All Snow Angels Are Fallen Angels

On Vanya Bagaev's Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel

Dear Republic,

Vanya Bagaev is one of our very favorites. It was really a privilege to be able to run his near-comprehensive survey on contemporary Russian literature. Now, for “The Depot,” Benji Taylor writes on Bagaev’s genre-bending, mind-bending and very, very Russian Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel.

-ROL

ALL SNOW ANGELS ARE FALLEN ANGELS

A squadron of armed men in black, their faces obscured, thunder up the staircase of a nondescript apartment building in the middle of the night; they cluster around their target’s door, having the courtesy at least to ring the bell. When the bleary-eyed occupant opens up, they drag him out, interrogate him about his subversive activities, name him a traitor, an enemy of the motherland and its leader. They ransack his apartment, searching for contraband, for anything that in the right light could be construed as evidence of an unnamed crime, but find nothing. After beating him bloody, breaking a bone in his arm, and threatening to sodomize him with one of their batons, the squad leader tells his goons that it was the wrong apartment. They have just assaulted and terrorized an innocent person, though whether the mistake was honest or just an excuse to terrorize remains unclear.

This scene is not excerpted from a media report on the activities of the FSB in Yekaterinburg, the Basij in Tehran, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles; the fact that it just as easily could be cannot help but color the experience of reading the collection in which it occurs, Vanya Bagaev’s Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel.

Bagaev, a Russian-born writer living in London, is quite frank about the novel’s topicality, listing in a post on his Substack some of the various laws its publication would have run afoul of in his home country — not an exhaustive list, mind you, but only the more “popular” ones, i.e. those most commonly marshaled against protesters and would-be dissidents. And while the inspiration for and target of the collection is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, its exploration of the violence to self and others that permeates and constitutes the authoritarian state has broader relevance. There is no facet of daily life, of subjectivity, of sociality that is left untouched by the regime’s violence. Even the seemingly innocent act of making a snow angel has been reclassified as a banned expression of dissent, of resistance punishable by imprisonment, torture, and death.

The collection’s title emphasizes this understanding — we do not have access to the “utopian novel” from which these scenes have been excised, and its absence haunts the text we do possess. We do not know how they fit into the ur-text, just that they have been removed “to preserve narrative integrity and avoid the descent into lierary [sic] anarchy and narrative discord.” This is relayed on the cover sheet that opens the novel, presenting the fragments to an “Illustrious Editor-in-Chief” to whom the committee responsible for the mutilation reports “in sincere obeisance.”

The texts that we are left with would indeed seem out of place in a work depicting an ideal society. Set on the fictional island of Novo Tsarstvo (“new tsardom”) — a thinly-veiled contemporary Russia conducting a “peacekeeping operation” with the neighboring island of “Slobodna Zembla,” governed by a “relentless terrorist junta, propped up by the imperialist influences of the United South” — they describe terror, murder, surveillance, alcoholism, and all-pervasive fear against the backdrop of a cityscape that verges on the post-apocalyptic. Though, in a nod to Orwell’s 1984, each apartment contains a “telescreen,” we are in pre-digital times — appliances are analog, telephones involve a handset, and the CRT televisions are bulky and heavy. Yet, like all dystopian fiction, this is a collection urgently addressed to its present.

The abortive police raid above opens the first deleted scene, witnessed through a spyhole by a narrator of indeterminate demographic. This novella (roughly two-thirds of the entire collection) unfolds in a carnival of language, blurring the lines between dream and reality. The narrator, who refers to themselves by the first-person plural, is alone in their 13th floor apartment with their thoughts. These, personified, take surreal flight, imagining an underground lab where the secret police are bred as pig-demon hybrids. In a Beckettian interlude, they spar with each other while downing shots, debating the nature and purpose of the balaclava-clad oppressors, the state and the Tsar for whom they ultimately work. They note that “[the agents of the state] don't care about our indignation, our pain and discontent. They don't care about humanity, morality, ethics, faith, hope, or love,” that for them, violence is a good in itself. That their hypothetical Stammtisch is broken up by a squad of “armored demons” who violently arrest them for disseminating pacifist propaganda underscores the point.

Language — and the media that disseminate it — is the first casualty of any authoritarian state, and Bagaev pulls no punches in describing Novo Tsarstvo’s state propaganda. The “higher echelons” of the government are imagined as clustered around a mahogany table, drinking expensive liquor “from gold-encrusted cat skulls,” chortling about the linguistic reconfiguration of the war with their neighbor into “a small local conflict,” an insignificant “special military operation.” They exult that “one needs not lay a stone to build utopia; one can convince the rest they live in one already.” In a later section, a government speaker on television warns the audience about how the few remaining humanists and dissidents are pliant shills for the imperialist United South, Slobodna Zembla’s ally, and as such are enemies of the state. A general then reads out fabricated statistics to emphasize the prowess of the Novo Tsarstvoan “peacekeepers.” As if the point wasn’t clear, the narrator is joined in their apartment — or imagines they’re joined — by “TVR” (for TV Reality), a woman with a television for a head, who in another dream sequence garrotes a personified Truth.

The dilemmas facing Bagaev’s characters (and their thoughts) are familiar to any reader of dystopian fiction, but the darkly comic manner in which he explores them heightens the grotesque absurdity of life under the authoritarian wheel. When the narrator accidentally flattens one of the security police with a defenestrated TV set, they describe the “pig porridge” as an art installation. Later, while they attempt to dismember with a borrowed hacksaw what’s left of the corpse for disposal outside the city lines, TVR calmly dispenses instructions as if she were an embodied ChatGPT. On the bus to the outskirts of town, carrying the pieces of the cop stuffed into a suitcase, an older man expresses sympathy with him, thinking he’s carrying his beloved dog to its final resting place. The sequence marks the first and so far only instance I’ve encountered of “porridge” as a verb. A later vignette, told from the perspective of a young child hiding from the security apparatus, imagines her stuffed dinosaur roaring to life and wringing the life out of one of its agents.

Bagaev defiantly describes himself as a “Russian writer” in exile, and in Deleted Scenes he nods to a number of his forebears. The first person plural in the novella recalls Zamyatin’s We, the original utopia of Russian fiction, while the section “Fluffislav the Fearsome” nods to Bulgakov in depicting the (not-quite diabolical) chaos occasioned by the arrival of a black cat; the sequence that takes the narrator into the frozen wilderness to dispose of the dismembered corpse recalls Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” in its crystalline exposition of the experience of freezing slowly to death. Finally, in a subtle hint at Raskolnikov, the hacksaw is borrowed from an old woman who lives in an upstairs apartment.

Given this identification with his native country and its literature, it is surprising to see Bagaev write that “After all, I'm in the UK, far away from that regime, Russian police won't knock on my door in the morning, won’t put me in prison, won't torture me and won't send me to fight in their war.” As Sergei and Yulia Skripal and the families of Aleksandr Litvinenko and Aleksandr Perepilichny could attest, the UK is in no way a safe haven if the Tsar considers you a worthy enough threat. With professed Putin admirer Nigel Farage and his Reform Party gaining momentum there, it may be less safe than when he wrote those words in October 2024. As democracy wanes globally, with India and the United States growing daily more authoritarian, right-wing parties skeptical of liberal democracy in strong positions in France, Germany, and Spain, and governing Italy, Deleted Scenes speaks to an audience that is poised only to grow.

The double bind of such regimes, Bagaev suggests and history has evidenced, is that the only way meaningfully to oppose them is to engage in the same violence they inflict on their subjects — “Even if we kill all the killers, only killers will remain,” a personified thought notes. In a late section, one of the sharpshooters ostensibly protecting the Tsar wrestles with a decision to shoot him, knowing that even if successful, her moment of heroism would cost her her life. The collection ends with reports that the Tsar has indeed been killed, yet a young girl watching her parents rejoice “couldn’t help but feel a pang of confusion, wondering how soon she would learn how to feel happy about someone's death.”

All utopias are ultimately dystopian and no “Golden Age” can gild over its dross. It does not matter if the Tsar has been killed, Bagaev suggests; the dedication to the “Illustrious Editor-in-Chief” hints that perhaps these scenes have been excised because the new regime cannot allow anyone to know that the dictator is dead. There must always be a Tsar in Novo Tsarstvo, and the apparatchiks who truly run the government have merely given the new leader a different title. Plus ça change, plus la même chose. Thus Bagaev offers no concrete answer to Chernyshevsky’s eternal question. Violence begets only violence and one tyrant replaces another.

“Utopia,” of course, means “nowhere.” Dystopia, it’s coming to seem, is everywhere you look.

Benji Taylor is a writer and editor who lives in the Pacific Northwest. You can find him on Bluesky, where he posts about politics, literature, LGBTQ+ issues, and Arsenal F.C.

Painting by Ilya Repin