I Am Drowning in a Fleeing Lake

She comes from the Ukrainian Crimea and is completely influenced by Russian culture. At Kyiv University, she meets a woman who is only three years older – and who casts a spell over her for years. It is the narrator’s first love, and it is to be her only one. The lecturer, however, insists on her right to love several women at the same time. In order to escape her control, she goes to Moscow after her studies, but she cannot get away from her. With the Maidan protests and the start of the war in 2014, the conflict between them becomes a political one. While the former teacher denies the narrator any identity, especially her Ukrainian one, she not only fights back against her, but also against her father, who is loyal to Russia.

I Am Drowning in a Fleeing Lake is the enchanting self-questioning of a first-person narrator who is shaken by the certainties of her socialisation. From the fragments of her past and the documents of a destructive love affair, she writes a book – and gains her independence in the process.

“I finally had a goal: to prove to her that I could do it, that I could survive. I was obsessed with the idea of transformation. The idea of surpassing myself. From a distance, I could believe that all of this was only happening because I had decided it. They didn't exist – I did.”