2025 Book Review #18 – Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (trans. Julia Meitov Hersey)
This was, I think, recommended to me when I asked for good and relatively approachable genre-fic in translation – but it’s been long enough that that’s really more of a guess on my part than any sort of real memory. Going in with only vague expectations, this book was a very pleasant surprise. An incredibly weird, surreal, meandering and oddly structured one, to be sure – but overall it worked far more often than it didn’t.
While on an increasingly surreal beach vacation, 16 year old Sasha Samokhina meets the mysterious (and incredibly suspicious) Farit Kozhennikov. After living through the same day several times, she finally speaks to him – and finds herself given a strict and bizarre series of daily exercises to ‘build her self-discipline’, vomiting up strange golden coins after each one. And finding horrible things befalling people she cares about whenever she fails to keep her schedule. Soon enough she finds herself on the train to the bleak, surreal university in the dreary provincial town of Torpa, where she will major in a vague and undefined ‘Specialty’ that her mind and conception of reality are not yet prepared to understand.
I’ve never been entirely clear on what exactly the label means, but if anything deserves to be called ‘Dark Academia’, it’s definitely this book. The large majority of its page count is spent with Sascha as she tortures herself struggling through mind-bending mental exercises and enduring strange and horrifying transformations (both mental and physical) over the course of her studies in cramped, poorly insulated and barely-heated rooms. The explicit purpose (explained only after the fact) of the first two years of lessons are to break you down completely as both a person and a human so that you can start becoming something else instead. The reward for showing real talent and aptitude at the occult and migraine-inducing exercises that make up most of your education is to have your tutors excitedly congratulate you and talk about what a fascinating and difficult career of more of the same you have ahead of you. Your faculty advisor only barely pretends to be human some days, but makes it very clear that if you fail an exam or receive a negative report from a professor some horrible freak tragedy will befall your loved ones. The causality rate across the first three years approaches 50%. It’s really one of the most accurate depictions of serious higher education in fiction.
In terms of mood and aesthetic, the book is a masterpiece. It consistently gets across exactly the vibe it wants to, and uses really wonderfully vivid prose and imagery to do so – in preserving it, Meitov Hersey’s translation is easily the best I’ve read so far this year. The way Sascha’s brain begins to break as she transcends her own image of herself if, I think, quite well-realized. Similarly, I’m not sure the vaguely gnostic metaphysics exactly cohere, but they hold together well enough to give a convincing impression of secret occult and poorly glimpsed knowledge the students are being initiated into.
On the level of plot and pacing the story holds together...less well. The book is very roughly divided into three parts of very uneven length, but beyond that there’s not really any kind of chapter or section break – which intensely exacerbates the feeling that the story is kind of just a long series of things happening to Sascha (or her doing them) without real rhyme or reason. The lack of any real consistent antagonist and the very opaque and limited characterization of most of the supporting cast doesn’t much help, either. Neither do the extended sequences where it’s incredibly unclear whether you’re reading some sort of dream or metaphor or a very literal description of Sascha sprouting wings or whatever. The whole finale sequence in particular was surreal enough that I’m only about 65% sure I actually understood what happened (and was absolutely weighed down by several absolutely pivotal revelations one after the other in far too few pages, if I did).
This is a Ukrainian book I read in translation. So it’s interesting how this having become something of a period piece (cellphones are expensive luxuries, schoolwork and research is universally done analog – I’m not sure a computer is mentioned once?) makes it feel more strange and foreign than any of the actual cultural differences between myself and the assumed audience. Not that those weren’t there as well – mostly things like diet and the stereotypes associated with different sorts of fashion and presentation, along with the levels of material privation and personal work on maintaining their lodgings a class of university students is expected to do (‘melting some butter in a mug of hot broth and drinking it on a cold night’ was much, much stranger an idea to me than it really should have been). The translation work was excellently done - or maybe so much of the narrative being intentionally obscure and only partially comprehensible made it easier to hide the seams. Whatever the case, the dialogue all ready pretty naturally (if still obvious in translation at points) and the idioms and levels of formality of various speakers came across very well.
It’s hard to know quite where to classify this book when recommending it – closest to Cosmic Horror, I suppose? But that label won’t be particularly helpful for deciding if you like it. Give this a try if you’re a fan of bleak magical university stories, narratives of alienating enlightenment and transcendence, and books where ‘the system’ is cruel and heartless but the protagonist retains a very ambiguous relationship to it throughout. Or just if you really love dark academy horror-tinged gritty urban fantasy vibes and don’t mind a meandering plot.
