Putin's Russia, homophobia and paper Frenchmen by Sergueï Shikalov

Surviving in a foreign language? A migrant autosociobiography

Sergueï Shikalov, Dangerous species (Paris: Seuil, 2024). [quoted as EDA]

Sergueï Shikalov, Français de papier, Dragonfly (Paris: Seuil, 2025). [quote as FDP]

EDA tells the story of the brief spring and the merciless ice age for a generation of gay men in post-Soviet Moscow, who come of age amidst Mylène Farmer concerts, clandestine club nights, and the hope for a "European" Russia—only to witness the state first removing them from the "list of dangerous species" and then, law by law, placing them back on it. In a language that elevates the concealed "we" to a collective testimony and is consistently written in French, the learned language of exile, Sergueï Shikalov transforms this forced disappearance into a defiant declaration of existence.

The novel condenses the fates of its characters into a series of concrete, often casually narrated tragedies, whose very casualness constitutes their harshness. There are the newspaper reports that quote the "we" as a threatening backdrop: the young man who dies in hospital after an "altercation" on a suburban train; the Muscovite who is admitted in critical condition after a fight at the train station; the man who is raped with a broken bottle because of his "alleged homosexuality"—headlines that prompt the police to shrug and refer to "more pressing crimes." Then there is Kirill, the handsome record store clerk with the pianist's hands, whose number is still saved in his phone and who today is perhaps "a living dead man—or simply dead." There are the exorcisms in the church, to which mothers lead their sons with bowed heads; the bearded priest with the BMW, who is supposed to drive out the "evil" for 1500 rubles per session; and the silent suffering of the parents who, instead of a future Zinédine Zidane, got a "Zaza Napoli." There are those returning home from demonstrations with broken noses and fake ribs, finding their disfigured faces on the front pages; and the ultra-Orthodox thugs who douse Madonna posters with gasoline and set them on fire. And above it all stands the tragic predecessor of Professor "MA," the elegant dandy, former Gorbachev translator with the silver wedding-ring facade, who dies alone—divorced, disowned by his own sons, marked by a stroke—because he "liked the young": the image of where life in secret leads, and at the same time the uncanny premonition that exile, too, only leads to another form of the same loneliness.

The novel shows that under conditions of persecution, identity cannot be asserted but only indirectly circumscribed—and that it is precisely a foreign language, French, that opens up the space in which one can express what one's mother tongue never dared to name. The following interpretation assumes that the book translates a collective trauma into a collective form, and that the unassuming pronoun "on" is the key to everything else: to genre, narrative perspective, character conception, and political thrust alike. What genre expectations does a text subvert that wants to be neither a confessional statement nor a social novel in the classical sense? How does the "on" constitute a subject that is simultaneously one and many? What is the relationship between the consumerist surfaces of memory and the political violence that underpins them? How does the novel intertwine the private choreography of desire and shame with the grand chronology of Russian authoritarianism? And finally: What does it mean that this text about silence is written in a learned language, the mastery of which the novel itself simultaneously demonstrates and reflects? These guiding questions structure the following investigation, whose core claim is that EDA uses the form of the litany to transform enforced anonymity into a process of witnessing – a poetics that turns annihilation into preservation.

Sergueï Shikalov's debut novel, EDA, tells the story of a generation of gay men growing up in post-Soviet Russia between the late 1990s and the early 2020s. After the repeal of Article 121 of the Penal Code in May 1993, a narrow window of freedom seems to open for them. They study, learn foreign languages, dream of careers as diplomats and interpreters, starve themselves to get in shape, secretly apply makeup before going out, and seek each other out in club restrooms, internet cafes on Old Arbat Street, and the chat rooms of Rambler.ru. The novel traces less a continuous narrative than the collective experience of this group: their consumerist aesthetic, their Western idols from George Michael to Mylène Farmer, their self-deceptions, and the tacit agreement with a society that tolerates them as long as they remain invisible.

This spring is followed by an ice age. The novel meticulously traces how the political climate closes down again from 2012 onward: the St. Petersburg law against the "propaganda of homosexuality among minors," Putin's return to the presidency, the revival of the word "pedophile" in its legal sense, the televised hate speech, the beatings at the demonstrations in Pushkin Square. The hope for irreversible progress proves to be an illusion. What began as a "life almost acquired" is systematically taken away until only departure remains.

The final section depicts the emigration: packing the "essentials," the flight west, learning a new language and a new first name adapted to the foreign phonetics. The novel does not end in triumph, but with ambivalent pain—the saving of one's own skin coupled with the guilt of having abandoned the country to the "medieval" population. An afterword records the sweeping ban of November 24, 2022, and the war of aggression against Ukraine as the historical endpoint. The very last sentence, however, in the newly used "je" (the preposition "ever"), defiantly asserts existence: "This is me. I exist. I have the honor of being."

Sergueï Shikalov was born in Moscow to a Russian-Belarusian family and settled in France in 2016. This debut novel was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize for first novels and won the André Malraux Prize in the category of "Committed Fiction" as well as the Grand Prix du Roman Gay 2024.

Sergueï Shikalov's essay FPP (2025), published shortly afterwards, is an autobiographically based political essay on multiple citizenship.
The French immigration law of January 2024 is a controversial text. Law No. 2024-42 of January 26, 2024, “pour contrôler l'immigration, améliorer l'intégration” (“to control immigration, to improve integration”), is the most controversial French immigration law in years, which Shikalov cites as a current political point of reference. Its passage was highly politically charged. The government draft originally comprised 27 articles; after deliberations in the conciliation committee, the compromise text grew to 86 articles, which were adopted by the National Assembly and the Senate on December 19, 2023. ¹ The increase was largely due to stricter measures pushed through by the conservative right and, in some respects, the far-right National Rally – which is why the law was perceived as a shift to the right and a concession to the extreme right. Thousands of people, including students, demonstrated against the legislation in many cities in January 2024. ² The Constitutional Council then significantly curtailed the law: On January 25, it censored more than a third of the articles – most as “legislative cavaliers” without reference to the original project (such as provisions on family reunification, student degrees, and social benefits), and three articles for substantive reasons, including Article 1 on immigration quotas.

For Shikalov's argument, what was negotiated in substance is crucial: Several of the originally proposed, partly censored measures aimed at a sharper distinction between "real" French citizens and naturalized or foreign-born citizens—for example, through stricter social benefits for foreigners, an erosion of the "droit du sol" (right of ownership), and proposals to deny citizens with dual nationality access to certain "sensitive" public offices. This very logic—the hierarchization of belonging, the figure of the merely nominally French citizen—is the starting point of his essay on "French without paper." The law provides him with real, current political evidence that the mechanisms of conditional belonging and suspicion experienced by his fictional characters in Russia are reappearing in a new guise in French exile.

Drawing on his own experience as a native Russian and naturalized French citizen—a “binational” who describes himself as a “born Russian and adopted Frenchman”—Shikalov dissects the semantic ambiguity of the term “nationality,” which he breaks down into its three components: identity, assimilation, and citizenship. Against the backdrop of the French immigration law of January 2024 and the rise of the far right, he analyzes how the category of “French on paper”—“Frenchmen on paper,” whose affiliation is marked as inferior and suspect—excludes people with complex identities. With linguistic precision, he exposes the kinship between French identitarian discourse and Russian nationalism (for example, through the untranslatable Russian “narod” and Uvarov’s triad), and demonstrates how the bureaucratic naturalization process itself obscures the question, “Are you French enough to be allowed to become French?” The essay serves as a conceptual complement to EDA, providing a framework for its interpretation: What the novel explores narratively in the form of a litany and through the concealing "on"—the life of a group classified, tolerated, and ultimately expelled by a state as a "dangerous species"—is further reflected upon discursively by the essay. It demonstrates that the mechanisms of classification, registration, and conditional belonging, which were used against homosexuals in Russia, are again being used against immigrants in French exile. Both texts revolve around the same experience of forced self-justification of one's own existence, around shame and the "honor of being," and around the foreign language as the site of a precarious, never fully granted homeland—so that the novel's triumphant final sentence ("J'ai l'honneur d'être") finds its bitter continuation in the essay: Even the saving new citizenship remains a status that is subject to reservation, and whose holders must continue to prove that they are allowed to belong.

Requiem for an extinguished life form

EDA defies the conventional novel form. There is no continuous plot with exposition, conflict, and resolution in the usual sense, but rather a serial enumeration of scenes, objects, habits, and losses. Even the first piece, "Qu'en reste-t-il?" ("What Remains?"), which precedes the actual beginning of the novel, employs anaphoric accumulation: "Des souvenirs," "Des promesses," "Des fantômes," "Restent des tableaux." Memory is inventoried like the estate of a deceased person. This list-like form, which permeates the entire text, gives the novel the structure of a litany—a liturgical invocation that generates meaning through repetition rather than causality. The novel resembles a requiem for an extinguished way of life.

The form corresponds to its subject matter. Because the existence depicted was itself fragmentary, precarious, and subject to oblivion, its representation can only be in fragments. At one point, the text compares the memories to "fleeting images" and "sand sculptures destroyed by the tide." ³The litany is therefore not merely a stylistic device, but the only form appropriate to what is being witnessed: it captures what inevitably slips away.

The novel exists on the border between autofictional exploration and a collective portrait of its time. Shikalov, a Russian émigré writing in French, bases his work on an experience that is clearly recognizable as his own. However, the text explicitly rejects the autobiographical "je" (the "I"). In a passage on poetics, the novel itself names this decision: the "on" serves "to reject the responsibility of the 'I' in order to preclude any confusion with personal history." ⁴The novel thus situates itself close to the French tradition of sociologically grounded autofiction, as practiced by Édouard Louis, mentioned in the blurb of the series, but shifts its focus on the individual to the collective.

The undefined "we" as a speaking instance

The novel's most striking decision is its consistent use of the French indefinite pronoun "on" throughout the narrative. This grammatical choice, best rendered in German as an indefinite "man" or a collective "wir," carries the entire semantic weight of the book. The novel reflects on this at length in its programmatic second chapter, citing three reasons: a lack of courage to use "je," a refusal to speak with "nous" on behalf of a community, and the need to "construct a collective with vague yet tangible outlines." ⁵.

The "on" thus accomplishes two things at once. It protects—it conceals the individual subject behind a nasal sound, behind "[ɔ̃], pronom indéfini," one of the first words learned in French class. And it empowers: it allows one to "let out a cry" and "revive suffocated lives." The anonymity, enforced in the Russian context, is reinterpreted in the French text as a conscious aesthetic and ethical strategy. What was a protective measure becomes a process of solidarity.

The key programmatic passage, in which the novel establishes its own method, reads:

This passage appears at the end of the second chapter, "On," which reflects on the choice of pronouns and language, immediately before the novel transitions into a depiction of the concrete world. Interpretation: Here, the central paradox of the book is made explicit: Concealment is the condition of the scream. The "on" is established as a third way between "je" and "nous"—it neither assumes individual responsibility nor claims representation, but rather occupies a precarious middle ground. The self-irony of the "luxury of the Francophones" and the matter-of-fact statement of its own length ("two hundred pages") are noteworthy, openly displaying the constructed nature of the text. The lack of courage that the text attributes to itself is not an admission of weakness, but rather the honest precondition under which the testimony even comes about.

Closely linked to the "on" is the reflection on the choice of language. The novel claims to be inconceivable in the mother tongue: "It seems difficult to imagine this text in our mother tongue." ⁶According to the text's logic, Russian forces a choice between singular and plural, thus leading to "total de-anonymization." The foreign language, on the other hand, allows one to "put words on things that the mother tongue never dared to name." The act of writing itself becomes the subject: French is not merely the medium, but the prerequisite for attestation, an "anti-inflammatory agent without an expiration date" against the shame injected by the "mother society."

The collective subject

The novel centers not on a single protagonist, but on a group of young gay men from Moscow, held together by the suffix "on," whose outlines remain deliberately blurred. Opposing them, the novel constructs a system of counter- and secondary characters, most of whom remain stereotyped and nameless. There are the "normals," marked with the distancing "ils" and "eux"—the majority society, which tolerates as long as there is no "provocation." There are the "progressives" with their Stalinist apartments and foreign vacations, who keep a gay friend as a marker of distinction. And there are the "older lovers," the quadragénaires, who offer the younger men dietary advice at breakfast, thereby revealing the hierarchies of desire within the group.

From this stereotypical world of characters, one figure stands out: the nameless Professor "MA," a relic of the Soviet generation of homosexual men. He is a dandy, married, father of two sons, a former diplomat and Gorbachev translator—the embodiment of that existence lived in secrecy, which is just beginning to leave the "on" behind. His repeated gesture of producing an old black-and-white photograph of Gorbachev and Mandela, and his statement, "You are lucky to be alive now," ⁷ They mark him as a figure of the historical past. His lonely death – divorced, rejected by his sons, marked by a stroke – becomes a bleak prolepsis: It shows where life in a closet leads, and ironically also where the emigrants ultimately end up again, in another form of isolation.

Mothers, grandmothers, the beautician, the "gay-friendly" girlfriend: women appear primarily as figures of care, complicity, and vicarious longing. The scene in which the "on" confesses his own desire to his girlfriend in the semi-darkness of the alleys and presses himself against her "soft, comforting breasts" to imagine "it is his mother speaking" ⁸This function is intensified: The woman becomes a surrogate for the impossible maternal assumption.

Register of Concealment

Communication in the novel is consistently characterized by encryption, innuendo, and lies. The demonstrative "ça"—"être comme ça," "comme ça"—replaces the unspeakable word. The parents learn of a fictitious "girlfriend from university," the nurse in the AIDS testing lab is deceived by the lie of the unfaithful girlfriend. The language of the majority, for its part, oscillates between pseudo-civilized "gay" and derogatory "pédé," "goloubyïé" ("blue," голубые), and "véhiculés par le derrière." The novel dissects this vocabulary as an index of social power relations.

A separate complex is technologically mediated communication. The chat rooms of Rambler.ru, the forums "Les mecs de Moscou", and later Grindr become stages for a simulated existence, where, under a false name, false age, and false height, one "lives through an entire couple's life in one hour". ⁹The anonymity of the internet doubles the anonymity of the "online world": here as there, the true self is hidden behind a pseudonym – "Andreï, Pavel, Roman, Nicolaï… It doesn't matter what, except theirs." Media use thus becomes an allegory for the entire form of existence.

Luck and disaster

Despite its episodic structure, the novel possesses a clear overarching architecture, marked by three titled interludes: "Une vie presque acquise" ("A Life Almost Acquired"), "S'en aller" ("Leaving"), and the concluding frame opened by "Qu'en reste-t-il?". This tripartite division corresponds to a tragic arc: precarious hope, isolation, exile. The individual, numbered chapters fill these arcs with thematic tableaux—beauty regimes, club nights, fear of AIDS, Mylène Farmer concerts, demonstrations—that do not so much follow one another as overlap.

Two narrative threads run parallel and intertwine. The personal thread traces the choreography of desire, body, and relationship; the political thread chronologically traces Russian history from Putin's inauguration on December 31, 1999, to the 2022 law. The novel interweaves both with calculated brutality: the enumeration of terrorist attacks—the hostage crisis at the theater, Beslan on September 1, 2004, the assassination of Anna Politkovskaya on Putin's birthday—is juxtaposed with anxieties about dieting and clubbing. This montage generates the book's central tension: the simultaneity of private pursuit of happiness and collective catastrophe.

Spatial structure: Moscow as a deceptive fortress

The dominant space is Moscow, and more precisely, a central Moscow: Pushkin Square, Tverskaya Street, the Patriarch's Ponds, the sauna at Mayakovsky Square "a ten-minute walk from the Kremlin." The city is the setting for a sense of security that proves to be an illusion. The recurring motif of functioning "Wi-Fi at bus stops even at minus thirty degrees" reinforces this deceptive immunity: one considers oneself "immunized" because one lives in the metropolis, while the provinces—Riyadh, Omsk, Siberia, places one "cannot even locate on a map"—are declared the zone of true danger.

The space is sharply divided into inside and outside. Inside, in the apartments, saunas, basement clubs, in the red light of the descending staircases, existence is possible; outside, in the cold, under prying eyes, secrecy reigns. This vertical contrast between ground and surface is superimposed on a horizontal axis: the distant "là-bas," the idealized West—the Marais in Paris, the Plaça de Catalunya, the Stade de France—which initially appears as a space of longing and a tourist preview, ultimately becoming the real, ambivalent space of exile. Significantly, upon arrival, the real West shrinks to cheap Formula 1 hotels with sheets reeking of cigarettes.

Time structure: Achrony of the litany

The narrated time is doubly constructed. On the surface, the imperfect tense of habit ("on faisait," "on allait," "on se disait") suspends linear sequence and creates an iterative duration in which years condense into a single generalized day. Beneath this, however, stretches a precise data framework—May 27, 1993, December 12, 1993, September 1, 2004, October 7, 2006, 2012, November 24, 2022—that repeatedly pulls private duration back into the relentless political chronology.

The cyclical nature of the seasons serves a structuring function. The Russian spring, "a fleeting season," appears as a recurring promise, a "numbing season for our anxieties." The Armenian tulip sellers at the metro exit become its reliable harbingers. But this cyclical hope is refuted by linear history: unlike winter, freedom does not return with the thaw. The novel plays off the naive logic of the seasons against historical regression, thus exposing the belief in natural, irreversible progress as self-deception.

The novel precisely dates the origin of this hope to the turn of the millennium and links it to a concert:

The passage appears early, during the transition from the programmatic chapter to the depiction of the early years. The concert by the singer, known for her queer following, serves as the founding event of a collective sense of freedom. Interpretation: The intertwining of euphoria and caution is characteristic. The "small revolution" is simultaneously declared something best kept quiet – the "ni vu ni connu" articulates the fatal agreement of the entire generation to enjoy freedom only under the condition of invisibility. The image of the "city sealed by snow" already anticipates the later ice age: The spring that Farmer promises is provisional from the outset. Furthermore, the phrase "like everything in this country" reveals a fatalistic view of history that essentially already anticipates the regression.

Species, body, shame, consumption, ghost

The title EDA establishes the dominant imagery: that of zoological classification. Gay men are consistently treated as an animal species that has been removed from the "list of dangerous species" and that oscillates between "path of extinction" and "path of reappearance." The state has "erased" their "social category" from the penal code; the logic of classification, registration, and extermination permeates the text. The later quote from the propagandist Kisselev, that the heart of a deceased homosexual is "unusable" and must be cremated, reinforces this. ¹⁰, takes dehumanization to the extreme and delivers the macabre punchline of the metaphor.

The semantic field of the body is omnipresent: acne, hair loss, the dictate of 65 kilos, contact lenses instead of glasses, the mirror as a site of self-examination. The body is a commodity – “rester sur le marché” – and the stage for an internalized discipline. Closely intertwined with this is the field of brand names: Zara, Lush, IKEA, Biotherm, Mylène Farmer's collector's boxes. This obsessive enumeration of brands is not merely a product of its time, but semantically functional: Western goods are fetishes of a longed-for European existence, material substitutes for freedom. Overarching all of this is the field of shame (honte), the affect injected by the “mother society,” against which all the writing effort is directed.

A recurring theme is that of ghosts and revenants. The Hunzinger quote preceding the novel—the narrator as a "ghost recounting the memories of a world it once knew"—sets the tone. The dead and vanished return as "phantoms farouches," the salesman Kirill is a "mort-vivant," and the past clings to the body as a "phantom shadow." The act of writing itself is a summoning of spirits, a "faire resurgir des visages disparus."

Semantic reversible image: the dangerous and the endangered species

The title EDA is multiply coded and its meaning shifts several times throughout the novel. Literally meaning "dangerous species," it evokes the vocabulary of zoology and species conservation, which the text applies to its characters: they are a "social category" recorded and counted by the state—the "less than one percent" of Soviet statistics—and "erased" from the list of dangerous species in 1993. This removal is therefore not an act of recognition, but a change in administrative category: they remain a species, only temporarily a protected one. The ambivalence of the adjective is crucial. From the regime's perspective, the characters are dangerous—a threat of contamination that, according to its inflammatory rhetoric, "infects the youth" and threatens "the foundations of Russian civilization." From their own perspective, they are not dangerous, but endangered: threatened beings facing violence, blackmail, and exile. The title leaves both interpretations in suspense, thus revealing the perpetrator-victim reversal of the homophobic discourse.

A third meaning resonates in the French: "espèces" also means "cash, coinage" (payer en espèces). This secondary meaning links the title to the novel's economic sphere—bodies as commodities, the "rester sur le marché," the constant balancing of desire and value. Human beings appear as quantifiable, tradable entities. Ultimately, the species in the text oscillates between "voie d'extinction" and "voie d'apparition," a dying and a newly emerging species. This indecisiveness is the title's punchline: the generation of "on" appears for a historical moment and disappears again, a flash between two ice ages.

Idealization and self-devaluation of masculinity

The novel sharply analyzes the differing societal perceptions of male and female homosexuality. Being a lesbian is "certainly less dramatic," indeed, "not bad at all": the relationship between women, the "rozovyïé" ("Rosa"), arouses "only indulgent smiles" and sexual fantasies, as long as the women ultimately marry, cook borscht, and iron shirts. Male sexuality between men, on the other hand, is considered "dirty, by definition disgusting." The novel traces this asymmetry back to the patriarchal instrumentalization of women: female desire is tolerated because it is seen as "folie de la jeunesse," which remains subordinate to the duty of reproduction.

Hegemonic masculinity appears as a constant pressure. The demand to dress "like normal men," the John Wayne-esque gait of the panicky, distancing man in the locker room, the idealized strength of Madonna with her "biceps of concrete"—gender in the novel is a repertoire of poses and disciplines. The violence of the neo-Nazis and the "normal" men is specifically aimed at punishing deviant masculinity, which makes the threat of rape "with a bottleneck" readable as a gesture of sovereignty by the heterosexual order.

The novel consistently portrays male desire as a divided experience of idealization and self-deprecation. The body itself appears as an object of discipline and a constant lack, while the desired body of another is presented as an unattainable norm. This hierarchy is condensed in a breakfast scene with the older lovers:

The passage appears in the spring chapter, which describes the group's beauty regimes—diet, gym memberships on credit, contact lenses, fear of hair loss. It immediately follows the description of starving oneself "to make the sides apparent." Interpretation: Desire here is inextricably intertwined with humiliation and age hierarchy. The older lover embodies the ideal and simultaneously issues the disciplinary command; the buttered slice of bread he allows himself marks the power imbalance as a disparity in the right to eat. The male body is a commodity—the later "rester sur le marché" is the economic formula for this—and desire means submitting to this market through self-mortification. The internalized norm speaks here from the mouth of the desired one himself.

The portrayal of male desire becomes most jarring where sexuality morphs into political conflict. The scene with the Georgian businessmen at the Hilton intertwines penetration, violence, and national guilt.

The scene belongs to the late phase of relative freedom; the Georgian accent is an “echo of the stairwell of our childhood,” when Georgians, Ukrainians, Armenians, and Russians still lived in the same stairwell. It stands in the shadow of the 2008 Georgia war. Interpretation: The penetrated body becomes the stage for national guilt—the “on” bears vicarious responsibility for the aggression of a state it itself despises. Intimacy and political violence are indistinguishable: The tender beginning tips into a rape that is simultaneously a punishment for Russian foreign policy. Here, the novel shows that male desire in this context can never be private but always remains permeated by history; the “tears of impatience” are directed at both, the body and the country.

Writing as proof of existence

EDA is to a large extent a self-reflexive text that also negotiates its own methods. The second chapter, "On," is nothing less than an embedded poetics: it explains the choice of pronouns, the choice of language, and the function of writing as a way of coping with shame. The novel even names its own length—the "on" is meant to "revive stifled lives for about two hundred pages." ¹¹ —and thus shatters the fiction of immediacy. This autopoetological self-naming is not a mannerism, but part of the ethical framework: A text about enforced speechlessness must exhibit its own linguistic development.

The poetics culminate in the final sentence. After nearly two hundred pages in the "on," the novel shifts only once to the "ever" and asserts an existence in a language that does not deny:

It is the last sentence of the novel's body before the epilogue, at the end of the list of what is to be "learned and forgotten" in exile. Interpretation: Here the meaning of the entire process becomes clear. The collective "on" was the necessary preliminary stage, the sanctuary from which the self can ultimately emerge. Writing itself is thus the act of emancipation it addresses—the form accomplishing what the content strives for. The location of this becoming-self is significant: before the mirror, which previously was always a place of self-deprecation and now becomes a place of self-assertion. The phrase "j'ai l'honneur d'être," which in French quotes the bureaucratic closing of a letter (j'ai l'honneur d'être votre dévoué serviteur), transforms an administrative phrase into an existential assertion—and thus turns the language of bureaucracy, which had categorized and "erased" the characters as a "species," against its own logic. The fact that this proof of existence is formulated “in a language that does not deny us” brings us full circle back to the initial reflection on language: French, once a makeshift solution, has become the only homeland that recognizes the self.

Imported Identities: Self-Assertion in Exile

The novel prominently displays its intermedial references. Mylène Farmer serves as a central figure: her "Mylenium Tour" in Moscow marks the beginning of her supposed freedom, while her concert with the "gate of hell" and the "corked statues" in Saint Petersburg provides a key image. The quoted lyrics of her song "Puisque," with its "Lasse je m'efface" (Let me disappear), naturally hint at the theme of self-annihilation. Alongside this is a whole canon of queer icons—George Michael, Elton John, Ellen DeGeneres, Ricky Martin—who serve as "sources of inspiration and courage," as well as the Russian pop duo tATu, whose later coming-out, staged as a performance, proves to be a bitter disillusionment. The Russian rock singer Zemfira appears several times with quoted song lyrics translated in footnotes, embodying the "sympathetic cowards" against whom hope is thwarted.

On the level of high culture, the novel evokes a queer literary family tree: Jean Genet, Hervé Guibert, Mathieu Riboulet, discovered in the Parisian bookstore "Les Mots à la bouche," along with the revelation about Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau, which shatters the maternal Fantômas image. Dostoevsky's The idiot It travels in a backpack into exile. Cinema—Xavier Dolan, François Ozon, Almodóvar, and "Eight Women" with Deneuve and Ardant—shapes the imaginary of a longed-for European existence, as does Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Paris. This density of references traces the cultural self-creation of a group that had to construct its identity from imported images because its own culture offered no role models. The novel itself, published in French by the prestigious Seuil publishing house's "Cadre Rouge," ultimately inscribes itself within precisely that Western literature which its characters once only distantly yearned for.

EDA derives its power from the perfect convergence of form and experience. What might initially appear as stylistic idiosyncrasy—the continuous narrative in the second person, the dissolution of the plot into litany-like enumeration, the obsessive brand mention—proves to be a precise translation of a historical situation into literary techniques. The pronoun that conceals simultaneously enables testimony; the foreign language that alienates liberates, allowing for expression; the list that establishes no hierarchy becomes an act of reverence for an extinguished way of life. The novel demonstrates that the most personal—shame, desire, escape—can only be expressed indirectly through the impersonal.

At the same time, the book is a political indictment of chilling sharpness. By relentlessly juxtaposing its characters' private pursuit of happiness with the chronicle of state violence, it exposes the fatal self-deception of a generation that mistook retreat into private life for security and paid for political passivity with the price of exile. The question of guilt posed repeatedly in the novel – "Et si c'était notre faute ?" – remains deliberately unresolved, lending the text its moral depth: it does not celebrate its characters as heroes, but rather portrays them as complicit in their own disenfranchisement, without condemning them for it.

EDA doesn't offer an outright utopia – the novel is too relentlessly grounded in its historical context, which the afterword defines as a grim endpoint with the 2022 ban and the war of aggression against Ukraine. The characters' hope for a "European," liberal Russia is gradually exposed as self-deception: the belief in natural, irreversible progress, symbolized by the recurring spring motif, shatters under the cyclical recurrence of repression. What remains is a smaller, more tenacious form of hope, which the novel locates not in the political sphere, but in the existential and linguistic. It lies in the act of bearing witness itself – in the fact that the "suffocated lives" are recorded and preserved from oblivion – and culminates in the final sentence, which, after nearly two hundred pages of concealing "we," finally dares to use an "I": "This is me. I exist. I have the honor of being." This sentence is not a promise of a better world, but a defiant self-assertion in exile, spoken "in a language that does not deny us." The novel's outlook is thus less utopian than defiantly survivalist: no prospect of collective liberation, but the possibility of asserting a precarious homeland and a right to one's own existence through writing and a new language—a consolation that embraces defeat instead of denying it.

In the end, there is no consolation, but rather an assertion. The shift from the collective "on" to the individual "je" in the final sentence accomplishes, within the realm of language, the emancipation that the political sphere has denied. That this proof of existence is formulated in a learned, "limping" language and reinterprets an administrative phrase as a formula of dignity is the final twist of a novel that consistently transforms annihilation into a preservation. EDA is thus less a novel about disappearance than a procedure against it—a text that bears witness to the very "species" whose annihilation it describes.