Elephantina's Moscow Years

Forget about provincial Kiev and boring art school: gripped by the desire to lead the free life of an artist, young Elephantina follows her idol to the catacombs of Moscow. The ruddy-faced poetry guru Pomidor, famous thinker of the avant-garde, has called her the »new Akhmatova«.

Wandering from one sleeping place to the next, through train stations, theatre cloakrooms, and museums, the nomad dressed like a nun finds an apartment that she soon transforms into an artists’ colony. Poetry readings in overcrowded student bars with KGB-informants in the back, forbidden art happenings in Moscow and its surroundings, meeting Allen Ginsberg, a summons from the KGB – yet all of that is only the setting for Elephantina’s yearning for Pomidor.

An éducation sentimentale in powerful colours, rich in episodes and full of esprit and laughter.

»Julia Kissina herself is a marvellous hybrid creature: internationally acting artist with an œuvre of installations, photography and performances on the one hand and one of the most unconventional contemporary Russian writers on the other. [...] Her literary archeology of late socialism seems not at all reactionary but highly topical, as it does with Esterházy, Cărtărescu or Tellkamp: because it’s the influences and mentalities of that time that cause the grotesques and tragedies in the Eastern European present.« Alexander Camman, Die ZEIT

»Elephantina‘s Moskow Years is a veritable inferno of a novel: smart, funny, imaginative, with powerful scenes.« Meike Fessmann, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»There is hardly another book that illuminates the connexion of tyranny and subversion, of submission and autonomy, better than this novel.« Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

»Kissina breaks open metaphors and puts them together anew, so that you have to laugh out loud or marvel at the sheer originality of it. [...] The colorful, grotesque, poetic images of «Elephantina» do not portray the well-known Moscow of the eighties, but evoke something quite different: a wild, anarchic counterculture.« Elisa von Hof, Berliner Morgenpost

»Her unflinching will to see grotesque in the ugly, the supernatural in beauty, and the thread of the absurd running through it all, is a victory over the hardness of reality. That is what art, every art, can do. But it is rarely shown as inspiringly as here.« Katharina Granzin, Frankfurter Rundschau

»The language in Elephantina‘s Moskow Years is delicious!« MUROMEZ

»A true odyssey through the cold and strange city – James Joyce could not have described it more radically or more closely. Julia Kissina's language is a linguistic firework. It does not bore for a single moment, and despite the often bitter gutter story, a defiant humor flourishes throughout.« Barbara Raudszus, EGOTRIP

»Elephantina’s Moscow Years positively bubbles over with storytelling skill. Julia Kissina is a world-class storyteller.« Susann Fleischer, literaturmarkt.info

»Julia Kissina knows her subject, and tells her story laconically and artfully all the while juggling amusing descriptions, hyperbole, and metaphors.« Daniela Chmelik, Missy Magazine