Wound
Oksana Vasyakina, translated by Elina Alter
Catapult, 2024, 240 pages
$16.95

Reviewed by Bailey Hosfelt

The plot of Wound is straightforward: a lesbian poet retrieves her mother’s ashes in the industrial steppe city of Volzhsky, returns to a life adrift in Moscow, and travels back to the small Siberian town of Ust-Ilimsk to inter her ashes. However, what unfolds over the two-month journey is more complex; the narrator, an autofictional version of Oksana, meditates on grief, memory, and fraught mother-daughter dynamics while reconciling her sexuality, place in Russian society, and identity as an artist.

The impetus for the narrative, on the surface, is the mother’s illness from breast cancer. The narrator chronicles the new patterns of life while her mother’s body was shutting down. She lived in her mother’s apartment, slept head-to-feet each night, diligently emptied and sanitized a bedpan, and noticed the space’s changing odor. The narrator secured her mother a place in hospice for her final days, identified her body in the morgue, and began the logistically complicated process of laying her to rest. Yet, her mother’s death is not the original wound. Rather, it reopens one scabbed over but never fully healed: “The wound is there not because she didn’t survive, but because she existed at all” (21).

A single mother and factory worker, she had a series of abusive relationships with men who exposed both women to violence growing up. Despite her mother’s harsh exterior—undeniably shaped by the Russian political context in which she lived—and inability to show affection, the narrator still describes her mother with love and longing. She reflects: “I felt my mother as a space. A matrix. A place. After her death this place disappeared. The world itself didn’t disappear, but the complex symbolic network that had allowed me to orient myself using my surroundings was gone” (66).

Anxiously journeying far distances with an egg-shaped urn and confronting the simultaneously bureaucratic and painful nature of death, the narrator grapples with childhood memories, generational trauma, and her lesbian identity—putting each under a microscope and examining the intricate ways they connect.

The novel is deeply introspective and fragmented, weaving together personal experience with broader reflections on art, literature, philosophy, and theory. The hybrid structure allows Vasyakina to analyze the relationships between mother and daughter, artist and art in a distinct manner—one that compares to the literature of Maggie Nelson and Maria Stepanova, among others. Prose breaks into free verse and essay-like asides. References to Louise Bourgeois, Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, Susan Sontag, and the ​​Greek myth of Philomela ground Wound in a broader feminist tradition. While evocative, these elements sometimes disrupt the narrative’s overarching flow and might not resonate with readers who prefer a more traditional structure. Nevertheless, this approach mirrors the nonlinear nature of grief—where past and present blur and coherence feels increasingly elusive.

Vasyakina’s exploration of queerness stands out, particularly at a time when LGBTQ+ “propaganda” is now illegal in Russia. The author illuminates prejudiced rhetoric in an opening scene where, en route to collect her mother’s ashes, distant acquaintances lament “those queers” in the West, “prancing around in sparkly underwear” and believe sex education should be replaced with teaching kindergarteners how to hold a Kalashnikov rifle to prepare for potential wars instead (9). The narrator asks them to be quiet, given the occasion, and only later do readers learn she has a wife in Moscow.

Throughout the novel, the narrator voices her internalized homophobia, a belief she must disentangle as she ages. What she first experiences as the erotic, expansive excitement she felt gazing at another girl’s body—“It was all like a tender lozenge that I wanted to put in my mouth” (64)—the narrator later regards as frightening: “In the bathroom I undressed. On the gusset of the underwear I’d bought specifically for travel shone a large clear spot. I felt hurt by myself. . . In little Ust-Ilimsk lesbians did not exist” (94).

Although she vocalizes her initial confusion and shame, she later reconciles and confidently embodies her lesbian identity, despite the challenges it creates for her in Russian society which renders her as “half-woman” or “half-person.” An attractive butch in a club has a gaze like a key that makes her want to “go limp and open” (95). Later, she describes her wife as “a complex, rich landscape” with a “warm, wide gaze that gathers me into itself as though I were a tiny insect and her gaze a drop of oozing warm honey” (138); she feels such affection for her that the world “trembles and transforms” (198).

While Vasyakina should be commended for writing as a lesbian so openly (and autobiographically) when doing so in Russia is increasingly dangerous, her narrator has a darker side worth examining. She is abrasive, flawed, and, at times, deeply unsettling. An early reference to a former girlfriend accusing her of rape is particularly jarring, especially as it is never revisited; instead, she attempts to absolve herself, citing that consent was not part of the culture at the time. This is particularly striking in a novel that otherwise circles back to past behaviors, examining them with increasing clarity and perspective.

Despite its looser narrative structure, Wound is ultimately a raw and deeply affecting narrative. Vasyakina acknowledges that the novel’s meandering nature is by design; the narrator reflects that she is deliberately putting off writing the story’s end because “once I finish the book, the wound will close” (199).

While the world continues to live on after death, Vasyakina notes grief’s unresolved nature: “Our great voyage, mine and Mama’s, from Volzhsky to Ust-Ilimsk was essentially over. But it keeps unfolding inside of me. Like a long road in the night” (222).

In a novel that so closely dissects the mother-daughter dynamic, it is fitting that its narrator addresses the last few pages directly to her mother. While her mother could never say “I love you” to her daughter, the narrator says it to her mother, believing their language is not so different after all, and her mother will finally understand.

Bailey Hosfelt is a lesbian writer and freelance contributor to Sinister Wisdom. She graduated in 2024 with a master’s degree in gender and women’s studies from UW–Madison, where she wrote a thesis on Dyke TV and queer activist infrastructure. Previously, Bailey lived in Brooklyn, New York and worked as a journalist for local newspapers. Bailey lives in Chicago with her partner and their two cats, Hilma and Lieutenant Governor.