NOVEL

autofiction

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First edition © 2024
Abridged, revised edition © 2025

Diary becomes novel, fact fiction, youth old age, paranoia reality, Moscow Russia, short sentences long, passion painlust, AI primal language, chapters essays, sadism masochism, pornography philosophy, crude poetic, torture unmasking, domination humiliation, paragraphs poems, Stalin Mr. Kremlin, peace war, slave master…

The protagonist of Masterslave fights against paranoia and begins to realize that some things are truly off, yet he knows no one would ever believe him. Isolated and increasingly obsessed, he is drawn into a world of friends, torturers and mirrors—until a dating app leads him into captivity. From there, he enters a Europe untold, unmatched, unbound...

Contains stylistic and thematic transgressions in service of a literary voice (skaz).

Paragraphs from Masterslave

(...)

And that's what I hate—that war teaches me to stop loving Russia. No longer loving its people, no longer loving their language; no longer their detours, their shaky balance that somehow always holds, the dumbness that works out, the brilliance that fails, the endless plains where no one cries, the brutal stare without opinion, the indestructibility steeped in acid, a ballerina dancing on behalf of us all, the singer scraping out our saddest song; the wind that blows through everything. Russia, where have you gone?

(...)

I don't know if I know love. And isn't it true that not knowing her lets you understand her better? At least her illusion. And I believe that's all she is: illusion. One that vanishes the moment you've found her. Not being able to find her keeps the illusion alive—as long as she hurts, mentally or physically. When the pain stops, so does the love. That's why her pain is addictive—more than any other substance. You'll say: 'Love isn't pain. Love should be soft and embracing.' But isn't there always a movement that brushes up against the threshold of pain—and by doing so, dares it? This threshold is higher or lower depending on the person. And when does that shift into sadomasochism—or even torture? But once the illusion of torture is dismantled, then comes the end. Torture as a chosen illusion of love that allows love to last longer. A stay of execution. A delay of truth: that love doesn't exist, except in its illusion, enacted through pain.

(...)

I couldn't kill… I began to whip the master—as hard as I could; to torture him—as severely as I could; to work on him with knife as deep as I could, until I saw the flaming barrel... I walked toward it, grabbed the branding iron, walked toward the master, dropped it before him, turned around, ran to the barrel, grabbed its legs and shoved the fiery mass toward the throne—where flame and throne met in an instant.    

(...)

I still see the little bones lying next to the stones that had once covered them: the bone has evolved over billions of years—the stone has not. Yet they come from the same source. And when measured against the staggering distances of light-years that separate us from other stars, we see that stars too come from the same beginning... and you can't even call it a beginning—maybe it was an end, because we don't know and cannot know what we come from. Up to a point, yes, but that point is not sufficient to explain everything. That height fails us, offers no steady grip. We want to go further in our thinking, but we are cowards, afraid of the dark, afraid of ghosts, afraid of illusions—we are afraid only of ourselves in another. We fall in love with ourselves in another. We speak to ourselves in another. We see ourselves in another but do not dare look directly at ourselves. We are not yet ready—for the great step forward or backward—because our language is limited. We prefer to read recipes to poems. We prefer repetition to something new. We prefer shouting to a crying voice—because we are cowards afraid of seeing ourselves. That's why we will never know where we come from—up to a point—and where we are going—up to a point.

(...)

After the driver had accompanied Arvo to Oleg's apartment and the door was opened, they fell into each other's arms and both were startled by it. Oleg became a child with Arvo and Arvo became an adult with Oleg. Oleg gave Arvo a suitcase and told him to put the contents of his bag into it, then grabbed the old bag. Arvo looked around the apartment, which was tall and spacious, with beautiful furniture and even a piano—something he'd only ever seen in a church back in Finland. Oleg wore a three-piece suit, put on his fur coat, grabbed his fur hat from the rack, looked at Arvo with his suitcase, picked up his own suitcase, and walked outside together with Arvo into the early morning, into the virgin snow of Gorky Street, and stepped into the white luxury ZIS-101 that glided over the piercing snow from Tverskaya Street to the airport. They seemed to be the only souls in Moscow.

(...)

You see, it's the same pattern everywhere; someone has their thing and pushes it through, continues with it, becomes more adult, more powerful, richer, and craftier, starts expanding their thing, rises to the peak of their power and grows, becomes a thing-owner and gains thing-comrades who share the same thing-secret. That creates a bond, then it becomes a group-thing, people go look at the thing, let the thing do or do with it whatever they wish, and then suddenly there's no satisfaction anymore, and the thing is killed, a new thing comes, also gets killed, until the garden is full of them. A garden of dead things. Then it's time to be alert, because then the one who demanded the thing is weakened—by his surroundings or by age and decay—and then come the vultures, hyenas and jackals of which the thing-owner was once one, but now too weak to eat, only able to be eaten. Even this process ends when boredom draws near, the long boredom, the boredom of having felt almost every thing, seen, heard, killed, touched, even loved. Everything comes to an end, and you'll ask yourself: was I a thing or did I have a thing? Seek the answer in the question, even if no answer is possible, still. Ask yourself: am I such a thing or do I have such a thing? Did I demand or was I demanded? And the answer doesn't interest me in the least, because what matters is how you demanded and how you were demanded: with love or hatred, with the left or the right, with hardness or tenderness, with a man or a woman. Trace it, walk your path, your own path—but leave no corpses in the garden.

(...)

On a reading table lay a book—perhaps one no one had ever known, ever read. It was kept cool, in the best conditions. The small cage enclosing the reading table was unlocked for me and, once I stepped inside, closed again. I was a prisoner. Would I be the first allowed to see this book? Would it drive me mad? Is that what the cage was for? I had come here myself. I had been drawn in. It was my fault. I was guilty. I would become the witness to confessions recorded over many centuries—about the labyrinthine system of the upper and lower worlds, with only one entrance to the "shadow chamber," and that was the book.

(...)

This English translation was produced in collaboration with ChatGPT (OpenAI) and remains under the full literary and legal responsibility of the author.

Available at all bookstores and online, including at Brave New Books