About
When I write, I am drawn to moments of upheaval: the fall of empires, collapsing ideologies, families struggling to survive forces greater than themselves.
To vanished worlds.
To forgotten voices.
To fate and human nature.
To what remains when everything changes.
Path & Perspective
From early on, my life unfolded across languages, cultures, and traditions rather than within a single place.
Raised between Eastern Europe and the United States, I later settled in Paris. Moving between these very different ideological and cultural worlds shaped both my personal identity and my writing: history has never appeared to me as an abstract narrative, but as something experienced on an intimate level.
By the age of ten, literature had already become a private space where memory, thought, and imagination formed another reality. In my early teens, writing in Russian — my first language — I filled notebooks with poems and short fiction and completed two novels.
Music developed alongside literature. I gave my first concert at the age of six. My rigorous training at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory shaped my sense of rhythm, silence, and structure — elements that continue to influence my prose today.
After immigrating to the United States, I studied literature at UCLA and journalism at Columbia University. Then at the age of 26, I settled in France, where I started to engage more directly with history, politics, and collective memory.
Alongside literature, I became a journalist for French television and now serve as Director of International Affairs at Le Journal du Parlement and Nouvelles Diplomatiques, Head of International Relations at the Comité de l’Europe, and a Professor of Geopolitics and Communication at HEC Paris.
I have contributed to numerous publications, including The UNESCO Courier and Figaro Vox, and participated in the Malraux Commission’s White Paper on European Culture.
These experiences deepened my understanding of political language — and of what official narratives often leave unspoken.
Literature, however, has forever remained my anchor: the one place where everything can be said without compromise.
My debut novel, The Children of Perestroika, published by Albin Michel, opens a trilogy devoted to fractured inheritances and families caught in the upheavals of the twentieth century, and to a voice — fragile at times, stubborn at others — still searching for love, beauty, and meaning in the heart of chaos.
