Poplar fluff

Tatiana Lazareva and Ivan Vyrypaev perform fragments and chapters from Roman Darev’s novel Poplar Fluff

📆 Sunday, October 5, 18:00–20:00
📍 Sky Hall, Twarda 18, Spektrum Tower, 28th floor, Warsaw

What happens when someone changes countries but can’t change their inner reality? What does an emigrant carry with them besides suitcases? What voices continue echoing in one’s mind, even after many years?

Poplar Fluff is a novel about the wave of Jewish emigration in the 1990s — about the intellectuals who left the former Soviet Union after its collapse and found themselves in a boarding house in the U.S., built for émigrés. It’s a precise, ironic, and deeply moving reflection on any relocation marked by loss, adaptation, and the struggle to remain oneself.

The novel’s characters are people who left long ago but never let go of the past. They’ve rebuilt their previous lives — in a new country, but using the same blueprints. With all the fears, habits, and silences that are so hard to forgive — in themselves and in others.

This is a story about internal exile, about guilt, memory, and love.
About how it’s not geography we need to change, but ourselves.
About how we all live at the crossroads of cultures, traumas, and hopes.
And how real connection can emerge in those very intersections.

Tatiana Lazareva and Ivan Vyrypaev don’t simply read the novel — they enter into a dialogue.

With the audience. With themselves. With the author.

An evening of journey, of contact, of human connection.