An Obituary for Roman, an autofiction by Daria Serenko, translated from the Russian by Ksenya Gurshtein
Translator’s Introduction
Daria Serenko (b. 1993) is a contemporary Russian poet, essayist, curator, artist, feminist and anti-war activist. “An Obituary for Roman” alludes to a number of actions and projects she carried out as an activist in Russia.
Serenko grew up in the city of Omsk and moved to Moscow to study at university, graduating in 2015 from the Gorky Literary Institute. She first came to public notice in 2016 with a project titled #Quiet Picket (#тихийпикет). This project arose in the context of the Russian legal regime, continuously tightened in the wake of widespread protests in 2011-2012, which made individual picketing into the only form of public protest that citizens were allowed to carry out without prior authorization from officials. Over the course of two years, Serenko and about 100 other participants across Russia entered public spaces (e.g., public transit) holding home made posters with statements that quoted poetry or expressed opinions on a range of socio-political issues, including xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, racism, domestic violence, and political repression. The posters were meant to serve both as provocations to elicit responses from the people around them and as opportunities for conversation and dialogue. The experiences of the participants were documented and shared in an online community and later became the subject of a 2020 book published in Russian by the AST publishing house.
Serenko’s first book, Girls and Institutions (which remains unpublished in English) was published in 2021 by No Kidding Press. A work of autofiction, it documents and discusses through both poetic and feminist lenses Serenko’s experiences as a worker in Russian state-run cultural institutions, such as libraries, galleries, and universities. The author herself defined the genre of her book as “magical institutional realism or bureacratic passion play.”
In early February 2022, immediately before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Serenko was sentenced to 15 days in prison for a social media post that supported Alexei Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation (deemed an extremist organization in Russia) in advance of an upcoming election. Serenko’s diaristic notes on her experiences in prison, as well as her poetry and notes on life right after her release, became the content of her second book, I Wish Ashes Upon My Home, published in Russian by Babel Books in 2023 and since then translated into five languages.
Right after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in February 2022, Serenko was one of the organizers of a group called Feminist Anti-War Resistance. Since then, Serenko has lived outside of Russia, which she escaped fearing for her safety and freedom. In 2024, a warrant was issued in Russia for her arrest on political charges. She is currently seeking political asylum in Spain and continues her feminist and anti-war activism in Russia remotely. In November 2023, the BBC included Serenko in the list of 100 “inspiring and influential women from around the world.”
Above all else, what characterizes Serenko’s autofictional prose — which she writes from the perspective, among others, of a daughter of an abusive Russian police officer, a rape survivor, and a queer woman — is the keen awareness of the feminist maxim that the personal is political. Her writing articulates the constant slippage in contemporary Russian life between individual stories, and especially individual bodies, and the repressive patriarchal state apparatus whose violence penetrates everything from the most intimate interstices of quotidian experience, where it finds varying degrees of acquiescence or resistance, to the border of neighboring Ukraine.
Like much of her writing since the beginning of the war, “An Obituary for Roman” wrestles with Serenko’s sense of culpability as a Russian citizen while also articulating the things she learned as one of the people who, for years prior to the invasion, tried to fight both the miltarism and the misogyny of contemporary Russian culture. Reflecting on the purpose of her writing, Serenko writes in I Wish Ashes Upon My Home (my translation): “[T]here always has to be as many first-person accounts as possible because only a handful of texts will reach the future. This isn’t so much about confessing anything but, rather, that every text about repression is an arrow shot outwards, an arrow that’s thin and fragile, which most often does not hit its target or gets caught mid-flight. Only a handful of texts will hit the target; only a handful will make it into the hands of others; it’s always about luck and a string of circumstances. One has to use her shots to increase everyone’s chances.”
/ / / / /
An Obituary for Roman
I had promised myself never to write autofiction again, but the stories which continue to suck me into their whirlpools are livelier and more complex than any fiction that I could invent.
Recently, I received word of the death of someone who appeared in my life just once three years ago – but this happened in such a striking way that I will remember his name for the rest of my life. He died in the war in Ukraine. He fought as part of the Wagner mercenary group and, following the demise of Wagner, as part of a combat unit of radical soccer fans. Everything I’ve learned about this person was discovered against my will.
In 2021, I received a short but eloquent message from a man named Roman Litasov:
You’re washed up vermin, feminists are not people. Hi from Pozdnyakov. (Vladislav Pozdnyakov founded the closed community called “Male State” in 2016 on the Russian social network site VKontakte.)
At that time, the enthusiasts of “Male State” were sending me thousands of threats through different social media outlets, but I remembered Roman because he wrote from his personal account with a photo depicting himself as the avatar – and because he sent me the message on both Instagram and VKontakte. He wrote this to me on February 14th. Some men really do know how to send a Valentine that will break your heart.
On February 14, 2021, I was living in Moscow and organizing several women’s street protests. At the beginning of the month, Navalny returned to Russia and was immediately arrested. Protests ensued. I thought a lot during those days about Yulia Navalnaya. On February 14th, the whole city was decorated with flowers, hearts, and pink ribbons. Lovers sat in cafes under candlelight and glowed with happiness. Meanwhile, her husband was already in jail. Then I thought about how many such women are the wives, mothers, girlfriends, and sisters of political prisoners, and that many women were also political prisoners — under house arrest, undergoing torture. I initiated an action for that very day and named it “A Chain of Solidarity and Love: An Action in Support of Yulia Navalnaya and All Women Political Prisoners.” It was a peaceful protest staged in several cities. “Male State” — an influential Telegram channel followed by hundreds of thousands of aggressive and often ultra-right-wing men — published a post with a call to harass me as the organizer of the action. They not only provided links to all my accounts, but also published a surveillance photo showing me entering the gates of a country house on the day of the action. On the gates, one could see the address. The house was a secret shelter for women activists experiencing burnout. My friends and I ran it. Thus, the address of the shelter was leaked. I shook with rage because this act jeopardized the safety of everyone in that house. And also because I hadn’t noticed that someone secretly tailed me during the entire trip from Moscow to the countryside.
Roman Litasov was one out of the thousands of men then writing to me. I decided to take revenge on them all by focusing on him. He was an easy target. It took little effort to find out where he worked, what city he was from, and the range of his interests. He turned out to be a fitness trainer from my own city, Omsk. It’s my hometown, and I called upon all residents of Omsk who follow me on social media to contact the fitness club where Roman was working and demand his firing for threatening women. My request went far and wide — tens of thousands of reposts, scores of news items in major media. The fitness club at first denied its connection to Roman (“no such person works here”) and then closed down its social media. Roman’s social media accounts went dark as well. Later, my followers wrote to tell me that the trainer lay low at first and then returned to work at the same fitness club. No one fired him. But I still felt triumphant because I was able to stand up for myself at least in some way.
Based on photographs, Roman Litasov gave the impression of being a huge, pumped up man. Mountains of muscles, a reddish beard. He subscribed to the public pages of neofascists who worship solar signs, mythical warriors [bogatyrs], and pagan gods. I also figured out through his subscriptions that he really liked Slavs, and he liked people who are not Slavs quite a bit less. He wore heavy silver medallions with pagan symbols (runes? letters?) and left online comments of a eugenicist nature: Slavic women should not mix their blood with God knows whom, and disabled people should be eliminated to prevent the passing of their genes (he wrote this as a comment in response to the post of a mother with a disabled child). Overall, a pretty clear portrait came into view, and Roman was exposed to a wide public. Men continued to harass and hound me on social media, this time for doxing the fitness trainer and possibly ruining his career.
This episode would likely have been the end of Roman Litasov’s invasion into my life were it not for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Six days ago, I received a notice about his death. “Fitness trainer from Omsk who harassed activist and writer Daria Serenko, dies in the war in Ukraine.” In the first few minutes, I felt happy and let that happiness go to my head with its bubbles. “He lived sinfully and died laughably,” read a caption left under this news item by some witty commentators. “This is what will happen to anyone who harasses Dasha.” “He went from misogynist to war criminal.” I captioned my post, “A person’s path in two screenshots.” One photo showed a screenshot of his insults toward me; the other, a screenshot of the news of his death. He was two weeks shy of his 36th birthday. The world remembers him for having insulted a feminist. The saying goes, “One should live in such a way that your name shows up in your enemy’s obituary.” My name was mentioned in all the news stories about his death.
But the happiness quickly morphed into a feeling of desolation. Yes, banality of evil, yes, he was a war criminal, but how can a person be reduced to this? I would like to believe that a person’s path in life is unpredictable — that this man who was once a supporter of Male State could have become a volunteer in a crisis center for women. I would like to be reassured that there are no predestined trajectories of the patriarchy. I would like Roman’s character not to be so consistent. I would like reality to speak to me in the more complex language of hope and not the simplified language of hatred and war.
Another saying: Be careful what you wish for. As soon as I wished for this, women began to write to me. Women who had known Roman Litasov. Schoolmates from his grade, women whom he trained at the gym, other women. I wanted to say, “Women, leave me alone.” But the women kept writing, kept recording their voice messages, memories, and comments. Some of them really wanted to prove to the feminist whom he harassed and with whom he became so strangely intertwined in the media after his death that he was worth something after all. As if I’d been close to him during his life.
After the first wave of annoyance, I became interested. One part of me wanted him and his name to disappear into oblivion, believing he deserved it. Another part questions: What was he like as a child? Whom did he become after he grew up? What did he love? What contradictions did he have?
– What should a man be like?
– Equal to me
– And a man is equal to a woman, right?
– Everyone is equal to everyone else
– Why is it, then, that some are allowed to be insulting and others not? In your comment feed, everyone has piled on dead Roman. So many vile words have been addressed towards him. Why does anyone think they are better than he? Better how? I feel truly sorry for this person. And how does someone consider his lifestyle to be wrong and their own to be wonderful? Did they really know him personally to be able to judge?
That’s a dialogue that appeared on my Instagram. Roman was Liza’s trainer. I am listening to her voice messages:
– I could come to him with my problems, and he supported me. My husband was beating me, and Roman said that this person is never going to change and that a man should not use force on a woman. I left my husband, now I’m well, I have two children.
I try to tell Liza that to be a war criminal is something more complicated than “lifestyle.” Then I decide to stop trying to prove anything: the living Liza is more interesting to me than the dead Roman. Were it not for the dead Roman, however, she would not have written to me and would not have shared her story while believing that she was sharing his story. I don’t want to pressure her.
Liza sent me screenshots of a strange text. I look closely at it and realize that it is most likely from Litasov’s private channel. I find the channel and read it for several hours. It is a typical wartime channel of a Wagner mercenary with analysis of military strategy and tactics, with photographs of weaponry, and tallies of the number and locations of Ukrainians they have killed. What distinguishes the channel is only the style of the texts – Roman wrote in a literary manner, sometimes even excessively poetically. He understood that he had PTSD and was keeping either a wartime diary or a diary of his PTSD. Which is to say, Roman, too, wrote autofiction. Like me. In one of his posts, he mentioned as an aside that he dreamed of writing a book.
“In a war zone, colors are different … You can’t enjoy their beauty. You just won’t be able to do it. Your brain has already switched from ‘Life’ mode to ‘Survival’ mode. You can’t tell that beautiful grass is growing in a field. The only thing that interests you is whether your camouflage conceals you in that field and whether there are any mines in it. The gorgeous old tree, which at home you would have contemplated with deep respect for its age, now interests you only from the angle of building, a dugout, or the need for firewood.
When you arrive there as a newcomer, your brain still searches for the beauty which you are used to noticing around you. And you are amazed by the callousness of the veteran fighters, who don’t see the obvious. But after a short period of time, you become the same as them. And then you understand why it is so. Your brain simply has no time for beauty. There is now danger hiding behind every beauty.”
<…>
“Coming back to civilian life, I noticed an interesting peculiarity in my own behavior, namely a constant readiness for military action. For example, when I walk down the street, I do not contemplate the architecture of beautiful old buildings, but instead look for places where I could quickly jump into a hole or a ditch if there is sudden artillery shelling, or start figuring out the position of an enemy machine gunner or sniper. And those are not even all the post-traumatic quirks of my brain. There’s more. Looking at buildings, I assess in passing how difficult they would be to assail.”
<…>
“I have fewer and fewer such ‘quirks.’ I’ve begun to control myself. As it turns out, you can drag a person out of war, but you won’t be able to drag the war out of the person for a very long time.”
On the channel, I found a video. He was filming, in his own words, “a real man’s dream room.” This room was his wartime headquarters in someone else’s Ukrainian apartment from which civilians had hastily departed. That’s where he spent his nights. The interior was simple: a couch, wallpaper, toys, household stuff. The room was small and looked like a child’s bedroom. That’s where Litasov had stationed himself along with his munitions, which he showed off and commented on with pleasure and tenderness. A minesweeping kit, grenades, an assault rifle, something else. Camouflaged green boxes and metal objects laid out on other people’s tables and dressers. He also filmed himself in the dresser mirror. His face was covered up by squares, but you could see his figure and uniform. His voice was low and ingratiating, like a Soviet broadcaster. The voice had unpleasant actorly notes. Litasov used the code name Svyatogor — an archaic Slavic name derived from the words “sacred” and “mountain.” It is most famously the name of a mythical warrior (bogatyr) found in Russian folklore.
I asked Svyatogor’s female classmate what he was like as a child.
“I understand that I totally did not know this person who has died, who went to war for his beliefs and harassed women. And had it been anyone else, I would not have given him another thought for even a second because I would already have a very clear image in my head. Perhaps this is a kind of lesson for us all? The Romka I remember was truly cool. My most vivid impression of him to this day is how he cried during a music lesson over some sad song about a little bird and how he ran home whenever other guys tried to get him involved in fights because he was always a full head taller than everyone else. When we were in the upper grades, his little sister was born, and then a few years later, his mom died. I remember that when he moved to Omsk from Kazakhstan for college, these weird photos started showing up on his VKontakte page with shaved dudes styled as neo-Nazis. I don’t know how long this went on for. Then he became a trainer, got married, took pictures of himself wearing chain mail. When did this person change so much? I don’t know. I am not a psychologist and cannot say whether this pseudomasculinity was a way of compensating for his youth. It’s really sad because everything could have been completely different. The people who support the war — they believe in all this somehow. I don’t know how to explain it, but even my 80-year old grandmother supports it. I don’t even know what else to say. Our school group chat still exists, and no one can believe that this was one and the same person.”
More remarks by Svyatogor —
“Reading books is an activity I’ve always loved and about which I haven’t forgotten in the war. Books always carried me far away from the battlefield and from various worries into their own interesting worlds. Worlds in which everything is a bit naive and unusual and, at the same time, convoluted.
I must say that there were a lot of books available; in any home, you could choose some of any type and color. During my round of duty, I read six full-fledged books. Of these, the ones that most stand out are such works as Knut Hamsun’s Pan and Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. Naturally, I read military literature, as well, how could you not. I took a lot from those books in order to later train the assault forces. Personally, I always advise everyone to read during deployment since you have a lot of free time anyway. Reading really relaxes your nervous system and helps it to adapt. I think it’s a form of therapy for your mental health. I’ve also noticed that reading books develops your imagination, and you need imagination when you’re fighting in a war. With its help, you might develop unusual solutions.”
I read this and try to manage a wave of rage and nausea. He came into other people’s abandoned homes and chose books to read. The people who lived in those homes were either murdered or became refugees. Do you really need imagination in order to apply it in war? Why could you not use your imagination to envision a world without war? Isn’t that an unusual solution? Ok, great, now I’m talking to a dead man. In reality, there are two dead men here: the man who was two weeks shy of his 36th birthday and the boy who cried during the music lesson over a song about a little bird. One of them murdered the other and then died himself.
I find something inexplicable in the fact that what is likely the most thorough and comprehensive text about Roman was written by a person whom he probably hated, without ever having met her, with every fiber of his soul. What is this — an act of justice, curiosity, revenge, narcissism, humanism? It still seems to me that this is an act of hope. Am I devoting too much attention and honor for one war criminal? Why do I dedicate an obituary to this man — are there really no wonderful, forgotten women left on whom one could spend this time and effort? Am I not falling into the trap of the “mystery of the protagonist,” where the answer is simply that the protagonist was not loved enough, thus explaining and justifying his actions for readers? Am I not romanticizing Roman in the same way that he romanticized war for himself? He writes about war the way one writes about a beloved woman — and this makes a strong and oppressive impression on me. I don’t know how it is possible to love war this much. I don’t know how it’s possible to be willing to give your life to war and to believe sincerely that this is, indeed, your service and destiny. That war is your motherland.
I am trying for some reason to discern behind the man covered with ammunition and weapons the child who is afraid to show excessive force because he’s taller than everyone else. I can barely pull it off.
Once upon a time, Roman said hello to me on behalf of Pozdnyakov. This, in a mysterious way, has led to me saying farewell to Roman today on my own behalf.
Farewell, Roman. I’m sorry that in your whole life, you never did find a book that could have prevented you from becoming a murderer and dying.
/. / /
To access the original Russian version of this autofiction, click here.