Hella – Machoninová Alena (2023)

Hella is the literary debut of Russianist Alena Machoninová. Its title refers to the thematic foundation of the prose-essay, which is the fate of Hella, or Helena Frischerová – a Czech Jewess who was the inspiration for the character Ri in Jiří Weil's novel Moscow-Frontiers. It was originally believed that Hella was executed along with her husband during Stalin's Great Terror. However, a few years ago it was revealed that Hella spent ten years in a Gulag in northern Russia and lived in Moscow until her death in 1984. In 2017, her camp memoirs were even published in Czech translation. Machoninová attempts to reconstruct her fate and inner life based on all available facts, including Hella's correspondence. She does so in a distinctive prose form that reflects broader contexts, the past and present of Russia, the relationship between literature and reality, as well as her own journey to the personality of Hella Frischerová. This sophisticated, artistically truthful, and deeply felt prose is also a book about returns, or their impossibility, about home and nostalgia, about literature and translation.