A Flame Out at Sea

A Flame Out at Sea

A Flame Out at Sea

I was very pleased to get a rare book, a gift from my friend Grisha, a man who had the appearance of an old style Russian hero: he was tall, with auburn curls and an ample beard. Grisha worked as an ER doctor at a children’s hospital. He also wrote some powerful, catchy songs that even brought tears to the eyes of the most grizzled men of the North. He had brought me this book as a token of his thanks after I had recommended some routes along the White Sea shores to him. He wanted to go there to “find healing for his soul”, as he put it.

The heavy, dark-blue volume was pleasing to the hand and the eye. Its title, embossed in gold, was also a delight: Dictionary of the Spoken Pomor Dialect. I am very fond of dictionaries in general. One can learn many new things from them, unlike some novels. Yet again, I was intrigued by the story of this dictionary’s author, Ivan Durov. He was a native of the old Pomor village, Sumsky Posad, and a self-taught man. He was fascinated by the Pomor dialect and began collecting local proverbs, sayings and ritual speeches. He worked on this for five years, compiling a dictionary and ultimately sending it to the Academy of Sciences. Several years later he was shot at the Sandarmokh site in Karelia, the victim of repressions against local historians. His manuscript languished in the archives for eighty years and has only recently been found and published. This was a precious gift.

Grisha would talk at length, and enthusiastically, about what he had discovered in the places I had recommended to him. “You are a good guy,” he thanked me, imitating Pomors accent, after he had been given a chance to hear them. He would paint in words the White Sea, the northern rivers and the fields of juniper. Then I recalled the words of my Karelian grandmother: “Juniper is the tree of death”.