Un-fakeable, un-replaceable, and un-erasable

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Seraphina Michelina Aurelia Bogomolova-Huotelin spent decades as a double mystery—unknown to those who tried to place her, and unknowable even to herself. Until recently.

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Her birth has been shrouded in deep mystery, constituting an enigma of the Cold War period.​Being a result of her parents' clandestine love affair across borders and ideological divides, she always felt a certain gap which she longed to bridge, if only in her aspirations, and self-expressions.  

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​The secret of Seraphina's birth circumstances got imprinted in her pensive, almost introspective gaze which beamed at the viewers from her early childhood black and white photographs taken by her foster family in the USSR.  The nature and quality of Seraphina's gaze when she was 4 years old indicated that she had already weathered some challenges and difficult circumstances that forced her to grow up faster than her peers. 

 

The reason for her rapid psychological maturing was attributable to the fact that she was 'sacrificed' by her biological mother to fulfil the protocol of the Soviet intelligence services. As a result, right after Seraphina's birth, which happened in France, she was brought to Leningrad, USSR, whilst her mother of Russian aristocratic émigré circles, Sophie de PRITTWITZ (married name DRUON) remained in Paris with Seraphina’s twin half-brother who six years later was adopted by Sophie's husband Georges Richard DRUON.

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Seraphina's biological father, being in sensitive government operations, was not allowed to raise Seraphina himself. Instead, she was placed with a foster family of Russian-Ukrainian descent - the residents of Saint-Petersburg.​

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Estranged from both biological parents, misplaced, and missing from the French birth records and registration papers, Seraphina, nonetheless, was hard to erase. For, unknown to anybody, even to Seraphina herself, at the cellular level she became a living archive carrying within her three genomes - one of her mother, one of her unborn paternal twin brother, and one of her own. An unusual state, which is attributed to chimerism, a genetic condition where a single organism contains cells from at least two different individuals. 

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Seraphina's three genomes function almost like three different documents proving her identity - her mother's full story which she was able to tell by building her Family Tree, her father's lineage through Seraphina's twin brother's Y-DNA which she was able to identify as N1, and her own unique combination. It is as if her biology anticipated her life story even before her birth occurred. 

 

Seraphina doesn't just carry genes - she carries witnesses. Three different testimonies to her origins, each telling a part of the truth that would have otherwise been lost or deniable.

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1. Her mother's full genome - to prove the Royal disease gene did NOT come from her, therefore it came from her father

2. The twin brother's genome (with the Y-DNA) - to identify Seraphina's paternal lineage and distinguish her full twin from her maternal half-twin

3. Seraphina’s own genome - the baseline, her unique combination

 

The three genomes work like a triangulation - each one eliminating alternative explanations, each one closing off a false path. Seraphina needed her mother's genome to prove her father passed the hemophilia gene. She needed her twin brother's Y-DNA to prove her father's lineage. And she needed her own to show the complete picture.

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It's as if the universe said: "You will be displaced, but you will not be erased. You will forget, but the truth will be written in your cells."

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The trauma of separation from her biological parents that Seraphina experienced so early in her life had a profound effect on her. But, at the same time, it made her one of a kind. For, her early 'independence' and her unique cellular level genome archive paired with Seraphina's natural rich symbolic thinking and the ability to maintain authentic selfhood developed into a particularly sophisticated form of resilience.

 

Seraphina has grown into a rare person who could not only survive challenging circumstances but find deep meaning in them, transforming potential sources of trauma into opportunities for self-understanding and growth. But most important, Seraphina knows without a doubt who she is and where she came from.

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