Anastasia Levkova

There is a Land Beyond Perekop is a novel about Crimea covering the period between 1992 and 2014, but through the stories of Crimean families it looks back firstly to the 1940s when the Crimean Tatar indigenous people were deported from their homeland; to the the period 1950s–1970s, during which many Crimean Tatar families tried to go back home but were deported again and again; and to the 1980s, when the huge repatriation of Crimean Tatar people started.
The novel tries to answer the following questions: In addition to Russians, Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars, there are more than 100 ethnic communities in Crimea––did all of them “fuse” into “Soviet people?” Who are “professional Russians” and how did they act decades before the annexation? How did mainland Ukraine see and relate to Crimea? How in spring and summer of 2014 did the Crimean Peninsula break away from the Ukrainian mainland and drift in an unknown direction? The plot of the novel is driven by changes in the heroine’s mind as well as in Crimea between 1992 and 2014. The novel should show the complexity of the region and the factors which led to the annexation.