Sasha arrives at the Institute and meets a small group of other students, all of whom are from remote, rural areas and have been selected under unknown criteria. It follows Sasha, a teenage girl from a small Ukrainian town, as she is inexplicably accepted into the renowned Institute of Special Technologies, where she begins to unravel the secrets of its powerful and mysterious magical practices. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.Vita Nostra is a fantasy novel by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, originally written in Ukrainian and Russian and translated into English in 2018.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage.

I realize that this is a bit of a tease, but if you are at all intrigued by the phrase, “Time is a grammatical concept,” you will find yourself swept into this book’s estimable vortex from page one. Kudos are due to translator Julia Meitov Hersey, whose task cannot have been a simple one, given Vita Nostra’s complexity and sophistication. This particular exemplar could claim both Piers Anthony’s Macroscope (1969) and Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) as antecedents from the sci-fi realm, but also Jose Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1944) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Instantanés (1962) from the lit-fic sphere. Much of this genre has not yet been translated into English. The novel belongs to an expanding Ukrainian genre known as fantastyka, encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror and folkloric traditions. Once there, the lesson plan is-to put it mildly-fairly opaque, and academic failure is met with unpleasant consequences for the students’ families. Drawing her under his spell, the girl’s unbidden mentor persuades her to enroll in the Institute of Special Technologies, much to her confusion and her mother’s consternation. Vita Nostra starts out simply enough, with teenager Sasha Samokhina colliding with a strange man who exudes an unexplainable influence over her. When you crack the spine of the latest novel from acclaimed Ukrainian authors Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, you’ll get a full measure of all three, and just as with the famed five stages of grief, you may experience any or all of them out of order, and more than once. This circumstance is likely to incite one of three reactions from readers: befuddlement, terror or magnetic attraction. By way of orientation, imagine that Hogwarts has opened a satellite campus inside Harry Haller’s Magic Theater from Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and assigned Kafka, Dostoevsky and Rod Serling to oversee the curriculum. There’s really no way to approach Vita Nostra but elliptically, so strap in.

Vita nostra a novel