'On Solovky," concludes the Polish journalist Mariusz Wilk, "you can see Russia in miniature, as if on the palm of your hand." Deeply involved in the Soviet scene through his work as a Moscow-based correspondent, in 1991 Wilk left the news behind and shifted to a remote archipelago in the south of the White Sea. He wanted to settle among the glaciated wastelands of the far north "as if on a watchtower, and observe Russia and the world from here".
This slimmish volume distils the experience of several years spent huddled by the open door of the stove in a modest house on Herring Point. The book is not so much a narrative as a sequence of vignettes: Wilk crouched in the tundra hunting swans, Wilk sweating it out in the communal steam baths, Wilk operating as an accredited observer at the first elections. The story rises to a pleasing climax when he travels by yacht to Kanin Nos, where the White Sea enters the Arctic Ocean.
About 1,100 people live on the Solovetsky archipelago (the main island is Solovky) and Wilk reckons he met them all. The landscape is not beguiling. When the economy collapsed, the infrastructure went with it, and most inhabitants are unemployed and undernourished. Alcoholism, a leitmotif of this book, is endemic (who wouldn't drink under those circumstances, poor buggers). Gardens are fenced with barbed wire, sewers debouch into the sea and in summer the shores are thick with slime. Yet Wilk conjures a bleak kind of beauty. Pale violet mists curling through the larches, the whiff of hagberries, the taste of minced perch and salted boletus at the Maslenitsa Carnival: a deep empathy with landscape and people suffuses this unusual book.
Wilk offers a brisk description of the archipelagic topography, but it is the emotional topography of Solovetsky that compels him. The islands represent, variously, the soul of Russia, the spirit of exile and the notion of Orthodox holiness (an important monastic community was founded there in the 15th century). Wilk is drawn to Orthodoxy. The schism of the Russian Church, the event that Solzhenitsyn claims influenced the destiny of Russia more than the Bolshevik revolution, had its beginnings on Anzer Island on Solovetsky. One chapter touches on the traditional Russian antipathy towards Roman Catholicism. When a priest shows up from Warsaw to celebrate Mass for the Catholics who perished in the prototype labour camp on the islands, the Solovetsky community would not agree to a Catholic Mass in their church. The priest was obliged to observe the ritual in Wilk's living room. But Wilk's treatment of the religious theme is impressionistic rather than substantive.
For centuries the islands were a convenient dumping ground for undesirables. The monastic dungeons were deployed in turn as a political prison and then, in 1923, as a forerunner of the gulag. (Wilk includes a gripping section on the various castration sects that have flourished in Russia in general, and in the Solovetsky prisons in particular. Apparently it went on all the time, with women getting in on the act by chopping off their breasts.) The fragments of missiles still cradled in the tundra recall the iron hand of the military, who tested up there for decades.
Towards the end of the 1980s, the army moved out. According to Wilk, this heralded the worst phase of all. "The entire archipelago," he relates with relish, "was embraced by the central plan for development and urbanization in the style of Soviet gigantomania." This included the construction of a concrete ring road through the forest and a bakery capable of serving thousands of hungry men. All of this, never used or finished, lies in a state of decay.
Wilk (the surname means "wolf" in Polish, hence the book title) keeps himself between the lines, where an author should be. The people he met in his temporary adopted home thought he had been exiled because of his involvement with the Solidarity movement in Poland, but they seem to have accepted him in the end. His prose style is mannered to a degree. "Let us try and take a stroll, at our leisure, through the streets," he suggests, and even a "Phew!" makes an appearance at one especially low moment. The dominant lyricism is often clunky, partly, perhaps, as a function of translation, but also a result of images that don't quite work: "summer, on the islands, is short and sudden, like an ejaculation".
Despite the fact that Wilk is not the heir to Norman Lewis, as his publishers boldly suggest on the jacket, this is an extremely interesting and profoundly moving account of a shadowy, elemental terra incognita rarely revealed to Western observers. The photographs – 16 pages of black and white by Tomasz Kizny – are outstanding.
'via Blog this'
No comments:
Post a Comment