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| Ripe bird cherries (Prunus padus). Novosibirsk, 24 July 2019. |
[Image source: https://vn.ru/news-pervaya-cheremukha-sozrela-v-novosibirske/ .]
From Wild Berries (Ягодные места - Yagodnyye Mesta, lit. Berry places, 1982) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1984 translation by Antonina W. Bouis.
It begins up in space, and from this opening my only (unnecessary) advice to the reader is, just go with it. In other words, without stopping to worry about what kind of novel it is or whether this or that section is good or bad. At any rate readers in 1981 can't have been bored and I don't think it would be any different for a reader today.
'Along the midnight sky an angel flew. . . .'
The cosmonaut recalled the poem and smiled sadly. 'Some angel I make!' His face, reflected in the porthole of the capsule, was tired, no longer young, yet animated with childlike curiosity. He had never been beyond his country's borders before, And suddenly there were no borders; the striped barriers, no-man's-lands, border guards, German shepherds, and customs points all had disappeared. Now they seemed unnatural, ridiculous. Other things were difficult even to imagine: for instance, the idea of mandatory residency registration.
Below, the lights of Paris glittered, a handful of gold dust scattered across black velvet. ...
(Beginning of the Prologue of Wild Berries.)
Lermontov's poem "Angel", published in 1831 when he was sixteen, is mentioned again in the final lines of the Epilogue. Here it is in full:
По небу полуночи ангел летел,
И тихую песню он пел;
И месяц, и звёзды, и тучи толпой
Внимали той песне святой.
Along the midnight sky an angel flew
a silent song he sang
the moon the stars the clouds together
heard that holy hymn
Он пел о блаженстве безгрешных духов
Под кущами райских садов;
О боге великом он пел, и хвала
Его непритворна была.
He sang the bliss of pure souls
under Eden's boughs
and he sang the greatness of God
intently, devoutly
Он душу младую в объятиях нёс
Для мира печали и слёз;
И звук его песни в душе молодой
Остался -- без слов, но живой.
In his arms an infant soul, bound for
this world's tears and sorrow
and his song remains in the infant soul
wordless but alive
И долго на свете томилась она,
Желанием чудным полна,
И [звуков]1 небес заменить не могли
Ей скучные песни земли.
The soul lingers long in this world,
lost in yearning for
the song of heaven that passes
all earth's dull strains
The novel's title hints at two things about it: its accent on youth/freshness/ripeness (the really young, like Lermontov, and the young in spirit, like the cosmonaut); and its setting in the Siberian taiga, at any rate the setting of its central narratives. For (like the cosmonaut, again) Wild Berries has a strongly centripetal temper; it isn't a "local" novel as we normally conceive it. Indeed you might reasonably call it a global novel, though I feel the limitations of "global", the way it's deployed in news media. The novel goes a long way beyond that.
The novel "Berry Places" (1981) is fascinating and unusual, multi-layered and multi-character. This is a novel about Russia and the planet Earth, about humanity and man, about history and modernity. "Where is the world heading?" - this main question is always relevant, and the literary skill of the author simply cannot but surprise the attention. Yevtushenko remains a true great poet even in prose.
I'm quoting an unpretentious description from
https://avidreaders.ru/book/yagodnye-mesta.html , because it saves me the donkey work. And this description seems quite accurate, unlike Google Books talking about "the tale of Soviet scientists on a search for rare ore in the far northern taiga" (the main locations are about the same latitude as York or Hamburg, admittedly a latitude that would feel pretty northerly in Canada).
Anyway I think the description is quite right to see Wild Berries as basically a novel of ideas: that's what makes it all hang together. And yet, maybe paradoxically, it's unquenchably narrative in form. There are no authorial discourses, its chapters never stop telling stories, the Prologue and Epilogue just as much as the rest.
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And, of course, the title also means what it says, so let's get ethnobotanical.
"His cheekbones were prominent, like those of many of his fellow Siberians. The teeth were white and strong, probably thanks to 'sulfur' -- a Siberian chewing gum made from leaf resin" (Prologue, p. 10).
Actually made from the gum of conifers, such as the Siberian Larch (or here, at Zima, the intergrade with the Dahurian Larch). It can also be made with the gum of the Siberian Pine (see below).
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"Then he'd send his daughter, Ksiuta, the only other living creature around besides Charlie, down to the cellar for red bilberry juice." (Ch 3, p. 39)
"...the crimson sprays of red bilberry, hardening on dark lacquered leaves..." (Ch 9, p. 116)
I'm guessing this means Cowberry or Lingonberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea). From what I can see, Siberia has similar berry resources to Sweden: Lingonberry, Bilberry, Northern Bilberry, and the old-world Cranberry. (But Red Bilberry is a western N. American species (Vaccinium parvifolium).)
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When Tisha was leaving, Dasha ran out into the yard after him to hold the dog, which had been let off its chain. Unexpectedly she whispered in his ear, 'Come to Crooked Hill tomorrow at noon . . . I'll be picking bird cherries . . .'
The bird cherry trees were a marvelous sight on Crooked Hill. The bushes were weighed down by the black fruit, sprinkled with last night's rain. You could pick a big bunch, toss a handful of berries into your mouth, and using your tongue to separate the flesh from the pits, cover your whole palate with a tart, sweet film. Tisha bent the bushes down to make it easier for Dasha to pick,and she squealed like a child when the rain from the branches showered down on her, creeping in under her neckline and trickling down her back. Two baskets were quickly filled.
'Too many leaves!' Dasha sighed. 'I'll have to pick over them.'
And suddenly she strode over to Tisha, put her hands on his shoulders, and pressed up against him. Her malachite eyes were so close to his that he could see thin veins in them, as if they were real malachite . . .
They lay next to each other between the two baskets filled with berries. A clumsy movement of Tisha's turned over a basket, and the berries fell on Dasha's naked breasts. Tisha kissed the berries from her.
(from Ch 4, pp. 76-77.)
The Bird Cherry (Prunus padus) has a large native range, from Atlantic shores (including the northern British Isles) right across Europe and almost right across Russia. In Europe there's basically no tradition of doing anything with the fruit, but in Siberia it's a different matter. Check out ForagerChef's article on Siberian bird cherry cake. Out in the taiga, Kalya breakfasts on "bird cherry salad and soup with meat and dried potatoes" (Ch 16, p. 225).
Another post about Bird Cherry:
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/06/bird-cherry-prunus-padus.html .
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[Uncle] personally spread his bear-fur coat for them in the haystack and conjured pregnancy with vagabond's gibberish. He gave them a magic cedar cone to use whenever they started arguing - each had to eat a seed, and the argument would cease immediately. He unexpectedly burst into tears and said he had been a scoundrel to his own wife, and that if his nephew followed his example, he would beat him in front of all decent folk . . .
(from the Prologue, p. 23)
Two pine cone collectors were industriously at work in the taiga ... The Buryat struck the cedar trees with a long hammer-headed pole. The cedar shook, groaning hollowly and reluctantly shedding a sprinkling of cones onto the grass.
(from Ch 20, p. 259.)
This is the Siberian Pine (Pinus sibirica). It has edible seeds which are marketed in Russia as "cedar nuts", and indeed the tree is often called Siberian cedar, to the confusion of translators.
[Being as Euro-blinkered as I am, I had previously imagined that the only pine with seeds worth eating was the Stone Pine of the Mediterranean (Pinus pinea). However, there are also the "pinyons" of south-west N. America, a group of related species of great significance in Native American food cultures. (Pinus edulis is one of the most widespread species; another, Pinus monophylla is the world's only one-needle pine; and there's about ten others.) But the most important edible species, globally, is the Korean Pine (Pinus koraiensis), native to much of E. Asia; I've read that most of the "pine nuts" sold in Europe and the USA actually come from this species. In fact most pine species have seeds that are technically edible, just too small to be worth the trouble -- normally. Jacob Hunter's useful post explains what's involved.]
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Chronology
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 - 2017). Wild Berries was published in 1982.
The date of the main narrative (taking that to mean Seryozha Lachugin's time in Siberia) is July-August 1973. We know this because of the abandoned Japanese radio (Ch 21), broadcasting news referring to the imminent downfall of Salvador Allende. What the radio announces in two sentences is also the occasion of the narrative in Ch 22. (Yevtushenko had been a good friend of Allende.)
After reading the book and being thrown around to so many scenes and times, I was surprised to find how many of its chapters are, at least nominally, set at this date: 1, 2, 4 (only the frame: the rest is Tikhon by the Lena river about forty years earlier, during the era of dekulakhization (1929-34)), 5, 7, 8, 9, 12 (though it also includes Sitechkin's early life), 16, 17 (though it's mainly war narratives from WW2 and Vietnam), 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23.
To which list -- though it isn't explicitly stated -- you can reasonably add the Prologue (i.e. the cosmonaut in space), and Ch 13 (The Tails' first gig in Honolulu).
Yevtushenko himself was 41 in August 1973, so he (rather unusually) makes his young hero belong to a younger generation than his own; most novelists shy away from this. We think about the author a lot, of course. Young Seryozha sometimes embodies Yevtushenko's own experience (for instance in Kazakhstan); but so does the expedition leader Kolomeitsev, who is around fifty, that is, around Yevtushenko's age when he was actually writing the novel. And actually I suppose Yevtushenko himself makes a brief covert appearance, in the story about the "famous poet" that Gagarin unintentionally places in peril (Prologue, p. 8) -- besides being explicitly dismissed as "passé" by Kostya Krivtsov (Ch 10, p. 125; that must have been back in the mid-1960s). Yevtushenko is writing about, not just Seryozha, but Seryozha's whole generation (Krivtsov, Seleznyov, The Tails). That's why the novel becomes a question about who we can be, what direction the world might go in. Its optimism and idealism, not at all cheaply assumed (think of e.g. Chs 17, 22), is something to ponder, to envy, maybe even to be inspired by. Because, forty years on, it feels like the light reflected by Yevtushenko has gone, we pretty much need to start all over again, idealism and youth have been neutered and repurposed by technology, profit and exploitation.
The other chapters:
3, at Belaya Zaimka the previous summer (July 1972).
6, the mushroomer's biography, covering the whole 20th century up to the time of the novel.
10. Leningrad: begins with Seryozha's parents marrying (c. 1933?) and his grandfathers, both presumably purged by Stalin before WW2; then shifts to Seryozha's adolescence (mid-late 1960s)
11. Kazakhstan, Seryozha's first geological expedition (c. 1970?)
14. Krivtsov and Leningrad's literature circles (several years up to, presumably, 1973).
15. Leningrad: Selezhnyov and his father, c. 1970.
Epilogue. Mostly set in Kaluga, concerned with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935). From his conversation with Semiradov (p. 294), it must be mid-1914, just before the start of the First World War.
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Geography
In the Prologue the cosmonaut comes from Zima; Ch 1 starts in Zima, and we revisit it in Ch 19. Zima (Zima Station, Zima Junction) is a town in Irkutsk. It's the subject of Yevtushenko's most famous poem. Yevgeny was actually born in Nizhneudinsk (3.5 hrs drive away), but the family moved to Zima soon after his birth and (when he was still only one year old) to Moscow. However, Yevgeny and his grandmother returned to Zima as evacuees for several years during WW2.
If you try looking for Shelaputinki or Belaya Zaimka (where Belomestnykh lives) you won't find either, but you can maybe take a hint from Belaya Zima, two days walk to the SW of Zima.
It is around 40km from Belaya Zaimka (via Shelaputinki) to the expedition campsite (Ch 9, p. 113).
"..sent to the upper reaches of the Lena River to rid the taiga of rich peasants, called kulaks" (Ch 4, p. 72). The river Lena flows north from L. Baikal. Its source is not far from Irkutsk, 180 miles SE of Zima.
"During his first field expedition in Kazakhstan..." (Ch 11, p. 143). This is based on Yevtushenko's own experience, though it would have been twenty years before Seryozha's. After being expelled from school, the young Yevtushenko joined a geological reconnaissance expedition to Kazakhstan where fifteen unescorted convicts turned out to be under his command.
Sources:
Yevtushenko's entry in ru.wikipedia.org: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%82%D1%83%D1%88%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%BE,_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87 .)
This page, with biography and photos: https://uznayvse.ru/znamenitosti/biografiya-evgeniy-evtushenko.html .
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Love relationships and sexual behaviour
Naturally they play a large part in a novel about youth and ripeness. But not just youth: Kolomeitsev, leader of the geological expedition, is an inveterate womaniser even in his fifties. The trail of destruction that he and others like him leave behind is one of the book's recurrent concerns. Anyway, here's a list of some of the main entanglements, running the gamut from idyllic to horrific.
Prologue: Uncle's infidelities; the cosmonaut and the girl he falls for and marries (both unnamed).
Ch 1: The handsome Grisha and the hopeful storekeeper; Ksiuta and the unknown father of her child (Was it Grisha? Tikhon?)
Ch 3: Ksiuta and her one-time lover: it was Kolomeitsev. Her father (Belomestnykh) and mother.
Ch 4: Tikhon (Tisha) and Dasha.
Ch 7: Belomestnykh and his wife, again.
Ch 10: Volodya and Irina (Seryozha's parents). Seleznyov and the village singer Tonya.
Ch 11: Seryozha and Grunya (the beekeeper). Nakhabkin and his wife.
Ch 12: Kesha and Kalya. Kolomeitsev and Yulya Vyazemskaya. Yulya's marriage to the "sad-faced dentist" Dodik. Sitechkin's parents.
Ch 14: the drunken man (Vasya) and the woman (presumably his wife).
Ch 15: Seleznyov senior and his wife.
Ch 16: Kesha and Kalya again; Kalya's many men (including Kolomeitsev).
Ch 19: Tikhon and Darya; and their daughter.
Ch 20: The old man (February) and the woman he kills (in his story); his "old woman".
Ch 22: Allende and Hortensia.
Epilogue: Tsiolkovsky and his wife Varvara Evgrafovna.
Labels: Mikhail Lermontov, Pinaceae, Yevgeny Yevtushenko
