Inger Christensen (1935 – 2009) was a wholly original and experimental writer from Denmark, who wrote prose, poetry and essays. She won major European literary awards and was often named a Nobel Prize candidate. Her novella Natalja’s Stories takes an unusual approach to the theme of migration: a narrator is told a story by her grandmother about her great-grandmother, who was brought to Russia from Copenhagen. When she flees Russia after the revolution, she dies, and her ashes are returned to Denmark. The story is retold over and over — in playfully different, surprisingly rhyming ways. What follows is the first chapter from the English translation by Denise Newman, published by New Directions in May 2025.
— There was once a woman who traveled all the way from Crimea to Denmark so that she could bury her mother. That’s how my grandmother always began the story of her life, for she loved to talk about herself in the third person as if it were something she had read about in a book rather than something she herself had experienced. She was born in 1887 on the outskirts of St. Petersburg in a large wooden house with a veranda painted blue, and a garden leading straight down to the river to a small pier with a white pavilion. The property was only open to the side facing the river; the other three sides were surrounded by a high garden wall, and all you could see were the tops of the fruit trees in the orchard.
But down in the village you could see the house’s fruity towers, which at sunset looked golden and edible. And even though it was said that gold was poisonous, many were hungry enough to feel envious.
My grandmother grew up in that house as the only child of Alexander Firenko and his wife Marie, whom he had abducted from Copenhagen so as not to return to Russia empty-handed.
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