'One day I found out that my little native town used to be called not Znamensk but Wehlau. Germans had lived here. This had been East Prussia. Then they were deported. A ten-twenty-thirty-year layer of Russian life trembled on a seven-hundred-year foundation about which I knew nothing. So the child began to invent.'
The resettling of the Kaliningrad Region (former East Prussia) with Soviet citizens occurred a few years before Yuri Buida's...