Portrait of the Ukrainian author Anna Melikova: In love with the university lecturer

We meet in a café in Schöneberg. Anna Melikova wearing a short coat, hat and aquamarine scarf. The accessories are well matched to her eyes. The colors are deep and expressive, just like their owner.

The tall, slim woman with long, dark hair orders a tea with ginger and puts a thick book with a deep blue cover on the table. It’s her debut novel, “I’m Drowning in a Receding Lake.” (Translation: Christiane Pöhlmann, Matthes & Seitz, 477 pages, €23.99). As the author says, she spent 15 years writing it. The autofictional novel is about a codependent female relationship and the long separation process against the backdrop of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

Anna Melikova was born in 1984 in the Ukrainian city of Yevpatoria in Crimea. In 2014, the Black Sea peninsula was occupied by Russia. Melikova’s father still lives there. The author says that she skyped with him right before we met.

The conversation made her sad again. “My father asked me what I had been writing about for 15 years. I told him that it was about my life in Kyiv, Moscow and Berlin. I just don’t dare tell him what aspects of my life are at the center, my father doesn’t know that I’m a lesbian.” The two also have different views on political events. This means that they don’t talk about the two most important themes in the novel, explains the writer.

The fact that the book was published in German and that her father cannot read it is a relief for her. The novel would not be pleasant reading for him, she says. Because it’s about the protagonist’s relationship with her university lecturer, who is three years older than her. At the beginning of the novel, the first-person narrator describes herself as pro-Russian, she loves Russian culture and speaks Russian, but lives and studies in Kyiv.

The relationship between the narrator and the lecturer in Ukrainian literature and postmodernism is difficult. Because the older one insists on loving several women at the same time. With the Maidan Revolution and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the relationship takes on a political dimension, as the student increasingly turns to Ukrainian culture, but the lecturer denies her this identity. She also repeatedly clashes with her father, who is loyal to Russia.

Anna Melikova no longer speaks Russian in public and no longer writes literary texts in this language. Our conversation in the café takes place in Ukrainian. The author admits that she doesn’t like being interviewed. Because she is used to asking the questions herself. When she was living in Moscow as a film critic in 2016, Melikova met the director Isabelle Stever, who was presenting her film “The Weather Indoors” with Maria Furtwängler there.

From Moscow to Berlin

A year later, Melikova moved to Berlin. She and Isabelle Stever are now married. The two are also a creative team. Melikova was co-screenwriter of Stever’s film “Grand Jeté,” which premiered at the Berlinale in 2022. And Stever supported her wife in completing the novel about their painful first love. Ultimately, it became the story of a liberation in which Isabelle Stever and Berlin played a major role.

The couple has been in Kyiv often this year to prepare for their new film. “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” is about a queer Ukrainian couple whose feelings are tested when Russia expands its war across Ukraine. Melikova wrote the screenplay and Stever is directing. The work about a lesbian woman and a trans man also addresses how society’s image of masculinity is changing.

Filming is scheduled to take place in the Ukraine and near Cologne in the coming months. On the German side, Tom Tykwer and Uwe Schott are involved in the production. Despite the danger, Anna Melikova says it is easier for her to be in Kyiv than in Berlin, where she receives messages on her cell phone when the city comes under fire again. “In moments like this, it’s better to be there and see what’s happening.”

The author would like to go to Crimea again one day to see her father and the Black Sea. “That’s probably why I keep dreaming about home because I can’t go back there right now and I’m starting to lose hope that it will ever be possible,” she says.