A Flame Out at Sea

A Rainbow on the water Among the generation of Russian “New Realists”, who burst onto the literary scene at the turn of the millennium and were met with a loud welcome from critics and readers, Dmitri Novikov stands apart from the rest. The New Realists became known as a wartime generation who wrote about the uprising in the Caucasus, about local conflicts, about how the young men who served were broken and came back from the war straight into Russia’s brutal 1990s. However, Novikov affirmed a peaceful, everyday existence, with the silence of the northern forests in autumn and fishing on the tranquil lakes of Karelia. The New Realists were a generation of activity: demonstrations, skirmishes and explosive outbursts. Novikov however dealt in contemplation, in the static and still, and in adoration. Indeed, the collection of stories that brought him fame was entitled A Fly in Amber (2003). The “New Realists” arrived as a generation of unbridled self-biographers. They created a myth about themselves, either confessing or repenting, like Roman Senchin, or building up a tough self-depiction, like Zakhar Prilepin. However, Novikov retreated into the shadows; the image of the author himself was obscured and his characters were allowed to speak instead. Perhaps this is why, while Prilepin has his expressive “boots full of hot vodka” in that eponymous story, Novikov has his “fly in amber”, an emblem of a frozen, enchanted life; while Senchin has his hopeless Flooded Zone, Novikov has his “flame out at sea”: a flame that arises like the spirit of God over the cold waves of the White Sea, and Novikov refers to the open expanse by its Karelian name, golomya. There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the shore of the White Sea… There is nothing more fearsome than the shore of the White Sea… There is no greater border in the world than the shore of the White Sea… Dmitri Novikov’s new novel is essentially about faith and love. As it should happen, faith must first be lost, and love (of God towards mankind, of human beings towards nature, of kith and kin for each other… I could go on) is put into question. This doubt is expressed in the form of the novel, which is devoid of linear narration and which fragments into flashbacks, whether to prewar Kem, to the village of Keret before the October Revolution, or to the 16th century inhabited by hermits and renunciants, or to the fat first years of the new millennium when the descendants of the Karelian fishermen, hunters, camp guards and prisoners come to fish on the lakes in its natural reserves. The protagonist of A Flame Out at Sea turns out to be a descendant himself. Grisha is a doctor in a children’s ward, a folktale hero with an ample red beard (however, in this portrait one might guess at the appearance of the author himself…). Nonetheless, the book is not so much about Grisha, as about a person’s journey towards himself – through history, through time, and through terrible and painful memories. The path to oneself, a path that lies over water, is the principle that runs through the novel and gives it unity: restless Grisha, his stern and moody grandfather Fyodor, the good Konstantin, and the quiet and saintly old man of the place Savvin –all belong to the White Sea, as they all gaze out at the mysterious golomya. Is the White Sea, the open expanse, the golomya really the novel’s main character? That seems to be the case, especially considering that ultimately the grandfather and grandson, Fyodor and Grisha, must come to the sea and wrestle with it. In this novel the figure of Fyodor is linked to a certain secret that weighs over everything. Even his wife of many years, Grisha’s grandmother, has not disclosed it, “nor why he had received a pension that was as small as a sparrow’s tail; nor why some people came to the house without even waiting for the funeral and took all of grandpa’s medals, one after another according to a list.” Gradually things become clear. Grisha’s grandfather, the war hero (“The Karelian front. Private in a penal battalion. Sixteen combat reconnaissance operations. Two medals. Senior lieutenant. Then captain. Commander of the penal battalion. Concussion. Wounded.”) was one of those Soviet functionaries who sent men to prison, who castigated landowners and had men shot; this trace of the grandfather’s crime immediately sets Novikov’s novel apart from other family requiems that are dedicated to people who are ruined or who suffer without doing anything bad themselves. Deep down in the world of A Flame out at Sea is a crime: a barge began to sink as it was bearing arrestees – strong Pomors, men who knew the sea – off to the labor camps; they tried to save themselves by leaping into the water and swimming to the shore, but it was none other than Fyodor who shot at them from the barge, shouting “about treason, about running away, about how the country would not forgive us…” Bullets spread over the water like a fan. The water turned red […] One by one these men, who had been bold sailors on icy waters, now sank into the depths. One by one our northern people disappeared, Russia’s men of steel. Like fish that flash white in the depths, they disappeared into the sea. Like a flock of salmon that has left its native shores forever, tortured by an incomprehensible, evil force […] A bright, sinking, heavenly rainbow lay itself over the sea, it was parting now along with life and hope, following after the tribe of fish, which not so long ago had been people, they had left because of human evil. Was this the same grandfather who brought up his timid grandson and showed the boy the secrets of the sea and the forest? The same one who, wounded and contused, served the whole war and had medals to show for it? The same one who always wanted to catch a bear? Novikov’s A Flame out at Sea is a paradoxical novel. Nature, history, psychology, human relationships – everything within it is ambiguous and uncertain, everything is shown to the reader as an unbearable radiance or a pitch-black abyss, as an icy plunge into a stormy sea or as a rainbow rising above the calmed waters. It is no coincidence that an image that runs through the novel compares a man with a fish, and it is concerned throughout with fishing; a series of striking and fascinating metaphorical scenes, in which love proves to be closely linked with death, tenderness with brutality, and the deaths of the precious fish of the north with the powerful life-affirming energy by which these fish burst through the surface of the water. All of these episodes of fishing are depicted by Novikov with unconcealed delight, something he naturally transmits to the reader too, by forcing the reader to follow with baited breath, not only the symbolic and metaphorical “fish”, but also the specific details of a fishing expedition. Here, we have a man bound to an enormous slippery burbot with a triple hook. Here, under a rain shower, he pulls forth from the water a gray Atlantic salmon. Here, he enjoys a veritable feast of pike. Here, a flock of salmon is heading upriver to spawn and no nets, no traps made by man, can stop it. Here, a bullhead catfish puckers its mouth as if to say, “Look-there, watch-out,” and thus warns Grisha in his boyhood against a looming abomination from the world of older people… The scene of violence against a child, just like the scene where the protagonist is rescued after drinking to excess, follows the spirit of the New Realism, as if contrasting with the expressionistic style of the White Sea chapters. Yet, what is interesting is that for any other author this scene would have served as a culmination that ponderously points to the total collapse of our world and an inescapable catastrophe for the main character. However, for Novikov this scene is just one of many, alongside the shooting of arrestees on the barge or a bear killing a full-grown moose during rutting season. Yes, Fyodor’s crime ricochets back and strikes Grisha, but Grisha then lifts himself up and becomes a doctor in a children’s ward. We kill, we are killed. The fish that are killed give the fishermen a sensation of the sharp, pungent taste of life. Above the icy waters a rainbow flickers. On the shores of the White Sea, among hermitages lost in the forests, a demon appears to Grisha and his brother. The open sea threatens death, but only by coming into contact with the elements can one regain the desire to live. The fishing metaphor is simultaneously transparent and intense, straightforward and sophisticated, and already something one expects from Novikov, but nonetheless unpredictable in each scene: Even when I caught and killed salmon, I loved them. I loved to lay their silvery bodies down on the stones at the riverbank and slowly, and carefully, gut them. Inside they were just as fine as they were on the outside. Their flesh was bright orange, with mother-of-pearl innards, always an empty stomach (when the salmon is spawning, it doesn’t eat) – sometimes it seemed like all this was just some fine waxwork figure that clung to the highest spirit of beauty that the salmon bore within itself. I loved their smell – they smelled of themselves, alive, their leaps, their raging flights into the sky. They smelled like cheating on the sea… A Flame Out at Sea smells of blood and saltwater, of our world today and of history. The golomya is in fact a place where one can perish, but also where one can be saved. That is our history, the history of Russia in the 20th century (and not only). Where else than in the White Sea – along the coast with its ancient monasteries and Soviet camps – can one remember this and take it to heart? Elena Pogorelaya Literary critic