Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Shadows on the Tundra

Yet what splendour above. The northern lights are a magnificent web of colour. We are surrounded by grandeur: the immense tundra, as ruthless and infinite as the sea; the vast Lena estuary backed up with ice; the colossal 100-metere-pillaar caves on the shores of Stolby; and the aurora borealis. Against a background of such majesty, we are the pitiful things here – starved and infested like dogs, and nearly done in, rotting in our befouled and stinking ice caves

.

This book was published by the UK small press, Peirene Press “a boutique publishing house with a traditional commitment to first class European literature in high-quality translation” and is part of their 2018 series on “Home in Exile”: “how to find a home within oneself when the outside no longer exists”.

The first in the series was the Latvian Soviet Milk, this novel too has a Baltics author – the Lithuanian Dalia Grinkeviciute, but reminded me more of another Peirene publication Chasing the King of Hearts. Whereas that book was a remarkable but true-life tale of survival in the Holocaust, this is a remarkable but true-life and terribly harrowing tale of survival in a Soviet Gulag.

Oddly I never thought I might die. I believed absolutely that no matter what the future had in store, I would survive. It was as simple as that. During the days that followed, a kind of tenacity began to take shape as part of my character. I became stubborn. I felt a growing desire to confront life, to grapple with it, to prevail. I was convinced of my survival.

.

The author we are told in the Introduction and Afterword was transported, at the age of 14, with her mother and brother from their Lithuanian home on a 14 month journey (from June 1941 to August 1942) that ended on an arctic island by the Laptev sea on the vast estuary of the Lena river – where they were forced to build their own camp in a climate close to that of Northern Greenland. The transportation was part of the systematic exile, shortly before the German-Soviet war broke out, and one year after the Soviet army occupation of Lithuania, of virtually all of that country’s political, economic and cultural elite. This book is her memoirs of her time from being exiled until the end of her first year in the arctic – written around 7-8 year later when she and her mother are in hiding in Lithuania and buried by her shortly before she was re-arrested and found in 1991m four years after her death (by which time she had written some shorter memoirs).

The memoirs told in the present tense ,and approximately chronologically – and tell a deeply harrowing tale of extreme cold and even more extreme hunger. Through the narrator we learn of the effects of food deprivation and disease and the terrible struggle for survival as people watch their mothers or children die slowly in front of them – and how many turn inwards, trading and stealing what they can just to keep alive for one more day. Even the memories of their beloved homeland take on the aspect of fantasy as they can no longer remember what it was like to be warm or full, and only add to the torment they are facing.

But the hunger in my gut is too sharp. This terrible place – this prison, this fortress on the bleak, icebound tundra – is too real, too horrific; the sores on my shoulder from the harness to which I am hitched are too deep. I’m afraid of thoughts that bite and sting. Images from the past can be more powerful than a branding iron. They tear me apart. But they’ve also done me a favour. They’ve ignited a furious desire to live, to persevere, to engage in the struggle for life, even if what remains to be endured turns out to be a hundred times worse. I want to live, to live, to be alive, to return to life, damn it.

.

Among many of the horrors recounted, perhaps the most absurd and thus most chilling, is how even this living torture and effective near death sentence was adapted into the Soviet system (a little like how some of the most terrible parts of Holocaust stories are the bureaucratic way in which concentration camps were operated) – the prisoners are forced to form collectives and to meet targets to earn their starvation rations, many draw the line at stealing from each other but will steal and cheat the state willingly to stay alive, leading the narrator, looking back, to reflect on the complete failings of the Soviet state

In time. I came to realize that this was the thinking of most Soviet citizens. The only difference between them was how and what they took. But everyone pilfered, stole, helped themselves to whatever they could get their hands on

.

A terrible but necessary read.