Just as in real life, sometimes too the places fictional characters call home naturally run their course and are outgrown. It’s not a personal insult or done deliberately and maliciously, but just something that happens as they journey through more of life. That turned out to be true for the Konevs and Minnesota, a state I admit was pretty much randomly chosen as their future home.
Like Ivan, I also had a romantic, idealistic, fantasy daydream of someday living on my very own self-sufficient, 19th century-style farmstead. I idealized the farming lifestyle I read about in so many historical novels, and didn’t understand how much hard work is involved. I also didn’t understand how much farming began to change after the mid-20th century Green Revolution. Even small family farms use modern equipment, and they’re not sitting around the fireplace reading to one another, playing boardgames, and putting on plays when they’re snowed in, nor do they fill their spare time with barn dances, taffy pulls, and quilting bees!
While writing Dream Deferred, it finally dawned on me why Ivan latched onto this dream of becoming a farmer in the Midwest. It wasn’t driven by a genuine passion for either that region or profession, but rather an escape from his abusive father. Midwestern farming country also represented a place where he could keep his family safe from the ugly, cruel reality of the outside world. They only have to interact with one another and their dearest, closest friends out there.
I can’t believe I never realised how unhealthy and creepy it was for their three families to not only all live on the same piece of land, but also build houses for their adult children to move into as soon as they rush home from university with degrees they have no use for as career farmers in the middle of nowhere. That’s like a cult compound!
For whatever reason, I got the idea many years ago that Minnesota has a very high Russian population. I knew there were lots of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants, but thought there was also a large group of Russians. North Dakota would’ve been a far more realistic place to relocate based on that criterion.
Even without that being the reason, Minnesota always felt like a random state that could just as easily have been Ohio, Kansas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Wyoming, Indiana, or even a more rural place in New York State. I never did any worldbuilding about the fictional town of Firebird Fields other than mentioning the church and a few stores, and one scene at a skating rink. It was a self-contained world for the Konevs and their friends.
In The Twelfth Time, Minnesota is a healing escape from the poverty and tenements of New York, as difficult as it is to leave their extended circle of friends and Lyuba’s family behind. They needed that radical reset, particularly to save Lyuba and Ivan’s troubled marriage. It might be boring and cut them off from everyone back in New York but for strategically-planned visits when necessary, but all they can think about is that it’s a chance to start over properly.
In Dark Forest, Minnesota represents a safe beacon of refuge from the ugly, cruel outside world, a reliable place the Konevs can always run to when things in New York or California become too painful. It feels like a violation of this safe space when that outside drama invades and refuses to go away.
In Dream Deferred, the Konevs’ experience in another small town opens their eyes to how out of step they are in that kind of milieu. They’re seen as radical invading outsiders ruining the established local culture with their mere presence. Yet when they relocate to the Twin Cities, they choose St. Paul over Minneapolis because it’s smaller and sleepier. They still can’t shake their emotional attachment to small towns.
But before long, it becomes obvious they’ve outgrown Minnesota and that next-youngest child Sonyechka in particular feels stifled. Every time they visit New York for family celebrations, it feels so much more comfortable. I had plans to introduce three kindred spirit families (Czech, Greek, and Hungarian-Jewish), but what are the odds 1950s St. Paul or Minneapolis would have anything close to the intellectual, artistic concentration of NYC in that era? Sure such people existed, but there weren’t huge clusters of them.
Most cities in this era were built around one or two major industries (e.g., railroad, mills, mining, shipping, meatpacking). This wasn’t an era of choosing what city you wanted to move to based on the arts scene, restaurants, bars, a cute downtown, or historic architecture. If you wanted to connect with lots of other artists or intellectuals, you went to a city like New York or Boston, not St. Paul!
The idea of a large academy combining progressive pedagogy with prep school and European gymnasium education in 1950s St. Paul also now seems a bit unrealistic. The idea came to me to make Stefania Wolicka a New York school instead, when writing about Platosha Lebedeva-Teglyova’s high school graduation. She attends a progressive prep school for girls.
It’s also really expensive and inconvenient to constantly travel 1,000 miles back and forth for weddings, milestone birthdays, baptisms, and graduations. Other special events are missed entirely. If they’re all in the same place, it’ll save a lot of money and time.
And by 1952, Lyuba and Ivan have outgrown the reason they came to Minnesota. They no longer need to hide from the outside world, and they’re very eager to finally rejoin the intellectual, artistic society they were born for.
To be continued.
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