by Nicole Yurcaba
In Yelena Moskovich’s third offering to the literary world, A Door Behind a Door, readers enter the life of Olga, a complex protagonist, who with her parents and brother, Moshe, immigrate to Milwaukee in 1991. Moshe soon becomes estranged, and Olga grows up and falls in love with a girlfriend. However, an evil figure from Olga’s Soviet Union past, a neighbor boy named Nikolai who murdered a woman in their apartment building, calls Olga one night and informs her that Moshe has been kidnapped. What happens next for Olga transports readers into a Pynchon-like realm papered wall to wall with violence, the Russian Mafia, and the past’s ties that can’t be severed.
The novel opens innocently enough–Olga is an infant in the former USSR. Things take a murderous turn–Nikolai murders an elderly woman, and his mother pleads that it was only an accident. The novel’s structure is like a Venus flytrap: brief statements prefaced by a bolded fragment are small tendrils that lure readers deeper into the wide, red, raw mouth of Moskovich’s prose. The prose’s power lies in its severe brevity, and each sentence reads like a carefully calculated knife twist, which parallels the murders that occur throughout the novel. These prosaic twists push readers forward, and before they know it, they’re through the novel’s first 125 pages, not wanting to stop. The prosaic twists reinforce one of the novel’s more relevant motifs–the cycles of violence that time cannot seem to dispel or erase. Instead, what one must do is power on, move forward, and deal with the loss and grief that the combined cycles of life offer an individual.
In A Door Behind a Door, violence is paramount. In its entirety, the novel leaves readers wondering why humans are so inherently evil and how they become so. Olga, by far, is one of the novel’s most innocent characters, and readers see this when Olga is falsely accused of murder. Often, it is those who are most innocent who are perpetually blamed and framed. Angelina, as well as Angelina’s parents, are a representation of what little good actually exists in the world. Conversely, Nikolai, and by association, Moshe, represent the world’s most grotesque evil. Thus, the novel, much like Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” presents the world and existence in terms of extremes, with absolutely no room for negotiation or alternatives lying in between the extremes. Of course, this ideological proposition simply reinforces not only the novel’s violence but also Nikolai’s corruption and immorality. Olga’s own stint in a violent prison that resembles a claustrophobic setting in the Jeremy Irons film Kafka illuminates for readers the philosophy that too often it is the good who must suffer well and pay for the sins and impulsivity of the wicked.
Sometimes, nonetheless, the prose deviates and offers small glimmers of poesy amid the emotional, mental, and physical carnage. These offerings act as brief respites from pain, grief, loss while nurturing reminders that surviving, ultimately, is imperative: “What is life, if you cannot willingly go into the heart of the storm. What is life, if you cannot willingly storm someone’s heart. What is life, if you cannot willingly leave safe waters.” At other points, readers are reminders that in order to understand themselves, taking the time to understand others is vital: “We seek ourselves in the eyes of others.” And, yet, the philosophical offerings continue, wading into spiritual territory, where one questions the existence of God: “God brings us here and God guides us back. It was not God who came to me and took me elsewhere.” By the novel’s end, readers are left questioning everything, including their own existence and the reality, safety, and comfort of their own lives. And, perhaps, that questioning is necessarily discomforting, particularly for white American readers, who unlike their minority and Eastern European counterparts live separated from the ravages of war, generational loss, and inherent grief.
In its examination of evil, A Door Behind a Door also pursues another psychological path–an exploration of how and where evil manifests within an individual. Nikolai again appears as the conversation’s star, describing himself as “a little songbird with no song to sing” and a “little bird.” He states that other men “took turns with their fists in my gut. In the beginning.” The violence flicked an invisible switch inside Nikolai, who states “I don’t want to go into the details. Their force. Their reign.” The violence Nikolai endured makes him no longer afraid to die, and Moskovich’s clinical yet poetic prose dissects Nikolai’s desensitization to death and brutality. For American readers, Nikolai’s character may even call into question and warn about American society’s glorification of and obsession with violence, making A Door Behind a Door as imperative a contribution to American literature as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
A Door Behind a Door may not be for the faint and the fragile. If Moskovich’s Virtuoso is bears “a hint of Lynch,” then A Door Behind a Door is surreal and psychological–the prose equivalent of a Steven Soderbergh film. It possesses the dark, ambient rawness of a Nine Inch Nails album. Quietly terrifying and utterly engrossing, it’s a gift to the literary world, one that surely solidifies Moskovich’s rightful place among the greats.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба) is a Ukrainian-American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole holds an MFA in Writing from Lindenwood University, is the recipient of a July 2020 Writing Residency at Gullkistan, Creative Center for the Arts in Iceland, and is a Tupelo Press June 2020 30 for 30 featured poet. Her poetry collection Triskaidekaphobia is forthcoming Black Spring Group in 2022. She teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and works as a career counselor for Blue Ridge Community College.
