What happens when the language we inherit is no longer enough to explain the life we live?
 In Three Stories at My Wake, a woman travels from Frankfurt to Moscow for the twentieth anniversary of her mother’s death. She is also preparing to tell her grandparents that she has left Russia for good. What begins as a story of grief and family memory becomes a story of a wider rupture — between generations, values, countries and versions of the past.
 In Russia, these fractures have taken on a new meaning since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, amid growing repression, censorship and emigration. Families and communities have been divided, much of Russia’s independent cultural scene has moved abroad, and Russian-speaking writers have been forced to reconsider what “home”, “belonging” and even “Russian literature” mean today.
 But these tensions did not begin in 2022. The books of Est Smysl, a series of contemporary Russian-language fiction by a new generation of authors, explore conflicts between parents and children, metropolitan and provincial lives, inherited values and new identities, private memory and official narratives.
 Evgenia Zakharchuk’s debut opens a wider conversation about a generation searching for words for experiences that are often difficult to discuss: displacement, family trauma, ideological division, grief, identity and belonging.
 How do you speak to people you love when you no longer share the same language — emotionally, politically or literally? And can fiction create a dialogue where ordinary conversation has failed?