Hunger

5 hrs. 18 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Svetlana Pavlova

Narrator Liza Yankovskaya

Description

An ironic and piercing confession of the new generation’s search for love for oneself—when the pressure of megapolitan exhaustion, loneliness, and hustle-culture weighs on you; when a slave-like dependence on services and personal comfort gets in the way of finding love, friendship, and something understandable, meaningful to do. Lena is thirty. On the outside, she has a clear, established life: a career at a creative agency, a mortgage, parties, friends. But she also has a secret—bulimia. For more than ten years Lena has been dieting, then breaks down, then starts starving again—and it goes in circles. She hates what she sees in the mirror and the scale, but with a timid hope she keeps in her closet the cherished jeans she will definitely fit into someday.

One day Lena meets a man who is also fighting addiction. That meeting becomes the starting point on the path to mutual healing from disorders that people are accustomed to hide and that are rarely discussed in society.

The novel “Hunger” reveals the vicious cycle of unreachable standards imposed by the world of media and social networks, self-hatred, and crushing loneliness—hidden behind a prosperous facade of positivity, careerism, and a cult of health. This harmful way of thinking is passed down from generation to generation, starting from an early age hardwiring boys and girls, young women and grown women into harsh numeric standards: kilograms—centimeters—calories.

The book is especially therapeutic because it talks not only about the illness, but also about the experience of healing it, searching for (and finding!) beauty within yourself.

Svetlana Pavlova is a writer critics call “the voice of the new generation,” a resident of the House of Creativity in Peredelkino, a graduate of Creative Writing School and WLAG, and of the master’s program “Literary Craft” at NRU HSE. At the author’s request, the slim novel “Hunger” was performed with subtle honesty by a young, bright theater and film actress—Liza Yankovskaya. Svetlana Pavlova explains her choice this way: “Liza has an incredible voice... I’d like the heroine’s thoughts to be voiced by exactly that kind of voice—calm, measured, and sometimes ironic.”

Rights for filming the novel have already been sold—so hurry up and listen to the book!