Tears of a Komsomol Girl

by Audrey Szasz, Karolina Urbaniak (Illustrator), Martin Bladh (Interviewer)

Tears of a Komsomol Girl by Audrey Szasz is an experimental concept novel based on the real-life crimes of Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who was finally executed in 1994 having been convicted of murdering 52 people between 1978 and 1990.

USSR, Rostov, 1980s. Arina, a young girl - insolent, obnoxious, but most importantly musically gifted, poses as the ideal student - upstanding, hardworking, and a member of the Komsomol - the Soviet Union's Communist Youth League. Fantasising unrealistically about becoming an internationally famous classical violinist, and yet simultaneously behaving as cynically and hypocritically as she can, Arina uses her Komsomol duties as a pretext for strutting unsupervised around town of an evening, fraternising with soldiers and Party bureaucrats alike, compulsively lying to cover her tracks. And yet her sleep is punctuated by obsessive and oppressive dreams concerning a certain killer who's been on the loose for years - a ruthless, sadistic and thoroughly vicious opportunist referred to in rumours as Citizen X, the Rostov Ripper, or simply Satan - a monster who brutally slays children and adolescents having assaulted them at knifepoint. As the killings become ever more torturous and frenzied, and the number of innocent victims tragically swells, it's only a matter of time before Arina finally crosses paths with Satan, and her nightmares turn into a reality.

Genres: Fiction, True Crime

210 pages, Hardcover

First published December 10, 2020

About the author

Instagram: @szasz_audrey

Reviews

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I might come back to this and write a more in-depth review in the future. For now, I'll just say the presentation is incredible. Excellent collage work, great photography which shows Audrey really getting into character. The writing is great as well, though it didn't connect with me quite as much as her last novella. Though I appreciated that last one more on a second and third read. Might have to return to this one too. (Original review from 2/21)

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Update 3/13 - Decided to come back to this review and add some more thoughts on it, though I haven't gone back and re-read it yet. Planning on listening to her appearance on Wake Island and going back to it. Some spoilers ahead.

As I mentioned before, the presentation here is superb; the book is a work of art just as a physical object. Looks and feels great to hold - all the pages are glossy, more like a magazine than a typical book, and there's a lot of full color photos through out. Each chapter begins with a collage piece with the centerpiece being a picture of the author playing the main character of Arina, a teenage girl living in the 1980s USSR. Throughout the chapters there's also pictures of Arina after her encounters with a vicious serial killer (based upon the real-life killer Andrei Chikatilo.) You can take a look at the Infinity Land website to see how those encounters end. This book isn't inexpensive (especially if you're outside the UK), but it is very high quality.

I really enjoy Szasz's prose, it's very rich and descriptive with a dark sense of humor. There's some videos on Youtube where you can listen to her read an exceprt from Marquis De Sade's "Justine", and I liked to imagine her telling us the story of Arina. I also enjoyed her mentioning some Russian new wave music of the era, and whenever a group came up I'd listen to them on YouTube (Infinity Land Press also made some cool videos hyping the release of the novel with similar soundtracks.) Just from the description of the story, the photos and the mention of De Sade - you probably realize that this is not a book for the squeamish. Arina's encounters/nightmares/dreams/fantasies(?) involving the "Rostov Ripper" are very detailed.

I mentioned in the original review that the book didn't quite connect with me quite as much as her "Invisibility: A Manifesto" novella, and after thinking about it a bit, I realize why. One of the things I really enjoyed about that novella was how it alternated between 2 (maybe 3?) different characters (or just different points of view?) Half of the book revolved around Nina, a victim of sex tracking forced into sexual behavior by a character she refers to as "Mother" - while the other half revolved around a character named Audrey Szasz, who uses her sexuality to her advantage and whose antics leave people dead (especially after teaming up with a pair of serial killer cannibals.)

I really enjoyed that contrast, and the description of this book made me expect something similar - with the character of Arina sounding like a bit of a brat, blatantly breaking rules and fraternizing with older men, while being haunted by visions of a serial killer. The book features plenty about the latter, but not a lot of the former. As a narrator , Arina tells us about the former without really showing us, there's not a lot of detail - while the latter goes into very explicit detail. So I couldn't help but feel slightly disappointed that the excellent sense of balance found in "Invisibility: A Manifesto" seemed to be missing here.

Rather than being a flaw, maybe I was naive to expect that an experimental writer like Szasz would use the same method of writing/same theme in her follow-up book. Perhaps the lack of detail was meant to imply that Arina wasn't a reliable narrator, and that in reality these adventures are a figment of her imagination - that she is simply a girl who went through an a lot of trauma when she was younger, and is now haunted by these nightmares of being killed. Perhaps a way of convincing herself that she deserved the awful things that were done to her, and that will inevitably occur to her in nightmares and in the future.

Szasz is an excellent artist, not only with her prose, but also with her getting into character for the photographs which are beautifully done. I also find her social media intriguing, as she often posts pictures that seem to be her portraying one of the characters in her books. There's an interview with Audrey done by Martin Bladh included at the end of the book which shares some thoughts on her usage of social media, among other topics.

I highly recommend checking out Audrey Szasz, particularly her "Invisibility" chapbook, and if you enjoy that, move on this novel. After writing this, I'm looking forward to giving this another read as well as reading her first published work "The Abduction of JG Ballard". She's an extremely promising young author.

[Alana · Rating 4 out of 5]

like most young girls i am always dreaming of soviet russia, being brutally had by a statue of lenin come to life, and of course let’s not forget my own abject fall at the hands of a murderer mythologized as satan himself coming(cumming) teeming and thrashing from the dark depths of my unconscious. an entirely realised and dream-like text (the dream is a nightmare). a narrative that’s snigglingly detached repetitive reoccurring and fragmentary leaving one with no sympathy no understanding — just the pure terror of a komsomol girl — not to mention her tears, hot and salty tears mixed with blood semen and her own piercing screams gaged and left over to be shaken and not stirred then served as ur favourite cocktail or aperitif. a romantic read to curl up to for sure ♥️

[Ben Arzate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full Review

Tears of a Komosol Girl is an excellent first novel. It mixes the genres of true crime, coming of age, historical fiction, and surreaism in a seamless and unique way. Szasz's prose is excellent and vivid. Between this and her novelette Invisibility: A Manifesto, she's one of the most exciting newer writers I've come across. Highly recommended.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Nerves tingling—new sensations—repetition compulsion, an uncontrollable urge to overpower, injure, and maim.” In this baroque, punchy, almost altogether Day-Glo bit of fantasist prosody, author Audrey Szasz, an extremely calculating ‘literature of transgression’ type, announces less her theme than her metaphysic or her cosmicity. “Repetition compulsion” is very much at the heart of the matter; the term appears not only in her new novel itself, but also in the interview with Szasz conducted by Martin Bladh included with the boutique Infinity Land edition of this debut full-length longfrom whirlpooler. Bladh is obviously a figure of central curatorial and perhaps also cult-of-personality-type exchange-value at the small boutique outlet Infinity Land—publisher of among other things the letters and ephemera of Antonin Artaud—and as such the genial book lover may be inclined to imagine him in possession of a walking stick topped perhaps by a large anthracite skull. The interview appears at the back of the volume in question, and in having already presumably read the novel, no reader can possibly be surprised that Bladh has to start by poking his previously mentioned possible walking stick into the thorny matter of author, protagonist, degree of conceptual irony, possible personal kink angle, and the nature of performance when the performer can pose for photographs and participate in media events but will always be largely for the reader of the physical book a performer ‘in absentia.’ Audrey Szasz is young. I am not certain how ingenuous an interviewee she is when affecting a somewhat guileless or folksily pleb non-sophistication on various matters of roving interest, this being when she suddenly becomes most like young Arina, I think, the young protagonist of TEARS OF A KOMSOMOL GIRL, fourteen at novel’s commencement and/or for the bulk of its duration (don’t hold me to that). Audrey Szasz may be young, okay, a good deal more so than am I, but she is also a sophisticated stylist and formalist with a German car manufacturer’s genius for the fine machine and the finely-nuanced multi-tiered running of same. A stylist and rhythm sage with a long and here unerring lyrical streak, speeds ever ready to adjust to her demands, Szasz also knows the formal and conceptual limits of her undertaking like the back of her hand, understanding all the while punctuation to serve as a kind of dispenser of occult authority as well as the manual transmission as the prose stylist’s regulatory model. The manual transmission is there precisely so that when you decelerate and shift down you can feel the full potential-energy kinetic immanence of the lower chakras. This too is crystallinity, however bent on whatever harsh trip and/or constitutive de- or anti-socializing trauma. This is Audrey making clear that she knows her machine’s console as well as the geniuses in Munich or Hamburg must know theirs: “For some reason, I felt that I didn’t want to run the risk of inadvertently glorifying a serial killer or exploiting the suffering of his victims to shock or titillate…. Having spent a considerable amount of time in Russia, I also didn’t want to fall back on lazy, kitschy stereotypes viv-à-vis the Soviet experience, but rather hoped to produce something at least a little bit more nuanced…. I don’t know to what degree I succeeded in achieving this, but what’s done is done, and I guess I have to stand by what I’ve written….” The real life historical serial killer in the present case is Andrei Chikatilo (Citizen X, the Rostov Ripper, Satan), marginally human and largely lupine predator with a propensity for the violent squeezing of his odiferous leaky genitals in wincing despair of them, but the hazy schematic here allows Audrey Szasz, our author as secondarily-sourced-out performer and collector of ruthless obsessions, dressed up on the cover of this book identikited as a real Ripper victim next to whose corpse she is posed, to come to serve and be served-up as narrator, faux-conceptual embodied instantiating register of first-person voice pursuing its savage metier beyond the purview of anything safe or any longer coherently social (or even stably worlded). “Desolate dreams—of ships, cranes, railroads, river ports. Sweet dreams—of eating vanilla ice cream or meat pierogi on Pushkin Street—of staring at young people strolling in groups—or even admiring the glimmer of modern shop windows. Will I ever wake up from this stifling slumber? You know, I don’t care what the other kids say. I really don’t care if they envy, resent, or mock me, because one day I’m going to make it all the way to Moscow—they’ll film my performances and present them on Channel 1—and I’ll be famous all over the Union, just like Zhenya Kissin, the pianist. I bet he doesn’t have that many friends either. How could he? He’s a talented musician.” Because she is a stalwart Komsomol girl, institutional prodigy violinist, and one in what is apparently a series of comically oversized pouting Audrey Szasz snob surrogates, Arina is always to a certain extent a burlesque figure and a joke (I happen to believe it a very good and very slippery joke). The nostalgia here is never just a joke just as Arina and Andrei Chikatilo cannot be, even as they must be, they whole serpent dance a kind of textbook cannibalistic ouroboros circularity and a tightening of the string on which a targeted, zoned-in fugue state asserts its force of attraction by staging the same laboriously extended and re-extended hallucinatory pas de deux of killer and quarry, again and again, stage-managed beyond all memory of manageability and therefore needing to be managed all the more fiercely, single-mindedly, no time for the protocols of Geneva. We are undergoing some sort of molecular obliteration at all times. “And as I snap back into my flesh I realize that my eye-sockets are empty and I can’t move my limbs.” The be flesh, to enfleshen, the unfleshen. Eternal raging (and ragingly strobic) resurrection. Arina is the People Pleaser / Overachiever / Good Girl and its own Jekyll engineering its own Mr. Hyde, plus she occupies this special seat of distinction in a world with those ubiquitous Russian track suits, the elektichka that runs through the outer suburbs of Rostov, all the bad Perestroika-era pop music and mass culture silliness, a kindergarten song about how “the fighting soul of Ilyich is still burning in our hearts,” as well as a continuum of precarity allowing for only transformation at the level of surfaces and sanctioned interchange or intercourse, practices that bind just as they exclude. The cute/funny fan fiction / true crime-parodic element at play in TEARS OF A KOMSOMOL GIRL is so immediately swallowed, acidified, and otherwise categorically pulped that to call it “cursory” is to already start having trouble grasping the dexterity of Audrey Szasz’s extremely impressive and uneasily febrile achievement. Take a funny throwaway line that seems at first like little more than a very fine gag about that normative function with respect to jaded, slump-shouldered youth (therefore basically universal): “Everyone hates a party activist, and nobody likes a kiss-ass.” The thing is, it is the fact that this is a joke about the normative function with implicit reference to the embodied experience of world and time that already has us tangling with the question of a metaphysical or ontological ground for the achievement of a mental and physical territory that can be realizeed on an open and intensive plane where Satan and the little smart-mouthed girl with the pigtails and salad bowl bangs can succumb to their ritual erotic-cosmic overload without the small matter of a person’s only being able to be killed once having to figure really at all. Readers may know Muriel Spark’s THE DRIVER’S SEAT and some of Dennis Cooper’s more ghoulish tales of courtship and the erotics of elective victimhood. You may also like myself have had the opportunity to see the happily aberrant candy-coloured Brazilian schoolgirl movie KILL ME PLEASE (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2015). (It’s a film I’d certainly recommend to Szasz if she hasn’t seen it yet.) Okay, right, but none of these previous novels (and one film) lean in so zanily and ultimately so virtuosically as Szasz does to that business we qualified at the outset relating to this whole repetition compulsion para- or fugue-territoriality that connects TEARS OF A KOMSOMOL GIRL less for me to Robbe-Grillet, as Martin Bladh sort of starts to argue, so much as two Robert Coover novellas, SPANKING THE MAID (1982) and BRIAR ROSE (1996), both of which in turn evoke for me the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s book on Sacher-Masoch and the 'concept-assemblage' of bondage, a field of sense related to regressive repetition and gradual intensification in service to the maintenance of a sustained vibrating nerve pitch. Audrey Szasz adds to the mix something we find in the two CAPITALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA books Deleuze co-authored with Institutional Psychiatrist and onetime presumed Lacan successor Félix Guattari, in which much of what is conceptualized relates to clinically-varifiable varieties of experience lived out by human creatures cast to the wastes or excluded from heteronormative reproductivity or any kind of somatic-resonant situated communal correlation. We can analyze endlessly some of the ways this tricky business operates at the level of a particular and I think increasingly impressive literary language. “The endless approaches, ice-breakers, innocuous conversation starters, cheerful questions—destinations—desires—dilapidated versions of depravity—slaughter scenes in the tall grass—dereliction dreams of spring afternoons in Shakhty—the dusty platforms of Novocherkassk—the sunken streets of Krasny Sulin—a folding knife and two lengths of rope. Insect life—crawling through a shrinking aperture of self-recrimination mingled with unbridled ecstatic lust, like blood and semen curdling in a knife wound—a naphthalene kiss—the paranoia—shadowboxing—over his shoulder—the spectre of the militsiya detective—the courtroom, future trial, vengeful relations, animal howls of pain and agony, the slammer, the cells, the firing squad. They can’t get me. They can’t hunt me down. I’ll never be apprehended.” Whatever consolation we may find in believing this whole literal shit show high comedy should by this point be thoroughly dispelled. I find the mindset provided expression here utterly convincing, finding no difficulty either in picturing it gone off to murder or mutilate untold numbers of boys and girls pursuant of some sort of twisting, spiraling, increasingly frenzied pattern of a lone wolf’s extemporaneously learned behaviour, the core murderous and flesh-collage-jazzed mandate of which clearly here finds its compliment similarly if differently in both Arina and Audrey Szasz. “This excites me. I feel something like pleasure. It’s unreal. As though I’ve reached another level, a higher plateau, removed from the banality of everyday life.” Maybe not the thousandth plateau in particular, but we know we’s in the ballpark, kid. This is the 1980s Perestroika Russia in which we get all the goofy set dressing, yet ever and always here the benign and expected “homemade kvass and apple pie,” say, will find its phantom twin doublet in “penectomy and orchidectomy.” I'm a reader who is invariably going to read between the lines and ground this thing in ways Szasz has but most readers might not be equipped to. Andrei Chikatilo was a small Ukrainian child during the Second World War. In reading TEARS OF A KOMSOMOL GIRL, I could not help recall the following passage from BLOODLANDS: EURPOE BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN by eminent historian Timothy Snyder, which I will dutifully cite for you now: “People in the Ukraine never considered cannibalism to be acceptable. Even at the height of the famine, villagers were outraged to find cannibals in their midst, so much so that they were spontaneously beaten or even burned to death. Most people did not succumb to cannibalism. An orphan was a child who had not been eaten by his parents. And even those who did eat human flesh acted from various motivations. Some cannibals were clearly criminals of the worst kind. Bazylii Graniewicz, for example, lost his brother Kolya to a cannibal. When the cannibal was arrested by the militia, Kolya’s head was among eleven found in his house. Yet cannibalism was, sometimes, a victimless crime. Some mothers and fathers killed their children and ate them. In those cases the children were clearly victims. But other parents asked their children to make use of their own bodies if they passed away. More than one Ukrainian child had to tell a brother or sister: ‘Mother says that we should eat her if she dies.’ This was forethought and love.” Just because life does not get any heavier than that shit don't not mean it ain't life. As for young, haughty, Universal Socialist Arina….what? Another citation, I should think. She only really exists in Audrey Szasz’s language (especially at its most speedy / least em-dashy): “I can’t get any leverage to keep him from stabbing me, and he pushes my arms to one side, gripping them with his spare hand, and he easily forces my hands above my head, and that’s when I know I’m going to die, and a scent of wet bison grass, and something like rubber or chlorine, or a sickly-sweet smell like shaving cream or soap mingled with stale masculine sweat overwhelms me and—in the dream—he stabs at me but misses me somehow and the knife which looks like any other kitchen knife with a blunt tip and a slightly serrated blade and a plastic handle that you’d find in any household rotates in the space between his hand and my face and that’s when he reaches down to his crotch and I’m overwhelmed with fear and disgust and the inevitability of the pain and agony I’m going to suffer as I struggle to cry out in my sleep and as the knife comes down I feel it sink into my skin beneath my collarbone and it’s coming again relentlessly and as the blade is planted into my throat it pierces my larynx and then, and only then, do I wake up with a nauseating jolt and I sit there on the bed huddled in my sheets, wide awake, until sunlight finally appears behind the dormitory drapes.”

[Ben Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dreams and terrors of Komsomol girl Arina, who is by turns a musical whiz and a sorry degenerate who's destined for some cruel sacrifice here. This really is a visionary read, presented in the utmost style by Infinity Land Press.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the bodies. Gone now, but seared into his memory. Burning fields. Retribution. Swift reprisals. Partisans strung up, their corpses swaying, to set an example. The foreigners from the West, marching through.
Trampling the innocent underfoot. The butt of a rifle, a bayonet, gasoline, a burning barn, the terrified screams of the villagers trapped inside, the thatched roofs, wooden beams, piles of straw, human flesh, cooking, burning, going up in billowing clouds of acrid smoke. Starvation. The crippling pangs of hunger. Indescribable pain. And the rumours. Of kids going missing. Questionable sources of meat. Old wives tales. Driven to madness. Scare stories. Morbid gossip. Unattended babies snatched and slaughtered, insanity, cruelty, brought on by sheer desperation. The Red Army is advancing now. Our T-34s versus their Panzers. And the animals the Germans slaughtered during their retreat - livestock riddled with machinegun fire — pure calculated spite and unadulterated cynicism - what else can one expect from them? — blood flowing, pooling, congealing, the buzzing flies — the terror and the hunger again — skeletal figures, collapsed, too weak to move, bellies distended, faces emaciated, rendered ugly, terrifying, alien, repulsive. Scorched earth. What you wouldn't give to ambush a Nazi, slit his throat, slaughter him like a pig, cut out his tongue, slice off his ears, nose, genitals, gouge out his eyes, and string him up by his ankles for his fellow krauts to find. Let them all suffer, like we've suffered. Let them starve and burn to death. Let them have a taste of their own medicine. They'll rue the day they so much as set foot on our soil.

How to stay alive now? How to put it all to one side - to somehow forget - to live with it? A foreign soldier bayonets a bloated corpse. Frozen bodies, hideous, in various states of decomposition, covered in fresh snow.
Uniforms drenched with blood. Every time the Germans passed through the village they repeatedly desecrated the bodies of their victims that hung there, suspended from the gallows they constructed especially to terrorize the locals. Sometimes the invaders get drunk, tear the clothes from the bodies of the women they've killed, mutilate and defile them further. The memories return in your sleep. The anxiety, panic, fear. You wake drenched in sweat. You were too young to fight. You were a child, weak, helpless. Death was everywhere. The horror and misery were seemingly relentless. They stole everything. They took what was rightfully ours....


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[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

An experimental novel with photographs. The plot revolves around a young female protagonist rebelling against her harsh upbringing by transgressing in various typical ways. She makes the perfect target of a notorious serial killer.

The author spends ample time describing the Brutalist cityscape of the USSR, which is a place she is familiar with. She hails from Vienna, but spent much time in Russia and other European locales before settling in England. The reason I picked up this book was because I read the author's novella in the anthology Neo-Decadence Evangelion. Her use of language is impressive. Instead of figurative language, she relies more on stark, pristine sentences, often burdened by grotesque subject matter. On display is a fascination with the Ballard-esque dehumanizing sex and violence. In the appended interview she purports a fandom for Ballard's Atrocity Exhibit. This work is predicated on a similar aesthetic. Its images are haphazard, but it steadily builds tension by getting into the protagonist's head. Abuse is a recurring theme in her work, as evidenced by her other books, Counterillumination and Zealous Immaculate. So far, those works further diversify her style and approach. She favors unreliable narrators, often girls from a broken home or an abusive foster care system. I don't think this says anything about the author's own upbringing. In her interview, she talks about the mimesis and her stylistic devotion to playacting through her characters. The photographs may add to some readers' squeamish reactions, staged though they are. I would have preferred actual crime scene footage to be interspersed, but I can foresee all kinds of issues with trying to publish those. The publisher is already pushing the envelope about as far as you will find nowadays.
She switches forms in this book several times, employing multiple perspectives. Unreliable narration is the norm. We are often not sure if the events depicted in such graphic detail are mere fantasies or reality. We see the same events repeated in different locales, the same rituals reenacted from differing angles. The author strives for verisimilitude, succeeding on every front to confront the ghastly details of the crimes with clinical attention.
A lot of subliminal cultural context is present between the lines, but the author's intense focus on the extremes of human nature make for exciting reading. For a visceral experience, she can be counted on to deliver.
I am so curious about her collaboration with the superb author Jeremy Reed entitled, Plan for the Abduction of J. G. Ballard. I'm already reading some of her other work and look forward to what she puts out.

[Christopher Owens · Rating 4 out of 5]

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