Book premiere
An apartment with a blue linoleum floor in a Russian spa town near Kazan, where Stalin once spent his summers. This is where Valya returns when her grandmother Nina dies. Walja goes in search of clues, trying to understand where she herself comes from.
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Volksbühne Berlin
She remembers the women she grew up with, who were fundamentally different, but united in their abhorrence of any form of dependency: There is great-grandmother Tanja, who had Valja baptized as a child in a dangerous cloak and dagger operation. And of course Nina with the determined gait and the flirtatious cherry mouth, who notoriously lied and made everyone around her shrink a head. But she also had other sides. And only much later Valya finds out about Nina's harsh fate, which she never spoke of.
Walja, who lives between worlds, between a northern German village on the B77 and her childhood home in Kazan, is realizing more and more how deeply her life has been shaped. Valery Cheplanowa is a strong new voice. In her autobiographically inspired novel, she finds her very own luminous, visually powerful narrative style, intense snapshots combine to form a great story about four strong women in Russia in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Valery Tscheplanowa was and is seen as an actress on the most important German stages, including the Volksbühne, she appears in cinema and television films and was celebrated as a paramour in Jedermann at the 2019 Salzburg Festival. She has received many awards, including the Berlin Art Prize and actress of the year 2017. Born in 1980 in Soviet Kazan, she came to Germany at the age of eight. The Horse in the Well is her first novel. Valery Cheplanova lives in Berlin.
