You-Gin One-Gin: Sort of a Novel starts as a theatrical comedy of Eugene Onegin, and soon expands into a surreal campus narrative involving academic rivalries, mysterious shootings, alien abduction, and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

It started with the play—the stage adaptation—which was initially inspired by watching Martha Fiennes’ 1998 screen adaptation in Russia, with my wife and her friends. They were hooting all the way through at the silly mistakes the filmmakers made, like having Russian aristocrats in the 1820s eat borscht—peasant food that aristocrats would never have touched. (They ate FRENCH cuisine, while speaking French.) What I paid attention to was that the whole movie adaptation was focused on the supposed “love story” between Tatiana and Onegin, the most boring part of Pushkin’s novel. What makes that novel come alive is Pushkin’s dual role in it: as Onegin’s friend, but also as the author and narrator. Your wonderful reviewer wrote, “I liked how Robinson lets Pushkin walk in and out of his own story, constantly poking at the thin wall between author and character, past and present.” I like that too! But it’s not something that I made up. It’s in Pushkin’s novel. It’s a metafictional novel from the 1830s.

What I did add to Pushkin, though, came out of a question I asked myself: Pushkin-the-narrator is looking back at events that transpired earlier; so when is he narrating it, and where is he located physically while he’s telling the story? And if he is both the narrator and Onegin’s friend, how is he slipping back and forth between the time frame of the story and the time frame of the narrating of the story?

And since Pushkin was writing the novel in exile, always worried that the tsar’s spies would report something terrible back to the tsar, why not have the man who shot him in the duel that killed him, Baron d’Anthés, appear as a spy for the tsar and then shoot him in the duel that Pushkin puts in the novel?

All that inspired the whole novel. Pushkin was a Russian-African, with subtle but unmistakable African features. Why not have an African-American theater director direct it and star in it? Why not have him suffer something like the fate that befalls Lensky and Pushkin in the play: getting shot? And if he’s the narrator, and then gets shot and critically (and mysteriously) wounded, and spends a week in a coma, who will narrate the rest of it? Nabokov is one of my favorite authors of all time; I don’t know his brilliant trickery as well as some readers, but I’ve read a lot about it, and I decided that making Nabokov’s ghost the follow-up narrator would be fun. And it was!

My good Russian friend Ivan Delazari read the book in manuscript and loved it, but commented that Nabokov didn’t sound like Nabokov; he sounded like me. So, since I had put myself in the narrative, not as the narrator, not as the author of the novel, but as a character, I had the dean, to whom he used to be married, comment that Nabokov’s voice sounded like Doug Robinson’s, and speculate that Doug Robinson wrote the novel. (As I say on the back cover, I’ve never been married to a dean, and I’ve never set foot in Liberal, Kansas—let alone worked for the nonexistent Liberal State University.)

The book includes a play, a campus narrative, and a ghostly metafictional layer. How did you balance those pieces?

My original idea was to mirror the events of the play in the events arising out of its production. As I wrote the latter, though, my weird SFantasy mind kept coming up with cool complications. I was never sure I was balancing all the various pieces successfully!

What role does humor play in exploring serious literary ideas?

I’ve been teaching literature to university students most of my life. I’ve written numerous books and articles about literary texts. And somehow, through all of that, I’ve gravitated toward the funny. I love the humorous classics the best: Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. James Joyce’s Ulysses. And then all the recent ones: Vonnegut, Barth, Pynchon, Coover, Heller. All of them have inspired me through laughter.

If Pushkin or Nabokov could read You-Gin One-Gin, how do you think they would react?

Nabokov’s ghost does react to the book, in the book: he disapproves. He thinks I’m not subtle enough with the hints of the supernatural. He was always much cleverer, much trickier, about the afterlife in his works. When Sherry sends him on a quest to find the ghost of William Shakespeare, he is tempted to fly away and not come back, and explains his disgust at my ham-fisted narrative strategies at great length. But because he loves Sherry—and because he is controlled unsubtly by me!—he goes anyway, finds Shakespeare’s ghost, whom he absolutely despises as a fraud, as not Shakespeare at all, because WS’s ghost keeps saying things like “Take a chill pill, dude!”

Pushkin would probably say, “Where’s the poetry?” Pushkin’s poetry in Russian is so incredibly brilliant, sounding exactly like someone talking but subtly and yet unmistakably following a complex rhyme scheme, that he is fundamentally untranslatable. Nabokov railed at Pushkin translations in English—they were too pretty, he said—and did what he took to be an “ugly” literal one of Eugene Onegin. And it is ugly. But it’s also boring. Nabokov doesn’t DO anything with it. It just lies there, inert. So that’s me disapproving of Nabokov! Whom I otherwise love. My use of dramatic prose (and a lot of humor) livens the novel up—but at the expense of the brilliant poetry. Pushkin-the-narrator in my stage adaptation says that Onegin is prose and he himself is poetry; and when Onegin retorts that he’s speaking in prose, Pushkin calls it a bad translation. That’s my guess as to what Pushkin would say!

By the way, I call You-Gin One-Gin volume 1 of the Liberal Kansas series. I’ve just finished volume 2: Love Borg, built around my stage adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Where nineteenth-century Russia is a kind of implicit backdrop to volume 1, nineteenth-century Norway features prominently (but spectrally) in volume 2.

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“In this hilarious tripartite Robinsonian cruise of metaleptic abracadabra, the authorial attributee of You-Gin One-Gin is at his novelistic best, chasing and transforming Pushkin, Nabokov, Philip K. Dick, Vonnegut, John Barth, and Shakespeare in the manner so obscurely familiar from his Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia and Insecticide.” —Ivan Delazari, Nazarbayev University

Who is shooting people in Liberal, Kansas, and why are the bullets mainly mystical rounds? What really happens the second time an American writer is abducted by aliens? How would Vladimir Nabokov have rewritten the book his ghost helps narrate?

You-Gin One-Gin answers these questions across three wildly inventive layers: a stage adaptation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the narration of Kip Knurl, African-American theater professor at Liberal State University, and the surreal perspective of Nabokov’s ghost. Each section ends with a “shooting”—in the play, on campus, and in ghostly metafiction—though no one truly dies.

A genre-defying ride for lovers of absurdist humor, experimental narrative, and the exhilarating intersections of literature, science, and the supernatural.