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In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging
character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His
pristine settings are once again living presences described with
the touch of a 'psychologist of nature', to quote one of his
admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose
inhabitants as late as the second half of the 20th century were
still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity, folk for
whom the great world was the primordial one of their surroundings:
an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near, and at
first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern
lights and the very stars. It is or was until recently still
possible beside such places as the White Sea and its adjacent
forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that
sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the
ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining power in their
lives, and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible
a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for
years had been frenetically industrialising and whose relation with
its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as
well, including that modernising hothouse or engine which was the
Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still
lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to
climate are inescapable in Russian writing. Kazakov saw no
opposition between urbanised, technologically evolving humans and
the rest of the universe we call 'natural'. An intercity bus or
elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable,
but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or
by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in
arctic waters predominate, if they have defined his milieu and
established his reputation, it was because to his retrospective
imagination those were in his time, and perhaps still are in ours,
clear if departing instances of that integration, that
give-and-take in nature, that sharing in an immemorial cycle of
life and of death that itself sustains life in its turn.
The two volumes consist of 38 short stories and travel sketches
describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to
Kazakov's time (he died in 1982) had been almost untouched by that
country's 20th century upheavals. The majority of his settings are
the coast and forests adjoining the White Sea, peopled by hunters,
fishermen, buoy-keepers, ancient peasants, children in the most
halcyon moment of their youth, and among his memorable actors are
not excluded even an occasional soul-full dog or bear. Through the
eyes of this new array of 'Russian originals' we return to
forgotten ways of perceiving the world around us, of appreciating
the essential miracle of our surroundings, the universe extending
from the immediate and almost microscopic grain of sand or flower,
out to the infinitudes of which we are a part. The sense of the two
books is topical and universal: the degree of man's involvement in
the harmony and natural processes of the world is an essential
measure of his moral dignity. That such natural processes included
hunting, for instance, is a challenging thought in our
environmentally-ideological and conservation-focused times. In the
classic style of the Russian short story Kazakov's narratives move
at a leisurely pace and often end apparently inconclusively, but
they never fail to induce a deeply reflective mood. A few of his
tales do have an urban setting, but even those are suffused with a
pastoral quality, contributed to by the inescapable presence of the
seasonal and climactic envelopment of man's works; and too by
nature's mind-borne continuities: a suburban boy repeatedly
imagining and remembering episodes in some once-glimpsed corner of
Russia's backwoods. Such recollections, and more immediate
contemplations of nature in other stories, return and return like
sighs among the meanders of Kazakov's uncomplicated plots.
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