Yevgeniya (Zhenya) Berkovich is a prize-winning theater director and a poet. She is a member of Kirill Serebrennikov’s Seventh Studio and the founder of the independent theater company, SOSO Daughters. 

A Russian military court has sentenced her and a playwright Svetlana Petriychuk to six years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” in the 2020 play Finist The Brave Falcon about women marrying jihadists in Syria. The play had been awarded two prestigious Golden Mask national theatre awards in 2021.

In years following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Berkovich wrote a number of powerful anti-war poems that were published in social media and recited by theater actors and social activists, some of whom are so-called “foreign agents”, a state opposition. There are speculations linking Berkovich’s arrest and trial with the poems, seeing the play as a pretext for a case and an eventual grave sentence.  

Women in Berkovich family have been human rights activists in several generations: her grandmother, Nina Katerli, passed away in 2023, while Berkovich was kept in prison during the case investigation, denied of parole and house arrest; and so is her mother, Elena Efros.

Through years, Berkovich was active in charity, founding and running a theater festival, You Are Not Alone, for children in the orphanages. In 2019, she with her husband adopted two girls, aged 13 and 15, whom she got to know through this charity work.  

Zhenya Berkovich wrote her prison tale, Pets, for her daughters, but it will definitely travel to a vast adult readership who is open to bold genre and text experiments and wants to support people of art who are in prison and under prosecution. Berkovich wrote Pets by hand, sending us notebook sheets, while her friends made copies, deciphered the text, forwarded the printed version back to us and the editor for her notes and questions. According to Zhenya, writing the story of a cat struggling with odds to re-unite and, ultimately, to free her imprisoned owner, has helped her to survive through these tormenting times.

We hope that the fairy tale spirit of the book will unite people in support of Berkovich.