I first met Svetlana Satchkova in the place where I met most of my fellow USSR-born authors—online! We started chatting about the new novel she was working on—the book that became The Undead [Melville House 2026], a novel about a debut filmmaker in Putin’s Russia who starts making a zombie film who finds herself at the center of scandal when the government puts her on trial because they believe it was a critique of the current regime. That conversation took place just over a year ago, and the novel has already been published. Svetlana and I finally met for coffee in Brooklyn, where we discussed our different experiences as USSR immigrants, the various challenges of making art, and how our backgrounds informed our writing. That was where I had the idea of talking to her more deeply about her novel, which struck me not only because of its timeliness, but because of its profound exploration about how hard it is to make art—and to stay committed to it in the face of great challenges. I met Svetlana over Zoom a few weeks after our initial meeting, where we had much to discuss.
Maria Kuznetsova: I think the ties between your novel of Putin’s Russia and the increasingly authoritarian feeling of life in America are clear. Though I realize this is a bit of an oversimplification, I was wondering if you explicitly saw the connection between America today and Putin’s Russia while you were writing the book, or if it was more like something that occurred to you after you wrote it and were thinking of how to pitch it?
Svetlana Satchkova: When I started writing this novel, I wanted to explore the story of a friend of mine who was believed to be a genius by everyone in her graduate program and who made a film based on her own screenplay. But the movie never came out, for reasons that are unclear to this day, and this failure, or what she perceived as such, broke her. She never wrote or filmed anything again.
So I was really just thinking about my friend and her story. At first, Maya was making a dramedy, just like my friend did in real life. But when I had to come up with scenes from that movie, I struggled. I obviously couldn’t plagiarize the film my friend made, even if it never came out, and I couldn’t come up with my own scenes that felt interesting. For some reason, they came out flat and boring, which probably reflects my skills as a writer.
Then I came up with a solution: what if Maya was making a zombie flick? That would be more fun. My husband was actually the one who came up with the zombie Lenin idea. It’s not particularly new, it seems almost obvious. The Lenin mummy has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for more than a hundred years now, after all. But when I went deeper into the idea, writing scenes from the horror, everything started to come together in this very uncanny way.
I remembered how, when I was about to leave Moscow, I explained it to my friends: I can’t stay anymore, because the city has been seized by ghouls. That’s the word I used, the same word Maya’s friend Lena uses to explain why she’s emigrating. Immediately, the title of the novel occurred to me, and I began to understand the implications of the metaphor. How it could be used to describe those who have come to power under Putin’s regime, and also those who continue to live under it, becoming deaf and blind to the crimes it commits.
I didn’t think of America directly at the time. But of course, the similarities begin to suggest themselves, perhaps inevitably.
You’re right—the America angle gives it this extra layer of meaning, but it didn’t feel like it was trying to reach beyond Putin’s Russia because it didn’t need to. In a way, the description of Maya being arrested and punished for no reason felt more chilling because there was this undertone of hey, it could happen here. Maybe not as much in the sphere of making art, but I don’t have to think too deeply to name recent examples of people being arrested, or worse, for no apparent reason.
I found the zombie flick, this idea of Lenin and his crony zombies running wild all of Moscow, such a fun way into the darker themes of the novel—and that filmmaking in general was such a great lens into making art. What do you feel you’ve gained through writing about a filmmaker instead of a novelist, and what particular challenges, or added benefits, did you find in doing so?
I didn’t deliberately choose film as an art form to write about. As I mentioned, my novel began with the story of my friend, whose film set I spent time on and where I even had a tiny part. But once I started writing, I realized how lucky I was, because writing about filmmaking is far more interesting than writing about novel writing. For example: a writer mostly sits in front of a computer, and there isn’t much action. On film sets, by contrast, there are clashing egos, funny moments, constant problems to solve, and a particular sense of intimacy that develops when people make a movie together, so that for a short while they become a kind of family, with all the dramas that involves.
It was genuinely fun for me to write, and I drew on my long experience reporting on the Russian film industry. For nearly twenty years in Moscow, I wrote features, profiles, and interviews with major actors and directors, and spent time on countless film sets. But the novel also required additional research. I had to watch many films, especially horror, a genre I hadn’t been familiar with, as well as various YouTube videos on filmmaking techniques.
I loved the big cast of characters in this novel, who were almost like supporting cast members with Maya being the clear heroine. I loved Ksenia, the narcissistic actress, Mark, the love interest and camera man, and Toni Morino, the older legendary director, just to name a few people.I know you said some were based on real actors and real scandals, and I wondered how you went about changing certain things, finding inspiration in real life, and also working to create such a wide and colorful cast?
I’m afraid I’m not a very imaginative writer, at least in this particular novel. All of the characters are based on real people, and I didn’t even have to embellish much. They were interesting already. I just had to write it all down. I did have to come up with scenes, of course, that didn’t take place in real life, but the characters, their motivations, and their idiosyncrasies were already there. I knew how they would behave in this or that situation. As for the scandals, they too were taken from real life, even if it might seem that my imagination has run wild. As we all know, life is the best writer.
I love that idea! Sometimes, I’ve found that when I discuss autobiographical fiction with my students, there’s almost like this sense that it’s cheating, or not as hard, because you’re not really making anything up. But I think crafting things out of your own life, or the lives of people around you, can be just as hard, or even harder, because hey, all of life has happened to you, but you have to pick the moments, or the situations, that are interesting enough for a story.
I know one of the things we bonded about was our insomnia struggles, and I sensed that at times, you drew from real life when you described Maya’s mental health struggles during her trial. The carousel of medication, the sleepless nights, the vertigo, and her stress throughout the process was so palpable that it almost felt like another character in the novel. How did you do it?
Again, I drew from real life, from my own experience. I’ve had insomnia for more than thirty years, and there were periods when I was close to dying from lack of sleep, surviving for months on an hour or two a night. The vertigo episode also comes from my life, but from another period, when I was in Moscow working fourteen- to sixteen-hour days with no weekends. One day I couldn’t get out of bed and had to call an ambulance, just as I describe in the novel, because the world was spinning so violently. At the hospital, doctors told me I would have a stroke if I didn’t change jobs. So I did, because I didn’t want to die.
Another thing I drew on was losing my husband suddenly and horrifically in 2011, and how for a year afterward I was suicidal, unable to eat or function in any meaningful way. I think I combined all of this to be able to write convincingly about Maya’s state.
I love how you explored both your own experiences and those of your friends to tell a larger story. For me, when I’m drawing for my own life, I use a convoluted metaphor for my students about how I put all the different relevant “scenes” from various moments on a stage, walk around them, and decide which ones to put all the way in the back because they don’t fit thematically, or which to kick off entirely. What is your process in writing things that draw from life? How do you know what to pick and choose?
I can’t say I really picked and chose. I wrote the book in one year, which is much faster than anything else I’ve written. I mostly put in everything that occurred to me and didn’t cut or revise that much later on. The only time I got stuck was after I had written maybe the first forty percent and was trying to figure out the ending. At that point, Maya had finished filming her movie, and the producer was stalling on post-production money for no reason she could understand. I found myself thinking: what do I want to say with this novel? If it ends up being a book about Maya experiencing artistic failure and never filming anything again, what does that say about the world, or about human nature? That didn’t feel interesting enough to me.
All along, though, I kept thinking about what was happening in Russia, about how repression was intensifying, how a culture of denunciations was developing, and how artists were struggling to make art under authoritarianism and having to make hard choices. I realized that this was what I really wanted to write about. Then the Berkovich–Petriychuk trial happened and became part of my novel, reimagined for Maya. The rest of the book basically wrote itself.
This sounds like a magical and mystical writing experience, not typical of most novels. Another experience that wasn’t typical was the story of the publication of your novel. I was amazed to hear your story of meeting your Melville House editor at a party. How did that all play out, why do you think stories like this are so rare in the industry, and what benefits do you see from being published by a small press?
I finished the novel in November of 2024, close to Thanksgiving. My writer friends told me that no one really works during the holidays and that I should wait until after New Year’s to start querying, so my emails wouldn’t be buried in people’s inboxes. I thought that was a good idea and, in December, went to the launch of a new literary magazine. There, I found myself standing next to a man and struck up a conversation with him without knowing who he was. He introduced himself simply as Mike. He asked me about my life, why I left Russia, what I’d written, and when he learned that I had just finished a novel, he asked if I wanted him to take a look. Only then did he tell me he was an editor at Melville House. He also warned me that he would probably take six months to read and that I shouldn’t change my plans on his account. I sent him the manuscript the next day and honestly forgot about it, because it didn’t seem likely that he’d be interested. Then he called a few days later and offered me a contract.
I was at a crossroads. I could sign with Melville House, or I could try to find an agent who would then try to sell the book to a bigger publisher. But this is where I began to understand the appeal of a small press. They could publish my book quickly, and by that point I already realized the book was timely and needed to come out sooner rather than later. If I started querying, that could take months or years. If I signed with an agent, the next steps could also take months or years, and I might still end up at Melville House, only much later. So I decided to go with them. I signed the contract in January 2025, and in January 2026 the book was already out.
Beyond that, from what I can see and from what I know from friends who have published with big houses, being at a small press means the team is very small and feels almost like family. They answer my emails right away, which is such a rarity in this business. They seem to genuinely care about my book, and Mike has become a great friend.
It must be amazing to have such a supportive and devoted team—it almost sounds a bit like Maya in the early days of her filmmaking. There are so many incredible books published by small presses working on a shoestring budget, and the world is only richer for the diverse and interesting books that they put out.
Though, of course, in Maya’s case, her support team mostly disappeared after she was investigated by the government, and she found herself nearly alone, though her best friend and former colleague did help her through it. Toward the end of The Undead, we find Maya defeated artistically and psychologically, where we sense that she too has decided to stop making art. In the final beats of the novel, I was heartened when she said she was writing something new, and I’m wondering about your take on this subject, both through Maya’s experiences and your own. Have you had moments when you just felt like stopping, and what kept you going?
I suppose I was interested in writing the story of my friend who stopped making art precisely because it seemed incomprehensible to me. I simply can’t stop writing. When I’m not writing, I don’t feel complete. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t feel that my life has any meaning. There were periods in my life when I stopped writing after a traumatic experience, but I always came back to it.
One such experience happened in 2010, while I was still in Russia. I wrote a collection of short stories that I knew was innovative in both content and form. I contacted a literary agent; she read it and told me, “I’ll sell this in five minutes. You’re going to be famous.” She then asked me to write two more stories, and I did. The day I sent her the manuscript, I turned on the TV and saw the first episode of a series so similar to my collection that I immediately understood it would never be published. The series aired on Channel One, was watched by the entire country, and became a smash hit. I was right: the agent couldn’t sell the book. I was so bitter and disappointed that I stopped writing altogether. But a couple of years later, I returned to writing.
Now I think that maybe (it’s just a hypothesis) if you’re meant to be a writer, you continue to do it no matter what, and that this persistence is what separates you from non-writers, not awards or the extent to which you’re published or reviewed. And going back to Maya, my protagonist, there’s a lot of myself in her, so I just couldn’t give up on her. She had to go on.
Maria Kuznetsova is the author of the novels Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable. She lives in Auburn, Alabama, where she is an Associate Professor at Auburn University, as well as the fiction editor of the Southern Humanities Review. You can also find her work in dozens of venues including Slate, One Story, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Sun, and Guernica.
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