The village in this novel stands on an island, and the sea around it is mud.
The houses stood on an island, not immediately recognisable as such, for there were no sea-waves, not even the ripples of a lake, washing against its shores: it was surrounded by a wilderness of slimy tussocks and the rustling of eternally sodden forests.
For most of the year Kureni cannot be reached. A letter arrives in the bag of a chance traveller, because nobody would cross that bog without a pressing reason, and a long fall of rain is enough to cut even that. In autumn and winter the village is sealed for months, and Melezh gives you the sensation exactly: the people live "as though on a raft that dirty weather had torn from its moorings and carried out to sea, waiting for the wind to change and bring them back to land."
Then the sun comes up over the Teremossky Forest, smoke rises, milk zings into buckets, and a sleepy boy walks down the empty street leaving dark prints in the dew, cracking a whip woven from string and shouting hoarsely, "Cows! Send out your cows!" The gates open, the cows come out "self-important as a court procession", and at the last yard a slim dark girl drives out a brown cow with a white patch and goes quickly back to the house.
That is the first page, and everything the book will spend five hundred more pages on is on it. The girl is Hanna Chernushka. The boy with the whip is the writer himself, the child who rose before dawn to herd swine in the village of Glinischi in the Khoiniki district, two rows of houses in what he called "a boundless sea of marshland and forest."
Three dates govern this volume. Ivan Melezh finished People of the Marsh in the autumn of 1961, writing in Belarusian; it is the first novel of A Polesye Chronicle, whose second part, A Breath of Thunder, followed in 1965. The two together won the Lenin Prize in 1972. Natalie Ward's English translation, the first of any part of the Chronicle, was made for Progress and published in this 1979 printing in the Progress Soviet Authors Library, with illustrations by Georgy Poplavsky. Melezh had died three years before it appeared, in 1976, leaving the Chronicle's third volume unfinished; it was assembled from his manuscripts and published posthumously in 1978. No further part reached English in this series.
Ward's translation deserves more than a credit line. She keeps the Belarusian shapes of the names, which a Russian-mediated version would have smoothed away: Hanna and not Anna, Evhim, Mikanor, Vasil Dyatel, Kureni, Oleshniki. And she finds an English habit for a Belarusian conversational filler and lets it run: "it's no secret" occurs thirty-five times, settling into Mikanor's mouth in particular, and it is the last thing said in the book. It should be irritating and it is not. It does what a peasant tag ought to do, which is to make a claim sound like common knowledge whether or not it is.
There are no heroic deeds in People of the Marsh. The commissioned foreword says so approvingly and it is true. What there is instead is a land redivision, and a young man who wants a particular field.
The Soviet authorities have decreed a reallocation of the strips around Kureni, taking from those with too much and adding to those with too little. Vasil Dyatel is to be one of the gainers. He has already chosen his field, in his head, long before anyone else thought of it. Melezh writes his longing for it with no irony at all and no contempt:
He stood there happily for a while: the land was free, no-one had taken it! He could take it and become its owner, its lord and master. Here, alone in the field and the darkness, alone with his boundless dreams...
For a moment, standing in the wet grass in the dark, he stops distinguishing between what is possible and what has happened, and owns the field. Then the cold gets into him and the joy goes "in a moment, leaving no trace," and he walks home feeling as though he had been shown a treasure so that people could laugh at him and take it back. That is Vasil for the whole novel: a boy whose capacity for hope is entirely bound up in a piece of ground, and who is therefore permanently afraid.
What happens to the redivision is the most interesting thing in the book, and the foreword does not describe it. An armed band under a man named Maslak, sent in from across the Polish border, comes to break the reallocation up. Vasil, with a shotgun at his chest, shows them the way. Afterwards he is taken in and questioned, and a security man named Harchev works him over on exactly the point that matters: wasn't it you who showed Maslak's men the way when they came to break it up? Vasil has no answer. He is, at this moment, one signature away from being an accomplice of an anti-Soviet band, which in the decade that followed would have been the end of him.
What saves him is a sentence from Apeika, the head of the district:
"You're not a bandit!" repeated Apeika in a harsher tone. "You're just a coward!"
Melezh notes that neither the words nor the contempt in them offended Vasil, who looked up "no longer guarded, but hopeful". The reader understands why. A coward can be let go. A bandit cannot. Apeika has just refused to make an enemy out of a frightened man, and the refusal is an act of political judgement, delivered as an insult because that is the only register in which Vasil can receive it.
Vasil, being Vasil, is furious about it afterwards, and his fury is the second-best thing in the novel:
"I'd like to see you with a shotgun in your chest, see what you'd have to say for yourself then! Here in town, in your offices, nicely protected by your militiamen, you're all heroes out here!"
And the redivision fails. Zubrich, a "special delegate from the District Committee" whose kindly smile the old rich peasant Glushak distrusts on sight, uses Vasil's having taken the law into his own hands as the reason to stop the whole business; and when the causeway is finally finished and the villagers have their road, Vasil looks around and says what the novel has been building towards:
"But Korch is still occupying the best land, just as he always did!"
"Why are you so obsessed with that land of his?" retorted Honya.
"Why? Because he's settled like a fat turnip on the best land, and there's no getting him off it! And he doesn't give a damn for reallocation of the fields! There's no touching him! The Soviet authorities themselves are all on his side!"
Mikanor denies it, and the denial is thin, because the facts are Vasil's. A Soviet novel published in 1961, set around 1926, ends with the village's rich peasant on the best strip, the redivision abandoned, and a poor peasant saying that the state is on the rich man's side. That is not a concession wrung out of the book. It is the plot.
Against that, Melezh sets what is actually working, and it is worth being precise about what he shows, because the whole argument of this introduction turns on it.
Mikanor, the young activist of Kureni, asks his district chief for permission to apply pressure. Apeika refuses:
"Only if we need to give someone a bit of a scare, put some pressure on them."
"You try to get them going by playing on their sense of responsibility, not by force. Organise some activists to help. Choose a group of sensible, honest people, and talk it all over. Raise them up above the level of the marsh and show them what's going on all around and what's ahead!"
Mikanor says he has tried, and that the villagers are impervious, ignorant. Apeika answers: "We're all ignorant until we learn to see. We must work with them patiently, believing in them, with love! As Lenin taught. Don't lose heart right at the beginning: there's years of work ahead of you here." The same conversation produces spades and axes sent to Kureni by the workers of Rechitsa: the alliance of town and country arriving as a gift of tools rather than a grain quota.
And in the neighbouring village of Oleshniki it is bearing fruit. Gailis reels off the news: Machinery Leagues at Oleshniki and Glinischi, a Milking League as well, a club open every evening with a library and "evening classes in agronomy, atheism and drama", a Yanka Kupala comedy taken on tour to two other villages. His one complaint about Kureni is that "half your villagers haven't even joined the co-operative!"
That is the co-operative road: voluntary, slow, materially useful, and visibly succeeding. It is what the peasantry of the marsh is being offered in this book, and Melezh makes it attractive.
Now the other thing. The words "collective farm" appear exactly once in five hundred pages. They are painted on a notice nailed to a canvas stall at a fair, over a hand-shake and the slogan "The unification of town and country!" The stall is selling meat, and a slim young lad in a white overall is weighing it out; the peasants stop and stare, and Larivon says, "Like a doctor!" The collective farm enters People of the Marsh as an advertisement. It is a sign at a market, glimpsed by villagers from an island, and it is the last they see of it.
The word "collectivisation" does not appear in this book at all. Neither does "kolkhoz". "Kulak" occurs twice, once as a taunt thrown at a rich man's child and once in the phrase "the hated kulak class", spoken at Evhim by a man whose meaning he cannot follow: "The longer Evhim listened, the less he understood." Stalin's name does not occur once, in the novel or in its apparatus.
This is a novel that stops on the threshold. It was designed to: the Chronicle was to carry these people forward volume by volume, as the jacket says, "right down to the present day". Melezh got as far as the eve of the thing, and then spent the last eleven years of his life on the volume that would have had to describe it, and died without finishing it. Whatever else is true, the collectivisation of Polesye is the book Ivan Melezh did not write.
Which brings us to the eight pages at the front of this volume, signed Grant Martirosyan.
It is 2,542 words long. In it, the word "collectivisation" does not appear. Nor does "kulak". Nor, in a foreword to a Soviet novel that quotes Lenin in its own text, does the name Lenin. The word "class" occurs twice, and one of those is "Russian classics". Political class, in a foreword to a novel about the differentiation of the peasantry, is named once.
Here is where it is named:
Vasil's cowardice at a decisive moment (in one of the episodes depicting class clashes in the village) links the characters' lives closely with the political situation of the time.
The politics of the novel is inside the brackets. And the sentence commits a second, quieter theft. Apeika says "coward" as a reprieve; it is the word that keeps Vasil out of the hands of the men who would rather have had a bandit. Martirosyan lifts the word out of Apeika's mouth, drops the gun and the interrogation and the band from Poland, and re-files it as a defect in Vasil's character. The foreword's reader learns that the young man was a coward at a decisive moment. He does not learn what the moment was.
Everything else in the foreword is displacement, and it is skilfully done. Polesye is evoked at length. Melezh's childhood, his wound, his first story in a Buguruslan newspaper in September 1943, his philology degree, his work in the Party apparatus and on the journal Flame — all of that is there. The novel is praised for its "ethnographer's exactitude and the artist's fire", which is fair, and for the fair-scene's "bright colours, noise and motley crowds", which is also fair. The village "gradually sloughs off its centuries-old shackles after the breath of fresh air that was the October Revolution." The period is "the '20s and '30s, when Byelorussia along with the rest of the country witnessed such unprecedented social changes."
Unprecedented social changes. Read that again with the dates in it. A foreword written for a 1979 English edition describes the Belarusian countryside of the 1920s and 1930s in a phrase that would serve equally for the building of a causeway and for the deportation of a class.
The jacket completes the job by inverting the book:
These were years of change for the villages of Byelorussia. A new life came to Polesye, where the peasants had always been destitute, and the old life was forced to retreat, unwilling and resisting change with all its might.
In the novel the old life does not retreat. Korch keeps the best strip, the redivision is called off by the man from the district, and the causeway, which is a real achievement, is a road across a bog. The blurb describes the volume Melezh did not live to write, and attaches it to the one he did.
The rear flap of this printing carries the Progress Soviet Authors Library's own account of itself. Launched in 1973, it aims "to give the foreign reader a comprehensive picture of Soviet literature in its many forms", and it is "a living chronicle of the life of the various nationalities of the Soviet Union, their past and their present."
Two things follow. The first is on the same flap. The 1979 list includes Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned. In one year, in one series, the house issued Melezh's novel, which reaches the edge of collectivisation and declines to cross it, and Sholokhov's, which crosses it and supplies the authorised version: the dekulakisation as drama, Davydov and Nagulnov, the liquidation of a class rendered as a plot with a resolution. The series did not need Martirosyan to answer the question People of the Marsh refuses to ask. It had already commissioned the answer and shelved it alongside. (Sholokhov's novel is not among the titles reissued here; no unrestricted scan of the Progress English text exists. The reader who wants the official version of what happened next to villages like Kureni will have to find it elsewhere, and should know that is what they are reading.)
The second follows from the phrase "living chronicle" applied to Belarus. Melezh enrolled at the Belarusian University in October 1943, returned with it to liberated Minsk in 1944, and from 1945 lectured there in Belarusian literature. On the night of 29–30 October 1937, in Minsk, over a hundred members of the Belarusian intelligentsia had been shot, at least twenty of them writers; through the 1930s some thirty members of the republic's Academy of Sciences were repressed; and in 1933 the written language itself had been reformed by decree to bring it closer to Russian. The literature the young lecturer was appointed to teach had had its previous generation killed eight years earlier and its orthography rewritten by administrative order. Martirosyan's account of Melezh's formation records the wound, the newspaper, the degree, the Party apparatus, the journal — and passes over that in complete silence. The chronicle is living. Someone had to arrange for it to be so short.
None of which makes Melezh a dissident, and this introduction is not going to pretend he was one.
He worked in the Party apparatus after the war. He took the Lenin Prize. His novel's most likeable character, Gailis, a lame Latvian with a child's blue eyes and a soft accent that the village laughs at, is admired by the young activist because he is "the amazing Latvian who had taken Kronstadt after the mutiny and seen Lenin close too." That is how the sentence stands in the book: the suppression of Kronstadt as a credential, the sailors' rising as a mutiny, the whole thing worn lightly by the gentlest man in the village. Readers of this series will know what we think of that, and it is better to print the sentence than to walk around it. Melezh wrote inside the given account of the revolution, and where that account was a lie he did not know it was one.
What he did was narrower and harder. He rendered a poor peasant's hunger for a strip of land from the inside, without contempt, at a length that makes it impossible to dismiss; and having done so, he made it the thing that destroys the man. Vasil loses Hanna because he takes the marriage that secures the field. The novel's last exchange is Mikanor telling him what a girl she was, Vasil losing his temper — "All right, I let her go! What is it to you?" — and Mikanor, embarrassed, offering the only comfort available: "Never mind, perhaps that's not the end of it! Anything can happen, it's no secret!"
That is where a five-hundred-page novel of the revolutionary countryside ends: two young men on a finished causeway, talking about a girl, with the rich peasant still on the best land. Socialist realism required a positive hero and a resolution that pointed forward. Melezh delivered a district secretary who counsels patience, an activist who is refused permission to bully, and an ending with nothing settled at all. Whatever the doctrine demanded, it did not get it here.
And there is one more thing, which is the whole reason this novel belongs in a series with critical introductions rather than a series without them. The position Melezh gives his most authoritative character is the pre-1929 position. Voluntary co-operation, material aid from the towns, machinery, literacy, years of patient work, and an explicit refusal of force: "not by force", "as Lenin taught". That was the common ground of Soviet agrarian policy before the turn, and the argument of the 1920s — the argument the Left Opposition fought and lost — was about how to industrialise fast enough to make that road real, by taxing the strong peasant and building the industry that could supply the village, rather than by leaning on the strong peasant as Bukharin proposed or by smashing the whole peasantry as was done in 1929. Nobody in People of the Marsh says any of that; Melezh had no access to it. But he wrote a novel in which the coercive road is asked for by a young activist and refused by his superior, and in which the co-operative road is shown working in the next village, and he published it in 1961 in the one window when such a book could appear.
Read the foreword's "unprecedented social changes" against Apeika's "years of work ahead of you here", and the distance between them is the history of the Soviet countryside.
Melezh dedicated the novel "To my father, my mother and my country," and said of it: "This book is about my native land as it was fifty years ago. Now much has changed, the marsh, the fields and the people... But even if today we are sending ships into space, the roots of what we are now and what we know go back a long way."
Seven years after this printing, on 26 April 1986, the reactor at Chernobyl went up eighty kilometres from Glinischi. The first evacuations from the Khoiniki district began on 4 May; by September, 24,700 people had been removed from 108 settlements in that district alone. Part of Melezh's Polesye is now inside the Polesie State Radioecological Reserve, which is to say that the marsh, the forests and the sandy fields between them have been closed to the people who lived there.
The novel was written to repay a filial debt to a place. It is worth saying plainly that the place is gone, and that it was not the marsh that took it.