To be published: Q2 2025
The Steppe. In the hot summer of 2010, when the European part of Russia was engulfed by fires, a 20-year-old girl arrives from Siberia to meet her father, whom she hasn’t seen for ten years. Together they set off on a long journey in his truck and their destination is the untamed steppe in the south of the country. The father, who considers this inhospitable expanse his home and only possession, would like to share it with his grown daughter. However, the taiga-born girl is rather frightened by the open landscape and finds it alien.
And her father is a stranger too. And so, on the way in the cab of the truck, she tries to understand who the prematurely aged man she calls Daddy out of habit is, and thinks about the childhood she spent with him in the Siberian small town of the 1990s, about the romanticized world of crime to which her father belonged, about the illnesses she prefers to keep quiet about, about a homeland that cannot cope with its own past.
Step is the second part of an auto-fiction trilogy by poet and writer Oksana Vasyakina, which tells the story of the author’s deceased loved ones and herself. For the first part, titled Wound, Vasjakina won the prestigious NOS award in two nominations.