Essayist. I write about cities, memory and the houses we never lived in.
Today's line
Silence is not the absence of sound but the place where it is listened to.
Hover or tap — it opens on page seven
Book
Twenty-two essays on houses, cities and what we carry away with us
About the flats we rented, the houses we never moved into, the cities where we spent a single summer. Essays written over six years in four countries and one kitchen.
Essays
Seven years of essays. Short ones — for one stop, long ones — for the way home. Hover: I'll show the first line.
7 essays
Tbilisi goes to sleep not by the clock but by the slope: the upper streets go dark first, then the ones clinging to them by their balconies, and only towards three — the embankment, where someone keeps laughing by the water for a long while.
I lived there one winter and learned to tell the floors apart by sound. The upper ones creak. The middle ones sing in the mornings, because that's where the early risers live. The lower ones keep quiet and smell of bread.
Read in full →There isn't a single date in the notebook, but there are butter prices for eleven years. That's how I reconstruct time: here we moved, here I was born, here butter doubled in price and the handwriting got smaller.
She didn't keep a diary. She kept house. But if you read those columns in a row, you get the most honest autobiography I know.
Read in full →The fridge, it turns out, sighs. I didn't know that for thirty-four years, because there was always someone at home, and its sigh got lost in the conversations.
An empty house sounds like waiting: a door that hasn't slammed yet, a kettle that hasn't been put on. It isn't silent. It's holding a pause.
Read in full →Everyone translates the Portuguese saudade as «longing», and everyone lies — by about a third. There's a tenderness in it that longing doesn't have, and there isn't the weight that longing does.
I collect words like that in a separate file. There are fourteen. One per move, as if the language hands me a word for every suitcase.
Read in full →The balcony is the only room where the owners don't pretend. There's the bicycle, there are the jars, there's the laundry they won't show guests, and there too — the chair someone thinks on in the evenings.
If I wrote guidebooks, I'd write them by balconies.
Read in full →Dear Ladozhsky, you were the first to see me leaving. You weren't surprised. That's your job.
Since then I recognise cities by their stations: the ones that greet you with an echo, the ones that greet you cramped, and the ones where the platform turns straight into a street, as if the city doesn't want you lingering on the threshold.
Read in full →There are smells that vanished along with a profession. The photocopier in the library basement smelled of hot paper and ozone, and I went there for that smell more often than for the copies.
Now I know: memory keeps not the events but the conditions we lived them in. The light, the temperature, the smell of toner.
Read in full →Excerpt
From «Rooms We Never Lived In», chapter three
The fridge, it turns out, sighs. I didn't know that for thirty-four years, because there was always someone at home, and its sigh got lost in the conversations, the radio, the footsteps in the corridor. Now everyone has gone — some to work, some for good — and the house has started speaking in the voice it had all along.
I write it down in a notebook, the way I'd write down birds. Half past seven: the radiator clicks three times, as if counting1. Nine: the light in the stairwell goes out with the sound of a book being closed. Eleven: someone upstairs puts down a cup, and I know the cup is white.
An empty house sounds like waiting: a door that hasn't slammed yet, a kettle that hasn't been put on. It isn't silent — it's holding a pause, like a good reader before the last line2.
I think I've understood why people get cats. Not for the warmth and not for the mice. So that there's one more listener in the house3 — and so that the fridge's sigh becomes someone's again, and not only yours.
About
portrait · 2025Biography
Born in Petersburg, in a house with a bay window that was later demolished. Studied philology, worked as an editor at three magazines, two of which closed — not because of me.
Writing essays since 2019: first in letters to friends, then in a column, then in a book. I live wherever there's a balcony and a railway station half an hour away.
Now writing
A book about people who don't sleep when the city does: bakers, dispatchers, nurses. The draft is 62%.
In numbers
Cities
the deskFact
I write by hand and type it up in the evening. Half the text gets lost on the way — and that's the best editing there is.
Readers
What people write in the margins, in letters and on the metro. The notes change — like the readers.
Read it on the metro and missed my stop. Twice.— Marina, Kazan
Bought the paperback after the e-book. To underline.— Anya, Yekaterinburg
The balcony is the only room where the owners don't pretend. There's the bicycle, there are the jars, there's the laundry they won't show guests, and there too — the chair someone thinks on in the evenings.
If I wrote guidebooks, I'd write them by balconies. Not by façades — façades lie for money — but by what's been put outside because it didn't fit inside.
— 41 —The one about balconies — that's about my father. How did you know?— Igor, from a letter
The only book I've ever read aloud to a cat.— Timur, Tbilisi
Events
Launches, readings and broadcasts. Come along, I'll sign the book and read what isn't in print yet.
Podpisnie IzdaniyaPetersburg19:30
Dom Knigi, second-floor hallPetersburg19:00
Online, the link comes by email20:00
Nekrasov LibraryMoscow18:00
Auditoria bookshopTbilisi17:00
Letters
I write letters more often than essays. They're shorter, warmer and don't go through editing. Subscribe — and choose how often.
Every Sunday, short: one thought, one book, one photo from the balcony.
No ads and no «hot offers». Unsubscribe with one link at the bottom of any letter.
The last letter · hover to open
Letter archive →For publishers
Translations, excerpt publication and film adaptation are handled through my agent. Interviews and broadcasts — directly, I reply within a week.
For interviews and broadcasts — directly: vera@kholodova.ru