Nina Chayka is the author of the new linked story collection Seagulls. She is a Russian-American writer, and is a graduate student at Harvard.
Q: What inspired you to write Seagulls?
A: Seagulls began as my personal way of processing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. I wrote a draft of what would later become one of the chapters only a few weeks into the war. As often happens, I didn’t think of it as a book when I started writing it – it was simply something I had to put down on paper, for myself, without any intention of sharing it.
Over time, writing down stories of people impacted by displacement, immigration struggles, and the intensely personal dramas of our lives – divorces, marriages, childbirth, falling in and out of love – unfolding against the backdrop of geopolitical crisis was a way for me to connect with those people, to find resonance between their stories and mine.
Q: The writer Cristina García said of the book, “Inspired by Chekhov’s famous play, the characters seem almost to oscillate in time, hovering like seagulls over their own uncertain destinies.” What do you think of that description?
A: First, that’s so generous of Cristina! The collection is indeed inspired by Anton Chekhov – the play, of course, but also the short stories.
There’s a sense of nostalgia for a lost Russia that permeates Chekhov’s work and deeply moves me: nostalgia even for the Russia that still physically exists, but you can feel it already slipping away. A kind of longing that arrives before the loss itself– missing something even while you still have it.
Q: How did you decide on the order in which the stories would appear in the book?
A: I wanted first to show the main characters in the lives they built after the immigration. The first three chapters follow these women after they’ve already left Ukraine or Russia – we meet them in Barcelona, New York, and Istanbul.
The sense of loss surrounding events as monumental as immigration, war, or displacement can be overwhelming, so I wanted to give these women the dignity of new beginnings. In a sense, I wanted to reassure the reader – these women are okay, they make it through – before leading the reader to follow them into darker places.
After this initial flash-forward, the stories move chronologically, and we finish more or less where we started. To quote T.S.Eliot,
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Being a Russian in America without outside of an immigrant community can feel isolating. It’s hard to explain to my American friends what this war means to my family and friends back home. Writing this book was my attempt to bridge that distance.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a novel set in New York about a woman who’s lying about everything until her lies start catching up with her.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you so much for your questions and hope you enjoy the book!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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