Meeting with Riva Evstifeeva. “Boarding School Stories” (nominated for the “Dar” award) and “Without a Mother”.
Presentation of the new book by Daria Apakhonchich “12 or 13 stories”. About the clash of the personal and the state: on the street, at home, in the classroom.
Riva Evstifeeva Born in Moscow in 1984. Graduated from Moscow State University, worked at the Institute of Russian Language of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In exile since 2007. Defended her dissertation in Rome, University of Tor Vergata, author of the monograph "European Journey of Baltasar Gracian: Supplement to the Catalogue of Translations" (in Italian). Worked as a waiter, assistant broker, guard in a teenage dormitory. In recent years, she has been working at the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Strasbourg. Since 2021, she has held the position of Deputy Secretary of the Board of the Turgenev Library in Paris.
"Boarding School Stories" (Paris, Éditions Tourgueneff, 2023) is an autobiographical book about the cruel and hungry, but full of amazing adventures, world of a Moscow boarding school in the early nineties, where there is a place for sadistic educators, ascetic teachers, declassed technical staff and American preachers.
The second book, “Without a Mother” (Éditions Tourgueneff, 2024), is also autobiographical. At the center of the story is a teenage girl who, after leaving the walls of a boarding school, begins to live with her mother for the first time and finds herself faced with the need to find a common language with a person who is both familiar and unfamiliar, determined to the point of heroism and extremely vulnerable.
"Boarding School Stories" (Paris, Éditions Tourgueneff, 2023)
"Without a Mother" (Éditions Tourgueneff, 2024)
Daria Apakhonchich – March 24.03.1985, XNUMX – Russian artist and writer, born in Kamchatka, spent her school years in Siberia, in the city of Kemerovo, after school she went to St. Petersburg, studied at the St. Petersburg State University in the philological faculty, taught Russian language and literature in schools, universities, and also in the Red Cross, where she worked with people with migration experience.
Since 2013, she has been a member of the St. Petersburg group {Rodina} and other informal creative and activist associations, engaged in curatorial activities, organized several dozen feminist and anti-war events: exhibitions, festivals, meetings, and was involved in street art. In 2019, together with the Eve's Ribs project and the independent book publishing house Vse Svobodny, she published two collective collections of contemporary feminist fairy tales, Fairy Tales for Girls; in 2022, as part of the Kazakhstani project FemWriting Workshop Almaty, she took part in the publication of a collection of contemporary feminist literature, Causal Place; in 2023, in Tbilisi, she published a collection of fairy tales written by children with migration experience, What the Firebird Saw?
At the end of 2020, she was among the first to receive the status of "Foreign Agent", after several detentions and searches in 2021, she left Russia, lived in Turkey and Georgia, currently lives in Germany, is engaged in literature, raising children.
"12 or 13 Stories" (Paris, Éditions Tourgueneff, 2025)