School of Shards, the final installment in Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra dark fantasy series, asks us to consider the possibility that the universe is made solely out of language. This idea is based on the Book of Genesis, when God makes a series of pronouncements about light and darkness, Heaven and Earth, and animals and people, calling these material things into being. In the Dyachenkos’ world, a small handful of humans with special abilities form the core of this speech, known in the series as the Great Speech, and transform over several years into Words that keep reality going and the universe stable. School of Shards begins as the series protagonist has altered reality and threatened the very fabric of the universe—it is now up to her to fix her mistake or risk annihilating everything.
When we meet protagonist Alexandra Samokhina (or “Sasha”) in Vita Nostra, the first installment published in English in 2018, she is struggling to understand why she is being pursued and threatened by an unknown man who wants her to enroll in the Institute of Special Technologies in a town called Torpa. Reluctantly, Sasha realizes she has special abilities that allow her to influence reality, and that she needs the teachers’ help to hone and control these abilities, lest she destroy herself and the entire universe. A dark bildungsroman that echoes the Harry Potter series, Donna Tartt’s Secret History, and Dead Poets Society, Vita Nostra features the protagonist and her classmates reading Textual Module, which is filled with brain twisters that, when presented to the reader, seem nonsensical. The students are forced to imagine impossible things, and this, in turn, changes their physical structures and helps them prepare to become what they are destined to be: a Verb, a Noun, or an Article, perhaps. For instance, in one exercise, students are asked to “[i]magine a sphere, in which the exterior surface is red and the interior surface is white. Maintaining the continuity of the sphere, mentally distort the sphere so that the external surface is on the inside, and the internal is on the outside.” This metafictional book about texts and how they literally shape our world builds to its climax with moments of psychological horror and unexpected plot twists.
Assassin of Reality, published in English in 2023, continues the story, but this time it’s Sasha’s doomed love affair with a pilot named Yaroslav that sends the universe spiraling out of control. Here, the Sasha we knew is split in two by her teacher, Farit, with each self living a different timeline: one Sasha never enrolls at Torpa and dies in an accident, while the other Sasha follows her destiny as a Word in the Great Speech. However, she is not just any Word—she is Password, one of the most powerful forces the universe has ever seen. As she explains to her younger brother in School of Shards, “I am what opens reality, like a key. But a key does not define the laws of the room it opens. Password does. To a degree.” Thus, Sasha can call mini universes into being just by waving her hand. Her attempt to eliminate Death and Fear from the world threatens its very existence, and yet, as she explains multiple times, she is not a god. In a desperate attempt to keep Yaroslav happy and protect him and his father, Sasha ends up deleting Fear from the universe.
It is this new universe that we meet in School of Shards. Nothing seems amiss in Torpa—we still hear about the students running to their classes, the dorms echoing with their raucous parties, and the cries of fear and terror as they struggle to learn Textual Module. After all, they know that terrible things will happen to them or their loved ones if they fail. For instance, one student who isn’t studying hard enough finds himself trapped in a stone for millennia before he is let out, shaken and changed forever. What’s surprising, at first, is that Sasha herself is now the provost of the Institute of Special Technologies. She has complete control over the curriculum, faculty, and students. However, it turns out that this is far more than a simple job. In fact, Sasha’s responsibility is no less than stopping universal annihilation.
When she removed Fear as a concept from the universe, Sasha inadvertently also eliminated important Words on which the fabric of the universe depended. As she tells a new student at the Institute, “I shouldn’t have destroyed concepts, erased Words from the memory of the Great Speech. Instead, I should have assigned them different values, but that’s something I didn’t understand until much, much later. You see, there is no such thing as ‘the true world.’ There is only the world we’re ready to see and accept.” Having altered the nature of reality, Sasha is now responsible for fixing it, and the only way she can think of is to recruit three new freshmen to the Institute.
These three students are special because they all carry a “shard” of the Sasha from the previous universe inside them. The first, Valya, is Sasha’s younger half-brother, whom she nearly killed when he was a baby. After she reconstructed him with her mind, he carried within him a shard of Sasha that connected him to the Great Speech. Something similar happened with the two other new freshmen, Yaroslav’s twin sons, Arthur and Pashka. When Sasha removed Fear, she also removed Yaroslav’s memories of Sasha and their love. Yaroslav then went on to marry someone else and have twins, and these boys, like Valya, carry shards of Sasha within them. The problem is that, as twins, Arthur and Pashka have a complicated emotional and psychological connection that might result in one “absorbing” the other. Their fraught relationship with a fellow student, Eva, demonstrates this issue in the most human way possible, reminding them, and us readers, that even if they are a part of the Great Speech and two of Sasha’s tools for reconstructing the universe, they are still eighteen-year-old human boys with all the associated hormones, desires, and emotions.
Recruiting these boys is as difficult for Sasha as recruiting Sasha was for her advisor, Farit. Appearing to Valya after his parents have left on vacation, Sasha explains why she left the family many years ago, leaving her mother distraught and always longing for her return. She tells Valya why he is essential to repairing reality, subtly threatening that something terrible will happen to his parents if he doesn’t comply. Similarly, Arthur and Pashka are informed (this time by Sasha’s colleague and friend Kostya) that they must enter the Institute or risk the health of their grandparents. In a series of frightening events, including Arthur getting chewed up by farm equipment and reconstituted in the dark after they try to escape enrollment, we see the twins finally resign themselves to entering the Institute, if only to protect their grandparents.
The three boys wind up sharing a dorm room and, like every other first-year student, realizing with horror that they are part of an elite group responsible for stabilizing the universe. Sasha, though, is keeping a dark secret from them, something that involves all their families. Valya can sense, without understanding how, that the text messages and voicemails from his mother are not authentic. Sasha tries to disabuse him of this thought, but he won’t accept it. Eventually, Valya lets himself into Sasha’s apartment to speak with his sister and finds himself falling into the swirl of her strange, disturbing self-portraits that are scattered around the walls and desk. Something clicks in his mind, and he realizes that Sasha’s drawings reflect a horrifying reality—nothing outside of Torpa exists any longer. Because of Sasha’s elimination of Fear, its related concepts, and Words, the universe has been unraveling, and only the town and the Institute are left. The first-years must learn Textual Module and pass their exams in order to revive reality. Valya, Arthur, and Pashka are essential to this mission—without them, everything ends.
Across all three books, the Dyachenkos include sentences that sound like what the Torpa Institute students are reading in their brain-twisting Textual Module. The reader is told, for instance, that “Reality reconstructed itself like a salt crystal or a snowflake,” and “Reality shattered, splintered, allowing meanings to peek from beyond harsh matter.” On the sentence level, the words make grammatical sense, but what does it mean for Reality to reconstruct itself, or to shatter? Of course, the foundational nature of Reality is at the heart of all three books. But in School of Shards, Sasha must somehow return the universe to its previous state, in which certain Words still exist. References to salt crystals, snowflakes, and splinters suggest that Reality is made up of shards (as per the title)—small, sharp pieces of hard material that were lodged in the new students Sasha hopes to train. “Shard” suggests something pointed, something that draws blood or buries itself in the skin. Reality, in this text, is not a smooth backdrop against which we enact our lives; rather, it is dangerous and can cause physical harm.
Such references to ruin and destruction are developed throughout the book, such as in the aforementioned instance when Valya finds Sasha’s many strange self-portraits: he sees “flames bursting out of the round attic window, and this terrible fantasy refuse[s] to be contained.” Then, he sees “the remains of destroyed galaxies” and “a city in ruins.” Valya’s power to see these things in his mind threatens what Sasha is trying to do: turn Reality back to what it was before she interfered. The delicate nature of Valya’s training means that he is always hovering between doing what Sasha believes will change things for the better, and falling into an idea about Reality that might doom the universe.
A metafictional trilogy about the nature of reality as constituted by language is complicated enough, but translating it from one language into another is a literary feat in itself. Julia Meitov Hersey’s translation shows that she is just as adept with complex sentences as she is working with descriptions of more basic entities. Her close attention to detail, and ability to make imagery concrete, enriches the novel. For example, when Sasha sees some half-broken second-year students walking outside and thinks: “human shells fit them crookedly, like poorly tailored suits, heavy, tattered, and badly stained.” Thanks to Meitov Hersey’s skillful and sensitive work turning a Russian-language story into an English one, Anglophone audiences can savor the strangeness and beauty of these three unique novels about growing up and finding out that one is responsible for the fabric of the universe.
Copyright © 2025 by Rachel Cordasco. All rights reserved.
