# Svetlana Lavochkina

Svetlana Lavochkina (Ukrainian: Світлана Лавочкіна; born 1973) is a Ukrainian writer and literary translator. She lives in Leipzig. The language of her literary work is English. She became known in Germany with the translation of her debut novel entitled Pushkin's Heirs.

## Biography

Lavochkina grew up as the only child of her parents in Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. Her mother was a piano teacher, her father an engineer and photographer. She herself studied languages at a pedagogical college. At the age of 26, she became pregnant and moved to Germany with her husband as Jewish quota refugees. They could choose whether they wanted to live in Dresden, Chemnitz or Leipzig.
In her own words, she had to develop a "new identity" in Germany. Most Jews in Ukraine had adapted to the Soviet lifestyle since the 1960s after the second wave of purges under Stalin, which was mainly directed against Jews. Lavochkina's parents weren't particularly religious either, but traditional dishes were served on holidays such as Passover and the Jewish New Year. As a child, she first learned from her grandmother that they were Jews. At her grandmother's insistence, she attended an English language school, unusual for a Soviet child at the time, so English became her second language and created a distance from her surroundings. She did not directly feel anti-Semitism in her childhood. Today she sees herself as a global citizen and is proud of her Jewish origins. Lavochkina belongs to the Jewish community in Leipzig. She has taught her two sons what it meant to be Jewish.
In addition to her work as a writer and translator, Lavochkina works as an English teacher at the Waldorf School in Leipzig and writes for the English-language international literary magazine LeipGlo.

## Works

Lavochkina has translated Ukrainian and Russian poetry into English, among others. She wrote short stories and poems that were published in British and American anthologies and literary magazines. Her success as a writer began with her novella Dam Duchess. She submitted the unpublished manuscript to a literary competition run by the Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company and won second prize in 2013. The novella is part of her debut novel Zap. The title comes from the English spelling of Zaporizhia, a sleepy town on the Dnieper at the beginning of the twentieth century, where the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin is said to have lost a valuable ring while bathing in the river.
The setting of the novel, which was published in a German translation by Diana Feuerbach under the title Pushkin's Heirs, is Zaporozhye in the 1970s. Lavochkina describes the coexistence of Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Cossack and Roma families as "harmonious, but with all sorts of verbal fights" full of hearty jokes, with the Jewish families Winter, Knoblauch and Katz at the center of the action. FAZ reviewer Christiane Pöhlmann wrote that Lavochkina traces the mood of the Brezhnev era, which was characterized by dreariness and bourgeoisie, and pulls it "through the cocoa". Lavochkina captures anti-Semitism, contempt for women, the great silence about the Stalin era and the degradation of the provinces in a "colorful picture". Beneath the entertaining surface, the novel is a serious story about shattered dreams and life plans.