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

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Exactly 60 years ago, the USSR began the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, which marked the beginning of the Soviet dissident movement. One of the prosecution witnesses at this trial was the Orientalist Sergei Khmelnitsky — the father of historian of Soviet secret services and «Most» columnist Dmitry Khmelnitsky. Dmitry himself was 12 years old at the time. A couple of years later, Dmitry learned that his father had been a secret NKVD informant, whose denunciation in the late 1940s led to the arrest and imprisonment of two of his friends. After being released during the Khrushchev Thaw, they publicly exposed Sergei Khmelnitsky, and all his close friends turned away from him. Among them was Andrei Sinyavsky. However, few people know that the famous writer himself was recruited by the NKVD at the same time as Khmelnitsky and continued to cooperate with the KGB. Dmitry tells how it all happened in his forthcoming book «Khmelnitsky, Sinyavsky, and the KGB.»

#dissidents #denunciations #interview #historicalmemory #kgb #personalexperience #thaw #SinyavskyandDaniel #repressionsintheUSSR #parentsandchildren #specialservices #France #Emigration

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Masha Moskalyova is a girl whose fate shocked even those familiar with political repression. After the 12-year-old drew an anti-war picture at school, she endured several FSB interrogations, searches, psychological pressure, long months in a shelter, separation from her father—who was imprisoned for a couple of anti-war posts on social media—and, finally, forced emigration. We spoke with Masha about what she went through and how her life is now.

#WarinUkraine #state #interview #personalexperience #society #protests #repressions #parentsandchildren #Russia #familyandschool #Emigration

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