Julia Phillips on Life in a Remote Post-Soviet Russian Town

This week on The Maris Review, Julia Phillips joins Maris to discuss her debut novel Disappearing Earth.

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On choosing the novel’s setting

Julia Phillips: I thought if I could find a microcosm within the largest country in the world, that would be ideal. When I learned about Kamchatka, it has all those things, and so much more. It’s so beautiful and so isolated, it was extraordinarily important in the history of the Cold War and the Soviet sense of itself as a military nation, especially as a nation in opposition to America and American culture and ideals, and a place that since the fall of the Soviet Union has been going through a dramatic and fascinating transition. So I wanted to go to this place and write this book.

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On visiting Kamchatka

JP: I was lucky to go there in a time that the majority of Kamchatka was open still and had no prospect of being closed again. I encountered higher scrutiny than I have in other places in Russia. My impression was that people—it’s a much smaller community, one where infrastructure is low and neighborliness is high for the sake of common safety, so people make it their business to know who you are and where you’re going and what you’re doing. That was unusual for me as someone coming from New York, and someone who had spent most of my time in Russia in large cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Some of my neighbors were FSB agents. It was a still highly militarized territory, and people made it clear that they knew where I was, where I was going, and would continue to know.

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On self-reassurance of control

JP: This has always been an interesting thing to me, and something that makes a lot of sense—the ways in which blame and analysis and assignment of responsibility are ways to maintain control. For example, there’s a mother character in the second chapter of my book who observes the dynamic of the sisters who went missing, and of their single mom. And that character says that the problem there was that those kids weren’t properly supervised; they didn’t have two parents in the home, and the mother had to work and was unable to watch them, and that’s why this happened but that’ll never happen to me, because I have, in comparison, this.

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Julia Phillips is a Fulbright fellow whose writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. Disappearing Earth is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn.

Recommended Reading:

Sabrina & Corrina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine (*bonus: check out the author’s Instagram) · Women Talking by Miriam Toews · Putney by Sofka Zinovieff