How to plan and write your own disappearance

Wars do not end, but rather accumulate and, with them, forced movements of people: exiles, refugees, displaced persons, they can be called in many ways, but they are the non-fatal victims. When, among these exiles, there are writers, they usually leave texts tinged with sadness or melancholy for the lost homeland. What is not so common is that the texts take on a literary form close to fantasy, and I say close only because Desaparèixer, this perfectly geared nouvelle, with its feet in a Europe that has lost its identity and its head in a phantasmagoric world, has vanishing points that escape the realist corset. The oscillation between realism and fantasy makes one think of an acrobat walking a tightrope over European cities, train stations, impersonal hotel rooms, escape rooms, and circus rings to a point of no return from which one's own identity is completely interchangeable. As Joseph Roth said: "What is a man without papers? Less than a paper without men!"

The author of this piece that fits no mold is the writer Maria Stepànova, who, since the invasion of Ukraine, lives in exile in Germany, with a ban on returning to her native Russia. She is an important figure in the Russian literary world –a poet, a magazine editor, multi-award-winning–, and has concentrated in this work almost all the themes of exile literature without falling into cliché even once. Furthermore, she has crossed them with another subgenre, the art of disappearance, which has illustrious precedents, ranging from Samuel Beckett to Harry Houdini. Her narrative ingenuity, the poetry she manages to imbue in mundane places like waiting rooms, and the audacity she demonstrates in presenting a writer's journey to a literary festival as a vital rather than professional journey have allowed her to write a story that is difficult to forget.

Who has never fantasized about the possibility of transforming into another person? Leaving everything, no longer going to places we liked, as Cindy Sherman advised, being the other that wars precisely want to annihilate. Disappearance as a solution to the political tragedy of being ruled by a dictator like Putin, or the meaninglessness of the lives of writers who no longer know what to write because everything they say can be turned into an accusation against them. The most meritorious thing is that Stepanova imbues the radical proposal of disappearance with a playful proposal that takes the form of a tarot card: it is a book that Joan Brossa would have liked, who always remembered that circus artists must do the impossible without losing their smile. They should not miss this spectral pearl that takes away all the shame from an aging, rudderless, and culturally empty Europe.