Children of the Volga
Audiobook
Children of the Volga
A story of silence, love and the end of a world against the backdrop of Russian history
Russia in 1916. On the lower reaches of the Volga, where German emigrants have made their home since the 18th century, the stereotypical days of Jakob Ivanovich Bach pass. The thirty-two-year-old German teacher has such an uninteresting appearance and life that nothing can be said about him. Until the landowner Grimm from the opposite shore asks him to teach his seventeen-year-old daughter Klara German.
In her second novel, Children of the Volga, the Russian writer with Tatar roots Guzel Yachina, author of the bestselling Zulejka Opening Her Eyes (2017, PROSTOR), revisits the traumas of Soviet history, when revolutionary idealism withered amid the mass violence of Stalinism. While in her debut she took us to Siberia while showing us the Tatar language in herself and throughout Russia, in her new work she presents the strange folklore and lifestyle of the Volga Germans, which was completely destroyed by their deportation in 1941.
Guzel Jachina
Guzel Jachina (1977) was born in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, to a doctor and an engineer. She studied foreign languages at the State University, then graduated from the Moscow Film School with a degree in screenwriting, which she completed in 2015. She made her debut as a writer in the literary magazines Neva and Oktyabr with two short stories, Motyljok (Butterfly, 2014) and Vintovka (Rifle, 2015). In 2017, her novel Zulejka opens her eyes was published by PROSTOR, which became a worldwide bestseller and the basis for a TV series. Another novel, Children of the Volga, translated into seventeen languages to date, became a literary sensation. Jachina has collected several major prizes for it, including the Russian State Great Book Award. In September 2022, PROSTOR will publish Guzel Yachina's new novel Transport to Samarkand, in which the author revisits another dark episode of early Soviet history and sheds light on the experiences of ethnic minorities in Russia. It tells the story of the orphans evacuated from Russia's Volga-Urals region during the famine of the early 1920s, also known as the Volga Famine.
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