Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s novel “Life Before Us” – Culture

The Orchard is the original title of Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s perestroika book The Life Before Us. So the debut is actually modeled after “The Cherry Orchard,” Chekhov’s most famous play about a vanishing age, a thousand times over-interpreted. In order to take on this in literary terms, one must have extraordinary self-confidence or extraordinary talent. Or both.

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s characters have slightly different Chekhov names: Raneva instead of Ranevskaya, Lopatin instead of Lopakhin, Trifonov instead of Trofimov. Her story revolves around four life-hungry, fun-loving teenagers who experience the dawn of a new era, perestroika: Anja, the first-person narrator, and her friend Milka, the wild Lopatin and the brooding Trifonov. Chekhov’s plays are read, quoted and given away page after page. There’s even a real garden, albeit an apple orchard that’s about to be bought up and gentrified by a coup profiteer and ends up being cut down for real. More Chekhov is not possible.

Anyone who has never read a word about Russia will find a successful introduction to culture and the world of goods here

But not more perestroika either. Like her main character, Gorcheva-Newberry grew up in the late Soviet Union on the outskirts of Moscow, studied at the State Linguistic University in Moscow and worked as a teacher. While translating for a group of American hang-gliders, she met her husband and in 1995, at the height of post-Soviet misery and turmoil, but also: post-Soviet freedom, moved to Bland County in southwest Virginia. Since then she has published dozens of short stories. “Life Before Us” is her first novel, written with the best of intentions: to bring Russia closer to American readers.

To do this, she puts in considerable encyclopedic effort, patiently spelling out the foods and drinks of those years, clothes and rock stars, film titles and types of apples, literary classics (Chekhov!). Anyone who has never read a word about Russia will find a successful introduction to culture and the world of goods here. Anyone who didn’t know that the fall of the Soviet Union also triggered fears can listen to Anja’s father, who summarizes everything in a nutshell: “This is really the end of an epoch, the end of the world as we know it. What to do with this world hard to say, but many will perish.”

When Milka actually dies, it has nothing to do with perestroika, but it still marks the end of Anja’s youth. Anja leaves and only returns 20 years later to a completely changed Russia. For Gorcheva-Newberry, this Russia, like every Russia before it, is a country whose people are tormented by a “profound, harmful sadness,” a fateful fatalism that allows no progress, no development, let alone democracy. And Russia’s attack on Ukraine suddenly makes it seem almost logical. No wonder Russians don’t rebel when their sons are worn out in the neighboring country, amid so much harmful sadness. In a way, Gorcheva-Newberry’s thesis is the literary evolution of the “Russian soul.” If this Chekhov trivialization isn’t enough for you, you still have the original.