Trik – Stěpanovová Marija (2025)

The writer M., living in European exile, sets off to a neighboring country for a literary festival. However, the express train that was supposed to take her there is canceled due to a strike, so she boards a slow personal train, thinking that a taxi she ordered will take her across the border to her destination. However, the taxi is not waiting at the station, and the main character gets lost in an unfamiliar seaside town, escaping even from her own life. Unusual props help her: a beautiful blonde, a traveling circus, a black sarcophagus, a chainsaw, and tarot cards. The story takes place in the summer of 2023: the war between Russia and Ukraine is in full swing.

The novella Trick by poet and prose writer Marija Stepanova is one of the first literary accounts of the new, fifth wave of Russian emigration. It addresses that part of the emigration that feels responsible for the evil perpetrated by the regime in their homeland and seems to be in a state of endless decline. – It is published with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.