Girls and Institutions / I Wish Ashes for My House

In November 2021, Daria Serenko published her debut work Girls and Institutions (Девочки и институции, No Kidding Press 2021), which caused a great stir and in which Serenko in a laconic, sometimes funny narrative gives voice to a collective experience that countless women in Russia’s libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions make on a daily basis: working below capacity, fulfilling nonsensical tasks, absurd structures and hierarchies, sexual harassment in the workplace, the virulent misogyny of macho superiors, the internalized misogyny of the »girls« themselves, but also solidarity and support.

After she was arrested in February 2022, Serenko began working on a new text in jail: I Wish Ashes for My House (Я желаю пепла своему дому) started as an examination of her own activism and has since developed into something much greater. In it, Serenko describes her experience of imprisonment in short, unexpectedly original images: the dreariness of everyday life, the infringement on one’s body exerted by those in power, an individual yet at the same time a collective experience that she shares with thousands of people in Russia who have protested against the war. She also examines the possibilities of activism radically and self-critically and keeps circling questions of failure, guilt, shame, and the responsibility that the Russian society and each of its members carries.

This text focuses on the violence that has ingrained itself in her country’s society for many years with increasing force. In short vignettes, in lists, sequences, poems, simulated interviews, Serenko runs through all possible forms and consequences of violence and puts the horror of war, the horror of the women who live through it, into poetic, often expressive, drastic, sometimes disturbing images that are, despite their acute topicality, characterised by a fundamental validity.

»The author blends together a range of everyday experiences of nameless women in Russian institutions to form precise sketches of scenes from Putin’s empire that are at times comical, at times terrifying, but always ultimately absurd. This empire is depicted as a giant with feet of clay that are so fragile that even the smallest instance of insubordination must be sanctioned with the same pomposity that it metes out to the public protests against repression and war.« Julia Schröder, Buch des Monats e.V.

»Girls and Institutions [is] an internal view of a system in a delicate literary garment, a system that revolves around a pulsating, arduously repressed fear.« Lennart Laberenz, DIE ZEIT

»Girls and Institutions is an austere, puzlling, and at the same time a crystal clear, a poetic book.« Sveriges Radio

»You devour  the book in a single day, with a gaping mouth and the feeling of standing before a powerful work of enormous political force, a mixture of poetry, denunciation, and painful beauty.« ELLE España

»[Serenko's] stories are also eye-witness reports. As such, she writes herself into the ranks of Russian prison literature, alongside Yevgenia Ginzburg's autobiographical texts all the way through to Kira Yarmysh's novel ›Dafuq‹.« Amelle Sittenauer, Der Tagesspiegel

»Serenko strikingly demonstrates how absurd, how nightmarish, how humiliating life is as a (female) opposition figure in Russia today. Beuatifully illustrated.« Jens Uthoff, wochentaz