Nadezhda in the Dark

by Yelena Moskovich

'Moskovich is the master of silky, slinky sentences that run in unexpected directions' The Telegraph'Sexy and readable . . . a celebration of resilience and of myriad survivors' Times Literary Supplement'One of the best fiction releases of 2023' Dazed DigitalA queer anthem for doomed youth by the author of Virtuoso and A Door Behind a DoorOn the longest night of a Berlin winter two women sit side-by-side. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, one from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.A thigh shifts, fingers fold in, a shoulder is lowered. Neither speak.As silence weighs heavy between them, decades of Ukrainian and Russian history resurface, from Yiddish jokes, Kyiv's DIY queer parties and the hidden messages in Russian pop music, to resistance in Odessa, raids in Moscow clubs and the death of their friend.As the requiem inside the narrator's head expands within the darkness of the room, she asks the all-important what does it mean to have hope?'Nadezhda in the Dark is a marvel - a spellbinding work' LAUREN ELKIN'Yelena Moskovich is a true original, a literary titan, an innovator' JENNI FAGAN

Genres: Poetry, Lesbian, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Jewish

204 pages, Paperback

Published January 13, 2026

About the author

Yelena Moskovich is a Soviet-Ukrainian American and French writer and artist. She immigrated to America with her family as Jewish refugees in 1991. After graduating with a degree in playwriting from Emerson College, Boston, she moved to Paris to study at the Lecoq School of Physical Theatre, and later for a Masters degree in Art, Philosophy and Aesthetics from Université Paris 8. She co-founded her own theatre company, La Compagnie Pavlov in Paris in 2009 (since inactive). Her plays and performances have been produced in the US, Canada, France, and Sweden. She has also written for Vogue, Frieze, Apartamento, Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, amongst others. In 2018, she served as a curator and exhibiting artist for the Los Angeles Queer Biennial. She lives in Paris

Reviews

[Alek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rings true to the contradictory experience of being slavic and queer, of the experience of cultural pride for a country that doesn't want you, of the echoes of genocide felt across the generations.

Moskovich juxtaposes love and joy and pleasure with the experiencing and witnessing of human cruelty and ugliness, on the macro and microscopic levels, from dancing in the kitchen to famine, the book meanders through the complexities of existing in this world, leaking raw humanity from every stanza. One of the most beautiful writing styles I've ever read.

[christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Nadezhda in the Dark’, as best as I could describe it, feels as if Moskovich’s words are fingers running through strands of hair, sometimes gently, and other times catching knots and pulling to unloose them. There is a tenderness even in its melancholic moments; Moskovich takes care to embrace the fluidity of thought and emotion in its inevitable ebb and flow through images and remembrances by beautifully capturing the inferences of experiences and (the seeking and acknowledgement of) identity and trauma and history and people and emotions as she weaves between memories, stories, and facets of the present.

There are no justifications for why someone does and thinks the way they do but the acknowledgement of the feelings and the associations that trigger such feelings. Nadezhda establishes itself by asserting that what make up a life is the living and what makes life living are our perceptions filtered through our experiences and the emotions that embed themselves into the meaning we make of our world.

How whole and comprehensive the experience, reading Nadezhda, was.

[Quin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yelena Moskovich you are my MOTHER

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t typically gravitate towards novels in verse, but Nadezhda in the Dark left me completely undone.

It weaves Soviet history, Slavic Jewish identity, and both state and familial violence into something that feels less like a narrative and more like sustained heartache. Longing is on every page: for homeland, for safety, for love that isn’t shaped by fear.

If you wept at Connor Storrie’s performance of Ilya Rozanov’s monologue in episode 5 of Heated Rivalry, this is the sapphic, poetic exploration of post-Soviet nostalgia you're craving.

[Lyuba · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books (poems?) I’ve encountered recently. Stunning and queer. Full of passages that grip you and beg to be memorized.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I pledged not to love a single word I couldn’t pervert.” A harrowing portrait of the modern family and of wartime queer rights under systemic corruption, this is also an erotic love letter between two women, held in an intimate moment, thigh-to-thigh. It recalls “Our Wives Under the Sea” and “Boulder,” but pushes those concerns through a single, continuous sentence.

Breastmilk and pearls recur as symbols of sapphic endurance, of East and West. White stallions and white cars echo this visual field, blending a lawless aesthetic with a strain of saviorism, the desire to rescue or be rescued, or punished. I didn’t fully grasp all the historical references, but the book carries a strong sense of pathos, gallows humor, and a pulsating, underlying anxiety.

“The tighter the grip, the more I exist.” “It’s hard to dance with your arms pinned behind your back.” The personal here is political, shaped by lesbian resistance and inherited trauma. Slavic club culture and BDSM intersect as a sociological lens, tracing how grief, hope, and joy are felt and managed under tyranny. A work both lovely and profound.

[Lawrence Manuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book worth coming back to. Read a short part and sit with it. This opened a new world for me. To be sure, there's quite a bit to research. It's a good thing there's YouTube, Spotify, Wikipedia and Google Maps to verify the videos, musicians, events and locations mentioned. I was very engaged. I don’t think I’ve read a contemporary novel in verse. How does an author decide to take that route? I was turned off at the start. But I persevered. And it seems the style is effective, given that there’s no plot - everything happens during the “darkest hour of the darkest day of a Berlin black-milk winter.” The greater portion of the book mentions poems, songs, jokes, historical figures and events about anti-LGBT violence, Ukrainian killings by Russians, female subjugation or immigration tragedies - all very bleak - all coming to the fore during what seems like the bleakest time and place. And yet Nadya (means hope) and the unnamed narrator continue to exist and love each other. Near the end might be an explanation for another objective of the book: to explain the notion of destiny or fate: “In the East, there are three words that are untranslatable. Sud’ba (something like fate, it does not come from above, it is the weight in our feet when we stand, and the weight in our chest when we lay, it comes the verb sudit meaning to judge). Dusha (the soul, also the spirit and the pulse, also freedom and emptiness, the ability to hold that which is gone, and that which we await, it comes from the verb dishat, to breathe). Toska (depression, a longing, a memory, a dream, it’s grief and homesickness for things and people we’ve known and things and people we haven’t yet encountered, comes from the verb taskat, to drag something heavy around, you don’t need tragedy to grieve, you can just grieve life itself).

[Pree · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moskovich writes prose beautifully. A glimpse into a life and history I am not too familiar with. A literary critic aptly described her writing as “trying to get to the heart of desire, grief, and love” or something to that effect.

Moskovich takes us through the imperfect but honest love of the protagonist and her partner, how they navigate mental health, friendships with people of shared histories, her own attachment to Ukraine. The characters hold past lives, and the book shows how they hold their many truths in this shared space.

Moskovich ties the common themes together neatly, she is a great storyteller with a dark but welcomed sense of humour. There were many raw, poetic lines in the book - lots of heart scribbles on the margins.

[anna_bananna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this a while ago but it took me a long time to process my thoughts aha. I haven't read a novel in verse before and the whole book being a single sentence and a stream of consciousness set across one night was really cool! I enjoyed the references to Slavic culture and was so excited to read this! There were a few things I wasn't sure how I felt about. I didn't really understand how we were meant to see Nadezhda and whether the narrator really loved her, because it also seemed to be implied that Nadezhda was lying about her parents and her ex? And their close friend didn't seem to like Nadezhda? It was also more explicit than I was expecting aha. I'd love to read more of Yelena Moskovich's work in the future though!

[lily · Rating 2 out of 5]

books in verse aren’t my favorite- let’s get that out of the way at the top.

there were parts of this i enjoyed, lines poetically and sometimes comically written. i know and appreciate what the author was trying to say about identity, love, homeland, fear of loving in a politically charged environment, but it fell a bit short for me. there was also something about how the author takes you out of the poetic narrative and into an abrupt history lesson (which i get because not many people come with the history, but felt very tell don’t show). also feels weird to mention the russian/ukrainian conflict and israel but completely fail to mention palestine.

excited to discuss in bookclub to see how things change.

[Benny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nadezhda in the Dark is unlike anything I've ever read. Prosaic yet personal, the narrative is knot-shaped, moving from past to present as though there was no distinction between the two. I received a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, but the moment I can I plan to get a physical copy to tab and underline. So many passages were so emotionally told I felt in the character's shoes. Seriously beautiful, with a bunch of queer eastern-european writers mentioned to follow up on.

[Alex Abb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read. Ostensibly a love story between the narrator and Nadezhda, this book is about so much more. It describes the experience of a young queer person growing up amongst so much war and destruction, homophobia and antisemitism. The author masterfully combines the romantic aspects with historical happenings, and narrates the present lives of the protagonists in Berlin against the backdrop of the characters’ traumatic upbringing and how it is to grow up in post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia. The author uses very evocative imagery throughout and conveys the story in an unusual and compelling format.

[Maria White · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this really poetry or is this an innovative way by which Moskovich is trying to show how the fabric of life itself is disintegrating?
This writing style certainly makes the reader stop in bewilderment, start again and reflect.

Some quotes that caught my eye:

... in the east you don't need tragedy to grieve, you can just grieve life itself...

... my therapist reminded me that sometimes I take things a bit literally, and people can use words not to put forth facts but to make wishes...

Overall, an intriguing read.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stream of consciousness novel, written in verse, has moodiness and longing to spare, but goes out of its way to constantly remind the reader of better stories (“there’s a Chekhov story that goes like this…”), and also literally goes on for far, faaaaar too long. Interesting themes of displacement and struggles with queerness in an intolerant society are lost in the current of skin-deep rambling: 100 pages might’ve been riveting, but at 218 it mimicked the extra-ness of an undergrad’s sketchbook.

[Caitlin Holloway · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book touches so specifically on being a young queer person in the midst of a lot of chaos. So gentle yet so powerful at the same time, the prose was so poetically written that I felt like I was being guided through the dream of the protagonist. Easily one of my favourites of the year.

[patricie · Rating 2 out of 5]

pretty but unfortunately suffers from a grave case of the annoying diaspora syndrome

also what was that weird apologia for russian soldiers for?

also reminded me of this:

[Ames · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read I picked up at an LGBTQ+ book store. Lesbian short story poetry with some political war elements thrown, some of these elements I didn't understand as much. But lovely all the short stories about the couple and friends they had. Good read!

[Noor · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5
Has flashes of being profound but largely suffers from, as another reviewer called it, “annoying diaspora syndrome”. Conceptually I was with her but found the format difficult to get into and was cringing for most of the book.

[Mayzie Brammer · Rating 4 out of 5]

this caused me so much psychic pain and resonated on such a deep level and I cried while reading most of it

i want to reread when I feel focused enough to really dive into all the historical context

[Arcadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

<3

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my favorite books of all time, you will not regret reading this.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

very pretty but sometimes a bit aimless

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, Yelena,
ya lyublyu tebya

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing astounding incredible I wish it never ended

[Caitlin Waddick · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a night! These lines are her thoughts and memories as the two women sit knee-to-knee in the dark on a cold night in Berlin, and her love for Nadezhda gives her hope.

[E Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very difficult read. I think you need a good understanding of the Soviet Union, or novels-in-verse, or both.

[Emilie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The prose was absolutely stunning. I sometimes got confused by the nonlinear and abrupt storytelling, but this is so underrated and deserves more hype! Definitely going to read more by this author.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJCJ...

Wonderful lyrical writing about two bruised women, one from Russia, one from Ukraine, in a lesbian relationship. Lots of Jewish & Soviet jokes too!

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF - I found this so incredibly depressing that I couldn't finish it. It's an interesting exploration of being Ukrainian, Jewish and queer from an area of the world that frowns upon being those things. But it was so depressing because of those things, because of war and loss and being an outcast. The characters were depressed and it was making me depressed. I had to walk away from it.