The Shugovka Yacht Club
A modern literary novel with a Russian soul – written in Russian, still in progress.
Dan is an American dreamer who opens a yacht club in a Russian village of 500 people, on a lake in Leningrad Oblast. What begins as a peculiar idea – boats in the middle of nowhere – sets off decades of change: laughter, tragedy and love, and Lena, Dan's wife, unexpectedly taking charge. It is a modern literary novel with a Russian soul, written in Russian and still in progress. Here is the first excerpt, in my own English translation.
Excerpt: Labour Day At The Country House
April in the North-West of Russia is cold. There’s a wind off the lake. The ground is covered in slush, then ice, then gradually more and more of the winter’s rubbish emerges with the melt. Bottles, jars, wrappers, cigarette butts. It’s not always the people to blame. Often it’s the crows, in search of a feast, that pull bags out of the bins and shred them. The wind then scatters their piles of rubbish all around.
Dan arrived at the country house early afternoon. The old place looked even worse than he remembered from last summer. Wonky, neglected. Its single coat of paint, applied 70 years ago, had almost completely flaked off. It was as if the house was shivering, naked, in the cold of this northern spring. Dan shivered with it. Swigging the last of his coffee, he cut the engine, got out the house keys, and went inside.
It bore all the signs of nature having taken over from man. A piece of soap, left by the sink, had been nibbled by mice. The wall was stained with the fresh streaks of a leak. “Dammit, have I really gotta get up on the roof?” thought Dan. The old Russian stove, a massive brick construction in the middle of the room, had shed its whitewash into piles of dust and flakes. The air was heavy with damp.
Dan cleaned the ash from the stove, collected all the old scraps of wood he could find from around the house, and began the long process of firing it up. At this rate he’d need to chop down a few trees, or order in a truck of wood, to properly heat the house.
Staring into the flames, he began to wonder where he’d put his office. There were a few rooms in the house, but they were all full of junk. Books, keepsakes, magazines, rusty Nescafé tins, and endless empty Stepan Razin beer bottles. The books were true Soviet treasure: textbooks, scientific tomes, atlases. Glancing over them, Dan decided that it wasn’t the season for chopping down trees, and that instead the flames could first consume this useless pulp.
It was a good thing he was there on his own for now, or Lena wouldn’t have let him feed a single book to the fire. Not even the fine Raising a Soviet Person or Comrade Laughter.
More excerpts, in English, are on Patreon.
