Julia Kissina and Katja Petrowskaja: On Kyiv

Both Julia Kissina, author of Elephantina‘s Moscow Years (2016), and Katja Petrowskaja, author of The Photograph Looked Back at Me (2022) and Maybe Esther (2014) were born in Kyiv. One writes in Russian, the other in German. In their 2014 conversation with their editor Katharina Raabe, they find out they there were on the same train from Kyiv to Moscow on May 1, 1986. Katja’s parents, who had friends that were physicists and knew what was happening in Chernobyl, sent their 16-year-old daughter away. Julia, four years older, was already studying in Moscow and only learnt about the horrific accident on that very train.

This conversation was published in 2014 in our Logbuch Suhrkamp in four 10-minute parts. In it, Kissina and Petrowskaja talk about their childhoods in Kyiv and the myth of an ancient city, about Moscow as a city of refuge and about the hopes that the Maidan Revolution held. In light of the current events, these issues are as relevant as they were more than eight years ago.