A literary reconstruction of one of the thousands of lives swallowed up by Russian history.

Literary fiction

Alena Machoninová, a Russian Studies scholar, chose to embark on a subtle intellectual exercise by reconstructing the life of Helena Frischerová. A Moravian-born woman who landed up in Russia during the Stalinist terror, she also became the inspiration for the character Ri in Jiří Weil’s famous novel Moscow Border from 1937 (which was banned by the Czech communist regime). As it transpired years later, she managed to survive – unlike her husband, who was executed – and wrote down her recollections of the gulag where she spent ten years. In her literary-documentary novel, Machoninová follows the twists and turns in Russian intellectual thinking, reflects on the finer points of translation, and at the same time documents the attitudes of today’s ordinary Russians, including their views on the war in Ukraine. She also chronicles Frischerová’s memories and thoughts through her correspondence and memoirs. In doing so, she not only shows readers the tragedy of the Russian industrialization and modernization carried out by the authoritarian political system, but also the traumatized inner lives of its victims.

Alena Machoninová (1980) studied Russian and comparative literature at Charles University. She taught Czech language and literature at Moscow State University and lived in Russia on and off for twenty years. She writes and lectures on 20th and 21st century Russian literature, especially unofficial Soviet poetry and contemporary prose. Together with Jan Machonin, she compiled and translated Zloději všedních okamžiků (Thieves of Everyday Moments, 2015), an anthology of poets from the Lianozovo School. She has written afterwords for novels by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Andrei Bitov, Helena Frischerová, Tamara Petkevich, Andrei Platonov, Maria Stepanova, Oksana Vasyakina and others; she also translated some of these books into Czech. She is the editor of Dějiny ruské moderny (A History of Russian Modernism, 2022) by her teacher Miluše Zadražilová.