Evgenia Nekrasova

Evgenia Igorevna Nekrasova (born April 2 1985, Kapustin Yar) is a Russian writer and screenwriter, author of the novel Kalechina-Malechina, the selected prose “SisterMom. About those who will toil”, the novel “Skin” and the collection of stories, novels and poems “House Love”. According to some critics- the founder of "magical pessimism" in Russian literature.

Biography

Nekrasova was born in the city of Kapustin Yar (now Znamensk) Astrakhan region in 1985. She grew up in the Moscow region in the Podolsk region. She graduated from the secondary school named after Dmitry Kholodov. Worked as copywriter in Moscow advertising agencies.

From 2008 to 2012 she lived in Manchester, Liverpool, London, Athens.

In 2016 she graduated from the Screenwriting department of the Moscow School of New Cinema (MShNK).

In 2018–2019, she taught screenwriting at the directing department MSNC.

Lectures on screenwriting.

In 2019, together with Tatiana Novosyolova, Oksana Vasyakina, Alesya Atroshchenko, Evgenia Vezhlyan and Daria Serenko, she created the School of Literary Practices, in which Nekrasova leads the prose department.

Nekrasova began writing prose and screenplays in 2011. Her stories and novels were published in thick literary magazines - "Ural", "Znamya", "Volga", "New World", scripts in "Cinema Art".

In 2017, her collection of prose "Unhappy Moscow" was awarded the second prize for young poets and writers "Lyceum".

In 2018, Nekrasova's book “Kalechina-Malechina”, which tells about a girl whom Kikimora helps to survive domestic and school abuse, was published in the Editorial Office of Elena Shubina, as were the two subsequent books “SisterMom. About those who will toil" and a collection of stories, poems and short stories "House love".

In 2019, Kalechina-Malechina was shortlisted for the NOS, National Bestseller, Big Book, Fiction 35 awards, and long listed for the Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the Yasnaya Polyana awards . The novel was staged in 2020 at the Kriklivy and Pankov Theater in Novosibirsk and by Katya Korobelnik at the Vs. Meyerhold Center in Moscow.

In the summer of 2019, Nekrasova spent a month at the Artkommunalka residence-museum “Erofeev and others" (Kolomna, Moscow region), as a result of her stay she wrote "The Museum of Moscow Garbage", which was her first poetical experiment (published in the magazine "Ignorance", also included in the collection "House Love").

The collection of short stories and novels “SisterMom. About those who will toil” consists of the texts written over last years. It is a kind of Nekrasova's laboratory in search of a new language and at the same time a study of how the family changed in post-Soviet Russia. The book "SisterMom. About those who will toil" was shortlisted for the "Nose" award in 2020.

The story "Unhappy Moscow" from the series "SisterMom" was staged at the Praktika Theater by director Marina Brusnikina with cast from the Brusnikin Workshop.

The story "Lakshmi" from "SisterMom" was filmed by director Ekaterina Skakun (short film "Hands").

The story "Poppy Brothers" also from "SisterMom" was translated into Latvian and published in September 2021 in the magazine "Domuzīme".

In 2019, the collection “SisterMom. About those who will toil" was used in "reading practice" in Istanbul performed by artist Elena Semyag (action of the Central Universal Scientific Library. N. Nekrasova).

The novel "Kalechina-Malechina" has been translated into Italian and Latvian.

The collection“SisterMom. About Those Who Will Toil" was longlisted for the National Bestseller Award in 2020.

In the summer of 2021, Nekrasova's novel “Skin” was published on the Bookmate digital platform in the format of a book series. It tells about the Russian serf Domna and the American slave Hope who meet by chance and switch skins. Episodes of the novel were released simultaneously in text and audio format, performed by actress Anastasia Velikorodnaya. The soundtrack to "Skin" was recorded by the duet "Aigel". In January 2022 Skin was published as a book by PopcornBooks. Nekrasova received the NOS/Wanderer award for "Skin".

In the early autumn of 2021, edited by Elena Shubina, a collection of short stories, poems and novels “House Love” was published, which talks about overcoming loneliness and breaking down attitudes. It is a kind of artistic study of the feelings of home and family. As in the previous books folklore motifs are embedded in the depiction of Russian everyday life.

Evaluation of Creative Works

Fiction as a genre inevitably more and more tends to resemble scriptwriting. Whereas Evgenia Nekrasova works and experiments with language with precision, returning to the word its academic essence” - Maya Kucherskaya

Nekrasova, with whom the reading public unexpectedly fell in love quite unanimously the year before (“Kalechina-Malechina” entered all the shortlists at once, although did not win any), released in 2019 a collection of short stories that no one seems to be discussing: stories are somehow not in our favour. However, there is something to discuss - The SisterMom, for all its versatility and dissonance, reveals integrity both in subjects and in language, and in the author's attentive attitude to the characters. The narration rolls and rumbles from one story of people tossing about to another, the Anglo-Russian Volapyuk almost seamlessly fits into the poetic language of conspiracies, and although there is little hope in these stories (“And everyone who is further - beyond the Moscow Ring Road - will just cease to exist”), there is faith that we do not have to suffer forever. - Egor Mikhailov

It is clear why Shubina drew attention to this text: she is a specialist in Platonov, and Nekrasova is his direct heir, not in the sense of style (here it would be possible only epigonism, and this is not the case), but in the sense of this one Platonov’s longing that fills the world. Just as Pelevin once brought the elegiac evening sadness of the city's outskirts into literature, so Nekrasova captured the substance of the Moscow suburbs, shabby, unsettled, once expecting something and now frozen, because they have hope for nothing. - Dmitry Bykov

Book reviewers note the writer's attraction to folklore motifs, compare her style with the style of Alexei Remizov, Andrey Platonov and Pavel Pepperstein, attempt to find the main unifying theme in the stories collected under this cover, and at the same time notice the atmosphere of ordinary horror that permeates texts from start to finish. It is strange that the word "horror" and comparison with Stephen King have never been used so far talking about Nekrasova’s texts - presumably, this is a matter of the near future. - Vasily Vladimirsky

Sophisticated taste, passion for experimentation, bold handling of images of mass culture and folklore material, and most importantly, an attempt to create a mythopoetics of today - such optics allows Evgenia Nekrasova to be compared with Pavel Pepershtein, the author of the cult postmodernist novel "The Mythogenic Love of Castes". But if the author of "MLC" deliberately avoids moral assessments - one of the key concepts of his philosophical discourse "diet" - "di-ethical" contemplation - Nekrasova is hardly striving for a meta position. The homelessness of the described world hits backhand. The reader catches himself thinking that he sympathizes not only with the loser Katya (which is quite normal, she is a hunted child), but also with the kikimore Kalechina, and SestroMom flying in at night to have a piece of cake, and Anechka who killed her with indifference, and even the dumb security guard Pavlov, the hero of the named-so story, who respected expensive cars and despised "junior in rank", for example his wife and son ("well, just kicked him a couple of times, he studies poorly, argue, son of the bitch") - from the security guard a feeling of guilt crawled out "like a mature child". According to all the canons of new realism, a character falling down and apart should not have evoked any sympathy in a reader, but for some reason we empathise with Nekrasova's heroes. — Daria Efremova

I would like to quote pieces of her texts non-stop, and although someone will surely start talking about Remizov's folklore redundancy and Platonov’s inertness, Nekrasova, no doubt has her own voice - and you can see for yourself how her prose cries with it. Perhaps not always pleasant but necessary reading - and a great example of how small form prose can talk about today's pain much more clearly than most big novels. — Andrey Myagkov

References

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