Chizik Pizik

So in the last few days, I've made what are hopefully the final revisions to Correction Road, and it's now in the capable hands of Oberon Press. I'm going to use this space to talk about some of the issues in the book and offer further explanation on some of the themes and considerations, but given that they won't mean a whole lot if you haven't read the book (and the book won't be out until late November), these explanations probably won't mean a whole lot to most readers.

Chizhik, chizhik, gde ty byl?

Na Fontanke vodku pil. 

Vypil rjumku, vypil dve,

Zashumelo v golove 

Chizik Pizik is a statue of a small bird. It sits on an outcropping of the Fontenac river, which is, at that point, simply a canal that snakes its way through the southern side of St. Petersburg, working it's way toward the Neva River. http://www.panoramio.com/photo/523436.

The poor little brass statue has been stolen and recovered, stolen and remade several times through it's life.  There's a russian drinking folk song that names the bird, and a song that has become a mantra for Walt. As it's been explained to me, all of this comes from a school near that point of the Neva; the students wore school colours that matched the distinctive colours of a local finch (I've heard yellow and green, but I've also heard yellow and red). Thus the students were nickname chizik as a result, and the statue is a reference both to the folk song and to the students of the area.

 I decided early on that I wanted to use this little statue as a talis for Walt, because it worked for his character in a number of different ways, and mirrors another object of similar size and material that would become a talis for him later in the book. The difficulty was that it was an anachronism: the statue wasn't constructed until a decade after my novel takes place, two decades after Walt would have seen it on a trip to Russia. One of the statue's claims to fame is that it was the first statue commissioned in Russia following the collapse of communism there. It's certainly not the only anachronism in the book, but for me, one of the most visible.