Olga Grushin, "An Errand in the Country"

It’s December 7. Olga Grushin, author of Forty Rooms, just noticed that her timetable is out of date.

How would you describe your story?

OLGA GRUSHIN: An unpleasant, self-engrossed American businessman has a peculiar encounter at a provincial train station somewhere in Russia and is offered a choice. It can be read as a lighthearted fantasy in the vein of Bulgakov, or a sad little tale of a family drifting apart, but at its heart, it concerns childhood memories and second chances.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

OG: I wrote an earlier version almost ten years ago, in 2010, for BBC Radio 4, where it appeared as one of three stories, by three different writers, linked by the theme of trains and stations. It was my first radio effort and, as such, quite a different experience from my previous writing (two novels, at that point): I had to think in terms of the spoken word and thus fight the temptation to give in to flights of purple prose. (Although not quite on the level of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, which consists, more or less, of a 1,000-page sentence, my writing does, now and then, feature lengthy sentences, obscure words, occasional—gasp!—adverbs, and convoluted punctuation, all difficult to translate to the oral medium.) I found the exercise so refreshing that I have since done an entire cycle of stories for BBC Radio. 

When I was invited to participate in this project, I immediately thought of my old train story: the main character’s brush with barefoot divinity, and the theme of forgiveness, seemed to fit the holiday spirit well. I did rework it quite a bit, but resisted deleting periods between the sentences or adding an excessive number of adverbs.

What kind of research went into this story?

OG: No research at all, if you look at it one way. If you look at it another way, my Russian childhood, all those happy summers at the dacha with my parents, and then my growing up and leaving home at eighteen, and the subsequent decades I spent living in the U.S., away from my family, and the death of my father in Moscow—unlike my character, I was there when he died, I was there for the funeral, but the guilt and the pain over all the things I had missed over the years remained with me—and, well, the sum of my entire life, perhaps, can be viewed as research for everything I write, even though not one of my fictional pieces is autobiographical.

It really depends on how you look at it.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

OG: I sometimes think of a novel as a building. It may be a sinister Victorian mansion or a spotless suburban home or a ramshackle hut in the woods or a grand museum full of magnificent statuary, but it will always have an invisible foundation and a series of rooms one follows from the entrance to the exit, as well as some functional storage closets and perhaps a balcony or two from which one can take stock of the outside world. To continue with the metaphor, then, a short story seems to me like a single lit window you are walking past: you pause, peek inside, glimpse the furnishings in one corner, the comings and goings of people whose movements you can’t trace beyond your narrow field of vision—and there is inherent mystery in this abbreviated perspective, and power, too, when you happen to catch some arresting, life-changing moment.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

OG: I have a website, www.olgagrushin.com, but these days, I am mostly found on Twitter, @olgagrushin: I have finally figured out how it works (a bit behind the times, I know), and am excited about it. Also, my new novel, The Charmed Wife—a dark Cinderella retelling—will be coming out in early 2021, and, of course, my three previous novels are available on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

What's the best gift you've ever been given?

OG: This is a hard question for me to answer, because I have been spoiled, starting in my fifth year, when, for New Year—in the old Soviet days, Christmas was not celebrated, so we got New Year presents instead—my older brother made me a cardboard castle, which was already thrilling; and then I discovered an actual live hamster, a gift from my parents, inside! True, the subsequent fate of the hamster was not happy, but the gift bar had been raised high. 

My favorite gifts to this day are probably a painting of twelve creepy imaginary creatures my son painted for my birthday (it is now on our kitchen wall, ruining our more impressionable guests’ appetites) and a thank-you poster my daughter made me for the most recent Mother’s Day. Her Russian is hesitant at best, but she used Google Translate and wrote everything in Russian, so it was really touching—and also filled with absolutely marvelous phrases; for example, “a shoulder to cry on” became “the scream of your shoulder.” It made me very happy, both as a mother and as a lover of words.

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