Zuleikha opens her eyes

Guzel Yakhina was born and raised in Kazan, graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages, and is currently studying screenwriting at the Moscow Film School. Her work has appeared in the magazines Neva, Sibirskie Ogni, and Oktyabr.

The novel "Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes" begins in the winter of 1930 in a remote Tatar village. The peasant woman Zuleikha, along with hundreds of other displaced people, is sent in a freight car along the eternal penal route to Siberia.

Backwoods peasants and Leningrad intellectuals, declassed elements and criminals, Muslims and Christians, pagans and atheists, Russians, Tatars, Germans, Chuvash – all will meet on the banks of the Angara, daily defending their right to life against the taiga and the merciless state.

Dedicated to all dispossessed and resettled people.