Guzel Yakhina

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Russia

Zuleikha is the debut novel of Russian author Guzel Yakhina and winner of the Russian Big Book Award, the Yasnaya Polyana Award, the Best Prose Work of the Year Award and is shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (2015). Set in the 1930s in the communist Soviet Union in Kazan, Tatarstan and Siberia, it tells the story of young Muslim Tatar housewife Zuleikha, who is deported to Semruk, a remote settlement on the Angara River in Siberia. The novel is inspired by Yakhina’s grandmother and her memories of being exiled to the Gulag.

The book begins like a Russian Cinderella story with Zuleikha living with her harsh and brutal husband Murtaza and manipulative, spiteful mother-in-law, who could have easily auditioned for the role of Baba Yaga in another tale. This all changes when the Red Army arrives, killing Murtaza and taking Zuleikha away. In the 1930s the Red Army swept through Russia as part of its dekulakization programme, killing and deporting millions of kulaks (prosperous peasants) and redistributing their land. This program was begun in 1917 by Lenin who declared the kulaks to be enemies of the state and began forcibly expropriating their land, and was continued by Stalin who announced the "liquidation of the kulaks as a class" in 1929. Between 1929–1932, the period of the first five-year plan, up to 600,000 kulaks died from hunger, disease and in mass executions.

Zuleikha finds herself on a gruelling six month train journey, not knowing her destination. She travels with an assortment of characters including Volf Karlovich Leib the eccentric doctor, Ikonnikov an artist, and Ignatov the conflicted Commandant. They arrive in remote Siberia and must set up a camp. Despite the hardships Zuleikha finds herself gradually evolving from the timid, superstitious housewife her mother-in-law had dubbed Pitiful Hen, to a strong and powerful hunter and survivor.

This was overall a good read, too long in parts, and somewhat dramatic in others. I wondered if the fact that Zuleikha’s experience of the Gulag was almost an escape from, and improvement on, the hardship of her previous life was somewhat undermining to the true reality of the absolute horror and classicide that occurred. You did however feel the mindless fanaticism of the regime and the hypocrisies inherent. I enjoyed the story of Ikonnikov, exiled for being an artist and part of the intelligentsia, then employed to create “agitational art” to inspire patriotism to the regime. 4 stars for me.… (more)

Zuleikha Valieva lives an oppressed existence. It’s not because she lives in a village near Kazan, USSR, 1930, and the Soviet regime crushes her, though it’s about to. Rather, her husband, Murtaza, gives her nothing except hard blows and harder words, using her as beast of burden and sex object and haranguing her every move — that is, when he bothers to notice. Murtaza’s mother is even worse. She promises that the fates will punish Zuleikha, who’s a weakling, good for nothing — hasn’t she given birth only to daughters, all four of whom have died in infancy? — while Murtaza, like Mama, is strong, a born survivor.

But prophecy isn’t her chief talent, for the Soviet administration has decided that kulaks — landowning peasants, like the Valievs — are enemies of the state. And when soldiers come for their grain, livestock, and butter to feed the city populace, Murtaza fights back and dies for it.

Good riddance, you think. But Zuleikha has believed every harsh word ever spoken to her and figures that Allah has marked her for punishment. Scared to death of what will happen next, she doesn’t understand why she must leave her village to go someplace far away; she, like many other kulaks and other “undesirables,” are being exiled, though no one will say where they’re headed. But what Zuleikha and her companions don’t realize is that they’ve just been handed a ticket to freedom. The rest of the novel shows how that happens, to what degree, and how much happiness, if any, they derive from living at the ends of the earth.

Aside from her ability to work her fingers to the bone, because that’s what life demands, Zuleikha has a fatalistic outlook that will stand her in good stead. Other notable characters include a demented doctor who’s somehow a capable clinician; the camp lickspittle, a truly despicable sort who always bobs up like a cork, no matter who pushes him down; and a couple members of the intelligentsia, city slickers who’ve seen Paris, not just Leningrad or Moscow. The camp commandant, who killed Murtaza and has a thing for Zuleikha’s green eyes, comes to feel for his charges, though he can’t say so or even let himself think it. For all these, banishment to Siberia spares them from worse punishment, for the camp is a backwater, where purges don’t reach.

You just know that these people, had they remained where they were, would have been swept up by the secret police, even—especially—the commandant. For the longest time, he resents his posting, in his pride mistakenly thinking that the bureaucracy has shunted him aside, after all his many accomplishments. The political message comes through loud and clear, though Yakhina never spells it out: here’s a cross-section of people who, for better and worse, built the Soviet state, receiving no thanks for their pains and, more often, a whip across the face.

Zuleikha has a touch of the fairytale—witness the demented doctor who remembers a remarkable amount of his training—yet reality takes front and center. In fact, when the pain of what he experiences penetrates his consciousness, he has the persistent fantasy that he’s living inside an eggshell, which shields him from the suffering all around and allows him to exist. So even when Yakhina surrenders to gauzy fantasies, she tries to twist them, make them her own.

You won’t recognize Solzhenitsyn’s gulag in her Siberian camp, though many exiles die from the harsh atmosphere and poor food. She’s more interested in the survivors, who find skills or character traits they didn’t know they had. In this, Zuleikha is Exhibit A. Her acquisition of a spine is a marvelous transformation to behold, and Yakhina’s careful not to let her consummate masochist turn into a different person altogether.

Nevertheless, at times I wonder whether our heroine would be able to achieve what her creator intends, even less that Zuleikha feels drawn to the commandant, who killed her husband, after all — though, to be fair, her sense of attraction causes her guilt.

Overall, however, Zuleikha is an excellent novel, a first novel, surprisingly, full of rich, evocative prose, sharp political commentary, and a story cast against type.… (more)

I requested this book because the premise sounded interesting: a woman is removed from her brutal husband and mother-in-law and taken to Siberia where life is actually better than what she left behind. Also that it was based on a real person. When the almost-500-page book arrived in the mail I was daunted by the task ahead.

From the first page I was enthralled with Zuleikha's world: life as a Russian peasant (in modern times) just trying to eek out an existence. Then six months in a cattle car across Russia, a section that reminded me of countless Holocaust stories. At the end of their long journey Zuleikha and her new friends find themselves in the middle of nowhere with practically nothing. Welcome to your new home.

The author doesn't mince words and there is rarely any filler. Nearly every word on the page moves the story along. The author was descriptive of the landscape and the people, but spread it throughout the story, not just in a giant section.

The only thing I found disappointing was the way the ending happened. After nearly 500 pages of the story plodding along, it was like the author realized she needed a climax and an ending in the space of about seven pages. The action seemed jerky, almost like a movie on fast forward and you only get a frame here and there. Then the story just stopped.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone interested in life in Siberia during Soviet Russia.… (more)