Marina Palei emerged as an important prose writer during the years of perestroika, from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s. A person of many talents, she writes prose, poetry, and criticism, as well as translates poetry from Dutch, Italian, and other languages. The recurring themes in Palei's writing include the creative freedom of the artist (usually a woman), human communication, and the liminality of existence as manifested in the interdependence of life and death, body and soul. Women's issues, such as maternity and the sexuality and physicality of women, are prominent in many of her works, which feature characters who are often homeless--both literally and in the philosophical sense of the word. According to Palei, this homelessness, together with cultural displacement, is a sine qua non condition for an individual's creative freedom.

Palei focuses on human, especially female, physiology as an indispensable part of the human condition...