Vanya Bagaev's Blog

This project aims to recreate Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” with modern vocabulary and setting.

Previous instalments of “Posts”: 1.1

Now, dear readers, whether you want it or not, I want to tell you why I couldn’t become even a bug. I’m serious when I say I wanted to become a bug, many times, read Kafka and all that. But even that didn’t help. I swear, dear readers, that to be hyper-conscious, hyper-aware is a disease, real, absolute disease. For everyday life it woul...

What follows is a translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” that does two things in particular: 1) aims to recreate the energy of the original, 2) happens in the 21st century.

The catalyst for its creation was simple — seeing countless out-of-context badly translated quotes from the novella, as well as generally solemn “philosophical” aura around it. The book is, on contrary, a comedy, but archaic translations completely bury its manic, self-contradictory energy, so it becomes ...

This continues the thread of Twisted Lullaby I-V

If Goddie were a child, I would be his sister, and he would love soap bubbles. He would love everything soapy, except for unchildlikely soapy, for instance grown-up shampoo that stings your eyes without mercy and tastes bitter on your tongue for hours, as if it’s made not from liquid soap but from the juice of jellyfish that were caught in the seas and oceans and squeezed, bottled and sen...

The picture below was intended to be used as a cover to the first Tatar translation of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons”. At the time (1928) it was the first literary work in Tatar to use Latin script called Yañalif instead of Arabic script that preceded it, and one of the very few books that managed to use Yañalif before Tatar writing was forced into Cyrillic script (1939), though many baptised Tatars had already been using Cyrillic for centuries.

The book, faithfully titled “Atalar häm Balalar” in ...

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~ Continuing this AI thread, I want to republish another practically ancient and pre-historic story of mine written perhaps in 2021, before the ChatGPT/Midjourney deluge. It is about technology and its consequences, and, shall we say, “satire” on a certain developments in a particular type of technology — generative AI. I don’t often engage into that theme in my work, but everytime I do, I can feel the appeal of doing so, especially in hindsight. All of a sudden, an innocent satiri...

It’s October 2025, and I’m watching my flatmate package human faeces into matchboxes. This isn’t fiction, this isn’t a fever dream, no, this is just a Saturday in London.

Six months ago, if you’d told me that Google DeepMind’s breakthroughs in protein folding would lead to a coprophagy epidemic sweeping through universities and schools, I’d have laughed at you for such a bizarre and absurd claim, for your conspiratorial boomer take. But here we are! Nobody’s fucking laughing. Not me at least.

You ...

The issue today covers a lot of “what to read” as well as adjacent thoughts on the craft and publishing. You’ll find a few reviews of my book plus two reviews I’ve written for others: a story/essay collection by and a novel by .

This is something new for me — I had never written a capital R Review before these two (!) — but it’s something I want to do more, especially for my contemporaries, friends and fellow writers, to all of whom I believe (having skin in the game) every review is a gift. I ...

As usual, this story is free to read for everyone but has a radically new feature: the author’s commentary at the very end, a post-scriptum section only available to paid subscribers to Nova Nevédoma. Please enjoy!

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In grandfather's garage did Savely find a button, which upon pressing hard enough could destroy the entire world. Happened it thusly:

Savely had a childhood → this childhood was given him by his parents → someone amongst these parents also had parents, at least several, one...

§1 Re: New heights. Be it odd and accidental, be it fateful, consequential, a few good things happened lately, even tho I’m being humble marking them modestly as “good”, for they are rather remarkable and unprecedented for me: my story “Dragonfly’s Retinal Structure” was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Short Fiction, making into the top 10 amongst 108. You can find my story and the whole shortlist on the contest’s website.

“Dragonfly’s Retinal Structure” is a special p...

Internet of the future — the central tree of consciousness — shall open vistas of infinite tasks and unite humanity.

Around the main data centres of Internet, this digital castle where clouds of wires scatter like hair, there will surely be inscribed a pair of bones, a skull and the familiar inscription: "Danger," for the slightest cessation of Internet's work would cause the spiritual blackout of the entire world, a temporary loss of its consciousness.

Internet becomes the spiritual sun of the wo...