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Anna Lidia Vega Serova: Ánima fatua (Anima fatua)

This is an autobiographical novel though how much is not clear. . Our heroine is Alia. We start with a young Russian woman in a university observing a dark-skinned man . As Alia wittily remarks she was my mother, though she didn’t know it yet. The man, is of course, her future father. He was dark-skinned and that made her think of Pushkin. They soon marry and she is soon born. After three years they emigrate to the father’s home country of Cuba. As she tells us the first love of her life was Malena. She will have other loves of her life, including a couple of boyfriends, and it is clear that, at least in some cases, she merely means someone she is close to. In this case the two girls are three years old.

The two girls do not have a language in common so they make up their own language. Alia was in her mother’s words, a leader and a tyrant.

We follow the other loves of her life, who initially seem to be female friends though in some cases it does not work out, nor least because she is by no means always a good friend.

Her life is undoubtedly made complicated by the fact that her parents soon divorce and she is cut off from her father and his culture and, with her younger brother – the two siblings generally do not seem to get along – taken back to Russia.

Things are not good in Russia. They stay with her mother’s parents as her mother struggles to find a job. Her grandparents are not happy that their daughter married a black Cuban and resent having dark-skinned grandchildren. You’re not right in the head,’ says my grandmother. ‘But then with a black father, how else could the children turn out?Her mother is stressed out. Alia is stressed, partially because at school she faces the same racism from both her fellow pupils and her teacher as she faces from her grandparents so she is not the obedient, doting daughter her mother would like and the two clash frequently. Her situation is not helped as she knows very little Russian.

As children do in such situations, she has various coping mechanisms. The first is immersing herself in both maths and reading. A favourite author seems to be be Alexander Grin. A second coping ,echanism is the not uncommon imaginary friends. She invents various ones. For example, when she goes to camp and befriends the very real Lyuba, she tells her that she she has a host of friends back home. When camp ends Lyuba proposes they stay in touch Alia pretends that Lyuba would not fit in with Alia’s (non-existent) friends, leaving Lyuba feeling very hurt. She will get her revenge later in the book.

The third mechanism is adopting an alter ego. She has more than one but the main one is Alpha, the super-confident, very popular girl she would like to be. This works sometimes but causes problemsat others. For example she takes up acting or, rather Alpha does. All goes well and Alpha gets the leading role. When it is time for the actual performance and they go on stage, Alia reappears. She forgets her lines and makes a complete mess, to, not surprisingly, the great annoyance of the instructor.

Back at home she and her mother move out as the grandmother has had enough of Alia’s bad behaviour and she and her mother move to a small flat. The mother works all day and expects Alia to be the dutiful daughter and stay at home when she is not at school. Of course it does not work out like that. Without consulting her, her mother also sends her to art school. However she goes wandering on her own. She plays truant. “My mother hits me and tells me I’m a wretch, a curse, a calamity.

And, of course, she grows up. She goes to drama school in Odessa but again does badly with friends. But now men enter the equation and she makes some foolish mistakes with men and alienates friends. She ends up having a nervous breakdown and her mother finally rescues her.

She resumes her studies at Moscow University but the actual studies take up very little if any of her time which she spends partying, drinking, having casual affairs and the like. The inevitable happens and she is kicked out of the halls of residence. She drifts around with various affairs – most of the men I slept with weren’t very demanding, she says but, agrees with her friend Tanya men are pigs, they’re all the same, we’re better off without them. However Tanya rightly points out You’re too impulsive, Alia, you’re always making stupid decisions. Alia will later say I hardly ever know what I want in any given moment, but I’m very clear about what I don’t want: I never want to sleep with another man. Never again.

But not surprisingly, she soon drops out all together using the vpiska system, i.e. crashing in other people’s flats and being part of the sistema i.e. the hippie culture. This includes travelling round the Soviet Union. She enjoys her first return to Leningrad since her family emigrated to Cuba. Riga, however is less successful.

The obvious thing to say about Alia is that she makes a whole series of poor choices – men, friends, relationship with mother, drink and drugs and so on. When it looks that she might be setting out on the right path, we know that she will soon fall by the wayside. Of course she is not helped by having parents from two very different cultures, who get divorced and leave her with virtually no contact with her father, with grandparents who despise her origins and a mother struggling with her own demons and unwilling to help her daughter. It must also be said that many others in this book also make poor decisions, undoubtedly, at least in part, because of the fall of the Soviet Union, even if this is not much mentioned.

We know that our author returned to Cuba and stayed there and we can only hope Alia has a better life there.

Publishing history

First published in 2007 by Editorial Letras Cubanas
First English translation in 2025 by Amaurea Press
Translated by Robin Munby