Snow Germans is a highly topical metaphysical novel about young people growing up trapped between two of Europe’s giants: Germany and Russia. It captures a disappearing world, that of Germans once encouraged to settle in the Russian countryside in the times of Peter the Great, whose identity and traditions have been stricken by the impact of two World Wars. The Snow Germans are three of these Russo-Germans: now repatriated, they find themselves strangers in their own land. Entangled to the point of feeling more Russian than German, they are lost and unwelcome in both countries, caught up in an unknown land rife with fierce national division and enmity.
Translated by Arch Tait.
Dmitry Vachedin was born in 1982 in St Petersburg and moved to Germany with his parents in 1999. He now lives in Bonn and works as a journalist for Deutsche Welle. At the age of 25 he won the Debut Prize for his short story ‘Shooter in the Azure Sky’. In 2010 his novel Snow Germans was nominated for the Russian Prize, a prize he won in 2012 for his short stories.
Arch Tait’s recent translations include Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia, winner of the inaugural English PEN Literature in Translation Prize in 2010, and the Glas novel Sense by Arslan Khasavov (2012).
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