Meat Cleaver Man and Other Stories of the Post-Soviet Space - Softcover

Wigglesworth-Baker, Dr Teresa

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798320568218

Publisher: Independently published, 2024

Synopsis

This book is a self-reflective ethnography of short travel stories, which began during the late Soviet period. The stories begin in Leningrad, Donetsk, and Moscow in 1984, through the collapse of the USSR in Riga, Latvia, and continue until the present period across the post-Soviet space in the Republic of Tatarstan, Georgia, and Ukraine.

The author invites the reader to see the space around her, smell and taste the cuisine of the countries visited and to hear the stories from the characters who she had the chance to meet, including meat cleaver man in Latvia, and a volunteer charity worker in Ukraine and the Cat Lady of Sioni Street to name but a few. These characters evoke humility and compassion from the reader and provide an insight into life in the post-Soviet space.

The narrative of the book is mainly contextualized within Charles Forsdick’s definitions of horizontal and vertical travel. Horizontal travel is considered to be the linear conventional aspect of travel where the traveller moves from place to place. In terms of this book, the horizontal narrative follows the chronological order of trips the author made to the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces, which form the basis of each chapter.

The vertical travel takes the reader into the underground of these spaces and gives an insight into spaces which are either hidden from or unnoticed by the conventional traveller. In other words, it is what is not usually apparent or is stumbled upon, or as the author terms, a per happenstance, or a coincidence. These coincidences can make the lived experiences frightening, exciting, and richer at the same time. Each of the stories of this book comprises a coincidence that happened to the author while she was either studying, working, or researching within the Soviet and post-Soviet spaces.
Little known facts and information are weaved into each story for the reader, such as how late Soviet rock music became synonymous with the need for change in the USSR, how war veterans were treated by the state after the Afghan war, and the plight of stray animals in Georgia. The author invites readers into secret satellite cities where she worked, including Korolev, the space city, and Dubna, the city of nuclear research.

As a Russianist, the author was able to understand the culture and gather much information about the issues that people were facing in their environments and relate this throughout her storytelling. By inviting the reader into these spaces, she also invites the reader to contemplate their own lived experiences and vertical travel.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798320568218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 171