10 Questions for Natasha Lvovich
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
This is a complicated question because in my several lives—Russian, French, and American, with some overlapping—there have been different chronologies. I wrote my first book in Russian at the age of seven; it was called Papa, Mama, Eight Children, and a Truck, and it doesn’t matter that this book, very popular in Russia, had been written already by a Norwegian children’s writer Anna Catharina Vestly. It was about a funny family, which lived, like us in Moscow, in one room. . .All eight children slept on mattresses, and Papa adored his truck, just like my father adored his Moskvich. In my book, I wrote about and drew pictures of MY family, like Borges’s Pierre Menard, the Author of the Quixote, so I never considered it plagiarism. I wrote poetry in French when I was a teenager. My first book in English was a collection of autobiographical stories on my life in languages, The Multilingual Self. It was part of my doctoral dissertation and was written in the fifth year of my life in America.
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