Anna Akhmatova, like so many other poets, did not find it easy to flee Leningrad. She didn’t have much of a choice, because everything around her was death and destruction, and she felt that it was not her turn to live the end of it. So she reluctantly accepted the evacuation organized by the Writers’ Union to the desolate Chistopol. She took a flight to Moscow and from there a train to Kazan, accompanied by other intellectuals, such as Boris Pasternak. “The idea was to concentrate them all in one place because that way it was easier to control what they wrote,” says Ana Rodríguez Fischer (Asturias, 1957), who has just published Before the Oblivion Arrives (Siruela).
The novel is based on that journey of the Russian poet who, upon arriving in the Tatar town, learns that Marina Tsvietaeva has committed suicide. These two exceptional women maintained a very particular friendship, as there are only a couple of documented meetings in Moscow, in June 1941. “Two months later, Marina hanged herself,” says Rodríguez Fischer, who tries to recreate some of the conversations. that were left pending and that they never kept, inviting the reader to travel to a crucial stage in the history of Russia and Europe.
“I have always been fascinated by the idea of ??fictionalizing possible encounters between people. Or, impossible, but desired. And the fact that there is not too much data allows me to imagine more freely. I had them both in mind for a while and, as soon as I had the opportunity, I started writing,” explains the Asturian, who, to give her story verisimilitude, has had to revisit narratives and authors whom she wrote more than twenty years that he did not attend, like the works of Pasternak. She “Also discovered new stories, such as The Eternal House”, which have allowed her to expand her vision and provide some very specific details, such as the menus in the spas of the time.
This is not the first time that Rodríguez Fischer imagines a meeting, as he already did so in The Poet and the Painter (2014), with Góngora and El Greco. He had been thinking for a long time about doing the same with Anna and Marina, about whom he was not surprised by the admiration they professed for each other. Their lives ran in parallel and were full of similarities, since both belonged to well-off families during pre-revolutionary Russia and failed with some of their loves. “Just as they knew a world of privileges, they also learned, along with their children, what hunger was and the most twisted methods of Stalinism.” As far as professional matters are concerned, both of them stood out in their fields. Marina, despite not being liked by the regime, was “one of the most original poets of the 20th century.” A woman “much more impulsive” than her friend Anna, who “also stood out notably in poetry.”
Before Oblivion Comes earned Rodríguez Fischer the Café Gijón 2023 Novel Award, worth 20,000 euros. “You can’t imagine the excitement he gave me when I was Asturian,” he says proudly. The jury highlighted from her work, presented in the competition under the title Ljuv (love, in Russian), that this epistolary chronicle is “a passionate and intimate commitment” that wants to bring two exceptional women closer to the public.
Although the writer debuted in fiction with a literary award, the Lumen Women’s Prize, for the novel Lost Objects (1995), she insists that, for “too long a time,” she felt “overwhelmed” by authors like Shakespeare. “What was I going to contribute differently?” She often asked herself, even though she never stopped writing, even though she kept everything to herself.
“Now I know that you can always give new perspectives that interest the public,” she says confidently while finishing a glass of peach juice in her living room. There, a few steps from her, a library looks majestic that shows her love for books. Since she learned to read, the writer and literary critic has been linking one volume after another until she has become a renowned professor of Spanish literature who is also passionate about Russian culture in all its forms.
“Since I was a teenager, I have been a great devotee. In the late 60s or early 70s I first saw a black and white version of Crime and Punishment that shocked me and introduced me to this universe. It starred Marisa Paredes and José Luís Pellicena. From here I began to get into the classics, not only by Dostoyevsky, but also by Tolstoy and many others. Years later, for ideological reasons, I read writers persecuted by Stalinism. And I’ve never really stopped. My interest in Russian literature has always been constant,” concludes Rodríguez Fischer, who does not rule out daring to write something related again.
