Vadim Bystritski’s Comments

An interview by FRiGG with Vadim Bystritski was imagined by the latter on the sleepless night of 05/14/06.

—Tell us about your stories.

—The thing about telling a story about a story is that such a story is often more interesting than the story itself; then there is another danger, the one that is similar to the situation with an explained joke: we finally get it, but it’s no longer funny.

—Is “The Last Leaf” the earliest of the stories submitted?

—Yes, and for that reason, structurally it is the least sophisticated; after all, any attempt to break the monologic by the way of paranoid looking over the shoulder can successfully simulate dialogic for about a page.

—Fortunately for the readers, the story is just that long.

Structurally, “Gleb’s Story” is also quite simple: a Russian group is about to meet a Chechen group to negotiate their differences; and there is a woman positioned as an empty modifier.

—Yes, but the market whore introduces herself violently into the familiar horse formalism of pushes and pulls; and the economy of the abundant narrator interrupts with more frugal semiotic communication.

—Is this a postmodern narrative that makes fun of Heidegger’s “letting be”?

—This is an otogenetic ending.

—Now, “Bandiera Rossa”...is it about rationalization of the irrational?

—Well, that is a good banalization of it; however, the story is an exercise in polyphony.

—Is it a moral tale?

—Not any more than Fichte is just a moral philosopher. He was known to say that to understand his ethics, we need to grasp his metaphysics; but, like the rest of us, philosophers are bundles of contradictions, and mismatches in their ethics and metaphysics are common. This returns us to the previous text where an accident is both epistemological and aesthetic category and is in need of logicalization.