Posts filed under 'post-apocalypse'

Where Are You Racing To?

Russia has a long history of endings.

The apocalyptic story of a (fictional) post-epidemic Russia in Yana Vagner’s To the Lake had found an enormous international audience by way of a 2020 adaptation, directed by Pavel Kostomarov and Dmitriy Tyurin and released on Netflix. This positive reception of what audiences called an exceptionally prescient tale perhaps encouraged another English edition of the award-winning text, which is now out by way of Deep Vellum. In this following essay, Heloisa Selles discusses To the Lake in view of its on-screen reproduction.

When I first saw the publication announcement for To the Lake from Deep Vellum, I almost missed it. It was mid-July, and social media feeds were rife with pictures of a New York city ablaze with smoke from Canadian wildfires—scrolls of tiny red suns paired with tips on how to cope with poor air quality. Through the apocalyptic scenes, the outline of a hazy pine forest on a white, inconspicuous cover caught my eye, and within a few minutes I discovered that the book was, in fact, the book—that gave origin to the lauded Netflix series of the same name.

When To the Lake (Эпидемия in Russian, or “Epidemic”) came to screens in October 2020, we were all stuck at home, journeying around our rooms, trying to find ways to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and two months away from the first vaccines being administered. The show seemed to be an addition to an ever-growing collection of media that depicted viruses, contagious diseases, and varying levels of societal panic—as though watching chaos unfold before our eyes made the palpable reality a bit easier to endure. But this story, an action-packed drama directed by Pavel Kostomarov about a group of people struggling to survive an epidemic ravaging Moscow, had a distinct texture. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Everything There Was” by Hanna Bervoets

We started craving other things. Things that were there. Though they were becoming scarcer by the day.

Today we present a haunting extract from a newly translated novel by critically acclaimed Dutch writer, columnist, and journalist Hanna Bervoets. Stranded in a school building after a catastrophic event leaves the outside world uninhabitable, a TV crew and the subjects of their documentary struggle to survive in Bervoets’s post-apocalyptic universe. From the scattered diary pages of the crew’s researcher, we learn the troubling story of everything there was, and the little there was left.

We haven’t turned on the computers in a long time. The last time we turned them off again, there still wasn’t any internet. Until then we still opened the browsers every day. Though perhaps that was just habit, like in the old situation, tearing a page off my calendar every morning, even though I already knew full well what day of the week it was, or what date. But the more often you do something, the stranger it is not to do it. So I can’t say whether we still believed the internet would come back. Just that we kept hoping it would.

It is perhaps hard for you to imagine how important the internet once was. I also find it hard to imagine. Perhaps it really wasn’t all that important.

But I think it was.

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