[English] Toby Lisitich / Wen Shi Xi Chin / Translation
The Archipelago of Another Life: A Novel, Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan, Arcad, October 2021，240pp
More than three decades ago, Andreï Makine changed his nationality from Russia to France and changed his everyday language from Russian to French – and his home country still lingers. This instinctive gravitational pull is not just nostalgia, but always present and full of pain. For Makini, Russia is not so much a state or a place as a state of mind, a reminder — with its considerable history and frightening beauty — of human incompetence, insignificance and arrogance.
As is the case after an injury, the gaze on this tends to focus on the past. Makini once mentioned that Russia was "like an old lover" and that he needed to maintain its complete image in order to gain aesthetic and intellectual inspiration. It is for this reason that he has been reluctant to revisit his home country since he sought asylum in France in 1987. Instead, in novels such as Russian Midsummer Night (1997) or Dew Will Never Be Forgotten (2013), he tends to reimagine the country's turbulent twentieth century and turn a blind eye to its recent fall into oligarchic capital.
Another Island of Life is a typical Makini work that tells a fascinating story of pain, resistance, and transcendence. It is both myth-like and elaborately realistic, both rustic and almost enlightened, and although brief in the narrative, the clues of adventure and tracking are pleasantly straightforward. The story takes place in Siberia, the author's birthplace, and this is not a futile search, but a wild taiga chase.
Andrey Makini
Similar to Makini's previous novels, the stories in the book are nested like Russian matryoshka dolls. An old man recalls his youth encounter with another man who was already old at the time, and looks back at his own youth. This setting allows us to look at a wealth of historical context: the narrator of the "outer" narrator who tells us about him in the present moment, his lonely childhood, and his youth in the 1980s when he was sent to the Russian Far East as a "land surveyor." While exploring the forest in the north, the young man discovers a mysterious figure and reflexively begins to track it down. As a result he was deceived by someone smarter than he was and fell into a trap like a rabbit. He was hunted by a two-sided fugitive named Pavel Gadsev, arguably a Magwich who lived in Siberia's Lone Star Blood and Tears, and the complex story of his excavations and explorations unfolded.
Gadsev's story takes place in 1952 and is the subject of the novel. The twenty-seven-year-old reservist and student was writing a treatise on revolutionary violence, and during military training, Gattsev got into an argument with his temporarily promoted superior, Luskas. The first punishment he met was to spend the night in a hellish underground "bunker"—a "coffin" in which he could barely enter; the second punishment was to join a search for fugitives, and if not caught, he would become a scapegoat.
The five-man squad set off, ramming around in the taiga. Gadsev instinctively wanted to understand and survive the "cruel and impermanent game of history." Vasin, once a prisoner of the order, is now the moral pillar of the squad, and he has long since given up on this delusion. He was responsible for disciplining the stalking dog Almaz, and his dedication to the beast, as well as his reaction to its senseless killing (he punched a boss and then gently knelt down to "try to stop the blood from flowing from Armaz's chest") showed that he recognized the laws of nature over the laws of man. The ranks also included the sadistic but cowardly Captain Luskas, his subordinate, the well-behaved Ratinsky, and the humane but alcoholic Major Butov. The characters in the story have a Dickensian exuberance, and there is an Austenian playfulness with human stupidity and hypocrisy. It also reminds one of Chekhov and Conrad. Makini is accustomed to evoking such lofty comparisons.
The hunt itself has maintained a thrilling atmosphere, the depiction of the forest is gorgeous and heterogeneous, and many details of the survival process are directly rooted in people's hearts. Man cannot "walk" in the taiga, but must "pass through it with the flexibility of a swimmer". One had to avoid the "milky white" part of the stream, "the bottom of the river is clay and therefore slippery". Hanging a hatted cloak from a tree can be a useful bait. Forests vary endlessly, but Soviet science and its "goniometers, tachometers, and theodolites" seem to be a ridiculous overview. Geoffrey Strachan's translations are sublimated in the challenges posed by many of the lyrical texts, but also include a pleasant colloquialism and vulgarity ("a bit like an instructor in a skirt"; "we exerted the strength to suckle").
Time and time again, the pursued targets outnumbered them, and the members of the search team were injured or sick one by one, and had to leave the team on a makeshift raft (these failures gradually accumulated, creating a deliberate sense of absurdity). After each loss of a member, the ecology of the group changes. The fugitive is the only constant factor in the process—although he has also been transfigured to some extent, his relationship with the taiga and his incredible ability to get out of the predicament are almost supernatural. The fugitive is both a MacGuffin in cinematic terms, a villain, and a navigator star, and he is the spiritual center of the novel as a whole. And we gradually learn that what guides this mysterious figure is a will to survive in order to completely abandon the world.
During the hunt, accompanied by compassion, Gatsev gradually shed his psychological burdens, including the bondage with the army and society, the effort to maintain sanity, and the bondage with humanity itself. He exploited a recurring image: a rag doll that he had discovered as a child at the scene of a terrible tragedy. "When I saw this rag, I felt the extreme fragility of my body." This ragdoll is his "guardian angel", a man with the ability to "be cautious, compromise ... Obedience" and other traits of the cowardly auxiliary. There is also a side that represents desire and conquest: in short, it symbolizes the wanton behavior of mortals and the indifference and cowardice of morality.
Only by transcending this "doll", only by abandoning his "desire to live" can Gattsev truly live. This is what the fugitive taught him, what Gattsev later taught the narrator of the book, and what we know from it. Makini's theology is extremely Buddha-like here, necessarily post-Christian. After years of horror, Gadsev said no to "forgive this noble temptation."
There is no cliché about this in the context of the book, but Andrei Makini bravely and soberly tries what writers, artists, mystics, and philosophers have been trying to do for thousands of years: to go beyond what Gattsev calls the "core of human nature," the fog of experience, and the illusion of time, to enter things themselves, to return life to its essence. And when Gadsev and his spiritual guide begin a "nother life," we follow them, step by step, on their path.
(This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal on September 23, 2021, with a translator authorized by the author.) ）
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng