Mystical Forces of Good and Evil

One important concept that emerges in both Valentin Rasputin’s “Baikal,” as well as Aleksandr Petrov’s “The Mermaid,” is the duality of nature as a mystical force of both good and evil. Both works highlight the tranquility associated with serene bodies of water, but also how one can be fooled into thinking that serenity is the only possible state for these natural settings. In Rasputin’s “Baikal,” the narrator describes Lake Baikal as sacred for its” spirit of age-old grandeur and power preserved intact” (189). The narrator’s colleague, who accompanies him on a visit to the lake, claims that “[his] spirits have been lifted, and that comes from out there, from Baikal,” which underscores how the lake’s mythical power positively impacts individuals who respectfully relish in its beauty (191). The colleague however only saw “the tiniest edge of Baikal… on a marvelous summer day when everything around was showing its appreciation for the tranquility and sunshine,” leaving him without the impression that “Baikal can rage for no reason… as if whipped from inside” (191). While the lake on the surface appears tranquil, the sudden thrashing of the lake water and “winds that can instantly swoop down” reveal a darker side of the lake’s mystical force that go unseen by infrequent observers (191). The lake not only can raise peoples’ spirits, but also poses great danger for reasons only known to itself.

“The Mermaid” also focuses on the duality of nature’s mystical force. While the earlier portions of the film beautifully depict both the water and mermaid, the sudden storm that brews at the end, as well as the mermaid’s attempt to pull the boy underwater, complicate this beautiful depiction. It leads one to believe that beauty may only conceal evil intent, especially seen as the mermaid’s ultimate goal is to knock the boy off the boat and presumably drown him. Just as seen with Lake Baikal, both the mermaid and water appear serene on the surface, but are subject to change at any moment and reveal a dark side concealed by the outward beauty.

It would be interesting to further discuss in class whether one can classify acts of nature as inherently good or evil, especially given Rasputin’s writing that “[n]ature by itself is always moral; only human beings can make it immoral” (193).

Inward and Outward Natures

In the two works, “The Bronze Horseman” and “The Flood,” the descriptions of people and nature are constantly merged. Pushkin describes the river Neva with feminine images and adjectives. Complementing her feminine aspects, “I love thy stern and comely face, / Neva’s majestic perfluctuation, / Her bankments’ granite carapace,” Pushkin uses feminine articles and describes her face as “stern” and “comely” (Pushkin, 9-10). He merges the natural beauty of a river with the romantic beauty of a woman. This becomes further sexualized: “Neva, her clamorous water splashing / Against the crest of either dike, / Tossed in her shapely ramparts” (Pushkin, 11). These descriptions maintain a somewhat militaristic quality, and yet are overly sexualized (for a body of water).

In contrast, in “The Flood,” referring to her pregnancy, “Her stomach was round, it was the earth. In the earth, deep down, invisible to anyone, lay Ganka, and in the earth, invisible to anyone, seeds burrowed with white roots,” Sofya feels within her a connection to the mother earth, and that motherhood is laced with death (Zamyatin, 276). Although new life comes from the earth and from the seeds planted there, it is also where the dead return, a haunting aspect of motherhood when juxtaposed with the earth. Her husband, on the other hand, is first likened to a machine, “And Trofim Ivanych could no longer suppress his laughter; it burst out of his nose and mouth like steam out of the safety valves of a boiler under pressure” (Zamyatin, 257). This description becomes more predatory, and yet still mechanical and cold, “Trofim Ivanych’s face twisted into a strange, slow, ugly smile; he seemed to be smiling only with his teeth” (Zamyatin, 264). His outward appearance reflects a contradiction between his feelings and how he acts on them (i.e. laughing mechanically, smiling through the fury). The intertwining of nature, humans and machines highlights the conflict warring within by bringing attention to the apparently incongruous aspects of humans, nature and machines.

Zabolotsky’s Contradictions

In both “The North” and “Thunderstorm,” Zabolotsky presents images in such a way that they contradict our expectations for them, or he attributes contradictory concepts to them.  In the first stanza of “Thunderstorm”, he paints in the reader’s mind “a scowling cloud,” which (in my mind at least) appears as a heavy, dark, and imposing cloud. Yet just three lines later, he calls the cloud “a lantern lifted high.” Rather than a source of darkness, we are forced to switch our understanding of the cloud as instead source of light. Then, he describes a beautiful image of the cedar whose “lifeless canopy / Props up the dark horizon.” However, “Through its living heart / A fiery wound courses.” Here, we have three contradictions. While the cedar’s stature is lifeless, its heart is living, yet that very heart is also wounded. (There is also a chance that this stanza could be referring to the thundercloud rather than the cedar, but in either case, the contradiction persists.) Zabolotsky continues: “Scorched needles rain down, / Like stars, or curses!” Whereas we typically associate stars with the heavens, and an overall positive, majestic image, here he nests several metaphors into one another, and seems to show stars as a scary image.

In the final stanza, the poet finds these contradictions even within himself. The lines are crafted such that they offer multiple interpretations.

“Split in two, like you, I did not die –

Why, I shall never understand –

In my heart the same fierce hunger,

And love, and singing till the end!”

Just as the earlier images seem to be split into two interpretations, the poet himself is split in two. The poet cannot understand why he did not die from this strike of lightning. Moreover, he can no-longer feel the same immense emotions that he presumably had once experienced. The upshot is that these three states of emotion: fierce hunger, love, and singing, are all very different from one another. If we have been “trained” in this poem not to associate images or concepts in a typical manner, then perhaps the fierce hunger is meant to be a positive hunger? Or, more likely, are we as readers are supposed to leave this poem acknowledging life and nature’s complexity and duality?

[Side note: It seems that the thunderstorm and the cedar tree are both representing very specific things. I wonder what they are specifically standing in for.]

“The North” Zabolotsky also presents both the beautiful, and the gruesome, frightful interpretations of any given image. He ultimately seems to portray the power and awe of nature through this dichotomy. (no space left, but I will delve into this in class!)

Hell is on Earth

In his short story “A Child’s Drawing”, Varlaam Shalamov shows how far a society can fall and how dark human life can be. Set in the horrendous conditions of the Soviet gulag, Shalamov uses a character finding a child’s notebook full of drawings to contrast the isolating dread of conditions in the far North.

The conditions of the world around the characters in the story can only be described as hell-like. Every moment living in the harsh, unforgiving environment of biting cold and long depressingly dark nights is a punishment. This is hell, a land of punishment that can never be escaped. Shalamov describes the weather as a way of purposefully breaking spirits: “Nature in the North is not impersonal or indifferent; it is in conspiracy with those who sent us here.”

This feeling is furthered by a myth told by the narrator towards the end of the story. He describes God literally abandoning the people of Northern Russia, of God condemning them to an existence not truly meant for those He had made in His image. The end of the legend goes: “Later when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patterns from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child’s word and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.” God has left the people and the land He Had created, never to return. And there is nothing more lonely, more crushing, then feeling that everyday you move further and further away from God’s light.

Barren Mother Nature

“A ‘Pushover’ Job” is not only haunting in its descriptions of forced labor, but also its description of a barren nature, subverting the common trope of the bountiful life-giving mother nature. Of course, in winter, very little things are green or alive. The story begins with a description of the color of the winter landscape, “The hills glistened white with a tinge of blue—like loaves of sugar” (21). Loaves of sugar act as a particularly odd simile estranging the natural landscape. Of course, a loaf of sugar does not exist, but this odd imagery of a collage of bread and sugar highlight the inability of nature in winter to be bountiful. As it would be normal to make a comparison of the natural world to food during other times when the woods are teeming in life, here the narrator has to stretch for an awkward and odd comparison.  Whereas the narrator is continuing to look at nature as bountiful, his impossible comparison begins to show the falsehood of that belief causing his simile to be gibberish.

 

This falsehood of the bountiful nature persists in the narrator’s pushover job of collecting needles for snake-oil like vitamins. The narrator is sent out to collect the needles of evergreen trees, the only green and outwardly alive plant in the forest in winter. The narrator and the other needle-pickers are quite literately destroying the signs of life from the winter landscape. Their actions are pointless in that the elixir made by these needles is useless and also that their work goes unchecked. Even without meeting the quota they are left unpunished and more importantly, regardless of their harvest, they remain unfed, their soup served free of the nourishing vegetables and meat. The only outwardly available bounty of nature in winter is useless. The pointlessness of the narrator’s needle-picking in both gain of the state and gain of himself begin to highlight the false conception that nature is bountiful. The value put on these trees in their supposed cure on scurvy and their break from hard labor for the narrator are both false and constructed myths. “A ‘Pushover’ Job” demonstrates the barrenness of the northern winter landscape and the blind attempts of man to recognize it differently.

Continuation of winter and fate in ‘Kolyma Tales’

Last class, we discussed the role of winter in the plots of our various readings. In Lend-Lease from Kolyma Tales, I found that the role of winter played an especially important role in this story’s theme. Further, fate plays a key element in Lend-Lease, as it did in the stories from last class. In this story, Shalamov alludes to the importance of the physical properties of the camp more and more as the plot continues. Toward the middle, he begins to describe the stone and permafrost of the camp as keepers and revealers of secrets, a sort of documentation of the past war. He writes, “Stone keeps secrets and reveals them…The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets”, and of the corpses buried in the stone: “The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost…The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret”. It appears from this quote that these feelings of defeat are regularly experienced in these camps – prisoners past and present, as well as the physical land – yet a glimpse of hope is present in the preservation of secrets Shalamov describes.

Shalamov’s describes the camp as horrifying, cold, and cruel places, as they were, but the theme of fate seems to lurk in his writing. While the cold led to miserable experiences of labor and frostbite, it also created this frozen earth, capable of preserving the bodies of these people lost to starvation, torture, and cold: “All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years…The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost” (178). It seems as if being able to recognize the bodies of these people pays them the respect and admiration they deserve, making it sure that people will not forget them – because their physical bodies have not deteriorated, the camp’s history and the individual experiences of these people, too, will not be erased.

Harmony versus Disunity: Rivers in Yuri Norstein’s “Hedgehog in the Fog” and Nikolai Zabolotsky’s “Winter’s Start”

There is a clear distinction in the symbolic functions of the rivers that are present in both Yuri Norstein’s short film Hedgehog in the Fog and Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poem “Winter’s Start.” Specifically, in Norstein’s film, the river exists as a larger metaphor for the randomness of life. It both literally and figuratively intersects the routine homecoming of Hedgehog, who all along intends to return home promptly with raspberry jam for the owl. Disoriented by the fog and enamored by a majestic white horse, the hedgehog falls victim to the natural, untouched elements of the Russian forest. There is a scene where the Hedgehog loses his balance and falls into the river after being deeply distracted by both the fog and the horse. I read this as the river and surrounding environment working in unity to divert the Hedgehog in his mission to return home. Here, the Hedgehog’s self-made schedule to traverse through the Russian forest is collectively obstructed by elements of said forest. The river, portrayed as a windy labyrinth, is just an element of the random and natural aspects of the Russian forest.

Meanwhile, Nikolai Zabolotsky’s “Winter’s Start” illustrates a less harmonious interaction between a river and its natural environment. Here, instead of combining forces to obstruct the notion of routine and order, the “cold start of winter” instead “numbs” the river, causing it to “tremble” and “sense its own demise” (1; 9; 11 Zabolotsky). In other words, the weather does not work with the river, but rather works against it, causing it to freeze over and “die” (17). This time, the animals of this environment are neither enamored nor sidetracked by the elements of their environment; instead, “huge birds stare down,” “attentive” and agent of the forest around them (35-36). Because the weather works to harden the river, there seems to be more of a focus on the transition of seasons, i.e. impending winter, rather than on the animals or the narrator. There is clearly something greater to be said about the comparison between the natural environment and its harmony in Norstein’s short, versus the natural environment and its disunity in Zabolotsky’s poem. To me, it seems that when the natural environment works together in Norstein’s film, it collectively transcends the lives and routines of inhabiting beings. However, when the environment is disunited, as in “Winter’s Start,” there is shortcoming in transcending the natural world alone— a lacking that impedes connections to and influence on forest dwellers.

Do you all have any thoughts on this topic? I am interested in discussing more about how the changing of the seasons seems to represent not only a change in temperature and climate, but more so: a change in the chemistry of the environment. Any other examples of Russian literature where the transition of seasons functions as a disruption of unity, like it does here in Nikolai Zabolotsky’s poem? Or perhaps this transition preserves natural harmony, as nature exists in Norstein’s film? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Winter Transformations

Both the excerpt from the “Blockade Diary” and “The Cave” highlight winter’s great transformative power and ability to upset the status quo. In Ginzburg’s “Blockade Diary,” the characters are transformed from sensible to senseless beings through the brutality of the cold and paucity of available food. The city dwellers, despite their acknowledgment of the danger, are not afraid of the relentless shelling of the city, and “instead of being frightened, [they are] annoyed; instead of being afraid of death, [they are] afraid of being stopped on the way and herded into shelter” (35). Additionally, “the man of winter,” as the city dwellers are described, no longer fears the military danger of the siege and instead is fixated on “starving [and] freezing” (34-35). While the people would normally take immediate shelter from the shelling, the winter transforms their senses to the point that they no longer think completely rationally and focus only on staying warm and finding food. The winter and scarcity of food renders the people just shadows of themselves, as they no longer feel any emotion and accept that death is upon them. One girl is described as “grown numb,” and “not a person at all” as a result of the sordid conditions, which causes her to “[not] care because [she knew she] could die at any minute” (53). As the winter has brought with it a sense of the inevitability of death, the city dwellers accept death and completely lose care for anything in their lives. As the girl claims, there is no use in caring when you could die at any moment.

Zamyatin focuses heavily on winter’s transformative power in “The Cave.” Not only do the characters’ behaviors change as a result of winter’s approach, but the humans are frequently portrayed using non-human descriptions. When Martin Martinych contemplates stealing Obertyshev’s wood, one transformation occurs as “The caveman, gnashing his teeth, knocked the other Martin Martinych down and… plunged his hand into the stack of wood” (95). While his old persona, “the Scriabin one” would not have committed the crime, the cold has transformed him into a criminal “caveman,” seen as he steals the wood to provide himself with warmth (95). Not only does the cold lead to Martin to commit crime that he normally would not, but it also causes him to be described as both “Mammothlike” and as having “mechanical contrivances” as limbs (98-99). There are many more examples in both works about the transformation of people and the world, which stresses winter’s unrelenting power to upset the status quo.

Working From Home

Both the Zamyatin and the Ginzburg stories describe the role of food during starvation in relationships between men and women, but the two stories depict the role of men and women during these periods of starvation very differently.

Although the Zamyatin and Ginzburg stories take place in very different venues, the Ginzberg in an urban setting and the Zamyatin in a remote setting, they both focus on the roles of men and women during extreme rationing. The Ginzburg story discusses siege queues in great detail. Though there are no enforced rules about the queue, Ginzberg tells us that it is mostly a woman’s job. She says that “men cope particularly badly with queues, since they are used to the idea that their time is valuable… A man considers that after work he is entitled to rest or amuse himself; when a working woman comes home, she works at home” (39). Ginzberg begins this thought by just saying that men tend to be more frustrated in siege cues, but ends it with a more broad social commentary about difference in how men and women value time. In times of conflict it seems that these values are exaggerated. She argues that men feel like “a stray individual, a woman is the representative of a collective” (39). Because it is normal for women to spend hours on end in queues, it is no longer considered inconvenient, whereas a man is incredibly inconvenienced by this hardship.

The Zamyatin story focuses on one specific couple, Martin and Masha, rather than a starved population. Martin and Masha are living in a very remote setting without easy access to food or resources. Masha is very unwell and she is unable to contribute to gathering and preparing food and wood. The story begins one day before Masha’s birthday, which Martin is preparing for by stealing wood in order to please her. When he boils water for tea, they realize that there is not enough for both of them to have some: “She saw. A moment shot through and through with clear, naked, cruel electric light… ‘Mart, darling! Give it to me!’ Martin smiled distantly. ‘But you know, Masha, there’s only enough for one” (101). Although he considers taking the tea for himself, Masha argues that she’s “not living any more. This isn’t me any more, anyhow, I’m going to… Mart you understand, don’t you? Mart, have pity on me! Mart!’ … Martin Martinych slowly rose from a kneeling position. Slowly working the crane with an effort, he took the blue little bottle from the desk and handed it to Masha” (101). Unlike the Ginzburg story, Martin is the one who is constantly working. Masha is unable to help provide, yet she expects all of the fruits of Martin’s labor.

“A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having.” -V

In the two works, excerpt from Blockade Diary and “The Cave,” the authors take very different tones when describing the horrors and desperation of this period during the early-mid twentieth century.[1] Lydia Ginzburg presents the stories of a multitude of people at this time, all with a matter-of-fact tone, yet thoughtful. Her understanding of the terror of the air raids, “He doesn’t want to wake up to find the world falling about his ears, meeting his death in the tiniest fleeting moment. Better to be prepared” reveals to the reader the underlying psychology of someone in Leningrad at this time, futile though it may be in the long run (Ginzburg, 35). She presents the emotions of this time and the ironies of behavior to the outside observer, but while always maintaining that personal interaction with the individuals she describes. Her description of the power of social pressure to not steal or take more than your share, “Nothing more lies between them – no lock, no police, no queue. Just the abstraction of social prohibition” may seem inane and yet it is so effective (Ginzburg, 47). Even her description of the numbness after months of living in this terror filled existence seems so oddly matter-of-fact: “Oh, I’m not afraid of anything. I’d like to find something to be afraid of” (Ginzburg, 54).

Zamyatin veers strongly in a different style of description. Rather than focusing on many, he focuses on one couple. Instead of the matter-of-fact and understanding style of Ginzburg, he writes bordering on the absurd, comparing these people to cave men. Rather than trying to understand and explain everything, he embraces a sense of mystery, “It may be a gray-trunked mammoth, it may be the wind, and it may be the wind is nothing but the glacial roar of some supermammoth” (Zamyatin, 91). Houses are caves, one’s wife becomes a stranger, and around every corner lurks danger, “a human had come from another cave, and—who knows?—he might fly at her and seize [the food]” (Zamyatin, 94).

Both pieces present these fear-filled times to the outsider. Yet encapsulating the true emotions, reasons and psyches of the people trapped in these times requires a great deal of skill and certainly different understandings of human nature. The Ginzburg piece reminds me strongly of the movie V for Vendetta, which I will probably bring up in class. People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.

https://youtu.be/KKvvOFIHs4k

[1] Although these two works were written at different times, it all seems to be one dark period of Russian history.