Abstract
Olga Grjasnowa’s debut novel The Russian Is One Who Loves Birch Trees, revolving around themes such as national and linguistic boundaries, borderline transgressions and border crossings, the sense of home and the sense of alienation and the search for one’s own identity in the face of a life in the threshold of cultures. Using the example of a young woman who has emigrated from Azerbaijan, who was traumatized as a child, and who is trained as an interpreter in Germany, the article explores subjects such as loneliness, identity, limitations and hunger for language. By making interpreting her profession, the figure solidifies the leap from one culture to the next as a pattern of action and acts transculturally between different spaces. She finds access to marginalized groups, she has ambivalent erotic experiences with men as well as with women, which reflects her cultural indecision.