I Wish Ashes upon My House
Essay by Daria Serenko
Essay by Daria Serenko
ORIGINAL TITLE: Я желаю пепла своему дому
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Suhrkamp, 2023
158 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Czech (Akropolis), Danish (Palomar), Dutch (Koppernik), German (Suhrkamp), Spanish (Errata Naturae), Swedish (Ersatz), Portuguese (Antígona)
ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Suhrkamp, 2023
158 PAGES
RIGHTS SOLD: Czech (Akropolis), Danish (Palomar), Dutch (Koppernik), German (Suhrkamp), Spanish (Errata Naturae), Swedish (Ersatz), Portuguese (Antígona)
ENGLISH SAMPLE AVAILABLE
TRANSLATION RIGHTS REPRESENTED BY SUHRKAMP VERLAG
TRANSLATION RIGHTS REPRESENTED BY SUHRKAMP VERLAG
“War caught us live at the scene of events, unfolding everywhere, all at once. We froze in place, disarmed, pathetic and helpless, observing daily the way our bodies melted and merged with the bodies of the youthful occupiers, transforming into indecipherable bloody scrawls on the margins of the snow-covered field.”
After she was arrested in February 2022, Serenko began working on a new text in jail. What started as an examination of her own activism and an account of the everyday reality of detention, has developed into something much greater: a powerful meditation on war, resistance, exile, identity, and political responsibility.
Within these pages, Serenko describes her experience of imprisonment in short, unexpectedly original images: the dreariness of everyday life, the infringement on one’s body exerted by those in power, an individual yet at the same time a collective experience that she shares with thousands of people in Russia who have protested against the war.
She also examines radically and self-critically the possibilities of activism and keeps circling questions of failure, guilt, shame, and the responsibility that the Russian society and each of its members carries.
In short vignettes, lists, sequences, poems, simulated interviews, Serenko runs through all possible forms and consequences of violence and puts the horror of war and of the women who live through it, into poetic, expressive, drastic, sometimes disturbing images, whose force extends far beyond their immediate political moment.
Within these pages, Serenko describes her experience of imprisonment in short, unexpectedly original images: the dreariness of everyday life, the infringement on one’s body exerted by those in power, an individual yet at the same time a collective experience that she shares with thousands of people in Russia who have protested against the war.
She also examines radically and self-critically the possibilities of activism and keeps circling questions of failure, guilt, shame, and the responsibility that the Russian society and each of its members carries.
In short vignettes, lists, sequences, poems, simulated interviews, Serenko runs through all possible forms and consequences of violence and puts the horror of war and of the women who live through it, into poetic, expressive, drastic, sometimes disturbing images, whose force extends far beyond their immediate political moment.
An insider's view of Russian society, clothed in a delicate and prodigious literary garment, at whose heart pulses a fear that is both palpable and meticulously repressed.
Its poetic force has the power to dispel even the darkest pessimism.
— DIE ZEIT
Its poetic force has the power to dispel even the darkest pessimism.
— El País