In ‘A Voix haute,’ novelist Polina Panassenko makes a pilgrimage to the gulag

In her second novel, A Voix haute, Polina Panassenko returns to Russia 15 years after leaving it and undertakes a personal pilgrimage to trace an ancestor deported to the gulag. She crosses family prohibitions to pursue that history.

Panassenko, who recently won the Le Monde Literary Prize, is appearing at the Livre sur les quais festival in Morges. She is also an actor and translator, and her work moves through the unstable territory between languages, countries and identities.

The article presents dual culture as a hall of mirrors, a maze in which people search for their reflection in distorted glass. Bilingual grimaces, shifting perspectives in time and space, divided families and identities with blurred borders all shape the literary world of A Voix haute.

The return to Russia forms a symbolic counterpart to her first novel, Tenir sa langue, published in 2022. That book recounted her administrative struggles in France to preserve the Russian form of her first name and followed her family’s arrival. Together, the novels examine the contortions of belonging between East and West.