Nadezhda in the Dark

Moskovich (Virtuoso) offers a raw novel-in-verse of a Ukrainian American’s passionate affair with a Russian woman in Berlin. The unnamed narrator was born in Soviet Ukraine and left with her family in 1991, when she was seven, for the U.S. As a young woman dealing with depression, she fled to Paris and then settled in Berlin, where she met her partner, a Russian expat named Nadezhda. The narrator doesn’t feel like she belongs in the places she’s lived (“I’ve always wanted / a city to love as my own”) and she has faced lifelong persecution for her Jewishness. Her relationship with Nadezhda is intense and obsessive (“she’s my Russian Bonnie, I’m her Ukrainian Clyde,” the narrator muses at one point). Though the two bond over their Soviet heritage and queerness, Nadezhda’s lack of interest in having children drives a wedge between them, as does her misinformed Russian family, especially after her mother parrots Putin’s claims that the 2022 Russian invasion was meant to rescue Ukrainians from fascism (“Nadya, your face is getting red, I like Ukrainians, her mama said”). Throughout, Moskovich effectively evokes her narrator’s dizzying rootlessness and all-consuming love for Nadezhda. It’s a memorable portrait of the ways in which desire defies reason. (Jan.)