The Death of Samusis, and Other Stories

Bio/Artist statement: I was born in sun-bathed city of Odessa, Ukraine, along with Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Yuri Olesha, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, and other greats. Following in my father’s footsteps, I enrolled at the Odessa College of Refrigeration and Food Industry, more out of necessity than choice: the science of food preservation being the lesser of two evils next to an otherwise compulsory stint in the Soviet Army. Emigrating to the United States in 1977, I quickly discovered that the canned food market was hopelessly cornered by Andy Warhol, so I decided to concentrate on a career of a foot messenger. I took multiple stabs at the Arts at The School of Visual Arts, while supporting myself as a cab driver, garment district shipping clerk and speed-reading program salesman. Following a cross-country move, I studied comparative literature (Russian and English) at UC Berkeley, where I was lectured by the likes of Czeslaw Milosz, Rene Girard, Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. In my undergraduate thesis I applied Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Faulkner’s The Snopses Trilogy. In the mid-80s, I studied Film Theory and Production at San Francisco State University under the benevolent gaze of Dean August Coppola, who, nevertheless, could not countenance my proposal for a 3-minute MTV-style mini-rock opera “Oedipus Redux” (libretto by Sophocles, noise-music and camerawork by Pavel Lembersky). Back in New York, I supported myself as a computer programmer, while writing screenplays and working in the film industry on such projects as Jonathan Demme and Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia and the Oscar-winning The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, written and starring the comedian Steven Wright, among others. After a two-year stint in the business jungle of Yeltsin’s Russia, I entered the 21st century as a co-host of a classic rock program on New York’s Russian radio and occasional curator of downtown art shows. One such show, entitled Living with it, had me sharing my apartment with some 30+ artworks by 27 New York artists, the kitchen and bathroom both turned into installations. Each of the twenty-seven stories that comprise my first book in English, written and translated over the period of two decades, takes its origin and inspiration in the patchy fabric of my experience, however fictionalized or amplified the final product may be. Their moods range from mildly transgressive, experimental, darkly surreal to fairly conventional, even ‘realistic’, though never without a tinge of irony, and, on occasion, a smear of sarcasm. The shifting subjectivity of the narrative voice owes a debt to Bakhtinian polyphony, and, to some degree, Flaubertian neutrality. Thus, the storyteller in some texts may appear ill-informed or confused, his perspective is likely to change from story to story, and his first person privilege suspended. My youthful fascination with the chiseled prose of Isaac Babel or the profound flamboyance of the Russian Dadaist Daniil Kharms could not help but put its stamp on my early writing, just as the American postmodernists, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover, or – at the opposite end of the spectrum – John Cheever and Richard Yates, in one way or another, have affected my more recent output. But then so did Kierkegaard, Musil, Kafka, Sylvia Plath. Pavel Lembersky