It must be acknowledged that both the subjects and, in the cases of Davydov and Taïa, the writers themselves are uniquely positioned for this cultural work. After all, who embodies the twenty-first-century Other par excellence more than queer migrants during an era when global political conversations are consistently dominated by anxieties surrounding queer lives and migration? Consequently, who is better equipped to hold up a mirror to a zeitgeist in which the politics of identity and the grand narratives of public life have aggressively invaded the most private spaces?
Sergey Davydov has profound personal experience with this intrusion. Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he was well on his way to becoming one of the most celebrated playwrights of his generation in Russia. His debut play, Lev Tolstoy 49, was shortlisted for the Eurasia International Playwrights Competition while he was still a university student. This early success launched a decade of accolades, culminating in 2020 when his play Republic was named “Play of the Year” by Culmination, Russia’s national competition of competitions for contemporary playwriting.
Then came February 2022. Davydov took a definitive public stance, coming out not only against the war but also as a gay man. This decision raised the stakes exponentially in a country where queer people are officially labeled by law as extremists, and where the nation’s chief cleric notoriously justified the invasion of Ukraine by claiming the country needed protection from Pride parades. As official pressure intensified, Davydov was forced to flee to Germany. It was from there that he published his first novel, Springfield (Freedom Letters, 2023), a queer coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Russia’s deindustrializing and decaying provinces. Predictably, the book has been banned in Russia.
While Springfield contained distinct autobiographical elements, Midwest sees Davydov entirely dispense with the pretense of a fictional avatar. This genre-defying work operates as autofiction, yet it functions equally as a memoir—though certainly not in the mold of authors who commodify truth-telling for commercial appeal. In Midwest, truth is not a brand; rather, it forms the bedrock of a text that seamlessly weaves together poetry, screenshots of WhatsApp conversations, and prose written in a characteristic playwright’s style: sparse, brief, and direct.
This decoupage narrative guides the reader in a broadly chronological fashion through the past four years of the author’s life. Although history and fate have provided him with ample material to mine for high drama or ideological object lessons, Davydov stubbornly refuses to take that path. Hatred and division—the lifeblood of modern political conflict—are not the organizing principles of his inner world. Love is. His strongest desires are for human connection and, quite explicitly, for an ordinary life built upon love and its boundaries.
In a passage mirroring the familiar social media genre used to report spontaneous everyday conversations—such as a child speaking with unfiltered bluntness or a parent offering an unprompted opinion—Jasper, Davydov’s German partner, makes a profound statement. Appearing in the second half of the book, Jasper responds to gentle teasing about his noble family background by saying, in Russian, “Ty moya semya” (“You are my family”). Davydov replies, “Ya vsegda khotel semyu” (“I’ve always wanted a family”).
Yet the most direct declaration of Davydov’s stubborn insistence upon his right to an unremarkable domestic life, and by extension his refusal to surrender his full humanity, emerges when the German asylum bureaucracy abruptly disrupts the life he has been constructing. He lays out the fundamental thesis of not just Midwest, but his broader body of work, in the simplest of terms:
"I hate having to prove my right to a life—to a normal life. I had to do it in Russia, and I continue to do it in Germany… All you want is to live like normal people; you want a family, a husband, a little house, and to carry on with the honest work promoting humanism that you believe in."
It is entirely possible—and perhaps our default modern impulse—to read this insistence as a wholly political act, viewed as just another form of protest in an era defined by activism. After all, we live in a cultural moment where people routinely utilize their private lives as political weapons. From TikTok tradwife influencers to Instagram polycules, private lives and domestic desires are constantly co-opted to score ideological points.
Far too frequently, the opposition to authoritarian dehumanization falls into the trap of making political identity the primary lens through which other people’s lives are understood. However, Davydov’s recurring desire for “an ordinary life” vigorously resists such a reading. It is abundantly clear from the text that Davydov simply wants to marry the man he loves, live with him in a modest apartment, and write plays and novels between the domestic chores of cooking pelmeni and doing the laundry. While he is far from ignorant of the political barriers standing in his way, he does not view those barriers—or their eventual destruction—as the central point of his existence. He wants this life because he loves his partner, not because of what that life represents. In fact, he reprints in Midwest the letter he submitted to Danish authorities while seeking permission for an international marriage, noting the inevitable bureaucratic and political complications that queer couples face.
He writes in part: "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 way about me. He calls me ‘Mishka’ in Russian, which means ‘little bear.’ For me, Jasper is home. And I think that’s the most important thing."
Compare his words to those of viral influencers who champion traditional domesticity explicitly to fight ideological battles against modern feminism. Unlike such public figures, Davydov is decidedly not trying to turn his private life into a political billboard. At the very least, he is far less willing than ideological influencers to surrender his private affections as fodder for political allegory—including the progressive trope that treats his identity as inherently brave. While Midwest offers a searing indictment of the authoritarian politics threatening the lives and dignity of queer people, migrants, and minorities, it is equally a critique of the counter-impulse that treats the lives of marginalized people as de facto activism.
The personal may well be political, but what could be further from true liberation, or from being recognized as fully human, than having every aspect of one’s existence co-opted by politics? If the primary goal of authoritarianism is to strip its targets of their humanity by robbing them of their individuality, our response should surely be something more profound than a funhouse-mirror version of the exact same mechanism.
A family, a husband, a home, and meaningful work should not require extraordinary courage. Davydov understands this fundamental truth, even though the harsh circumstances of his life have repeatedly forced him to treat the mere expression of these desires—let alone their active pursuit—as acts of immense bravery. This is the cruelest irony running through Midwest: Davydov’s circumstances are extraordinary precisely because everything he longs for is entirely unremarkable. To read him solely as a dissident, a migrant, a queer writer, or a political symbol runs the risk of repeating a form of original violence. Midwest asks something both simpler and more demanding of its readers: to let Davydov tell a story without attempting to extract a universal political meaning from every page.
This desire to occupy a self rather than an archetype is equally central to Abdellah Taïa’s Debout dans tes rêves. Although stylistically distinct from Davydov’s hybrid autofiction, Taïa’s novel occupies the same essential thematic territory, similarly rejecting the impulse to reduce queer migrant life to a sociological case study or an ideological trope.
The novel opens on a late afternoon in the year 2000 at a café terrace on Paris’s rue Blanche. Majid, Taïa’s fictional alter ego, is a young gay Moroccan studying French literature at the Sorbonne. To make ends meet, Majid works as a babysitter for Gabriel, the three-year-old son of an affluent French family. On this particular afternoon, Gabriel is inconsolable after learning about the death of his aunt’s dog, Roxy. Majid attempts to comfort the child in the most natural way possible, gently stroking his hair and offering all the tenderness he can muster.
To passers-by on the street, however, this tender interaction triggers immediate suspicion: an Arab man comforting a crying white child must mean something is amiss. A small vigilante mob quickly forms, led by a self-righteous bystander demanding to know who Majid is, whether his papers are in order, and why he is in the country. Only a frantic phone call to the boy’s mother, followed by her severe rebuke of the crowd, allows Majid and Gabriel to return safely to the home.
The cruelty of the scene is striking, echoing a modern phenomenon where strangers intervene in everyday interactions simply because they look suspicious, convinced of their own virtue. In such a climate, Majid can never truly exist unquestioned. Assumptions about him and demands that he serve as a political avatar are not confined to street mobs; they pervade academic spaces as well. In one of the novel’s most telling scenes, Majid’s thesis advisor suggests he abandon his research on the eighteenth-century painter Fragonard and instead write a thesis on the prohibition of images in Islam. The assumption that a young man from a Muslim background in Paris must focus his intellect on the oppressions of his native culture is yet another dehumanizing demand that constrains his individuality.
Both Debout dans tes rêves and Midwest arrive at the exact same destination. Davydov wants a husband, a home, and the freedom to write. Majid wants to comfort a crying child and study Fragonard. These desires are aggressively unremarkable, made politically charged only by a world that repeatedly denies both men the most basic human dignity.
Both books stand as acts of defiance against a culture that insists on viewing human beings strictly through political lenses. True understanding will never emerge from sociological or political theory alone; it arises from hearing individual stories. To grant another person their full humanity is to accept that there will always be something about them that exceeds our neat categorizations. Sometimes, the most radical act of solidarity is to stop demanding that every human story explain the world, and allow it simply to be a human story.
