6 - Traumatic Recollections: Olga Grjasnowa

Summary

OLGA GRJASNOWA WAS BORN in 1984 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, but at the age of eleven moved with her family to Germany. Der Russe ist einer der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees, 2012), Grjasnowa's first novel, was very well received by the critics as well as by the German and international book worlds. There are obvious similarities between the author and the protagonist of the novel, Maria (Mascha) Kogan: both hail from Baku and migrated to Germany as children, both are of Jewish origin, and both have a grandmother who survived the Holocaust and sought refuge in Azerbaijan.

Nevertheless, the book is not an autobiography, as it foregrounds the fictional story of the death of the protagonist's German boyfriend, Elias, as a result of complications arising after an injury in a soccer game, and the protagonist's attempt to deal with her loss by moving to Israel, where she becomes preoccupied with a number of historical and present traumas. Though many elements of Grjasnowa's experiences surely have made their way into the text, Masha's experience of migration and integration does not fully coincide with Grjasnowa's own. Rather, the novel can be defined as autofiction in the sense that it has both autobiographical and fictional elements. As already mentioned in the introduction, in autofiction the reader is in doubt as to whether the author is writing about himself or herself, has invented a fictional figure, or is oscillating between fictional and autobiographical narratives. In Der Russe, the fictional plot displaces the autobiographical elements, leaving “the autobiographical pact” weaker than the fictional one.

Adrian Wanner's reading of the novel as “a successful construction of the narrative of the self in a non-native language that is a means towards integration” implies that Mascha's impressive achievement in finishing her education as an interpreter, with the highest grades possible, mirrors Grjasnowa's success in publishing books in a non-native language. However, this reading does not take into account that Mascha's success is only superficial and conceals the trauma that war and migration exerts on her. Moreover, the novel does not foreground Mascha's process of integration, which already has taken place when the novel opens.