Hella is the literary debut of Russian writer Alena Machonina. Its title refers to the actual thematic basis of the prose-essay, which is the fate of Hella, or rather Helen Frischer - a Czech Jewess who was the prototype of the character Ri from Jiří Weil's novel Moscow-Border. Originally, Hella was thought to have been executed along with her husband during Stalin's Great Terror. However, a few years ago it was revealed that Hella had spent ten years in the Gulag in northern Russia and after her release lived in Moscow until her death in 1984. Then, in 2017, her camp memoirs were published in Czech translation.
Makhoninova attempts to reconstruct her fate and inner life based on all available facts, including Hell's correspondence. However, she does so in a distinctive prose form that reflects on the wider context, Russia's past and present, the relationship between literature and reality, as well as her own journey towards the figure of Hella Frischer. Her sophisticated and deeply experienced autofictional prose is also a book about return, or the impossibility of it, about home and nostalgia, about literature and translation.
Czech edition