she was eighteen… Buksha has written under the pseudonym Kshishtof Bakush, whom she sees as “a virtual grampa who’s seventy-four” and whose surname rearranges her own. She says she invented him – an eccentric old millionaire – because he can say whatever he wants thanks to his age and wealth and “nobody can say I’m showing off and talking about things ‘I haven’t the slightest idea’ about. It’s not really me, it’s grandpa Bakush”… Buksha said she learned German so she could read and understand the words of Bach’s cantatas and Gunther Grass…
Buksha’s Places: Born in Leningrad, studied at St. Petersburg State University, majoring in economics…
The Word on Buksha: Writer and critic Dmitry Bykov once called Buksha “a normal twenty-five-year-old genius” and said of her writing that “if Khlebnikov understood anything about economics and Kharms had looked optimistically into the future, this is about how they would have written.” Critic Galina Yuzefovich concluded her review of Buksha’s connected stories, Opens In, by writing, “In short, if there’s someone today who can vie for the title of a Russian Alice Munro, that’s unquestionably [Buksha] and that’s excellent news for [Russian] literature.”
Buksha on Buksha: In a 2010 piece for Sobaka.ru, Buksha said she doesn’t see herself as being part of any sort of literary trend, though she doesn’t have any other sort of separate position either. “Basically, no single literary space exists now. More specifically, there’s global intellect but that’s a space for all human thought, not just literature. As far as I go, I enjoy writing books and poetry and want very much for them to be read all over but without people being curious about me.”
On Writing: Buksha said in an interview with Russian Esquire that Oberiu (on Wikipedia, in brief, here) is where it’s at for writing poetry. This isn’t surprising, considering that in the same piece she says, “I don’t like the Russian poetry tradition very much.”
Buksha Recommends: In an interview with Russian Esquire, Buksha names favorite poets including Grigory Danishevsky, Viktor Ivanov, and particularly Galina Rymbu. She also lists three authors she considers “close”: Konstantin Vaginov, Alexander Vvedensky, and Lidia Ginzburg. She says she adores Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak.
When asked if she prefered Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, she opted in favor of Dostoevsky, adding that she lives near Sennaya Square so “everybody I run into is a Dostoevsky figure. Absolutely everyone.”