Anne O. Fisher

I am actively seeking publishers for my English translation of Manikin and the Saints. The author is the rights-holder. Please contact me at anne DOT o DOT fisher AT gmail DOT com if you are interested in discussing publication!

Andrey Filimonov, Manikin and the Saints

Poet and fiction writer Andrey Filimonov (b. 1969) is a native of Tomsk, the 400-year-old “Athens of Siberia” and center of White Russian resistance during the Russian Civil War. Filimonov trained as a philosopher and journalist; his poetry and stories have appeared in Nestolichnaya literatura, Antologiya russkogo verlibra, Sibirskiye ogni, Vavilon, and elsewhere. Filimonov’s 2016 novel Manikin and the Saints (Golovastik i svyatye) and his 2018 novel Recipes for the Earth’s Creation (Retsepty sotvoreniya mira) were both nominated for the Big Book and National Bestseller prizes. He was also nominated for the NOS prize, and Recipes won a Reader’s Favorite award in the Big Book prize competition. Filimonov’s latest book is the 2019 fiction collection I Walk A Loon Along the Road (that’s my first stab at rendering the challenging Russian title: Vykhozhu 1 ja na dorogu). Filimonov’s award-winning writing is harsh and playful, mined with puns and loamy with earthy language. He is often hilarious, sometimes coldly detached, and occasionally shocking, making his work an exquisite challenge for the translator.

ABOUT THE BOOK: You can read Andrey'’s reporting in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty about the “Cannibal Island” that makes an appearance in Manikin and the Saints. The novel itself is set in the mythical Siberian village of Pathlessness, which is nominally monitored by Manikin, a policeman punished for honesty: Manikin’s hand is cut off and he’s dispatched to Pathlessness to represent the powers that be. Manikin and his wife, Cabbage Core, don’t belong: they're damaged goods in the outside world, and outsiders in the world of the village. Still, Manikin and Cabbage Core side with the villagers against the senseless manipulations of the distant central authority they ostensibly represent. The villagers are loafers and connivers themselves, yet their hearts are as broad as the taiga and they exemplify that unmistakably Russian brand of can-do spirit. One doesn't know whether to mourn these folk as lost souls or admire them as holy saints (or holy fools). Then a priest and a journalist come to the village on a search for truth and find more than they bargained for...

In this excerpt from Chapter 6, Manikin describes how he ended up in Pathlessness:

In ninety-nine they sent me to administer a village that was called—and they really hit the nail on the head here—Pathlessness. Your tongue won’t let you call it anything else. Because there were no roads, no paths, no nothing leading to it on the map. There wasn’t even one drawn on there, like just for fun. People said there was a horse trail there back in Stolypin’s time. But as soon as the Civil War started, the population of the village quietly sat down on its ass and quit having any relations whatsoever with the outside world. The path was gradually grown over, first by burdock, then by young spruces, and by WWII the steppe taiga had grown back and it was as though nothing’d ever been there. The years went on, and every single one passed the village by. The people of Pathlessness quietly idled their lives away, sometimes creeping out to the edge of their dense, dark forest to have a look at what was going on in the world. And right on time, just before the ‘80 Olympics, they discovered a sign on the edge of the dirt road running through the district: Pathlessness, 5 km. Those five kay-ems scratched on that sign were dreamt up out of thin air. Who could’ve counted them, measured them out? What the hell? If they really needed to, people paddled into our district in boats, or if it was winter, they flew right in through the forest on skis. Getting there was really no big deal. But the pathless people celebrated the road sign’s manifestation all the same, by quaffing an entire keg of beet moonshine. They figured the sign clearly indicated that the great big world remembered them. And so it should! 

            It was five years after that historic bender, give or take, that the village store stopped getting shipments of vodka. Then Lenin was taken off the money, like Yevtushenko asked. I was in the city, in school studying to be a policeman, and I latched on to the library with a death grip, just like an octopus.

            There wasn’t anything else that was any good in the entire city. Well, besides the library there was Cabbage Core, my orphan, my feathered miracle. I picked her up on the street. After I graduated I brought her back with me, to my native hearth, to the place I was conceived and brought into the world… but that was where Fat Little Shura, that devil, ruled the roost. He turned it from a district into a red-light district. He was already chief over the entire police force and every time any of them got the tiniest promotion, he squeezed them for a cut. And not just any old way. He’d apply various technical means of persuasion. He just loved torture, that noxious Torquemada. Especially giving small business a soldering iron right up the anal canal. The glade behind the village, where people used to find random human body parts, was even called the Police Forest.