Mikhail Iossel Explores Identity and Breaking from the Past in “Sentence” [INTERVIEW]

Mikhail Iossel was born in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia), where he worked as an electromagnetic engineer and belonged to an organization of samizdat writers before immigrating to the United States in 1986. He is the author, most recently, of Love Like Water, Love Like Fire (winner of the 2021 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction), Notes from Cyberground: Trumpland and My Old Soviet Feeling. Founding director of the Summer Literary Seminars international literary programs, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and his stories and essays have also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Foreign Policy, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. A Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Stegner Fellow, Iossel has taught in universities throughout the United States and is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

James: “Sentence” begins with a single sentence that runs for 25 pages, albeit broken by inner voice parentheticals and ellipses, and I caught myself holding my breath while reading.

Later in the book you address your form of choice in the book head on, you write: 

but enough, I give up, this is pointless, and as the saying has it, if it needs to be explained, it doesn’t need to be explained

Rather than ask why you use this form, which is answered in part by the book itself, what challenges and opportunities has crafting long sentences that run many pages given you as a writer?

Mikhail: “I wouldn’t call it ‘crafting.’ I would call it, rather, getting on a roll, sort of, following my own inner creative rhythm. It was liberating. I just gave myself permission to write in the way most comfortable for me, the way I would write a long “Russian” sentence. Russian, of course, generally, is a lot less rigidly structured, more unconstrained, unrestrained language. So it was just following the unfolding sentence, with its digressions, its ups and downs, its continuous generation of memories and recollections — while still keeping in mind the original storyline and ever more evanescent timeline.

“It was, in short, a train ride, with its monotonous yet still variegating staccato rhythm of steel wheels on the millions (651 kilometers’ worth) of rail joints. 

“The challenge was not to get hopelessly lost in a sentence, bringing myself (and the putative reader) back up on the surface of the unfolding text time and again. 

“But what would be important for me to stress is this: it was about giving yourself permission to write in a certain way, liberating yourself. But also, it was, on the level of my personal sub-agenda, a marker of sorts, of the distance I traveled in my relationship with the English language since my leaving the Soviet Union in 1986. Then, just making the first attempts to start writing in English (a psychotherapeutic project, putting up a transparent plexiglas wall between myself and my life, because Russia was too much of an aider and abettor on my wallowing in sadness and self-pity at the time), I could only write a story using very short declarative sentences; it was like negotiating a hostile terrain. And well, now… I would tell myself, ‘Look at me now, me. And look at me now, English language: I’m not afraid of you anymore.’”

James: I had the opportunity to tour Leningrad in 1983 on a high school trip while I lived in Canada, and a few years before the invasion of the Ukraine took my family to St. Petersburg, as it is known again in the post-Soviet era. How did living in Russia, the Russian language, and the spectacular city of St. Petersburg, influence your writing?

Mikhail: “Well, how did my life influence my life?.. Let’s see: I was born and spent the first 30 years of my life in Leningrad, USSR — so I’ve already outlived my ‘Soviet’ life in the ‘abroad’ (a word that in Russian more often than not is used as a noun); but somehow, I must say, I feel that those first 30 years had a much greater gravitational pull on me, as far as my memories of my time in this world are concerned, than the rest of my life. I speak English with an accent; I don’t have a foreign accent in Russian.

“My Facebook cover photo is the St. Petersburg photographer Alexander Petrosyan’s ‘Man on the Bridge,’ depicting a person walking, or rather jumping across one of the main drawbridges over the Neva as it’s opening. Suspended in-between two worlds.”

James: Your writing in “Sentence” is threaded with recurring questions and repetition. Your beloved nanny, Lyuba, the experience of being a Soviet Jew including the fifth line on your internal Soviet passport where ethnicity is listed, and other callbacks. Did these connections happen organically or were they introduced during the editing and revision process as the book took shape?

Mikhail: “Everything happened organically — and indeed, everything connects, within the larger outline of the story. Memory begets memory, memories come in the process of remembering, a word suddenly opens a heretofore unseen, forgotten door onto another set of recollections. You write along, then you reread what you’ve written — and I read out loud to myself a lot — and realize that there needs to be another word and another memory in this space, another “something” to maintain the needed rhythm of the sentence.

“But of course, I had to limit myself, in terms of the scope of the longer stories, because this book could’ve been endless. For better or worse, there only was a short, seriously compressed between our (my publisher’s and mine) decision to make this book a reality and having it finished and sent off to the correctors and printers.”

James: “Waltz No. 2” is a beautiful example of prose as poetry. You wrote:

and we were young and the world was endless and full of infinity and immortality, while the dark waves of the eternal Black Sea, unseen in the dark, were lapping on the pebbly shore, rhythmically, methodically, ceaselessly, thousands millions trillions of them, sibilant, whooshing and susurrating in the pitch darkness

Beyond the obvious elements of form and detouring from the formal constraints of prose, what characteristics do you try to imbue into poetry as prose?

Mikhail: “I’m glad you liked that story. It is one of my two or three favorite ones in the book.

“Just the rhythm, just the sheer acceleration of being ‘on a roll,’ when everything ‘writes itself’ and feels right; just following the music of the metro busker’s Shostakovich waltz, just the momentary happiness of reliving the long-ago memories it evokes  — and just a quick, temporary lifting of the constraints of a rigidly structured ‘English-language’ sentence… perhaps.”

James: I appreciated the short interstitial prose poems after your longer single sentence pieces. For me, at least, they provided an opportunity to take a breath. “Other People” is one example, you wrote:

Most of our thoughts are memories, most of our memories are imaginary, most of what we are is other people. 

How did you approach ordering and structuring this collection?

Mikhail: “Largely intuitively, but not entirely so. I knew that ‘long,’ intense sentences would need to be followed by short ones, thus providing a respite, a measure, a bit of breathing space, some airborne ‘tissue,’ so to speak, for the reader. 

“I also decided to open with the longest and perhaps most emotionally ‘heavy’ story, but also maybe the most plot-driven one, DMD — having it it serve as sort of a gateway text for the reader to encounter, an obstacle, a challenge, a hill to climb, and even in a way a forewarning, you name it — thus giving the putative readers an opportunity to decide for themselves whether they would want to go on with the whole rest of it, to invest their energy and time (and money) in it; thus ‘finding’ my own reader, if you will, a kindred literary spirit. I thought that would be an honest thing to do. As for the ordering of all the other pieces, that, as I said, largely was a matter of largely an intuitive call on my and my publisher’s choice: gut feeling? sixth sense? hunch? instinct? You get the idea.”

James:. The experience of reading “Sentence” reminded me of reading José Saramago’s novel “Blindness.” Saramago transforms prose by forgoing most punctuation, using long sentence structures, and rarely breaking passages into paragraphs. The form of prose Saramago employed so beautifully matched the subject matter. In your book I found the lack of sentence breaks and frequent use of parentheses for introspection to be highly effective. How do you approach editing and revision given the unique form of your writing?

Mikhail: “Again, I appreciate the kind words. Comparison with Saramago is, of course, highly flattering for me. 

“I went by the internal rhythm of my writing. At some initial points I was thinking of maybe making reader’s task a bit easier, by playing with the visual arrangement of texts, using different fonts and even maybe variously colored highlights, breaking passages into separate lines or paragraphs, the way Jon Fosse does in his Septology; but then I decided against any of that. If the reader falls into the same rhythm of reading with my rhythm of writing, that would make the two processes synchronized, provide for some sort of mechanical resonance of shared writing-reading experience… which is all it would be about for me. So my process of editing consisted primarily of my re-reading any given piece, reading it out loud to myself, in order to maintain a certain rhythm throughout, while being able to say everything I wanted to say in that particular sentence-story, within the ambit of its original storyline.” 

James: In addition to a collage of your personal history, you touch on contemporary themes. The plight of the Ukraine, the “veritable orgy of Jew-hatred”, fascism in the United States, and that the “nominally long-deceased Soviet Union still isn’t done with us, not by a long shot,” are a few themes that recur. How do you approach weaving in topical references that will someday be historical? You touch on this challenge in “Crying.”

Mikhail: “Yes, I was constantly reminding myself to keep reminding the reader that there’s a ‘present tense’ in each of these texts, the ‘surface’ of the sentence, the ‘vantage point’ of telling, where the writer is sitting at his desk and writing, and maybe switching off for a few moments or minutes or even hours to watch the news on his laptop, go on the social media, maybe post something there — to feel some strong immediate emotions, to exist in the moment, to be part of the larger world, one extant outside the confines of his memory. I am — have always been, ever since my high-school days — a politically engaged person, following the world’s developments closely. The stories unfold on several layers of one’s personal chronology.”

James: What Russian or Soviet poets have inspired and influenced you, that you recommend listeners discover?

Mikhail: “I grew up in a “bookish” household in Leningrad, went to Soviet school, with its endless memorization by rote, so I knew by heart lots of the canonical Russian poetry, then throughout my youth I kept adding to that ironclad corpus, in its entirely, from Pushkin and baratynsky to VBrodsky, with the “60’s” poets (Voznesesnky, Yevtushenko, Akhmadulina, Rozhdestvensky, Vysotsky… Samoilov, Levitansky, Okudzhava, and many, many others).

“The book, Sentence, is dedicated to four people, all recently deceased, who had played a vital role in my life, each in their own way. Robert Coover was one of the greatest American writers of our era who also was a friend and a mentor, went with our literary program, SLS. to St. Petersburg twice, and came to Montreal for readings. Without Stan Persky, whom many consider the father of the Canadian avant-garde in literature, there wouldn’t have been this book, as he was the one who had encouraged and indeed urged me to write more of those long one-sentence stories so he could serialize them in his online literary journal. Alexey Tsvetkov and Bakhyt Kenjeev were two of the greatest Russian poets of the modern era, both were close personal friends, one living first in Montreal then New York, the other — in Europe and New York, and finally in Israel. They influenced me greatly indeed, as a human being, and as a reader and admirer of their poetry. There are lots of people I could mention, it’s an inexhaustible subject and endless list, great contemporary Russian poets — Vladimir Gandelsman, Sergey Gandlevsky, Maria Stepanova, Polina Barskova, the late Lev Rubinshteyn, and many, many others; but I don’t want to omit the essential names of others, so I’ll stop there. Many, oh many. Also, alas, the deceased genius, and also a personal friend, Alexey Parschikov. Brilliant, great poets of my “Leningrad” past: Elena Schwartz, Victor Krivuylin. Transcendental, world-class poets. I would like to just mention specifically the name of my late great older Leningrad friend: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko — truly a revolutionary figure in Russian and international poetry. Look him up. Read him. His poetry exists in English translations. He died 13 years ago, and I miss him. I miss all my friends who no longer are with us.”