NADEZHDA IN THE DARK

Lovers in exile reckon with the weight of history over the course of one winter’s night in Berlin.

In Moskovich’s novel in verse, two women sit quietly beside one another in their bed in the dark. Both were displaced as children when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991; the narrator, like the author, was a Jewish refugee from Ukraine to the United States, and Nadezhda, her girlfriend, an emigre from Russia to Germany. With the narrator’s meandering reflections on an intricate tapestry of references—the poetry of Sophia Parnok and Ilya Kaminsky, short stories from O. Henry and Chekhov, Russian queer counterculture (“all that stuff that made it into the New York Times, / and all the stuff that didn’t”), Yiddish sayings, Soviet jokes, the list goes on—Moskovich illustrates the silence that stretches between the women throughout the long night. Acknowledged in the shadows is the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine (“forbidden to refer to as a ‘war’ in Russia,” the narrator notes), and the long tradition of Soviet antisemitism. The novel engages frankly with these broader realities, but if there is a plot here, it’s the one that unfurls on a minute, human level through the slivers of personal history we glean about the pair and the trajectory of their relationship. The tension that thrums at the heart of the novel is their fervid, sometimes painful love for each other, laced through with unhealed wounds and an experience of post-Soviet splintering that is simultaneously shared and inevitably different for each woman. Moskovich etches the dynamic with elegant economy: “I like Jews, / Nadezhda said with such pride / that I couldn’t help but recognize / the generations of Soviets / who twirled upon their blind eye, she / didn’t have to understand, I decided, / but I wanted her to understand / that she didn’t understand.” Buoyed by nimble intertextuality and precisely observed emotional currents, this single-sentence novel in verse trips along with surprising ease.

A lyrical, sinuous exploration of queer love and diasporic grief.