An editorial illustration for an independent online magazine Discours.io The article is a dialogue discussing a new book by Roman Utkin, an associate professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University, and drawing parallels between Berlin of the 1920s and the 2020s as a place of Russian political and cultural emigration.
The book is entitled 'Charlottengrad. Russian Culture in Weimar Berlin' and provides insight into the Russian exile community in Berlin of the 1920s, which was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian when the Russia they knew no longer existed.
