In Svetlana Satchkova’s The Undead and Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory, the protagonists face impossible, morally corrosive choices. The Undead follows a young filmmaker in present-day Moscow trying to make a movie in a society where art becomes entangled with compromise, fear, and self-preservation. But are such compromises specific to Putin’s Russia, or are they universal? Meanwhile, in Your Presence Is Mandatory, a Jewish man survives WWII by concealing his identity in Germany, only to return to Soviet Ukraine and spend the rest of his life hiding that past. In the face of authoritarianism, where do we – and the characters we write – draw lines of personal responsibility, culpability, and complicity?
Svetlana Satchkova and Sasha Vasilyuk are both reporters, novelists, and emigrés from Russia, each intimately familiar with the challenges of storytelling and truth-telling when the open space of democracy is under attack. Join us for this member-exclusive conversation on June 9, moderated by Program Director of Membership, Andrew White.
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Speakers
Svetlana Satchkova: Svetlana Satchkova is a Russian-born journalist and novelist who immigrated to the United States in 2016. She covers culture and politics, with bylines in The Rumpus, Newsweek, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Independent, and others. Currently a research fellow at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU, she holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and lives in Brooklyn. Satchkova has published three novels in Russian; The Undead: A Novel of Modern Russia is her English-language debut. https://worldvoices.pen.org/profile/svetlana-satchkova/
Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of a debut novel, Your Presence Is Mandatory, winner of the California Book Award and the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It has been translated into German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Finnish, Russian and Hebrew. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She has a BA from UC Berkeley and an MA in journalism from New York University. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, CNN, Harper’s Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, KQED, and elsewhere.