Svetlana Satchkova’s first novel in English, The Undead is a strange amalgam. It is part farce, part political commentary, part reflection on the life of an artist in an authoritarian regime and then part Kafka. Set in Russia, it follows the tribulations of a woman who just wants to stay out of politics and make the best arthouse zombie movie that she can. But she finds that in Putin’s Russia, everything is political.
When The Undead opens Maya, a woman in her late thirties and a former entertainment journalist, has decided to follow her life dream and become a movie director. Following a couple of successful student films Maya pitches a script for a horror film to a local producer. In the film Lenin is brought back from the dead and leads an army of zombies that need to be stopped. The production process itself is a well observed comedy of errors and competing egos. But it is when the authorities get wind of the film and decide that it has political overtones that Maya’s troubles really begin.
The Undead is clearly positioned as a commentary on Putin’s Russia. On the ways in which, in an authoritarian regime, art is used to as an instrument of state power. And artists can either get with the program, fight the system and end up in jail or leave. When the book opens, Maya prides herself as being non-political but this just makes her naïve and unprepared for the interpretation that could be put on her work. Maya herself observes at one point – if she knew she was making a political allegory she could have made the film so much better.
While The Undead has a very specific Moscow setting and is, at times, very Russian, the observations that Satchkova makes about these types of regimes are universal and could, if you squint, apply as much to other, similar global regimes with observations like this:
[Maya had] thought so much in recent months about how authoritarians thrived on their subjects’ moral paralysis, how passivity in the face of evil helped cement their power… Every step of the way [people] made a choice not to ask for trouble.
The Undead is sometimes hard to read. Maya is a bit of a hapless character who has little self belief and, as noted, starts out as very naïve (although that changes over the course of the story). But she is also, for that reason, also very believable and relatable. She avoids conflict, she makes relationship mistakes, she pushes herself too hard. And Maya comes from a reasonably middle-class strata of Russian society so is generally cushioned. But then Maya becomes a victim of the State and Satchkova is keen to explore the impact of that shift.
The Undead is overall a fascinating debut. Satchkova digs deep into the relationship between the current Russian regime and the art scene through a flawed but relatable protagonist in what is a sometimes satirical, sometimes scary and always cautionary tale.
The Undead by Svetlana Satchkova
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