#wip: anthologia sovietica

[sunlit-gully]

WIP GAMES

Rules: Make a week-long poll with the names of your wips, let it run, then write one sentence for every vote the winner received.

This poll will be up for a week, until 28th August.

[sunlit-gully]

a wip by yours truly

ABOUT:

genre — anthology, slice of life

target word count — 3mil

status — first draft

themes — family / politics / war / love, grief, and love, again and again and again

warnings — violence and gore / death / substance, domestic, physical & psychological abuse / big trauma

SYNOPSIS:

All the Sokolenko are born in cradles of thorn. 1942. Mykola was struck with blast injury when he accidentally detonated an entire minefield, turning 10 Germans into one-time astronauts. The bigwigs up above, they gave him a medal, a quarantine hut, and a Georgian nurse called Medea by his side. Two week in and they found themselves cuddling together in bed. Two years in and Medea vanished in the maws of the Reich, while Mykola sobbed under the mask of a cool, calculating soldier. Eight years in and they knocked together a home, an unadorned thing, a bare nest on a bare tree, for themselves and a Jewish orphan boy. Fifteen years in and Mykola was alone. Again. 1992. Rusudan scrubbed off the blood scarlet smudged lipstick marks round the corner of her mouth with a forcefulness that surprised herself. She had just made out with her husband Kaspars in the middle of a Sukhumi forest moments ago, intensely as if they were the wildlife they were studying, intensely as if it might be their last time. Last time…Why had those words occurred to her? The woman shook her head at the unfinished thought - all the mess and debacle with the troubles in Abkhazia shouldn't be getting to her like this, it was supposed to be their day, it was supposed to be their day. Even if there had been gunshots right behind your backs…a treacherous voice squeaked faintly in her head. All of a sudden, Kaspars froze besides Rusudan, jaw clenched and eyes blown wide, in the middle of what she now realised as a bosky, shadowy canopy. Before she could open her mouth and ask her usually stoic husband what it was that bothered him so, she followed his eyes and saw it - the telltale red glint of a sniping laser. 2016. Gennadiy leant back on the creaky plane seat, fiddling with a Christmas card sent early, by Father, of course - the old man was afraid of all things late ever since Mother's death. Just some days ago he was singing his head off with all his colleagues in the Army Choir; his head still buzzed with echoes of the applaud; that bel canto movement of yours would move a heart of stone, so they said. He cared not a whit - now he was feeling quite nauseous indeed from the stuffy air, and already he was longing for the fresh sea breezes of Sochi, which the plane left just minutes ago. And out of the blue a hand clawed at Gennadiy's shoulder, just when fretful whispers were devolving into a savage uproar. It was clammy, shaky, and Gennadiy was frightened to see that his whole body was feeling just the same. And yet, he himself barely understood the panic till he saw the Black Sea growing nearer, nearer, nearer, through the jittering window, God above are there any lifeboats or what, guys we are crashing down the fucking sea, send the fucking SOS stop screaming stop screaming, now what the fuck was that boom- 2022. Sergey gazed at the virgin soil upturned of the frost-laced dirt road across a barren forest, the morning sun smothered by steely snow. His thoughts were bursting in odds and ends, but as long as it lasted he would be able to distract himself from the cold air and the rickety truck. This is where great grandpa called home, apparently, thought the young man. Who's gonna tell him his great grandson is also spilling blood over fascists in the very same land? His face broke into a bitter grin most decidedly unfitting for a young man barely out of university. To think he and I will be fighting against the same bunch, a century apart…Sergey glanced backwards; all his fellow boys were asleep, the sleep of battered men to whom peace was flitting. The young soldier toned his grin down to a weak twitch in the mouth and went back to guarding, the cold steel of rifle pressing against soft palms. And at that moment, as the snow spun and the soldiers snored and the wheels creaked and the winds howled, Sergey thought longingly of a time-locked drawer at home, containing nothing but a letter and a scrapbook. It was for his newborn son. All the Sokolenko are born in cradles of thorn.

[sunlit-gully]

"🎶 What song do they swear they hate until they’re alone and start singing it on repeat?" and "🔪 Open up this character's kitchen cupboards. What do you see?" for anyone from anthologia sovietica!

omg adklsjfkjskl thank you for making my inbox useful at last!

let's go with Lasha and Mykyta respectively. them youngest kids deserve more attention.

🎶 What song do they swear they hate until they’re alone and start singing it on repeat?

Lasha was (still is) vitriolically hateful to the song Arlekino for literally no reason, at least in public. Mostly because of the circus music riff at the beginning (Entry of the Gladiator), as well as the clown laughs between the verses that, according to him, 'provokes the heebies-jeebies violently'. But apart from that, man has literally no problem humming the rest of the tune while doing house chores; apparently, it had become an earworm of sorts to him.

Also, Lasha as a kid heard this song on radio right after a frightful sickness, so he had always associated it, though quite vaguely, with the end of all things bad. This does not diminish his hatred for the song's circus sound effects in any way.

🔪 Open up this character's kitchen cupboards. What do you see?

Mykyta? Kitchen cupboards solely containing actual cups and cutleries? Not a chance in hell. We're talking about a spy here. Any of those cutleries can hide intel, transmit signals (though to be fair the signals won't be very clear over the sizzles, but that's the point), act as dead drops, or just be general decoys. And the weaponry possibilities are as endless and creative as it gets - there was this one time Mykyta actually managed to gouge out the eyeball of an intruder with a marrow scoop, veins and all. Don't ask for more details;

Bon appétit.

[sunlit-gully]

🤥 LYING - are they good liars? do they have tells to show they're lying?

Doing this for Mykola Tykhomyrovych Sokolenko from Anthologia Sovietica.

He was not a good liar. He was not a great liar. He was a consummate liar.

To be frank, this is an unwritten requirement in his job, aka foreign intelligence. Yes, Mykola worked as a KGB officer, a Major General upon retirement, so would it be any surprise that he had a co(s)mically big repertoire of false identities? To list his most frequently used identities, in the Centre he was Comrade Smirnov, in Britain he was Sir Alan Ross Norton, in Ireland he was Séamus de Búrca, in Australia he was Scott Hardy, in New Zealand he was Ewan Muir, and in Scandinavia he was Axel Hansen. But his contemporaries, they only called him one thing.

The Virtuoso.

In his personal life, though, Mykola could not hide shit to save his life (he would not have wanted to anyway). Medea had proven time and time again that she could be trusted with secrets (which is, frankly, to be expected for a doctor) and could handle the more unsavoury side of married life, so Mykola saw little reason to lie about his thoughts and feelings in their relationship. As of his children, Mykola did somewhat deceive them, if you call putting on a stern, distant face after the mother's death qualifies as deception. To be fair, lying implied that a party was not aware of the truth; all his kids saw through the act immediately but chose not to comment on it to his face.

All in all, the stage missed out big time on Mykola Sokolenko the moment he entered KGB.

[sunlit-gully]

Hey! 13. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? Both for any character you want!

oh my god thank you sjkdfhakshdfkjahskjfskjxncx

Let's go with Medea Kurauli from Anthologia Sovietica because. uhm. blorbo.

13. What colour do they think they look best in? Do they actually actually look best in that colour?

Dark blue and yes. Incidentally it's also a primary colour in Khevsur traditional clothes. Medea would kinda look like the lady in this picture:

D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look?

Medea have always had the vibes of the lady above, but I have to figure out her specific features. Lika Kavjaradze is the most fitting, so far:

Also, Monica Bellucci is a really good reference:

[sunlit-gully]

Happy STS! Let's talk about secrets. Do your characters or world have them? Are they considered a good thing or bad? Who in your cast is most likely to spill one? ♥️

Let's go with Anthologia Sovietica again...because it's my most developed project so far. Rest assured, Eight of Stars isn't entirely forgotten. Oh, and also to keep it short, I'll focus on the first 2 generations.

Down to business, shall we? Well, of fucken course the world does. The first Sokolenko generation is already big on secrets; it's Mykola's whole shtick...which is unsurprising; we're talking about a KGB Major General here. And Medea had quite a few regarding her Chechen side in Nashkhoy and her imprisonment in Ravensbruck.

Lev never spoke of his summer fling Klara to any family members (at least, until that fateful Christmas party when he stumbled upon his illegitimate daughter, Ursula, and her family). Viktor is...reticent about his gay one-night stands during his time in underground theatres, to say the least (it's not exactly taboo in the family, but all of them prefer to let sleeping dogs lie). Rusudan kept her (never discovered) murder of her abusive ex Filip Adomaitis, of all things, better than the CIA keeps its classified operations. Lasha would never admit to having killed people in the Ossetian War, though it was for defense. And again, Mykyta, whose espionage career rivals his father, has secrets galore as well; his career spanned both KGB and FSB, and he was Major General upon resignation - make of that what you will.

Most of the time, secrets aren't much of a concern in the Sokolenko family. There's a reason they're secrets, after all, and almost everybody understands that reason. I said almost, because there are those who don't understand...or to be exact, there were those who didn't understand. An overwhelming majority of them were casualties of Mykola and Mykyta's spy wars.

At least it was nothing personal.

The ones most likely to spill the secrets are mostly the youngsters from the 4th and 5th generations. In particular, Tivadar, Laima, Carmen, Ketevan and Safaa are prime suspects, though to their credit they have been in excellent control of their tongues so far.

Whew, so much for keeping it short, huh?

[sunlit-gully]

Hi there, its Athena. Welcome to my new Thursday Ask-A-Thon where its basically a Thursday version of my Sunday Ask-A-Thon where I ask ya'll about your wips: Has there been any major changes in a character in terms of how you created them, to how they turned out as the wip went on?

hi again Athena.

Well, definitely! My two most fleshed out WIPs has gone through at least 4 pivotal changes, each. I'll go with Anthologia Sovietica.

Medea Kurauli was originally a guy called Malkhaz Artsividze. However, because I changed her backstory from a regular Tbilisi urbanite guy to a Khevsur highlander, I had to change her name as well as her surname ending to fit the background (-uri/uli suffixes in Georgian surnames are a great bet that the bearers come from the Northeast highlands). Also, her missing-in-action period was originally much more vague - at the beginning I just thought she'd get ping-ponged between various captors before somehow finally meeting her crush postwar. Oh well, the Vrba-Wetzler Report and the Red Orchestra gave me some nasty, but necessary ideas to sketch out an alternative. One more thing, I originally intended her to have only one birth kid with Mykola aside from Lev, but the more I thought about it the sooner I realised that those two pining idiots would definitely not keep their hands off each other. So, four birth kids it is.

Mykola Sokolenko was originally a girl called Maria Kogut. However, the name didn't hit me the right way - I had always envisioned the character's personality as fierce and elegant at the same time and Maria just wasn't what I had in mind. Also, I changed his backstory from just a nondescript Ukrainian peasant girl into a half-Jewish Cossack boy (I somewhat blame the influence on Tommy Shelby). The assault on his mother by a Cossack was there since the beginning, but I never connected it to a pogrom till I read about Fastiv. And after some obsessive repetitions of the Seventeen Moments of Spring soundtrack on piano I decided that giving Mykola a job in KGB would be very very fitting, actually.

Lev was originally just some random Jewish kid wandering in a nondescript Polish forest in a constant state of fatigue and hunger during the War, but then I got some fridge brilliance and thought 'oy, he can be the catalyst to Mykola and Medea's union!' So I gave him a much more active role; he evaded the Germans and the concentration camps, followed the nearest Soviet division he could find around till they gave up and let him be their scout, and eventually got trusted with establishing connections with local sympathisers because he could speak Polish and German fluently (this boy is fluent in 4 languages by the time he reached the age of 15 he is a chad alright). Note the last part: that's how Mykola found Medea.

Rusudan was originally supposed to be a nurse, following her mother's medical career. However, after some thinking I realised that her flippant, adventurous spirit would definitely feel stifled by the rather rigid hierarchy and heavy workload of the major Soviet hospitals, so instead I let her become a wildlife biologist. That way Rusudan got to be the cool science lady she deserved to be. Shame that her death turned out to be very early and tragic...

Lasha and Mykyta were actually last-minute additions. I was kinda on a whim and wanted to see how far the Sokolenko kids could travel and settle. The answer is very; Lasha ended up a cool lone ranger sort of ethnologist in the Caucasus, while Mykyta ended up following his dad's spying career but worked in a different department (Mykola was in the 3rd Department, his son in the 7th). I also gave them a sweet tooth and unnatural hunger for roasted meat of any kind, like their mother, as well as a love for horseriding, like their father.

[sunlit-gully]

Happy WBW! What's the harshest part of your world? Be it a place, a law, something character-created or otherwise, what is just HARSH?

Answering for my WIP Anthologia Sovietica. Spoilers ahead, read at your own caution.

Well if Medea Kurauli's life wasn't some harsh shit I don't know what is.

She was born to Nino Chincharauli (a Khevsur Georgian) and Vakha Aldamov (a Chechen). The girl was the result of Vakha's illicit affair with his tachanka driver Nino, which ended in disaster because Nino turned out to be a traitor and a spy. In the end Vakha had to execute his own lover, in the middle of a battle no less, and unwillingly abandoned a newborn Medea.

Otar Kurauli, the ten-year-old son of the local forest ranger, was scouting around the ground when he stumbled upon Nino's corpse, now irreversibly disfigured by a northern goshawk. The infant wrestling with the bloodthirsty bird of prey, so Otar took pity on her and decided to adopt her, as his mother was also nursing a newborn son and would have milk to spare.

When Medea was about to enter secondary education, she had to part with her hometown for a boarding school in Dusheti and, 8 years later, Tbilisi State Medical University. This obviously changed the girl a lot; for the first time in her life, the highlander girl got to experience new ideas and sights, and escape from the oftentimes-unbearable oppressiveness of her parents, who were very much conservative and sceptical of Soviet authorities. Medea retained some old Khevsur garments and traditions, but generally she found nature, music, clothes, and her siblings the only good parts of her childhood.

War broke out 2 years after her admission, and Medea joined her division as a field medic. Her medical skills, while mostly cobbled during wartime, were very much sufficient for treating battle injuries, and as such she was the division's sweetheart.

Soon the young medic pined for the division's intelligence officer Mykola. But before any of them could confess, their tender feelings were disrupted when Medea sacrificed herself to divert the German’s attention during an ambush in Sandomierz, subsequently getting imprisoned in Ravensbrück camp. This was where she suffered from horrific, unethical medical experiments and cruel assaults by camp tyrants, resulting in a crippled leg she had to amputate (she later used a wooden prosthetic leg). Fortunately, thanks to the courage she showed to the camp's chief when she refused to drink with him to victory of Nazi arms, Medea avoided her execution and, finally, ran from Nazis. She later anonymously submitted a testimony of her time in the camp to the Nuremberg Trial.

After having fled Ravensbrück, she joined as an unofficial member of a division belonging to the underground KPD resistance movement in Berlin, fighting alongside Soviet troops. This was when she met Lev Adler, the unofficial scout of the Soviet division she was trying to contact. They took a shine to each other at first sight due to shared trauma - Lev had also lost his family and innocence to the Nazi Reich. During the Battle of Berlin, Medea was chosen as her underground unit's representative in a meeting meant to establish contact with the nearest Red Army division. Much to her joy, her long-lost lover Mykola was also present. By a stroke of luck, all three survived to Victory Day and went back to the Soviet Union a happy family (Lev Adler now Lev Sokolenko). Afterwards Medea also got 4 more kids with Mykola - Viktor, Rusudan, Lasha and Mykyta - and gradually settled into domestic bliss.

Too bad the bliss only lasted 12 years.

Remember Medea's wooden prosthetic leg? This is where it comes to play. During a business trip to her native Chaukhi mountains, the doctor got caught in a flood. Because her wooden leg broke in two, she was unable to run away in time from the oncoming landslide.

Suffice to say her family never recovered from the shock.

[sunlit-gully]

ABOUT ME

Xin chào, hello, bonjour! A decent intro post for this blog is WAY long overdue, but here it is at last. Studies have been super demanding, but my mental health has regained some semblance of health and positivity (despite, and somehow also thanks to, my ADHD) in, so I suppose I'm quite ready to handle more writing at the moment.

All being said and done, hello, hi, it's me your Vietnamese homegirl Ravine (she/her)! Welcome to my little Internet nook and, as my blog title goes, have a look around.

Oh, and a note on my politics. While it's not immediately relevant to my writing, take note that I am Marxist-Leninist. Cue mandatory DNI list of fascists, imperialists, radfems, pedos, and their reactionary hordes of lapdogs that I can't be assed to list.

Now, on a brighter note,

ABOUT MY WIPS

↠An ennealogy of loosely connected slice-of-life anthologies following the Sokolenko family, which spans 100 years, 36 ethnicities, and 2 continents.

↠Includes 9 main books and numerous side stories, one-shots, and drabbles.

↠Link to wip intro here.

↠Link to all character face claims + profiles (updating)

↠Tag used: #wip: anthologia sovietica

↠ An octalogy following the rise of an earth-shattering revolution led by eight prodigies in the fantasy Asian-inspired world Tenhar, where a power-hungry empire is threatening the natural harmony of human, spirits, and the Eight Elements.

↠Includes 8 main books and numerous side stories, one-shots, and drabbles.

↠Link to wip intro here.

↠Link to all character moodboards (updating)

↠Link to all character picrew face claims (updating)

↠Tag used: #wip: eight of stars

↠A slice-of-life series of loosely connected short stories following 'shadow couples' (according to MBTI personality theory) in various sorts of situations - some end in tragedy, others in happiness, yet others in utter pandemonium. Life, you know?

↠The series contain numerous one-shots and loosely connected drabbles. Full-fledged books may be considered if befitting reader requests and my own motivation.

↠Link to wip intro here.

↠Link to all character moodboards (updating)

↠Link to all character picrew face claims (updating)

↠ Tag used: #dyads

OTHER TAGS

#personal: for all things personal, but really, it's just miscellaneous. memes, life refs, nice stuffs - ya know, the trinkets in a magpie nest.

#writing nook: all things writing, which may or may not be related to the wips. almost always goes with #writeblr.

#commie cranny: it has been 0 days since Ravine last raged against late stage capitalism. companion tag is #political pieces, where I, predictably, rage against late stage capitalism in words.

#literally literature: my Thoughts™ on literature, i.e. books. much more obscure stuff than you think.

#another one bites the dust: me when my political enemies go to their allotted chthonic shithole (i am the crab, the crab, the crab that is raving)