This month we will be reading Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich. 

On the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia. A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak.

Against the backdrop of the antisemitic violence that forced her family to flee to the US when she was a child and of the new Russian war on Ukraine, the narrator reflects on her life, her identities and her histories.

This novel in verse is a history of the two women’s relationships, but it is at the same time a record of Slavic culture, an archive of Eastern European queer lives, a call to other exiles and an ode to neurodivergent people. As we follow the narrator’s stream of consciousness, we jump from Ukrainian folk tales to Chekhov short stories to Russian techno pop from the 1990s.

Through Nadezhda’s life story and the narrator’s own search for belonging, their love story inextricably connected to their national history, a cartography emerges – from Romania, to Germany, to Ukraine, to Russia, from Yiddish jokes, to Kyiv’s DIY queer parties, raids on Moscow clubs, individual trajectories of migration, of poems that still echo today, of people who stayed and those who left.

As the requiem inside the narrator’s head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important question: what does it mean to have hope?

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