I’m not sure when I first met Bela Shayevich, but I think it was sometime between when her band Gay Peasant performed at the three-day North Carolina noise music festival (“Savage Weekend VI”) and when the author whose book she’d just translated (Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich) won the Nobel Prize. We spoke about genre, collaboration, and making “the big work” via Zoom in January 2023.

Mark Iosifescu: You’re a writer and translator of fiction, nonfiction, poetry; you also write essays that are very journalistic; you paint, you draw, you do music stuff, you do movie stuff. I definitely want to talk really practically about how you developed this broad practice. From the standpoint of writing, what do you get from a practice like that that you wouldn’t get from a really narrow one?

Bela Shayevich: I just don’t think that having a narrow practice is available to me in the first place. I used to have a cute theory about that, which is that part of my kind of compulsive hybridity is an expression of a general—I don’t know, personal, spiritual, intellectual, whatever—instability, that kind of permeates the way I am, that comes out of the instability of immigration. I don’t want to say it in a way that overdetermines what immigration is, or what the nature of someone who is an immigrant, or between cultures, is; I don’t want to make a general statement like that. But I can just say, on a specific level, that I think a lot of things about me come from having the rupture and breakage of living within two cultures. And then the constant rupture of what that meant growing up, of moving constantly, you know? We basically moved every year. I had a very unstable kind of upbringing that demanded constant readaptation and recalibration of what I was doing. And so I feel like being one thing—sticking to one activity, sticking to one practice, channeling my energy consistently in one direction—is just not available to me, from the way that I was brought up to cope with constant instability. That’s kind of a self-psychologizing, or whatever. Because I’m very jealous of people who are able to just do one thing.

It’s the most efficient way to be, right? To channel all of your energy into a single practice and a single direction; I’m very envious of that. But for whatever reason, I can’t imagine sitting still in any one particular thing, as much as I would like to. Writing was supposed to be that thing, and writing is that thing—like, writing is the thing that I care about the most, and that I believe in the most. But writing, just directly writing, is the thing that I’ve developed the least, in my time of seriously making stuff. Because I’m always running away from it or being forced to evade it. And that’s happened for practical reasons, and also, like, psychological insecurity reasons.

Do you think about it, in any way, as a single project?

I think of everything as a single project, mostly because once I do something, I don’t ever think about it again. Like, none of my projects mean anything to me once they’re done. They’re completely behind me. Nothing I’ve ever done defines me, and neither does it define my practice. I conceptualized myself this way maybe ten years ago, that whatever I do is on a project-by-project basis, and none of it is an identity. I just have the identity of being myself. And I wouldn’t call that a “project,” but insofar as we’re talking about it like this, I would say my project is just doing whatever I want, doing whatever I care about, doing whatever is accessible to me in whatever moment. And so, insofar as that’s the consistent feature, right, I can say that that’s my project. My project is just... being free? (laughs)

But you definitely—in a way that is obviously very fraught and very complicated—you do talk in your writing about the tension of trying to narrativize past experience and the temptation of drawing simple conclusions, or of a kind of easy self-definition or identification. So I wonder if you think that, like, even as you wrestle with it explicitly in your work, you also express it, in some way, by refusing to identify too narrowly?

Yeah, I think that, at the same time, there’s an aesthetic consistency, and a consistency of interests and concerns, and especially a consistency of ethical concerns that pervades my work, right? Like, everything I do is the same, like anybody else who makes stuff. Everything you do is the same; you’re the same person. And I can articulate what those concerns are, and what those aesthetic interests are, really easily—I know what that is. But in terms of identifying with a practice or a medium or anything like that, I just feel resistant to it, or I’m just incapable of it. Maybe one day, I’ll just be a writer, and that would be awesome. I would love to put all this behind me and just write (laughs). But I’m not there yet.

And maybe that’s what settling down and putting down roots would look like, for me, is being able to have a space and portal to channel everything through. But I think also, just because of the nature of how I’ve lived my life, that hasn’t been available to me at this point. Because a lot of the things I do, a lot of the decisions I’ve made, a lot of the work I’ve made, has been... a strategy to evade having to have a job (laughs). That’s what I mean when I say that my project is, unfortunately, just freedom. It’s, like, freedom and avoidance. That’s where everything comes from.

My trajectory was just that I wanted to be a poet, and I was like, “That’s dumb. You can’t do that. You’re not going to be able to make money.” And I was like, “Oh, I know; I’ll be a translator.” That was dumb, too, because you can’t make money being a translator, but I didn’t know that. And then, I was like, “Oh fuck, I’m doing all this work on the computer as a translator,” and then, because I was on the computer all day just doing translation, doing stuff I didn’t want to do, I lost my ability to write. So then I started drawing, because that was a way to get that satisfaction and creative self-expression without having to touch the computer. And so I did that for a long time as my primary artistic practice, until really recently. I was only able to write sporadically, when I wasn’t translating. So everything was just avoiding having a job, you know what I mean? Which is an artistic project.

Yeah, possibly the most, like, rarefied and elegant of all of them.

Yeah, it’s pure! But it’s very dumb. Like, there could have been another path for me: I could have taken myself seriously as a poet, and been like, “OK, I need to professionalize, and that’s the way that I will survive,” and gone and gotten an MFA, which—I’m getting one now, but that was like, the most disgusting possible path to me when I was in my teens and early twenties. I was like, “No, I can’t do that,” and I refused to do it. But maybe if I had done that, and taken myself seriously, I would have made it; like, maybe I would have been the one who made it. Because some people do, right? Some people are able to be like, “I’m a poet, and that is my job,” and then have that be their job. I just didn’t have that faith in myself, or that faith in the world, and so as soon as I realized I wanted to be a poet, I started running. But some people do the opposite: they just dig down, and then they’re able to do the impossible. Whereas what I’ve done is just live an impossible life. Like, I still don’t have a career, or money, or stability, but I also ran away from doing my primary practice (laughs).

But I didn’t run away from being an artist, right? And this is what I mean by saying this is related to immigration; because it’s stupid in the way that being an immigrant is stupid. Because being an immigrant is about the futility of assimilation. Like, the immigrant is somebody who tries really hard to get it right, and simply cannot. Have you read Pnin?

Yeah, I was just gonna say.

Right, it’s just being Pnin. Where you’re just, like, “Hey guys, what’s up? I’m normal!”

“I’m at the barbecue—”

Yeah, “I’m at the barbecue,” and everyone’s like, “Yup, there’s that silly guy who’s at the barbecue, pretending,” you know? That’s why I feel like my foolishness is characteristic of an immigrant foolishness, but that’s... I’m not trying to evade responsibility, I’m just trying to theorize about what happens.

It’s also—I don’t know, it’s just so tempting to think of a kind of free, genre-agnostic, open practice as something that, for me, being somebody who’s really vulnerable to certain prevailing myths about authorship, or grand artistic statements... There’s something very compelling about being able to avoid conceptualizing work that way, and being comfortable in the idea that instead of some grand project, your path is actually just dictated by the practicalities of trying to make some money once in a while. I’m really interested in that, because I usually feel that to apply some other kind of clear, scrutable career path to a practice that crosses genre boundaries is totally impossible. It would be great, but it’s totally impossible.

I just don’t think that it matters, right? I think I do believe that you’re going to make X amount of projects that are really good, and that will be it. And that might be what you’re known for, or that might be what results out of all of the flailing... but if it’s not psychologically available to you to escape the flailing (laughs), there’s no inherent value in doing so. The inherent value is in what you are able to actually produce, and whatever you’re able to produce is contingent on the moment you’re making it.

Obviously, people set up really cool, really amazing life systems that allow them to consistently produce a certain kind of work, and I don’t think I’ve failed at that. But it just—it resembles an explosion, rather than some kind of steady stream, or something like that.

What does happen internally, personally, for you, when you’re finding self-expression in a writing project? Is it always specific to the genre, or are there things that are universal?

I don’t know if I’ve been able to find that in a writing project yet. Which is really cool. I think I’m at a really interesting juncture, where I’m trying to figure out what and how to write, and I feel like I’m on really thin ice, because I always feel that I’m not gonna be able to figure out what I write, but it’s really funny, because I’m “a writer.” Simply because, while it would be kind of easy to be like, “OK, no, I failed, I’m a translator. I’m only good for transmitting other people’s things, and I’ll never make my own thing,” it just simply isn’t true. Even if I fail to ever make my own thing, the fact is that my deepest interest and satisfaction is in making that thing. Which already makes me a writer.

Right now, where I’m at with my writing is that I know so much of what I don’t like, and I have no idea what it is that I do like, and that I want to make, and I’m looking for what that is, and looking for a consistency in that. I know certain things about it, but I don’t know other things. Like, I basically just don’t know the aboutness of what I care to make work about, what I care to actually say. All I know is that I have a compulsive need to try to find it.

I’m really obsessed with failure, in general, but I also am aware that it’s another kind of...

Cop-out.

Yeah, or it’s an art-historical trap: failure as a means of moving forward. It’s just all so easy and so simple. And yet, on a personal level, it’s completely the case that whenever you do have any kind of success, it just appears, internally, to be an avalanche of failures. Even if people are like, “That was amazing!” So you can analyze it a couple of different ways. I just think the effort to contrive a coherent personal narrative, the effort to create a coherent story, and the constant failure to do that... in that tension is, I think, where I locate my actual practice.

Yeah, I mean, but there’s two things. It is available to some people. That’s the other side.

Being, like, single-minded?

Being coherent. Being coherent is available to some people, and that’s cool.

I hate them.

But that’s the only thing that justifies being into failure, because otherwise, you really fail.

In a non-courageous way.

Well, I don’t know, I don’t consider anything “courageous,” per se. Again, I’m just a privileged person trying to evade having a job. That’s not brave, that’s just being a privileged person. But I think that... it’s really unsatisfying, and feels really pretentious and really cursed to be like, “Yeah, I have a life practice. My life; it’s art.” But that’s literally all I can say for myself, you know? What makes me a loser is that the best thing I can say for myself is that my life is art (laughs). I wish my art was art, but my art is random artifacts that I’ve accidentally made that maybe will be considered admirable by other people.

Not that I—I don’t dislike stuff I’ve made. I’m very proud of a lot of my work. There are things that I consider successful, definitely. I’m not, like, a crazy person. I care and invest in what I make. But like I said, everything I make disappears as soon as I’m done with it, and doesn’t exist anymore, anywhere. It doesn’t matter to me, because all I’m obsessed with is, A) finding a way to, once and for all, never have to have a job, and B) absolute freedom, which is “freedom from,” you know? Those are my two measures of success. Which is about just having a life practice, rather than “being anything.”

But I think this bone-deep awareness of the impossibility of a certain type of success has also been inculcated and beaten into us, a little bit. I know we’re very privileged, and we’re all experiencing a version of what once would have been this possibly glamorous “bohemian” life, but what it actually is is dead-end, sub-underground culture, where there is no possibility of money, ever. And so there’s no expectation. Which I think is a good thing, mostly.

Yeah. It’s a cushy precarity. That’s kind of the way to characterize the way that everybody in our milieu exists: a cushy precarity that could get cushier. But the fact is, there are other things available.

You also work with people who are operating from completely different backgrounds and milieus and, presumably, perspectives on these questions. When you translate, or when you collaborate with another writer, is it just assumed that you two will match up or find common ground? Does it matter?

When it comes to translation, translation of living authors who I choose to work with, I definitely have a really intense... it’s not even “impostor syndrome,” it’s just a sense of irreality. When it comes to Russians, and especially the Russians who I work with, I consider them as real and myself as fake. Again, it’s so rooted in this cultural problem, where I feel like my sense of my own absolute irreality is rooted in the fundamental experience of having had my roots cut off. So I have this sense of inadequacy, or the people I seek out are these heroes and martyrs. And I hold them in such esteem, and am able to sacrifice my juices to them, because I’m like, “These are the real people. It’s not accessible to me to be a real person, but I can serve as a kind of conduit between these real people and this silly fake world that I live in.” And that’s my only access to reality.

So that’s my translation practice, and then I guess my writing practice is exploring that irreality, kind of expressing it, and writing about it, and being like, “Ha ha ha! I’m not real, I don’t matter, and yet I talk, cuz I can’t shut up for whatever reason!” And maybe that’s interesting. Like, to me, what’s interesting about it is that I think a lot of people who have the same background as me who have that experience—and I mean the experience of hybridity, specifically, which is an experience that so many people have, in so many different ways—I think a lot of people don’t feel real. So it is a worthwhile and real subject to try and write about, and maybe that will become the thing that becomes my thing.

And so, besides a sort of practical and/or arbitrary definition of success, what would it take? Is the point to explore those tensions and those incapacities and those missed connections? What would it take to arrive at a point where the project becomes a project?

Right now, I would say it’s that. But that’s because I just discovered it, in this conversation. I don’t know, that’s the writing I’ve been doing, the past couple of weeks, and if I had to identify the main tension of my existence right now, that’s what I would say: that my issue is that I’m not real. How would I become real? If I were to, right now, say that this is the primary tension of my life, and I’m able to express it really well, and then publish it, and then fuck other people up with it. That would be success, for me, right? Because I think that’s putting my finger on something important.

That’s the area that I’m exploring right now. I know that, as a writer, I’m interested in hybridity, and the experiences of hybridity, because that’s what’s universal about my condition. So I would say that it’s available to me to do that, it’s just that I don’t feel like I’ve quite done it yet, just because of where I’m at in my process of developing as a writer, because I’m waylaid by what I find to be my responsibility in this other direction, which is more the direction of journalism and translation. Those are the things that are in conflict for me.

It feels so easy for me to bind those together. They don’t seem like separate worlds to me, necessarily.

What do you mean, how not?

It seems like the experience of hybridity and the sense of irreality that you describe are possibly essential components of your having made yourself available to these other voices, or your being there to bear witness to them. You’re making yourself available to witness those things because you have the ability to transmit them.

Yeah. It’s just that they become competing practices, on the practical level. And I’m trying to allow myself to shift from being a conduit to processing everything that I’ve been through as a conduit, everything that I’ve experienced, and turn that into real content, myself. I’m at a really interesting inflection point of, like, where I put my attention and where I put my efforts. And that is intentional, to a certain degree.

I’ve translated professionally for eighteen years, and I do see this period of my life as an apprenticeship. And it was intentionally designed as an apprenticeship, because I have this really silly, patriarchal Soviet belief that you have to earn the right to write. You have to earn the right to talk, through experience and reflection. And I see this in the work of my peers; like, I’m in an MFA program right now with a bunch of twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five year olds, and there’s a big difference between the work of those who have more life experience and the work of those who have less. You can have a lot of life experience and a lot of things to say at the age of twenty-three, right? And arguably I did, as well. But I do think that—even though it terrifies me that I’ve spent so much time not writing, and I might die at any moment without having written anything important to me—I do feel like I had to earn the moment of being sure that I was ready to start making the transition between one practice and the other, and I’m at the moment of the transition.

It’s interesting to be interviewed as a writer at this point, because I’ve talked about myself as a writer, and people have introduced me as a writer socially, like, my whole life. I just don’t feel like I’ve written anything, or very much. But I feel comfortable with the fact that I apprenticed in the way I apprenticed, and that I’m at a juncture where I think that if I keep throwing sticks at it, I’m on the precipice of being able to say something that is valuable in the way that I want it to be valuable.

Earlier, you declined to characterize your practice as “courageous.” But what about the role of courage, in work that engages really honestly with these complications?

I don’t know what, of what I do, could possibly be considered courageous.

What about in writing that you engage with, or writers you work with, or writing in general?

I’m curious about what is interesting about applying the concept of courage to any of this, because, to me, courage feels like a concept that is applied externally in all cases. Even in cases where—like, we were talking about a writer I’m working with who constantly risks her life. When you’re talking about somebody who literally constantly risks her life, and you’re talking about someone like me who tries to be honest in my work, like... OK, in a certain way they’re the same, right? I can see how you would want to apply the concept of courage, from the outside, to both of those things. Obviously, the concept applies in a much more obvious and clear way to someone who literally risks their life and risks being murdered by the government because of what they say, but the thing that you could call “brave,” and that you could say about each of those things—even though they’re so so different, on such different orders, and like, embarrassing and completely wrong to compare—is that there’s some risk being taken. But the risk being taken isn’t what’s being assessed, right? The risk being taken isn’t what’s on the line. Like, you can’t imagine the value of dishonesty. You can’t imagine making work that doesn’t engage seriously with the things that you need it to engage with, because what’s the point of making that work? The only thing to do, the only possible reason to do anything, is to do it honestly, is to try really hard to do it for real.

Just like Elena, the journalist we’re talking about, would be like, “What would be the point of me being a journalist in Russia if I wasn’t trying to cover the most pressing issues that the government doesn’t want me to write about? Why would I be a real estate reporter? Why would I write about lifestyle, when there are really important things to do?”

Yeah. There’s just something interesting to me about the idea of stripping away some of the useless, calcified ways that writing has been characterized as moral, or courageous, or noble, but then finding a version of courage, or purpose, that acknowledges banality, or pointlessness, or failure.

I think the main thing that I wanted to say, when I think about everything I’ve done in sum, is that I’m absolutely motivated by an ethical impulse. Like, there are things that I care about the most. I have a very, very strong ethical sense. I wouldn’t know what it is to make stuff without that. There are things that you care about, and there are things that you consider right and good, and those are the things you have to do. You don’t have a choice. Those are the things you do. Your thing is that you’re reacting to and resisting something in society that you think is disgusting. All of it comes from an ethical impulse. Internally, there’s a motor inside of you about what feels important to make.

I think something that I got from my experience of underground culture was the sense that so-called “life practices” are legit art practices—as insufferable as it is to describe them that way—and the sense that small-scale, small audience, non-commercial but completely open, free, cross-genre self-expression was not just the version of creativity and self-expression that was available to me, but was actually an ideal way of living, an ideal way of expressing oneself. And of course, there are considerations of privilege, and time and place and context, that go into all of that and make that possible—and in general, I don’t feel the way I felt when I was twenty about that kind of art-making at all. But I do think that there’s a value that you get from thinking of things that way that feels salient in, say, reporting on injustice around the world, or writing really honestly about the impossibility of narrativizing the immigrant experience, or something like that. The art-historical trap of “failure,” that we were talking about before, it’s there, right? The idea that failure is a driving force is tempting and possibly applicable, but I don’t mean it in a nihilistic way. I mean it in an affirming, transcendent way. Like, life is this practice, which contains this embedded failure, and also this embedded ethics.

I’m just not sure how “failure” is being defined here. Because the thing I see that’s the consistent strand between what Elena does and being an underground musician, or whatever, is that the primary ethical impulse, the primary ethical conception of the world, is that the world as it is is unethical; that participating in society, in the way that you’re supposed to, is inherently really harmful, and disgusting, and spiritually destructive. It’s destructive on every level. And so whatever your level is, whatever’s available to you, your impulse as an artist is to criticize, resist, stand against the things that are harmful in that way. So, if you’re a privileged little guy, you slap the face of modernity (laughs), and make absurdist art. Or you can make work that’s, like, more impactful politically, more directly, if that’s what is available to you. But the impulse for both kinds of artists, for all kinds of artists, is exactly the same, and that is to resist conventionality.

Which is a really unfortunate and weird place for art. Like, we can imagine a completely different kind of social formation. I’m against “art.” I don’t like art as a separate category. That’s the other side of this “life practice” thing; like, as fucked up as it is to be a little rich bohemian, this idea of art being a denatured practice that’s outside of your social practice, outside of your spiritual practice, outside of what you do daily, is inhuman. The idea of being an “artist” is inhuman, because you’re not supposed to be an “artist.” You’re supposed to be a person, and “art” is just our disgusting, perverted label for the completely essential human activity of connecting to other people emotionally in a way that’s abstract. Being an artist is what’s disgusting (laughs), and in that way, having a “life practice” is a way of rejecting art as a separate, commercial activity.

Right. They feel bound up to me. There’s a significant overlap, to me, between those people to whom it was made clear that there doesn’t need to be any distinction between life and art, and those who are able to speak to the aspects of life that feel most essential to... make art about.

Yeah, exactly, and that’s what success looks like, right? That’s ultimately what you’re striving for as an artist. Being a successful artist, having the freedom to only make art, is having the freedom to just be a person (laughs), in a way that’s fully integrated. And having the freedom to just be a person means, as an artist, not having to fucking hustle. The thing that makes being an artist disgusting is that you have to claw your way against all of these, whatever, financial pressures—fairly or unfairly, whatever they are in your specific situation—and in your clawing, you’re doing all this disgusting stuff to accommodate yourself to conventionality. That’s why we’re jealous of artists who are able to not have to work, or not have to claw their way; because they have a true pure being, whereas we little guys feel like we have to do stuff that’s, like, “fake” in order to survive. But the actual thing is that it’s available to you to not be fake, no matter what. There’s no difference. It just comes at the sacrifice of leading a real life (laughs), of leading a conventional, rooted life. And some people are able to make that sacrifice, and then get the conventional life, and some people sacrifice being an artist and just get the conventional life, and then some people are these little hybrid cockroaches like me, right now, who feel various ways about the hustles and accommodations.

I get that, and that makes sense. I think I’m wrapped up in these really tedious bifurcations that feel like punk dogma that I inherited thirty years after it had last been useful to anybody: this idea that to chase a traditionally successful art or writing practice is to miss the point, or to compromise yourself, and that either you “get” that or you don’t.

So, failure—the concept of failure—is a double-edged sword in this way. I think that what we mean by “failure,” and how we define “failure,” is a failure to achieve or embody a conventional conception of what is good or what is bad, what is adaptive, what is maladaptive (laughs), or whatever. And the problem with that is that it assumes that there is something adaptive and something maladaptive, and the true wisdom of worshiping failure is that you know that there’s nothing that’s actually good. When you say somebody who “gets it,” what you mean is that not “getting it” is thinking that there’s a good and bad, right? “Getting it” is knowing that it’s all bad (laughs). But getting it is really complicated, because if you “know it’s all bad,” you still acknowledge that there are these categories, and the whole point is to reject that these categories exist at all.

And if the anxiety around this kind of compromised practice is that you’re somehow not being pure and true... What I’m saying is that “compromise” isn’t actually available to you. Even if you feel compromised, that’s not what’s actually happening, because you have a really dumb idea about what to do, which is to make work in the first place.

Right.

The stupidity of that will never be mitigated by your practical choices. You’re always going to be a fool—or, like, doing something maladaptive, or whatever. It’s always a bad idea. No one can take that away from you.