Snow Germans

The novel is about displaced persons and their cultural and psychological problems in an alien society. It consists of monologues by several male and female protagonists – repatriated Russian Germans -- whose lives become entangled at a certain point in the country of law and order, where they suddenly realize that they feel more Russian than German. They find themselves culturally different from the locals and often fail to integrate in the local communities. On the other hand they have never felt quite at home in Russia. Germans were encouraged to settle in the Russian countryside from the times of Peter the Great. Over the centuries they tried to preserve their national culture and traditions, but in the 20th century, marked with two great wars which made them highly unpopular, when they started repatriating they found themselves foreigners in their cherished homeland. The characters exist in the cross-cultural space between Russia and Germany, a space populated by about three million Russian-speaking Germans, who will be quickly disappearing and will probably no longer be around in 50 years time. Dmitry Vachedin was born in 1982 in St Petersburg and moved to Germany with his parents in 1999. He graduated from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz with a degree in Political Science and Slavic Studies. Currently he lives in Bonn and works as a journalist for Deutsche Welle. At the age of 25 he won the Debut Prize for his short stories. In 2010 his novel Snow Germans was nominated for the Russian Prize, and in 2012 he became the winner of the Russian Prize for his short stories.