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A review by arirang
Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė
3.0
“I have a feeling I will never see Kaunus again,” my mother says to me. Her words cut me like a knife. The fight of your life has begun, Dalia. Secondary school, childhood, fun, games, theatre, girlfriends - everything is in the past. You’re a grown-up now. You’re fourteen. You have a mother to look after, a father to replace. You have just taken the first step on the battle for life.
Shadows on the Tundra is published by the excellent Peirene Press:
On 14 June 1941, 14 year old Dalia Grinkevičiūtė her mother and brother were deported from Lithuania as part of a Stalinist purge of the Lithunian intelligentsia. After a lengthy, and for many deadly, journey, in August 1942 they and hundreds of others reached their final destination, in the Laptev Sea in the Siberian Arctic Ocean, where they had to build their own Gulag work camp, largely employed to process fish caught from the freezing seas.
This book is Grinkevičiūtė’s own non-fictional memoir of period of her time there until October 1943, when the next harsh winter was about to begin.
The story of how the book came to be published would make a good novel in itself.
In 1948, unsuccessfully, and then again in 1949 Grinkevičiūtė escaped from exile with her mother and returned to their Lithuania homeland, to fulfil her dying mother’s wish.
While in hiding from the authorities in 1949-50, she wrote these memoirs and after her mother died in 1950, buried them in her family garden. She was arrested shortly after and only returned from prison in 1956, but was unable to find the buried manuscript.
In the mid 1970s Grinkevičiūtė wrote a more condensed version of her memoirs, which was circulated illicitly in Lithuania and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. She died in 1987.
In 1991, and after Lithuania gained independence, the original manuscript from 1950 was found, quite by accident, and in 1997 both version of her memoirs were published posthumously in the same volume.
This version, brought to the attention of Peirene by the German translator Vytene Mushick, is an English rendition of only the 1950 version as, per Muschick “They reflect Dalia’s experiences in exile more directly, emotionally and in greater detail than the later work.” The English translation is by Delija Valiakenas whose own parents fled on 1944 to escape the Russian occupation and emigrated to the US.
Shadows on the Tundra deserves to take its place alongside other classic accounts of the gulags (most obviously [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427731744s/17125.jpg|838042]) and indeed other "international survival literature" (the publisher's term) such as that by [a:Primo Levi|4187|Primo Levi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1397346875p2/4187.jpg] and, given the age of the protagonist, [a:Anne Frank|3720|Anne Frank|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg], althoug as the opening quote suggests Dalia's childhood ends the day the book starts.
Her tale is mainly told in the present tense, lending the recollections a more immediate air of lived experience and (deliberate) lack of later perspective (by contrast say with Primo Levi's reflections), although she does occasionally lapse into past tense reflection.
Although one reads these memoirs knowing that the author survived her experience, and (again providing a contrast to Levi’s guilt at surviving) Dalia is fiercely determined to survive, and takes a pride in this determination.
The Arctic setting of the book is ostensibly beautiful but the cold is literally deadly and the surroundings of the camp anything but pleasant:
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-metre-pillar 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 liked dogs, and nearly done in, rotting in our befouled an stinking ice caves.
Indeed the book is most powerful on how the exiles are so rapidly dehumanised, how distant their normal day-to-day live bakc in Lithuania rapidly becomes:
So here we are - creatures you used to think of themselves as human, who laughed, flirted and call friends to visit, who planned summer holidays after exhausting winters of work in the city, who fumed because the tailor had botched an order or a two-bedroom apartment seemed too small. All are silent. But they are no longer here. The people they used to be have long gone. They died on 14 June ... only three categories of people remain: the corpses, the soon-to-be corpses and the dying who might survive. These survivors will bear witness to the horrific trials they have undergone. But by then each will have become someone else.
Although for Dalia it is these very memories, however distant and painful, that give her the desire to survive:
I’m afraid of thoughts that sting and bite. Images from the past can be more painful than a branding iron. 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 of 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.
The exiles soon develop an economy of their own, one largely developed around stealing, often from each other but this is not universal, but more universally from the supplies of the command economy in which they are employed. In one of the relatively infrequent parts of the narration where Daria allows her older post-camp self to reflect, she recounts a time when she witnessed and commented on a particularly outrageous piece of pilfering, her fellow exile:looked at me as if I had lost my mind and said, ‘U gosudarstva karman shiroky, ne bespokoysa.’ - ‘The state’s pockets are deep, don’t worry about it.’
In time I came to realise that this was the thinking of most Soviet citizens. The only difference between them was what they took. But everyone pilfered, stole, helped themselves to whatever they could get their hands on.
Another theme that runs underneath the surface of the narration is nationalism. The whole point of the exile of the intelligensia of the satellite Soviet states was to take-away national identity, but in practice it had the opposite effect and Dalia doesn't censor (indeed at times seems proud) of the nationalistic feelings she has in response:
It is here ... that I learned how to hate. And i thirsted for revenge against everyone and everything that demeans and brutalises other human beings.
Overall a powerful and necessary account, although certainly not a pleasant read. And while the history perhaps justifies the presentation of the original manuscript, the large cast of fellow exiles can be rather hard to follow (including emotionally) at times. It would also have been interesting to publish the 1970s version of the memoir, as in the original Lithuanian version, alongside the 1950s original, partly as a shorter account might have been more focused and partly to see how time and maturity had changed the way the author presented the events.
3.5 stars
Shadows on the Tundra is published by the excellent Peirene Press:
Peirene Press takes its name from a Greek nymph who turned into a water spring. The poets of Corinth discovered the Peirene source and, for centuries, they drank this water to receive inspiration.The idea of metamorphosis fits the art of translation beautifully. To turn a foreign book into an enjoyable English read involves careful attention to detail.Shadows on the Tundra is the second in their 2018 Home in Exile series ("How to find a home within oneself when the outside home no longer exists.") after [b:Soviet Milk|37554380|Soviet Milk|Nora Ikstena|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1513603629s/37554380.jpg|47304124].
Peirene specializes in contemporary European novellas and short novels in English translation. All our books are best-sellers and/or award-winners in their own countries. We only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a film.
We curate our international fiction according to themes. Each year Peirene publishes a new series – three books that belong together in terms of style and/or content.
On 14 June 1941, 14 year old Dalia Grinkevičiūtė her mother and brother were deported from Lithuania as part of a Stalinist purge of the Lithunian intelligentsia. After a lengthy, and for many deadly, journey, in August 1942 they and hundreds of others reached their final destination, in the Laptev Sea in the Siberian Arctic Ocean, where they had to build their own Gulag work camp, largely employed to process fish caught from the freezing seas.
This book is Grinkevičiūtė’s own non-fictional memoir of period of her time there until October 1943, when the next harsh winter was about to begin.
The story of how the book came to be published would make a good novel in itself.
In 1948, unsuccessfully, and then again in 1949 Grinkevičiūtė escaped from exile with her mother and returned to their Lithuania homeland, to fulfil her dying mother’s wish.
While in hiding from the authorities in 1949-50, she wrote these memoirs and after her mother died in 1950, buried them in her family garden. She was arrested shortly after and only returned from prison in 1956, but was unable to find the buried manuscript.
In the mid 1970s Grinkevičiūtė wrote a more condensed version of her memoirs, which was circulated illicitly in Lithuania and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. She died in 1987.
In 1991, and after Lithuania gained independence, the original manuscript from 1950 was found, quite by accident, and in 1997 both version of her memoirs were published posthumously in the same volume.
This version, brought to the attention of Peirene by the German translator Vytene Mushick, is an English rendition of only the 1950 version as, per Muschick “They reflect Dalia’s experiences in exile more directly, emotionally and in greater detail than the later work.” The English translation is by Delija Valiakenas whose own parents fled on 1944 to escape the Russian occupation and emigrated to the US.
Shadows on the Tundra deserves to take its place alongside other classic accounts of the gulags (most obviously [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427731744s/17125.jpg|838042]) and indeed other "international survival literature" (the publisher's term) such as that by [a:Primo Levi|4187|Primo Levi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1397346875p2/4187.jpg] and, given the age of the protagonist, [a:Anne Frank|3720|Anne Frank|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg], althoug as the opening quote suggests Dalia's childhood ends the day the book starts.
Her tale is mainly told in the present tense, lending the recollections a more immediate air of lived experience and (deliberate) lack of later perspective (by contrast say with Primo Levi's reflections), although she does occasionally lapse into past tense reflection.
Although one reads these memoirs knowing that the author survived her experience, and (again providing a contrast to Levi’s guilt at surviving) Dalia is fiercely determined to survive, and takes a pride in this determination.
The Arctic setting of the book is ostensibly beautiful but the cold is literally deadly and the surroundings of the camp anything but pleasant:
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-metre-pillar 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 liked dogs, and nearly done in, rotting in our befouled an stinking ice caves.
Indeed the book is most powerful on how the exiles are so rapidly dehumanised, how distant their normal day-to-day live bakc in Lithuania rapidly becomes:
So here we are - creatures you used to think of themselves as human, who laughed, flirted and call friends to visit, who planned summer holidays after exhausting winters of work in the city, who fumed because the tailor had botched an order or a two-bedroom apartment seemed too small. All are silent. But they are no longer here. The people they used to be have long gone. They died on 14 June ... only three categories of people remain: the corpses, the soon-to-be corpses and the dying who might survive. These survivors will bear witness to the horrific trials they have undergone. But by then each will have become someone else.
Although for Dalia it is these very memories, however distant and painful, that give her the desire to survive:
I’m afraid of thoughts that sting and bite. Images from the past can be more painful than a branding iron. 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 of 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.
The exiles soon develop an economy of their own, one largely developed around stealing, often from each other but this is not universal, but more universally from the supplies of the command economy in which they are employed. In one of the relatively infrequent parts of the narration where Daria allows her older post-camp self to reflect, she recounts a time when she witnessed and commented on a particularly outrageous piece of pilfering, her fellow exile:looked at me as if I had lost my mind and said, ‘U gosudarstva karman shiroky, ne bespokoysa.’ - ‘The state’s pockets are deep, don’t worry about it.’
In time I came to realise that this was the thinking of most Soviet citizens. The only difference between them was what they took. But everyone pilfered, stole, helped themselves to whatever they could get their hands on.
Another theme that runs underneath the surface of the narration is nationalism. The whole point of the exile of the intelligensia of the satellite Soviet states was to take-away national identity, but in practice it had the opposite effect and Dalia doesn't censor (indeed at times seems proud) of the nationalistic feelings she has in response:
It is here ... that I learned how to hate. And i thirsted for revenge against everyone and everything that demeans and brutalises other human beings.
Overall a powerful and necessary account, although certainly not a pleasant read. And while the history perhaps justifies the presentation of the original manuscript, the large cast of fellow exiles can be rather hard to follow (including emotionally) at times. It would also have been interesting to publish the 1970s version of the memoir, as in the original Lithuanian version, alongside the 1950s original, partly as a shorter account might have been more focused and partly to see how time and maturity had changed the way the author presented the events.
3.5 stars