A summary of "The Abduction of Europa" by Evgeny Vodolazkin

"The Rape of Europa" is Evgeny Vodolazkin’s debut novel, published in German by the Munich-based Zwillinger Brothers in 2003 and later in Russian. It covers approximately a year in the life of twenty-year-old German Christian Schmidt — a period he describes as his "past life." Written in the first person, the novel takes the form of personal memoirs and is subtitled "The Story of Christian Schmidt, Told by Himself." One of the novel’s notable structural devices is the frame narrative: Christian writes his memoirs from a place where he is "restricted in his movements," reflecting back on the events that led to this situation.

Christian Schmidt and his double

In the introductory chapters, the narrator introduces the reader to the story of his coming of age. In childhood and elementary school, he was a completely unremarkable child — awkward, uncommunicative, and unnoticeable. He would stand for hours in the school hallway, leaning against the oak panels, and no one would approach him. The only thing in which he stood out were his school essays: branching subordinate clauses in the spirit of the German philosophical tradition compelled his teacher, Frau Meyer, to read them aloud as models of style.

By the age of fifteen, Christian had undergone a dramatic transformation: the homely teenager had transformed into a slender, fair-haired beauty. He experienced this transformation as the emergence of a second self — an independent character, which he mentally called his double. Inside, the old Schmidt remained — timid and withdrawn — but on the outside, he was a different person: confident, charming, able to impress bureaucrats and strangers. However, his beauty didn’t rid him of his morbid obsession with invisibility: since childhood, Christian loved to imagine himself invisible, and later, a passenger on a submarine like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus — and this sense of unseen presence remained one of his most powerful psychological needs.

Nursing home in northern Munich

Having conscientiously refused military service, Christian is assigned to alternative service. He moves into a separate apartment on Sondermeierstrasse at the edge of the English Garden and begins working in a retirement home. A colorful world of characters emerges: the strict director Frau Hase, the cook and housekeeper Frau Wagner, and the art teacher Frau Hoffmann with her long legs and the marks of a long struggle with age. Among the residents are the one-legged Frau Kugel, who calmly smokes a cigarette with two fingers, the former stripper Frau Traitinger, and the massage therapist Schulz with a lush, peaked mustache. Daily breakfast at the communal table turns into a mini-theatre with witty remarks about old age, striptease, and sea buckthorn oil.

Christian’s duties also include delivering meals to homes. He regularly visits Frau Wolf, the nearly ninety-year-old widow of an SS officer who fled to Venezuela after the war. After each meal, she pushes away her empty plate and utters the same phrase: "Life is lived." A meeting with Sarah Fainzimmer, a seventy-year-old Jewish woman born in Munich in 1930, is quite different.

Sarah Fainzimmer

Sarah’s apartment resembles an antique shop: mysterious flea market mechanisms, mandolins, and apothecary scales are everywhere. Over coffee, she tells Christian her life story. Until 1940, the family lived in Munich; then her parents were taken to a concentration camp — she knows their subsequent fate only from historical sources. Sarah was taken to America by distant relatives. As an adult, she left for Israel, fought in the Six-Day War of 1967, commanding a helicopter platoon, and was wounded twice. After leaving the army, she eventually returned to Munich — not out of forgiveness or nostalgia, but out of some irresistible inner logic, "like birds returning to their wretched cliffs."

Political background

Christian’s neighbor, Kranz, a short man with a beer bottle in his hand, comes to see him almost every night and recounts the television news with the precision and intonation of a newscaster. Through him, Christian first learns about the Kosovo crisis and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. The scandal unexpectedly awakens the young German’s interest in politics: the close connection between sex and power, previously considered a figment of historical novelists, is revealed with unexpected clarity. Conversations rage on about Serbia and the Albanians, and about what will happen "as always" — war.

Nastya and Paris

Nastya, a Russian girl who becomes his love, enters Christian’s life. They end up in Paris together, where they meet Henri, an energetic Frenchman with political ambitions. Henri is convinced that the current situation in Europe resembles the moment before an avalanche: a single blow is enough to set the unifying idea in motion. He proposes creating an international organization, "Young Europe," a movement uniting diverse peoples and political forces around a single ideology: the voluntary unification of the continent.

Christian initially resists: the whole idea seems too far removed from his introverted nature and from the nocturnal journeys into invisibility he shared with Nastya. Henri, however, brings up one final argument — not political, but psychological: it’s a chance to escape the mundane, and such chances don’t come around again. Christian exchanges glances with Nastya and agrees. Henri solemnly clasps their hands. "A conspiracy," Nastya concludes.

Young Europe and discussions about the future of the continent

As Henri unfolds his plans, Christian delves into the essence of the project. Unlike the American or Russian models, based on subordination, the new Europe must be built on a voluntary union of equals — without colonial pretensions or imperial logic. A mysterious "prince" — a European aristocrat whose hands rest on Christian’s shoulders during the most heated political debates — joins in the fireside conversations. The prince listens to the young German’s discourse on European emancipation and calls it beautiful, "like a utopia."

Meanwhile, the political framework of the narrative tightens: preparations for the Iraq War loom. In 2002, Christian sends the manuscript of his notes to Munich, and the publishers’ response arrives on the day Baghdad falls. The notes come to life precisely when the world once again proves that individuals cannot escape the greater history, no matter how much they strive for invisibility.