My short story Abandoned Things is published in Spillwords Press. Read it here: https://spillwords.com/abandoned-things

Decided to start a blog. Texts and notes on literature, film, and other things I find interesting. Signed up on Substack. An ideal platform. https://substack.com/@dimaberkut

After reading The Smoke Tree by Denis Johnson, a novel less about war than about how war destroys the possibility of coherent meaning, I found myself returning to Apocalypse Now. The film remains deeply affecting, but it now reveals itself differently. What stands out most is how carefully ordered it is. The characters have a mission, a route, a clear objective. The journey upriver shapes not only the geography of the story but its narrative logic as well. Even chaos unfolds as a sequence, step by step. In this sense, Apocalypse Now invites comparison with Dante’s descent into Hell. There is a path and there is a movement inward. Each episode functions like its own circle, defined by a particular form of madness. First comes spectacle, violence that borders on the theatrical. Then cruelty. Then ritual. Finally, all of it converges in the figure of Kurtz. Horror here does not simply escalate. It is arranged and distributed. It has structure. What matters, too, is that the film allows evil to reach its extreme and still speak. Kurtz is mad, but he is articulate. He formulates his vision. The film does not dismiss the possibility that even in this hell there can be a final point where meaning, however warped, continues to exist. After The Smoke Tree, this feels especially stark. Johnson’s war is built on different principles. There is no route and no center. No descent through circles. His characters live inside hell itself, without knowing where it begins or where it ends. No one is leading them, and nothing leads anywhere. Meaning is not distorted. It disintegrates. That is why Apocalypse Now does not feel naive or dated. It belongs to a time when there was still faith that even the most extreme experience could be shaped into a journey and carried through to an ending. And that is precisely why it now reads as the last great myth of war. Complete, terrifying, and no longer possible in that form.

Rereading Sealed Off by Eileen Chang, one is struck by how an ordinary urban scene, a stalled tramcar during a wartime blockade, gives birth to such a piercing story about loneliness and fleeting intimacy. Eileen Chang does not idealize her characters, and in this lies her particular honesty. Lu Zongzhen begins flirting with a stranger simply to avoid his pestering nephew. Wu Cuiyuan accepts the attention of a married man partly out of spite toward her own proper family. Seemingly not the noblest of motives. But it is precisely this unvarnished truth that makes their encounter so touching: two tired, lonely people who, for a brief moment, stop playing their social roles and simply exist for each other. Cuiyuan is especially pitiable. Educated and conscientious, she has dissolved so completely into others’ expectations that she has become a person without definite features. Even her mother cannot say what shape her face is. Her life is a “translation of a translation,” in which something is constantly lost. And here, in this stalled tramcar, she suddenly feels real, when a strange man looks at her simply as a woman, not as a position or a family disappointment. Eileen Chang works masterfully with details: a newspaper stuck to a bun, white arms “like squeezed-out toothpaste,” an old man with a face like a walnut. These small touches create a sense of reality, stuffy and cramped, from which one so badly wants to escape. But the bitterest part is the ending. When the blockade is lifted and the city comes alive, Zongzhen simply goes back to his seat. Without explanations, without goodbyes. He silently declares that everything that happened was unreal, a dream of the sealed-off city. And Cuiyuan understands that the brief encounter in which they could both be themselves has ended. Reality demands a return to roles: he is a respectable family man and an accountant, she a lonely teacher. The blockade paradoxically freed them, while freedom returned them to the prison of everyday life. The beggar’s song, “Sad, sad, sad! No money do I have!”, runs through the entire story as a reminder that material circumstances, social conventions, and family obligations are stronger than feelings. Zongzhen cannot afford love. Cuiyuan has no right to choose. And the city goes on living, the tram moves forward, and two people remain in their cages. Eileen Chang writes about occupied Shanghai in the 1940s, but she speaks of something eternal. About how difficult it is to remain alive in a world that reduces us to functions. About how rare moments of genuine closeness are. About how we ourselves refuse happiness because it is “unreasonable” or “doesn’t fit.” This is a sad, intelligent, deeply human story. It offers no answers and no consolation. But it sees us: weary passengers in the tramcars of our lives, dreaming of becoming real, if only for a moment. Favorite quote from the story: “Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew into Greek, from Greek into Latin, from Latin into English, and from English into Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the Mandarin into Shanghainese. Some things did not come through.”

Merzouga, southeastern Morocco

Looking through family photos

I finished Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson — a long and challenging novel about the Vietnam War. Not “about events” in the usual sense, but an attempt to understand how war exists in human experience. What struck me most was how Johnson tells this war. He doesn’t present it linearly or try to assemble it into a coherent narrative. The war here emerges from short scenes, with gaps of months and years between them. Against this backdrop, the Houston brothers’ storyline works particularly well. It lacks epic scale and conventional plot logic. Both brothers deteriorate, but along different paths. One — because he went through the war and could never return to a normal life afterward. The other — through naval service, from which he is expelled for disciplinary reasons. For him, this is not an exit or a form of liberation, but the beginning of disintegration. Their trajectory doesn’t break off — it simply moves downward: life narrows, orientation is lost, and any connection to normal reality disappears. Prison and asociality at the end look not like a breakdown or a punishment, but like something everything had been moving toward all along. I like how Johnson writes. Every sentence is precise, without excess. This is a large novel, almost nine hundred pages, but it never feels bloated. Everything is necessary; nothing is superfluous. One detail instead of a page of description: a smell, a gesture, a casual remark — and through it you see the entire scene. The prose is constantly compressed, even when the scale seems epic. The novel’s structure is jagged. Huge jumps in time, abrupt shifts in point of view. At first this is disorienting, but then it becomes clear that this material could not be presented any other way. This is how war feels — as a collection of fragments that refuse to form a whole. Nobody understands what’s happening: not the characters, not the reader. Any attempt to assemble everything into a clear picture would feel dishonest. One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its reticence. Between chapters, events occur that can only be guessed at. Johnson deliberately refuses to fill these voids, and that refusal is precisely what makes them work. The gaps are felt almost physically — like lost pieces of life to which there is no longer any access. Against this background, the epilogue, in my view, overloads the novel with articulation. It seems to spell out what the main text has already expressed through structure, breaks, and silence. Without the epilogue, the book would probably benefit, preserving the degree of incompleteness and fragmentation that feels organic to it. It also matters that the novel has no heroes or villains. Everyone exists in a moral fog, making choices that cannot be judged unambiguously. This is not a story about right and wrong — it is a story about people inside chaos that no one controls and no one fully understands. In the end, Tree of Smoke is not a novel I “liked” — it is a novel that stayed with me. It matters not only as a statement about war, but as a writerly experience. It shows that a large novel does not have to be verbose. You can build an epic canvas out of short, dense scenes and out of the gaps between them. The text lives not only in words, but in the space between them — and it seems that is where the most essential things happen.

Eckermann's Ears An Imagined Preface to Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8284775617

Aït Benhaddou, Morocco

The first known literary text — the Epic of Gilgamesh — was written on clay. The world of this epic is literally made of clay: cities, walls, vessels, tablets. The material of writing was part of the same reality in which that writing emerged. If the material of writing shapes the way of thinking, then digital writing is not neutral either: it transforms the very reality in which it arises. Perhaps, in a few thousand years, someone will read a surviving digital text and wonder — how could they conceive of reality as so unstable, multiple, lacking a center? Just as we today marvel at the totality of clay in the Mesopotamian imagination.