Girls and Institutions
Debut novel by Daria Serenko
Debut novel by Daria Serenko
ORIGINAL TITLE: Девочки и институции
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: No Kidding Press, 2021
92 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Danish (Palomar), Dutch (Koppernik), French (Sampizdat), German (Suhrkamp), Hebrew (Locus), Italian (Nuova Editrice Berti), Japanese (etc.books), Portuguese (Antígona), Spanish (Errata Naturae), Swedish (Ersatz)
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: No Kidding Press, 2021
92 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Danish (Palomar), Dutch (Koppernik), French (Sampizdat), German (Suhrkamp), Hebrew (Locus), Italian (Nuova Editrice Berti), Japanese (etc.books), Portuguese (Antígona), Spanish (Errata Naturae), Swedish (Ersatz)
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
“Foreign agents are agents of the foreign. The foreign can get us at any moment: during a forbidden kiss by the TASS building, in the tumult of a children’s birthday party where everyone is passing around chicken pox, at a procurement meeting in the third hour of which you feel a warmth between your legs as you look at the woman who heads facilities. You can get pregnant when you’re a foreign agent, and then the question is: is your child in neutral amniotic fluid or in a foreign agent’s waters? Who might answer that question?”
An intricate political satire on the bureaucratic machine of the modern-day Russia, an eerie and hilarious portrayal of the Russian cultural institutions and a declaration of love to women — friends, sisters, colleagues — from a poet, activist and the founder of the Feminist Antiwar Resistance, a grassroots movement awarded with the 2023 Aachen Peace Prize.
The heroines of Girls and Institutions are employees of the state cultural establishments in Putin’s Russia. They live in a hermetic, delusional world that imposes its opaque laws on every person who happens to find themselves within it. All-pervasive hierarchies, events held for the sake of reporting, quarterly bonuses to compensate for poor salaries, reprimands and tons of paperwork constitute everyday life in this world. The girls are a secondary element to this system, and yet the crucial one. Their relationships with the system are often complicated and codependent: they live by its laws, sometimes rebelling and at other times obeying, they grieve, they have fun, they dance, they go and come back. Daria Serenko’s attempt at an elaborate description of this world of girls and institutions is aimed at amplifying the voices of hundreds of girls that are often drowned out in the hum of the state machinery and official culture.
The heroines of Girls and Institutions are employees of the state cultural establishments in Putin’s Russia. They live in a hermetic, delusional world that imposes its opaque laws on every person who happens to find themselves within it. All-pervasive hierarchies, events held for the sake of reporting, quarterly bonuses to compensate for poor salaries, reprimands and tons of paperwork constitute everyday life in this world. The girls are a secondary element to this system, and yet the crucial one. Their relationships with the system are often complicated and codependent: they live by its laws, sometimes rebelling and at other times obeying, they grieve, they have fun, they dance, they go and come back. Daria Serenko’s attempt at an elaborate description of this world of girls and institutions is aimed at amplifying the voices of hundreds of girls that are often drowned out in the hum of the state machinery and official culture.
Serenko perfectly portrays how the invisible hand of the Russian autocracy suffocates the freedom of its women through their condition as mothers, girlfriends, wives, sisters, daughters…
— El País
An enormous work, with tremendous political force and a mixture of poetic writing, criticism and a certain beauty that hurts the reader.
— ELLE Spain
Girls and Institutions is an internal view of a system in a delicate literary garment, a system that revolves around a pulsating, arduously repressed fear
—
DIE ZEIT
Girls and Institutions is a bleak, hazy but at the same time crystal clear — poetic — book. It is a book that, despite its simple low-key nature or precisely because of it, both throbs and burns.
— Radio Sweden
The depiction of queer awakening and forced yet genuine sisterhood in the shadow of patriarchy that seems at once ridiculously infantile and dizzyingly all-powerful.
— Ny Tid