UC San Diego

Like a detective trying to track down their partner’s killer, the narrator tries to make meaning out of grief after the loss of the collectively run arts space they have been a part of for six years. The essential clue arrives while reading Svetlana Alexeivich’s Secondhand Time & encountering “the last Soviet generation” articulating feelings jarringly similar to their own. It sends them to the last place they ever wanted to look: their family & cultural history. What starts out as half-breakup letter / half-attempt to unearth the deeper truths behind the relatively straightforward reasons for the project’s collapse turns into a fragmented journey through the Soviet dream & its collapse, compelled by a central question: how to follow one’s desire to imagine & struggle towards collectivity & mutualism despite an inherited political pessimism, the material realities of living & growing up low-income under capitalism, & a long history of radical movements being absorbed into hegemonic state projects. COLLAPSE meets us in a New York City illuminated by a post-Occupy, recession-era optimism & takes us into a kaleidoscopic world of cosmonauts & cosmists, the many faces of Emma Goldman, Soviet communal apartments, Soviet folktales & films & the American filmic trope of the villainous Soviet spy. Memory is translucent; trauma opaque. The hybrid manuscript deploys myriad strategies such as autotheory, film criticism, the epistolary, memoir, essay, nonfiction, family narrative, erasure, & documentary poetics to dig into the fibrous mass of experience & pull it apart before it can calcify.