The pictures in this article are selected from "The Earth Is Still Wintering Under the Quilt" (translated by Chen Shuxian, China Youth Publishing House, September 2021 edition)
It all started with a meeting, 2019, what it looked like in early spring.
A friend from a Russian translator family asked me to meet at Starbucks, and there was no epidemic at that time, so such a meeting was common. But it was also unusual, because it became the starting point for me to meet a distant writer. The small talk of the meeting soon focused on a Russian manuscript and a natural illustration, which was the result of his return from a trip to Russia. They all come from the same author, and the name of the writer I have never heard of. "You are the third person in China to have seen his writings and paintings." Friends speak mysteriously.
Earlier, in a few small paragraphs of the text, he had sent me translations, with the sensitivity of a professional editor, and I realized that they could come in handy. I did publish a few short paragraphs, exactly according to Beijing's solar terms. Looking at the published text now, you can instantly remember that February 14 was a snowy day in Beijing. Another week later, the north is still freezing cold. Because both of these articles carry the chill of snow, they are: "Snow always has many colors", "The earth is still hiding under the quilt for wintering". The titles were distilled from the articles, and when I became a book, I found them all hidden in the text of many paragraphs. Like a birch tree returning to a birch forest; a bird, once again perched in its nest in the dense jungle. Perhaps this is the vast nature of Russia, no one can exhaust it, and any record and description is a period and a moment.
As far as the Russian nature in the book is concerned, the writer uses three brush strokes to reproduce it. The first part, "Poetic Description", is purely a momentary thought that touches the scene. Previously, when the sample chapter came out, this part was arranged in separate rows, and the design was staggered, and I was not used to it. After writing the book, I realized that it may be reproducing the writer's point of view and thoughts. The re-creation of reading with vision is inevitably different from those of us who imagine according to words, but I am still surprised by his ability to make snow. The snow made of paper, right on the cover, is not the kind of white, boundless snow, but the snow that floats out of the shadows of the black earth. The cover paper has a sticky rice texture, but the whole book is turned over with a powerful rustling sound, which is caused by the resistance caused by his deliberate fake raw edges. The false burr shows a uniform longitudinal cut, and a gray line in the middle, which is a snow world, but it is not yet white and empty. This, in turn, is the snow world in the book that I have experienced.
Sketches from Kolipeli
I almost have to be thankful that, in the midst of this endless wait for the pandemic, there is such a book that takes me on a special trip to Russia. It is a pity to know that this country is already in my travel list, and it is a pity to press the pause button due to the epidemic. The desire to set foot in this country undoubtedly comes from the call of Russian works that have been read before, including of course those who are related to Russia. They gave me translations and shared with me their notes on their trips to Russia. All of this miraculously points to nature—the unity of all paths, and in this kingdom, one is nature.
This soil gave birth to landscape painters and poets and writers who were sensitive to landscapes. Of course, japan, which I am relatively more familiar with, is also the case. Compared with the nature of writers of the two countries, Russian writers do not have so many mysterious and lonely life sentimentalities, it is majestic and magnificent, and it contains magnificence in the steepness. It is a fairy tale belonging to the north, and the endless secrets and poetry of nature are hidden in the forests and rivers. When Kurosawa traveled to the Soviet Union to direct the film "Delsu Uzara", what he left behind was not only a character image, but also a variety of imprints shaped by nature.
In short, as soon as I came into contact with this book, I had thousands of associations. And in the process of going back and forth and waiting for the book to be written, I was also like being in the Russian Far East, feeling the migration from the long winter to the spring. Undoubtedly, this is almost a slow-motion delay, but only in this way, in the slight change, can you hear the sound of the cold ice cracking when the grass and trees turn from dry to green.
And how did I move from publishing an article fragment to a published manuscript? In fact, if you are friends with the publisher and the translator at the same time, it seems that you will naturally transition to the role of the reviewer. Of course, I also gladly accepted this, partly because I wanted to be in the world described by the Russian writer again and again. There is no complete and thrilling story here, and a moment in nature is often just a sketch of a few brush strokes, but you will still linger in some places and admire it over and over again. It even makes you feel that if people are faithful to objects that are higher and eternal than themselves, such as the sun and the moon and rivers and mountains, they will face them day after day, and one day, their breath souls will be transplanted into your body. So, seeing the literal face, I have more or less imagined that this writer, like the mountains and rivers, is deep, simple, robust and powerful.
What is the magnitude of a writer who writes such a nature among Russian writers? I didn't dwell on these issues. I was even somewhat glad that his work was introduced, and I was one of the first readers to come into contact. The publication of Russian literature in the country as I know it is already a phalanx of classic works in the sense of literary history. The forest is vast, and the translation and publishing project of different writers is almost still advancing. In terms of the sequence of natural literature alone, the famous works of Prishwen, Aitmatov, and Turgenev will automatically take precedence, ranking ahead of the choice of reading.
Classics naturally cannot be bypassed, but classics also have some kind of burden. When we share the reading information, we are not quite sure whether it is the big name that you like, or whether you must like it, because it has long been a classic. The anxiety of influence is present in every reader, but sometimes we stubbornly aspire to establish a spiritual connection of privacy. I remember that the poet Lan Lan once wrote a text in search of a Russian writer, also because of the other party's natural essays. She inquired for many years to be able to communicate with the old man, and the difficulties in the middle were because the old man was not well known. Not only is it unknown in China, but it is also in Russia. But what does it matter? It only makes one writer write more soberly: "It gives me a clear idea of the fame thing." "This is the most powerful stroke in the blue text.
Take a step back, forget his identity as a writer and painter, and see him only as an old man who has gone through the years, writing about the daily life of his life, there is still a lot to imagine. As seen between the lines, he experienced war, and then in the Far East, accompanied by nature. The family has an old wife and children, and in addition to this, secular life, he has not revealed more to us. But wandering in nature, he seems to have a more open, eternal world of home, birds and beasts, fish at the bottom of the river, and when you all read the familiar sense of intimacy like brothers and sisters, you are fully convinced that the things of nature are also through him, completing some kind of breathing.
Other Russian writers have certainly done this kind of conversion, but in different ways. Many Russian writers are very good at integrating natural, mythological, social, and life factors into a furnace, and finally turning them into a grand fictional work, and some are purified and sublimated into abstract philosophies. Compared to them, his nature is ever-changing, but more authentic—a distinction that involves literary ambitions, but it is clear that he chose to be a faithful recorder of nature. Explore each thing, know its name, know its shape, understand its mysteries, and then, carve their faces.
The Amur River, which is to say the Amur River. Look at the old man's creative resume, and his series of masterpieces - "Dense Forest: In Search of the Miracle of Ginseng", "Summer Travel Diary: Stories about the Cities, People and Scenery along the Amur River", "The Pattern of the Forest: Essays, Close-ups and Stories about nature along the Amur River", "Nature Reverie", "Calendar along the Amur River", etc., all almost revolve around this river. And this river, in 1931, Prishvin also went to it for the purpose of investigation, and wrote the famous novel "Ginseng". But again, nature will become a different landscape through the creation of each creative subject. The Amur River of the elderly has the meaning of an ecological log.
The ultimate destination of the river is the Sea of Okhotsk. I have not been able to see the Amur River in the distance, but the end is embedded in my journey to Japan. In 2017, the vehicle that my fellow travelers and I were travelling in was on both sides of the river, in Doto Shireto, Hokkaido. Before this trip, although I had also done a strategy, I was still shocked when the "Sea of Okhotsk" marked with a katakana on the sign on the road was spelled out by me. The definition of Shiretoko is: the northernmost point of Japan where drift ice can be seen. The season we went to was the end of the year, and some thrilling sights could not be seen. But the translator of her peers had seen it, and she showed me a video she had taken here in February, but saw countless streams of ice gushing on the surface of the sea, almost as magnificent as I had seen in Antarctica. Turning back to the book, I saw a group of people admiring a similar scene...
Nature is so widely connected that in the hearts of the old man, there is also a world where nature is connected. Especially when I read that he was talking about the exotic New Year, when people felled an 80-meter-high fir tree to gather under a decorated tree for Chinese New Year's Eve, I could also feel his heartache when some trees around the Amur River were felled for no reason. The various underconsidered behaviors of human beings may be due to the selfishness of anthropocentrists, or they may be due to the indifference of living in the city for a long time and being separated from nature for a long time.
Only a man like him, who is always in the face of nature, maintains this near-identical sensitivity. He also knew what it meant to stop hunting beluga whales to restore the inner cycle of the sea. The admonition of the existence of nature itself, which he manifests in the name of the chapter "Noah's Ark", is in itself a wake-up call. The text of "Noah's Ark" is undoubtedly the most in-depth and meticulous investigation record of the Amur River. Only a knife completed its rafting in the belly of the pike, and I have been in the circle of friends a few times, in fact, it is to express my incomparable amazement at the legend of nature itself.
Kolipeli knelt down and prayed when he found the first ginseng
- His self-portrait
Born in 1917, died in 2011. The old man eventually lived to be ninety-four years old. People familiar with the history of the twentieth century can imagine from this time span the three imprints of Ehrenburg's so-called "people, years, and life". I think he did too. However, unlike other Russian writers, he did not put more social and family content in the text. A man who has lived his life so simply and idyllicly, I believe, is not the reality of life, but it is like nature acting on his life miracle. In any case, it is a life worthy of envy. A person finds eternal sustenance and can still express this love. This is equivalent to embracing happiness - "happiness", which is indeed the word that the old man in this book thinks about repeatedly. "Happiness varies and can be divided into certain stages. It's like the division of day and night. If, at some point, within the limits of what is allowed, without being disturbed by a disaster, one can follow everything one is destined to do, then one can be considered happy. Recalling this passage in the book, we may as well say that the happiness that is limited can also be infinite.
Don't forget, he was also a painter. You can also paint a portrait of nature. The emotional imagery that the text cannot convey can be compensated here. This sense of happiness, although people who have pure code words cannot fully understand, can also capture one or two. This is equivalent to the desire we have for the person closest to us— to leave a mark on it in the course of time, no matter what.
Vladimir Ivanovich Kolipeli, here the full name of the writer is left.
I hope that one day, I can stand on the bank of the Amur River, in its real flow, and think again about the moment it brought me in reading.
Author: Sun Xiaoning
Editor: Qian Yutong
Editor-in-Charge: Shu Ming
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.