«The Russian language does not belong to the Russian Federation»
Kira, the main character of the novel Zungenbrecher, moves to Germany, learns German, works the night shift cleaning the kitchen of an expensive restaurant, falls in love with a girl, looks for her place in her new life, and tries to rebuild her relationship with her own past. The novel is structured like a kind of foreign-language textbook: the chapters are named after proficiency levels, and between them there are exercises for readers. At the heart of the novel is the personal experience of its author Karina Papp — a translator and writer with Hungarian roots, born in Riga and educated in St. Petersburg. Later, this multilayered identity was joined by emigration to Germany, queer experience, and the events of recent years — Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, volunteer work, and attempts to redefine her relationship to the Russian language, her country of origin, and her own place in the world. She wrote her first novel in German, a language that is not her mother tongue, and made a principled decision not to translate it into Russian herself — because her relationship with her native language after emigration and Russian aggression became one of the book’s central themes.
#autofiction #WarinUkraine #Germany #europe #Identity #interview #queer #parentsandchildren #Russia #modernliterature #feminism #experimentalprose #Emigration #language