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language: Russian (English tr. Irina Sadovina)
country: Russia
year: 1996
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 19.5.26-1.6.26
The heart doesn’t count. The human heart is stupid.
Nenets writer Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss, translated from Russian by Irina Sadovina, is a strange book, both narrowly focused and wide-ranging across space and time, about cycles and social reproduction.
the novel begins with a wedding: Alyoshka, the youngest of the three (later four) men who call this particular Nenets camp home, is to marry a nameless girl from another camp. Alyoshka, however, is in love with Ilne, the long-absent daughter of Petko, another of the men in the camp. Ilne has, by the looks of it, not returned home in years — perhaps not since she and Alyoshka finished high school — not even for her mother’s funeral. Petko, meanwhile, feels abandoned by the world, living as he now does on the charity of his neighbor, the kind-hearted Vanu, who desperately wishes he could find a way to give Petko’s life purpose again.
the novel wanders among these characters as well as Alyoshka’s mother. none of the women in the novel are named except Ilne, and the subordinate position of women structures every aspect of the narrative. the role of Alyoshka’s mother is particularly telling: she has been adamant that he must get married, because she is too old to do the work of maintaining their tent — as she puts it:
“No, I am not a mother to you,” shouted the woman, “I don’t feel like a mother. You want me to crawl on all fours, cleaning up after you. Enough. I want to sit in a quiet den of old age and watch your children from there.”
there is almost a critique here of the status of women, except that, caught as she is in the patterns of traditional Nenets life, the only way out that Alyoshka’s mother can imagine for herself is to find another women to take her place.
I’m not altogether sure if Nerkagi intended this to be a novel about the ways cycles of patriarchal exploitation are perpetuated, but I do think it must have been on her mind on some level, at least. the novel begins with Alyoshka’s wedding, which is meant to be his transition to manhood, to taking full responsibility for their family affairs, but by the end of the novel Alyoshka has still refused to consummate the marriage, shaming his new wife and marking him as willful and childish. only in its final pages does Alyoshka begin to grasp, first, that the image of Ilne he has held in his mind all these years does not reflect reality and, second, that his mother is not imposing responsibility on him but rather ceding authority to him.
He walked and felt the strength of his steps. Before the entrance he stopped, caught his breath, and, throwing the curtain far behind him, opened it. This is how a man enters the season of his maturity. And the first thing that he saw were the two women, illuminated brightly by the fire, lowering their eyes and rising from their seats. This is what a woman does when the man, the master and lord, enters the tent.
the thing about this is that even as Alyoshka seems to be coming into his full patriarchal authority here, the shadow of old age and death already looms over his story in the forms of Vanu and, especially, Petko. his authority extends only to the unnamed women who share his tent, women who might well simply leave — as Ilne seems to have — or else die, as the wives of Petko and Khasawa (who joins the camp partway through the novel) have done. and when he is alone, what will he have left?
Alyoshka’s story is not, then, the only story in the novel, which moves freely from character to character and from present (sometimes the gnomic present of a first-person narrator making pronouncements about Nenets life and, indeed, life in general) to past. Petko’s arc is particularly striking: near the end of the novel, he wakes suddenly reinvigorated. having come to terms with the fact that Ilne is never going to come home, he divides her would-have-been dowry among the people of the camp. this struck me as perhaps the most important scene in the novel: on the one hand, a reaffirmation of traditional Nenets life (Ilne’s abandonment of her father means she does not deserve her dowry); on the other, a dramatic restructuring of it, with the dowry becoming, in effect, Petko’s, creating a new set of relationships between him and the rest of his community.
there is a lot more happening here. it reminded me of Carole Labarre’s L’or des mélèzes in that while everything in it is structured by the history of Russian and Soviet colonial rule it never centers colonialism. it is ambivalent about the Soviet state, acknowledging both its violences (it’s worth noting that Nerkagi attended a Soviet residential school) and its sometimes benevolence, even as it affirms the value and values of Nenets lifeways. but it is most interested in its characters, their relationships to each other, to Nenets tradition, to the reindeer that make their lives possible, and to the world around them.
Nerkagi’s prose in Sadovina’s translation is lyrical and airy: even when the subject matter is grim, even with its decidedly ambiguous conclusion, the word I would use to describe the novel is light. Nerkagi is interested both in struggle and grief and in moments of revelation and, occasionally, of joy.
moods: emotional, hopeful, reflective