Hella

Hella, or Helena Frischerová, a Czech Jew, was the model for the character Ri in Jiří Weil's novel 'Moscow–Border'. She was long believed to have been executed with her husband in Stalin's Great Terror, but it emerged a few years ago that she spent ten years in a Gulag camp in the Russian north and, after her release, lived in Moscow until her death in 1984. From scraps of letters, official documents and her camp memoirs, the narrator, a Russianist, tries to rebuild Hella's fate and inner life while knowing it is futile. Her heroine becomes a mirror for her own features, and their dialogue across time asks what home is, how language shapes a person, what translation and friendship mean, and compares Moscow today with Moscow in the 1930s.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

262 pages in the original

Genres

Historical, Autofiction (assigned by AI)

Set in

Russia, Czechia, 1930s to the present

First published

2023 by Maraton

Author's age

43 when first published

ISBN

9788088411246 (original)

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Wikidata