We keep pressing Sergey Davydov for a straight news dispatch, but what he longs to share is a love story. It would benefit us to follow his lead. His second departure from theatre, Midwest (Freedom Letters 2026), a piece of autofiction Davydov himself calls more of an art project than a conventional novel, presents an invitation to do exactly that.
Midwest stands out as perhaps the most striking entry among a wave of books this year that recount queer migrant lives while resisting the impulse to reduce them to a single political manifesto. It sits alongside Abdellah Taïa’s Debout dans tes rêves (Standing in Your Dreams) and Afghan-Australian writer Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us. It is Davydov—and, to a lesser degree, Taïa—who anchor this moment, though Sayed’s work belongs clearly to the same literary milieu. These narratives, and perhaps their authors too, put forth a bold demand: the right to live as ordinary people. And in doing so, they rescue a shared humanity that is becoming increasingly endangered in our world.
It should be noted that the subject matter—and, in Davydov and Taïa’s case, the authors themselves—are particularly well suited to this project. After all, who better embodies the twenty-first‑century “Other” than queer migrants at a moment when global political discourse fixates on anxieties about queer lives and migrants? Consequently, who is more capable of reflecting a cultural moment in which identity politics and sweeping public narratives invade the most intimate corners of life?
Davydov’s experience with this intrusion is personal. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was on track to become one of his generation’s most significant Russian playwrights. His debut play, Lev Tolstoy 49, earned a place on the shortlist for the Eurasia International Playwrights Competition while he was still a student, inaugurating a decade of accolades that culminated in 2020 when Republic was named a “Play of the Year” by Culmination, Russia’s national contest for contemporary playwriting.
Then February 2022 arrived. Davydov chose openly to oppose the war and to come out as a gay man, a dramatic escalation in a country where queer people are legally branded as extremists and where the chief cleric justified the invasion by claiming Ukraine must be protected from Pride parades. Under increasing state pressure, Davydov fled to Germany. It was there that he published his first novel, Springfield (Freedom Letters 2023), a queer coming‑of‑age story set in Russia’s shrinking, decaying provinces. The book has been banned in Russia, as one might expect.
While Springfield was unmistakably autobiographical in parts, Midwest dispenses with the pretense of a fictional avatar entirely. The work sits at the crossroads of autofiction and memoir, yet not in the melodramatic mode of a writer who monetizes “truth-telling.” In Midwest, truth is not a brand but the substrate on which a text that blends poetry and WhatsApp screenshots with prose written in a playwright’s crisp, direct style is built. The decoupage narrative unfolds in roughly chronological order, tracing the past four years of the author’s life. History and fate supply plenty of raw material for drama and ideological lessons, yet Davydov stubbornly declines to deliver them.
This is precisely the point. Hatred and division—the currency of political conflict—do not govern his inner world. Love does. His most ardent longing is for connection and, above all, for an ordinary life grounded in love and its limits. In a moment that echoes the breezy tone of social-media posts about mundane exchanges—the child’s bluntness, a parent’s strong opinion, for instance—Jasper, Davydov’s German partner who appears in the latter half of the book, replies to gentle jests about his noble lineage with the line, in Russian: You are my family. Davydov’s response: I’ve always wanted a family.
But the clearest articulation of Davydov’s insistence on a right to a normal life—and thus a refusal to surrender his full humanity—emerges when the German asylum framework parts him from the life he has begun to construct. He states, in the simplest terms, the central thesis of Midwest and of his larger body of work:
I hate having to prove my right to a life, to a normal life. I had to do that in Russia, and I continue to do so in Germany… All you want is to live like ordinary people: to have a family, a husband, a small house, and to keep pursuing the humane work you believe in.
Later, we both realized that we simply wanted to formalize our relationship—our family bond—because we love each other, and I feel so good with him. And it seems he feels the same about me. He calls me “Mishka” in Russian, meaning “little bear.” For me, Jasper is home. And I think that’s the most important thing.
Compare his words with those of Savannah Stone, the viral trad influencer who told Fox News she married her husband in order to “rebuild a nuclear family because the left and modern feminism has truly tried to destroy that.” Taken as a cultural moment, this is an odd claim. Unlike the tradwives or Usha Vance, Davydov is not attempting to turn his life into a political billboard. It’s not a question of whether Davydov loves Jasper more or less sincerely than Stone loves Noah, though one could wonder about it. I will refrain from extending the comparison to the Vances for obvious reasons.
What’s clear is that Davydov resists the impulse to present private affection as fodder for political allegory—refusing to let one’s private life merely function as a sign of courage. Although Midwest surely delivers a searing indictment of the authoritarian politics of our time, it also critiques the counter‑tendency to treat the lives of “marginalized” people as devices for activism. Far too often, opposition to dehumanization is weaponized into a belief that someone’s political identity is the sole lens through which their life must be understood.
Now, we often say “the personal is political”—as my Second‑Wave feminist mother reminded me—but what could be more counterproductive to liberation than letting every facet of ourselves be subsumed by politics? If the aim of authoritarians is to strip those they designate of humanity by erasing individuality, shouldn’t our response be something other than a distorted, mirror‑image satire of the same approach?
A desire for a family, a husband, a home, and work in which one believes should not demand bravery. Davydov knows this, even as the circumstances of his life have forced him to declare these desires aloud—and to pursue them—at times as acts of extraordinary courage. This is perhaps the cruel irony that threads through Midwest: his aspirations are, in themselves, utterly ordinary. Reading him merely as a dissident, migrant, or queer writer—or even as a political symbol—risks reproducing the original violence. Midwest asks something both simpler and more difficult of its readers: let Davydov tell his story without insisting that it must carry a universal meaning.
This same impulse—to be allowed to be ordinary, to occupy a self rather than an archetype—permeates Abdellah Taïa’s Debout dans tes rêves as well. Though the narrative voice differs, Taïa’s novel engages the same essential question, resisting any urge to reduce queer migrant life to a sociological case or ideological cliché.
The opening scene unfolds in late afternoon Paris, 2000, on a cafe terrace on the fashionable Rue des Abbesses. Majid, Taïa’s fictional alter ego, is a young gay Moroccan in Paris to study French literature at the Sorbonne. He works as a babysitter for the three-year-old Gabriel, the child of a wealthy French family. On this afternoon, Gabriel collapses into tears upon hearing that his aunt’s dog, Roxy, has died. To soothe him, Majid runs his hands through the boy’s hair and offers all the tenderness he can muster: Je caresse ses cheveux pour l’aider à traverser ce moment difficile. Je lui donne toute la tendresse dont je suis capable (I stroke his hair to help him through this difficult moment. I give him all the tenderness I am capable of).
But to the passersby on the street, such a tender moment appears suspicious: an Arab man with a crying white child must signify something sinister. A vigilante mob forms, often led by a self‑righteous white woman, asking who this man is, whether he has proper papers, and whether he even belongs in the country. Only a phone call to the boy’s mother, who rebukes the mob, ultimately allows Majid and Gabriel to leave for the boy’s home.
The cruelty of the scene is undeniable. Yet there exists a long‑standing internet genre that revels in precisely this kind of intrusion—strangers stepping into others’ lives because an interaction seems “suspicious,” convinced of their own virtue without reflecting on whom they judge. In a world that rewards such behavior, Majid’s existence can never be entirely unproblematic.
Perhaps the most radical act of solidarity we have left is to stop insisting that every human story must explain the world, and let some stories simply be human stories.
That push to read Majid as a political avatar is not limited to rustling bystanders. In one of Debout dans tes rêves’s most infuriating scenes, Majid’s doctoral advisor urges him to abandon his Fragonard research and instead pursue “une thèse sur les images et l’islam, plus exactement sur l’interdiction de la représentation, et donc des images, en islam” (a thesis on images and Islam—or, more precisely, on the prohibition of representation, and thus of images, in Islam). The moment becomes almost absurd: Majid wants to study Fragonard—a perfectly reasonable subject for a doctoral thesis—yet his advisor cannot imagine a Moroccan writer approaching one of the late‑Eighteenth‑century painter’s works from such a frame of reference.
The suggestion that Majid drop Fragonard to study Islam’s ban on images is not just illustrative of a liberal intellectual’s narrow view of a Muslim student; it also implies a duty to interpret the world through the lens of the culture one comes from. That demand, delivered by a liberal mentor rather than a hostile crowd, still marks Majid as a figure who cannot exist apart from others’ expectations. It is here that Debout dans tes rêves and Midwest converge: both protagonists want a husband, a home, and the freedom to write; the desires themselves are not inherently political. What makes them political is the world’s persistent refusal to grant them basic dignity.
Both books stand as defiant replies to a culture that dehumanizes people who do not fit a narrow mold, and some critical responses have been disappointingly narrow. For instance, in a largely favorable review of Midwest for Novaya Gazeta Europe, Sorin Brutus reads Davydov’s encounter with a reactionary, homophobic Chechen roommate at a German refugee camp as a moment demanding deeper political analysis, and regrets that the book does not linger on it. Likewise, Jean-Philippe Cazier’s favorable Diacritik review of Debout dans tes rêves tends to read the work through a political lens, with the blunt claim that “even desires and pleasures are political,” implying that the self‑narration and intimate perspective reveal the political and social. Such readings left me wondering if we read the same book.
We have all been conditioned to anticipate overt activism from artists whose lives are themselves battlegrounds, but there is a stark cruelty in treating people and their stories as mere political material. Perhaps the enduring failings of the last century and a half lie in our collective appetite for ideological rancor, which blunts our capacity to recognize genuine humanity. This is not a call for a bland sameness; it is an acknowledgment that every person is singular in ways that resist any political project’s ultimate grasp. Real understanding of people and the world will come from listening to one another’s stories, not from theoretical schemata. That is the message of Midwest and Debout dans tes rêves. To grant another person full humanity is not only to defend their rights or explain the forces acting upon them, but to accept that there will always be something about them that exceeds our explanations. Perhaps the most radical act of solidarity left to us is to stop demanding that every human story explain the world, and allow it, when necessary, to be simply a human story.
Sergey Davydov wants to tell us a love story. Perhaps it is time we listen.
