In The Gift (1938), the last novel he wrote in his native language, Vladimir Nabokov describes a literary dispute among émigré writers – Russian writers, that is, who only read each other, and take little interest in Berlin, the city to which circumstance has brought them, or in the people who walk its streets, or the literature that thrives there.

The subject of the quarrel is a particular text that has given rise to a general sense of displeasure. One character mocks the text’s author – a Russian writer long past his prime, though still read in émigré circles – with a visual metaphor: a portrait of an unknown ancestor, which has hung in the family home for many years, even decades; it might not even depict a relative, just an acquaintance. Still, for no good reason, the object has accompanied the family through life, always turning up like a bad penny. Whatever twist of fate befalls them – fire, war, sudden displacement – the portrait still counts among the possessions they carry into the future. If anyone were to try to take it from them, they would defend it like a treasured possession. So it is with the work of this ageing writer.

I begin with this portrait – entirely dispensable, excessively important – to explain why I am speaking today in Russian, instead of, say, English, which more people in this auditorium would understand, making our conversation far simpler. Even the title of this lecture is hardly well suited to Russian. In Russian, “displaced person” is officially translated as “peremeshchennoe litso”: literally, “a person who has been moved from one place to another” – words that have a precise, bureaucratic meaning. But the spiritual notion of ‘dis-placement’ doesn’t seem to exist in Russian. To convey this sense of biographical and historical shift, we must invent neologisms and palliatives; we must define and explain.

Perhaps that’s no surprise. After all, this is a country in which slavery was abolished a little over 150 years ago. Every political system that followed in Russia has operated on a similar presumption of ownership: that the state has a right to its citizens, to everything they possess, and to anything they produce.

To live in a place where nothing belongs to you and where anything could happen at any moment: this is a feeling shared by everyone with a Soviet past, though its roots go deeper still. Peasant serfs were legally bound to work a plot of land that didn’t belong to them; they were never allowed to leave. They could, however, be sold or relocated at will by their owners. Even a landlord with thousands of souls to his name wasn’t quite a master of his own fate: he could be sent into exile or condemned to hard labour by the Tsarist authorities.

In a similar spirit, the early Soviet state disposed of its experts and political figures by “throwing” them – a literal translation of the Soviet term “brosit’ na proizvodstvo” – like ragdolls into factories and onto construction sites across the huge country, moving them on when they were no longer of use, and killing them when appropriate. In less brutal times, college graduates were subjected to a very particular assignment process: a special commission evaluated their knowledge and character in order to determine which distant city or rural backwater would receive them for a few years of compulsory labour. Special laws also applied to citizens who wished to emigrate; they were forbidden from taking with them anything of value. Their personal belongings became the cultural inheritance of the state.

Which is all to say: the very concept of a place of one’s own is so problematic that the Russian dictionary has not developed a term for its loss – either enforced or voluntary. “Bezdomny” – literally, “without a home” – is an umbrella category for all sorts of homelessness. There is no Russian word for a person who loses their country. We have only calques from other languages: emigration, expatriation, relocation. Of late, some of us have used the last to indicate that we are living outside our country only as a temporary measure.

Our country. But what is our country, if we have nothing of ours left in it?

The Russian language has gained a greater significance for me over the last few years. You might say I am being sentimental. Language, after all, is not just another item a person packs when they leave their homeland. Language is impossible to leave behind; there is always space for it in the suitcase, even if it won’t be of much use in the future. In a sense, language is the suitcase. It carries everything else, and turns ordinary possessions (makeup bag, book, white shirt) into a museum exhibit of a now-defunct universe.

Leaving only strengthens our ties to our native language: the horrible news in Russian is our daily bread. A sense of morality – guilt? responsibility? complicity? – stops the recent emigrant from looking away, even momentarily, to catch their breath, as they might have once done at home, from within the catastrophe.

Not every departure is enforced, nor is every person who leaves their home a refugee. With Russians, however, the line between the two can be very fine. It’s hard to say with any confidence – this person had to leave; that person did so of their own free will. You could well underestimate the danger, like so many of those who spoke up against Russian aggression towards Ukraine, never imagining that they could be imprisoned for such expressions of nonalignment. Equally, you could overestimate the danger and leave, only to be burdened with a sense of burning shame at your own safety.

Danger and fear are not the only reasons. Thousands left out of disgust, refusing to become part of an organism that wants to swallow and digest anything that looks different. All the same, there’s a moment when you suddenly realise that language binds you to the place you left. In your own eyes, and in the eyes of your new neighbours, you are, above all, Russian – stained by association with the state’s unrelenting violence.

I am minded to treat this situation as a personal imperative. My task is to understand and to analyse what is happening today in Russia – and in the wider world (which is gleefully following in Russia’s stead). This task still seems vital to me, although I know too well that it is unlikely to achieve much. The monumental efforts of the historians and philosophers of the twentieth century have not prevented state violence from resurging.

Indeed, in some sense, all this has happened before, a century ago. Nabokov’s characters are the close relatives of today’s émigré writers. But the analogy seems somehow too obvious, and it sows doubt. Russian emigrants of the ‘first wave’ felt themselves, not without reason, to be the victims of revolutionary violence; they hoped to return home once the Bolshevik madness had passed. Today, a Russian passport holder can hardly consider themselves to be a refugee or a victim. From Barcelona to Berlin, we walk the streets alongside those who have fled bombs dropped by our country. When we compare ourselves, it becomes too evident that Russian exile is of a different nature, is tainted by shame – we have come from a country that perpetrates daily the crimes we see on the news – and contains little hope.

Perhaps a more appropriate comparison can be made with the exiled German intellectuals of the 1930s. They felt ashamed and bewildered by the rise of Hitler, which they were powerless to halt. The analogy is closer, and yet the two situations also differ in important ways.

Firstly, the lessons of the German emigration (and the resistance to Nazism from exile that many felt to be their mission) are difficult to apply today. In essence, theirs is a rulebook for a defeat that didn’t last long: 12 years. Compare this to the 70 years of Soviet rule, or the interminable Franco regime. Thomas Mann’s radio broadcasts from California, addressed to his compatriots, are hardly likely to have affected the course of the war. If historical circumstances had been different, he could have kept up his broadcasts for decades. Putin’s 26-year reign could easily stretch to 30 or 40. It’s hard to imagine anything that might bring about radical change to the situation.

Secondly, any refugee community lives by its memory of the lost home and the formative catastrophe that led to its loss. Over generations, the contours of the legend change, the rituals and traditions obtain an independent value, and the work of postmemory – a term coined by the American scholar Marianne Hirsch – gets underway: the children and grandchildren of survivors begin unconsciously editing the past, the significance of which grows ever stronger, often to the detriment of the present and its promise of a new future. Cumbersome memory becomes a form of secular religion. The more your personal history is associated with loss and dispersal, the harder you toil to symbolically recreate the vanished world. Even tragic circumstances can be a cause for pride, as we well know. One could say that the Russian historical tradition has been constructed on such pride.

It’s sobering to consider that Russia’s “special path” – its sense of self as a nation that is “unlike any other” – is based on the exceptional amount of suffering it has endured in recent history (a difficult claim to challenge, although one could). This is the basis for Putin’s standoff with the West. It leads to a culture of self-absorption and incuriosity towards other peoples and cultures, as demonstrated by the dwindling number of books translated into Russian. The exception, of course, is books from ‘big’ languages: above all, English.

The desire to see oneself as great and powerful, to arouse fear and admiration in others, is clearly neurotic. This neurosis has deep roots: it grew in a laboratory during the ‘great Soviet experiment’ – the creation of a new form of state and a new human being. A little over 100 years ago, both citydwellers and rural peasants woke up one morning “but now under socialism”, as Mayakovsky wrote. They found themselves thrust suddenly into an unfamiliar country – an experience not unlike forced emigration. Economic and political systems changed overnight, as did the whole structure of Russian society, including the language, which underwent radical reform. To survive, people were required to change accordingly. Many didn’t. Millions were sacrificed in this forced migration into the bright future.

In 1991, Soviet citizens were again thrust into a different country. This time, they were compelled to learn how to live under capitalism. Again the language changed: it did not return to its pre-revolutionary form, but adapted all kinds of anglicisms and borrowed from prison slang.

I have to add that I – along with my parents, and probably most of that strange class known as the Russian intelligentsia – had long awaited this change. We found the Soviet regime intolerable, above all because it prevented us from writing or even reading freely. We never lost the sense that something new was needed – even when the system that followed slid toward disaster. My mother lost her job as an engineer; my father travelled around the country in search of casual work and food. The social catastrophe touched us along with everybody else. Despite this, I still look back at 1991 as a grand opportunity.

This opportunity was wasted, and the fault is at least partly ours. If we understand 1991 as a forced migration to a country with different rules, most Russians were simply not ready. Those who welcomed the new order saw its losers – the discontented, the impoverished – as mere relics. Few wanted to waste their time helping them adapt. Unresolved social inequalities created differences in how people interpreted political reality. Later, under Putin, this led to extreme social polarisation. Russia’s citizens were easily divided into two camps: those who agreed and those who didn’t.

I now live in Berlin, where many people speak Russian, just as they did a century ago. Now, though, the Russian I hear from the neighbouring table in the cafe only deepens my sense of loss and disorientation. It could be Russian-speaking Belarusians or Ukrainians, or possibly others from the various post-Soviet (there’s no other word for this yet) countries.

If they talk to me, it tends to be in English. When they don’t, I hasten to start an English conversation with them. Russian has become that unwanted portrait hanging on your wall; it draws attention to the zones of divergence. Russian-language writers are facing new anxieties. How are we to identify ourselves, or even think of ourselves, if we want to remain true to those who stayed behind in Russia and are writing Russian works that could land them in prison? Am I a russkaya writer or a rossiyskaya writer? (Russkaya refers to the ethnocultural identity, and rossiyskaya to the state-civic – the latter once seemed to sound more neutral.) Or perhaps I am a German writer who writes in Russian? But if that’s the case, would a year in Barcelona make me a Catalonian writer? Placelessness, or dis-placement, alienates a writer from her audience, her sense of belonging and her medium.

In a darkly sardonic text titled “We Refugees”, published in early 1943, Hannah Arendt describes a situation I still recognise 80 years on. She begins by remarking that the collective “We” dislike being identified as “refugees” – a dislike shared by my own compatriots. The Germans and Jews dispersed around the world at the end of the 1930s preferred to think of themselves as newcomers or immigrants. Russians, as I have already said, prefer the term “relocant”, stressing the temporary nature of their situation. None of this is forever, we say to ourselves. One day it must surely end. The unfounded optimism betrayed by the word is perhaps related to how my generation understood the end of the 1980s, when the Soviet system collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell. Our general feeling at the time – however embarrassing I find it now – was that good eventually vanquishes evil, even if it takes a while to do so.

In hindsight, I recognise this as a Eurocentric worldview. We focused on events close to home, without paying much attention to the wider world – to what, for example, had happened in Asia and Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. This blind spot remains, and it prevents us from grasping the structural ties that bind generations of diasporic communities: from Sudan, Ghana, Iran, Vietnam, South Korea, the Balkans, and now from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. As soon as the transition is completed and life as an expatriate begins, we are in well trodden territory. Whatever we think of ourselves, however unique we insist we are, our attachment to trauma is more than a simple parallel. And that makes it possible to speak of displacement as a territory populated by very different groups who are living very similar lives.

Identity is another old portrait – who retrieved it from the abandoned home? – though it is often mistaken for a magic talisman, or a small but terrible God. It demands that you stay true to the little homeland of the diasporic imagination, and forbids you from mixing with other communities, adapting new lifestyles. Who knows what it promises in return: the possibility of return? The comfort of not being alone? A magic helper who will appear to save you in your most difficult moments? Diasporic solidarity does work to some extent; no doubt it works better than the crude mechanisms of integration that most states provide. But it can’t cancel out that unhappy stasis, the passivity that results from resting on the hope that all this will be over one day, that you should school yourself in patience and remain true to who you were, if only to ensure that you are recognised and accepted on your return home.

Richard Sennett wrote a thoughtful essay, a part of his book The Foreigner (2011), about diaspora’s two trajectories. In it he looks back at two well documented, if larger than life, examples from the Russian emigrations of the nineteenth century. One exile, like many White Russians in the following century, arranges his life to resemble that which he left behind, refusing to pay any heed to the country, language or culture of his actual surroundings. The other practises a radical assimilation. Only a year after arriving in Paris, he is more French than the French; he furiously rejects anything that marks him out as a Russian.

The German intellectuals Arendt describes share the latter’s tragicomic desire to fit into whatever new country fate led them to, even when the country in question interns them in camps because they are linked with Germany. In one passage of “We Refugees” she writes:

“Some day somebody will write the true story of this Jewish emigration from Germany, and he will have to start with a description of that Mr. Cohn from Berlin who had always been a 150% German, a German super-patriot. In 1933 that Mr. Cohn found refuge in Prague and very quickly became a convinced Czech patriot – as true and loyal a Czech patriot as he had been a German one. Time went on and about 1937 the Czech Government, already under some Nazi pressure, began to expel its Jewish refugees, disregarding the fact that they felt so strongly as prospective Czech citizens. Our Mr. Cohn then went to Vienna; to adjust oneself there a definite Austrian patriotism was required. The German invasion forced Mr. Cohn out of that country. He arrived in Paris… ”

And so on. “Whatever we do, whatever we pretend to be, we reveal nothing but our insane desire to be changed,” she writes. “But the recovering of a new personality is as difficult – and as hopeless – as a new creation of the world.”

For Arendt, there is only one conclusion to be drawn from the story of Mr Cohn: assimilation is pointless. The exile must slough off all their identities – of birth and upbringing, the old home and the new one – to simply be who they are. Not a good German, or a good Czech, or a good Frenchman. Rather, a person without the armour of identity. For the Jewish Arendt, this meant stating that “we are nothing but Jews”. That is: a people with neither a place to call their own, nor a law or a convention that would defend them as a community. To be Jewish at the time was to be “nothing but human beings”.

In 2026, it seems to me that the very state of displacedness makes you ‘nothing but a human being’. It begins not at the moment when you are ripped from your homeland, but later, when you realise that there is nowhere for you to return, that you cannot and mustn’t stop, that you must keep moving forwards. De-placement, dis-placement, the shift, the yawning gap between past and future – this process is forming a new kind of community, one that hardly recognises itself as such. A community of dispersal, without common traditions.

The optimism that informs any dream of returning home – to lie again on the old divan with an old book taken down from the old shelf – might be thought of as naive, if it weren’t so natural. It is nourished by centuries of national literatures and local conflicts: “Being a guest is good, but home is better”, as the proverb has it. Or “where you were born, there you are wanted”. Life away from home is de facto disastrous; another country is always worse, even if your circumstances are better there. Strangers can never become locals, can ultimately never belong.

It follows that a person who changes their location to change their fate is marked out as suspicious, even malevolent. Why else would they leave the land of their fathers? The medieval custom, in many towns, of allowing a traveller to spend no more than four days in a town or village – merchants and travelling craftspeople presumably did not require any longer for their business – was related to anxieties over the preservation of identity. Drawbridges, high walls, separate Jewish areas: non-mixing kept the risk of conflict at bay, prevented strangers from settling or giving in to the temptation of assimilation. Only over a wall built of stone or through a wall of glass might locals gaze at strangers.

Mercè Rodoreda’s surreal novel Death in Spring (1986) features a description of a telling village custom: a prisoner is held in a wooden cage large enough only for him to hunch; he can neither stand up nor lie down. The villagers feed him and, in winter, warm him with logs. On Sundays they bring their children to throw chunks of meat through the bars for him to catch between his teeth or scoop up from the ground with his mouth. He is imprisoned for so long that the cage rots and has to be replaced. One day, all of a sudden, he neighs like a horse, so convincingly that the village horses neigh back at him. And this is how the villagers realise that they have achieved their goal: the prisoner is no longer human. They remove the cage like a suit of worn clothes and set him free. This unforgettable story strikes me as a metaphor for all exile, which demands that one cease being oneself and speak in a new language.

“Europeans have been thrust out of their biographies like balls from the pockets of a billiard table,” Osip Mandelstam wrote in 1922. Migration was already a mass phenomenon then; the number of those displaced by hunger and backwardness has since steadily grown. Throughout, foreigners have aroused fear and hatred, but also a peculiar sort of attraction, which cannot be reduced to exoticism. The draw towards the unknown and the strange gradually creates space for the long conversation, which over time grows more nuanced and may, eventually, lead to mutual understanding.

The catastrophes of the twentieth century make such a conversation indispensable. Nationalism has made it clear that the future of humanity depends on our taking an interest in people who don’t culturally resemble us. In recent decades, the task of understanding has preoccupied Western culture – has been its priority. Foreign experience, including of violence and exile, has become part of our general awareness. This development has also had interesting side-effects for literature. The quantity of translated books increased; institutes of translation sprang up; whole series dedicated to different parts of the world were established.

The relationship between the writer and her reader has changed accordingly. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine and Ivan Turgenev wrote, respectively, in German and Russian, during their Parisian exile. Both had excellent French and could edit French translations of their work, but their readership remained in the countries they had voluntarily left. The revolutionary Alexander Herzen published his journal The Bell in Russian, even though the Tsarist authorities had banned it. A generation later, exiled in California, Mann continued to write for a German audience, even as his books were being burned by the Third Reich. Very few authors changed the language they wrote in: Conrad, Nabokov and Arendt are among the notable exceptions.

But who does a diasporic writer address today? This question should not be mistaken as a choice between languages. It is sometimes assumed that if you write in the language of your abandoned homeland, you are addressing your compatriots, wherever they happen to be. And conversely, that if you write in the language of your adopted country, you are only conversing with locals. If, on the other hand, you compose experimental literature, you will likely have to work within the bounds of your mother tongue, as much as you may wish to flee it.

But today a literary text’s reception depends far less on its author’s language or citizenship. A writer of Turkish heritage living in Germany and writing in German about Turkey can justifiably claim a dual identity. Yoko Tawada, who lives in Hamburg, is more radical: she writes some books in Japanese, others in German, and feels no need to explain her choices. In Exophony (2025), her collection of essays about the experience of writing in a language other than her first, she states that each one of us is a repository, a vessel in which all the languages we have ever touched are conserved, whether we speak them or not.

We no longer have to wait for a book to be translated. ChatGPT or Google Translate can render a crude version of it in seconds, providing at least a sense of the original. It’s not only the technical means that have changed: so too have the mechanisms of address, and even the structure of the readership. This is where a space opens for the third way of being that Sennett gropes towards in The Foreigner – a space between assimilation and the more traditional models of diaspora.

By the end of 2024, the total number of forcibly displaced people across the globe stood at 123 million. This figure does not include people like me, who can’t properly be considered refugees; or those who view their situation as temporary and hope to return home; or those who have migrated by their own volition. Even without the numerical clarity, it’s fairly clear how many of us there are, a consequence of the dark times we live in, but also a novel and interesting situation – one that, to me, seems unprecedented.

It is to this community that I increasingly feel I belong. People like us can position themselves between identities, part of an in-between space. Without knowing or even suspecting, we have come to represent something beyond the dichotomy of our diaspora and the country we left behind: a new society, formed almost unwittingly, barely aware of itself. Held fast in the gap between languages and countries, we have gained an unexpected new audience: a group of unknown people who share our experience. Language decides nothing here, or nearly nothing. The essential condition is the will to converse.

The emigrant experience usually involves the simultaneous presence of several languages. You are their meeting point or their point of departure; they feel each other out in the pre-linguistic darkness: your mother tongue, the language of your new country (still weak, not yet quite formed in your mouth), and of course the omnipresent ghost of English (which, like it or not, serves as a background to any conversation). Your text, and your body, become a territory where speech and traditions collide, producing an unexpected result, beyond logic.

Any possibility, just like any hope, has its dark obverse. Mass immigration and, more broadly still, unbridled globalisation force us to reevaluate the very concept of national literature, if we accept the premise that a country’s literature is written in a particular language and for the particular people who live there.

A ‘foreigner’ – and there is an unexpected advantage in this – can write in the space between languages, or above them. Perhaps they will be drawn to explain themselves to those who, like me not so long ago, could hardly imagine living in a place that was not home; perhaps they will be irritated by how they are treated first and foremost as a representative of the abandoned country, like a human visiting card. The opportunity to retreat from locals and talk to those like yourself offers a freedom of its own. But it could easily happen that you lose your curiosity, lose interest in the lives that don’t resemble your own. Meanwhile, the circle of local people who are willing to talk with you might grow smaller. They have plenty to say to each other without our involvement.

I come now to a common denominator, reflected in the growing support for right-wing parties, the simmering rage at tourists, the fights on buses that make national headlines. There is less and less curiosity, and more and more anger and irritation. This comes from both sides: new immigrants themselves often lean towards radical conservativism. Many Russian-speaking residents in Germany sympathise with Putin and attempt to justify Russian aggression. They vote for the Alternative für Deutschland. The desire for mutual understanding, for translation (not only from one language to another, but from one culture to another) diminishes daily.

In the Jewish tradition, there is a holiday implicitly connected with thoughts of home. During the week of Sukkot, believers live in makeshift wooden shelters under the open skies, where they eat and sleep, and more importantly, feast and celebrate – Sukkot is a harvest festival. But it is also a yearly reminder that any home is temporary, that you cannot know when you will have to gather up your possessions once again, or perhaps for the first time, and close the door behind you forever. During Sukkot, a person has two homes instead of one. Perhaps this is simply a way of reminding us that our true home is not here, that one may not return, but must keep going forwards.

In The Human Condition, written 15 years after “We Refugees”, Hannah Arendt rejects the idea of hope, which she feels is a passive and therefore fatal sentiment. Hope is always situated somewhere in the future. It wears the mask of inevitability, and so deceives us. It reduces human life to expectation. By way of an alternative, Arent proffers the concept of natality, which seems vital to me in these new dark times. Unlike hope, natality does not offer a ready template for a future towards which we should strive, nor does it console us with the belief that everything will turn out OK in the end. It’s less an ethical notion than a physiological quality innate in the living creature. Natality is, very simply, the ability to start anew, from the beginning, over and over; without knowing why or to what end; each time being reborn, stubbornly; pointlessly persisting – precisely because that is our human wont.