The dream was to find a second home in a small village deep in provincial Russia. Then came the attack on Ukraine. With a light touch and humor, Lutz Dursthoff writes about the adventures and absurdities of rural life in Russia – and records with sadness and anger the many things that this war has destroyed.
“For years, whenever I told friends about my wife’s and my adventurous trips to our dacha despite the borders being closed due to the pandemic, or about what the wolves had done again during the winter, they had been telling me to write it down.” At long last, Lutz Dursthoff, long-time nonfiction editor at Kiepenheuer & Witsch, had begun to write. But then came the rupture: the atrocity of a brutal war of aggression, waged by the country that had become so familiar to him over the years. How could he continue to tell his tale? The end result is a touching swan song, a nostalgic story of a lost, idyllic world that his Russian-born wife and he had conquered and worked for in rural seclusion – quite literally in the fields, plots, and greenhouses of their dacha. And a subjective testament to the time when war came back to Europe.
