A washer woman dies in a mining village in the Donbas, Ukraine in July of 2014, and two days later invading Russian soldiers shoot a foreign passenger jet out of the sky. In the mystical world built by Sergei Lebedev, this seemingly unrelated sequence of events acquires the force of world-shattering causality.
Writing close to historical events, in The Lady of the Mine Lebedev presents his fictional version of the events leading up to and following the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 by a Russian surface-to-air missile, fired by Moscow-controlled separatists near the town of Horlivka, as a part of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The novel is told in the third- and first-person from four distinct points of view in the course of five days, beginning two days before the plane shooting and ending two days after. The central plot involves one of these characters, Zhanna, whose journey begins in the actual world, but over the course of the novel she transcends into its mystical sphere. Zhanna’s transformation, I believe, is the pivotal development in this ambitious novel.
Challenging as this might be for readers steeped in current events — my first reaction was “too soon!” — Lebedev asks us to accept the transcendent significance of the battle of forces in the mystical sphere over those in the physical world. For the forces of good, he posits the existence of the tribe of “the White Ladies, who walk the earth unrecognized.” The White Ladies are magical beings who thrive on ritual and, by exerting “daily, unremitting, but small effort, on repetition,” wash away the evil. Everyday people might perceive them as healers, seers, or witches, or simply “wise wom[e]n whose advice should be followed.” They clean and do laundry. “They [do] not let places and people become dirty.” Or: “The White Lady, the laundress of being.”
The powers of the White Ladies are highly localized — they are bound by the physical place in which they live —and vulnerable. Industrialization itself has reduced their powers: “the whole area was too corroded by old mines and fresh diggings,” “the life-giving currents of water were broken, and therefore the streams dried up, the forests disappeared, the animals left, the fields and gardens stopped giving birth in full force.” And now, Russia is finishing the job: “The war, not yet realized, still existing only as an approaching storm, crushed her first.”
“Her” is Marianna, Zhanna’s mother and the White Lady whose death is the inciting incident of the novel. Marianna passes away without training her replacement, and now that she is dead, her village is left defenseless from evil. It’s not clear why Marianna had delayed teaching her daughter laundering skills and put off revealing her secret — there’s custom involved, and perhaps she simply ran out of time. After her mother’s death, Zhanna becomes privy to her secret via a lucid dream.
The sources of evil are more pervasive in this world than the sources of good. First, we have “zombies” coming to wage war from the East — from Russia — personalized by two male focalizing characters, “Valet,” and “The General.” Both return to the Donbas after sojourns in Moscow; they are the vanguard of the invading army. Valet, Zhanna’s neighbor growing up, long in love with her, in his youth killed a man at the mine, and Marianna, the White Lady, sent him away from the village. He went to Moscow where he became a member of a police special regiment trained to crush peaceful protests. He now dreams of seducing and raping Zhanna, defenseless without her mother-protector. Zhanna is at first open to his advances: she would like to “erase, wash away the stigma of her mother’s heritage.” Traumatized by her mother’s death, she hesitates to accept the mantle of the White Lady even after the secret of it is revealed to her. We’re given to understand that losing her virginity to Valet — or other sources of evil — would preclude her from becoming a White Lady, and this becomes the primary source of tension in the novel. Will she or won’t she be able to take on her mother’s job?
The General, another personification of evil, is also after Zhanna. He is an old KGB man who had started his career at a mine in Kursk where he was recruited and then commandeered to the Donbas. There he quickly began to suspect Marianna: “there was something religious in Marianna, that is, supernatural.” His investigation of her, however, stalled when the USSR fell apart. He chose to continue his career in Moscow, his path running parallel to Valet’s, but with access to power. When Russia sends him back to Ukraine, he imagines that “the undeclared war, the seizure of Crimea, the invasion here, in the Donbas, had also happened so that he could return and finish what he had started” — his campaign against the White Lady.
A secret service man, the General serves as a conduit between the physical and mystical sources of evil. Arriving at the Donbas, he wakes up the Engineer, a spokesman for a powerful source of evil hidden in a local mine. In this mining village, Shaft 3/4 is a long-abandoned structure that has been secretly serving as a mass grave. The Engineer both designed it and died in it. He’s an “unnatural” narrator — in narratological terms — insofar as he’s long dead, murdered by the Nazis as a Jew during WWII, his body dumped in the mine alongside other Jews.
The Engineer doesn’t embody evil, but he speaks as a witness to it. Lebedev ascribes primary evil to the Soviet system of terror that turned the mine into a giant mass grave. In his nonfiction writing and in his earlier autobiographically inspired novels, he asserted the moral responsibility of the post-Soviet generations to uncover the mass graves that the USSR had left behind, to restore the names and biographies to as many victims as possible. He is an ardent supporter of Memorial Society, an organization that does just that, and he has interviewed and written about Yury Dmitriev, a prominent Memorial activist who uncovered a mass grave at Sandarmokh, and turned it into an open-air museum, before being prosecuted by the Putin regime and jailed on false charges. In an essay called “The Altar of Victory” published in 2018, Lebedev suggests that because the people of the USSR failed to pay their human debt to the soldiers killed in WWII, leaving their bodies in mass graves without giving them individual burials, they became overburdened by the spiritual debt, and after Stalin’s death, began worshiping Victory itself. The cult of Victory in WWII that contemporary Russia inherited from the late USSR quickly became an empty symbol, too easily hijacked by Putin and his propagandists.
“Humans are those who bury their dead, without care about the expense or looking for excuses because of the difficulty of the task” defines Lebedev in that essay (my translation). The horror behind The Lady of the Mine is that the USSR not only accumulated its own dead bodies but also covered up the crimes committed by the Nazis. In the words of the General, “The Soviet regime’s real power was revealed by its willingness to cover up the enemy’s guilt and evil. Only the strongest of the strong, who was above simple morality, could do that. [The General] would serve the regime faithfully, for he now knew its truth: it was easy to kill strangers, harder to kill one’s own, but to dare to cover up the enemy’s sin required great wisdom and unlimited might.”
This kind of thinking represents the ultimate evil in the mystical economy of this novel. So, when the General arrives at the village and wakes up the Engineer, he also unleashes the spiritual energy generated by the unburied dead, and Zhanna in her dream feels how a vertical axis of “the inexhaustible evil” “around which the world could turn” opens up, connecting her town and its mine to an airplane in the sky. And because her mother is gone and Zhanna herself has not yet committed to the work of a White Lady, there’s nobody to stop or diffuse the force of its impact.
Once the plane is shot down, the stakes of this novel become increasingly clear and weighty: Zhanna must take on her mother’s work for Ukraine — and for humanity more broadly — to have a chance in the war against Russia. I have to admire the novelist’s art that not only sets a novel amid the terrible, ongoing conflict, but also devises a way to give his readers something to hope for. As in his earlier work, Lebedev also shows himself a master craftsman of words and sentences, and his translator Antonina W. Bouis matches him every step of the way in English, allowing his prose, peppered with abstract nouns and lists, to have a clear, taut sound.
To dramatize the battle for the future of humanity, Lebedev makes a bold choice of going beyond an existing mythology to create his own composite one — the White Ladies are not quite “seers,” “heelers,” or “witches,” but their own tribe with its own complex back story. While he succeeds in making them realistic, he risks having to telegraph a lot of information to the reader and occasionally to fall back on unfortunate stereotypes. As much as I admire this novel, I found the novelist’s representation of women’s power to be limiting — tied as they are to nature and traditional life. The White Ladies are outnumbered, and their number is dwindling, leaving the future of humanity bleak and undermining the hope that we might feel for Zhanna. Gendering the concept of “good” — the White Ladies — and tying Zhanna’s eligibility to become one to her remaining a virgin (“part nun, part mermaid”), evoked a patriarchal stereotype of sex that shames women and makes them “unclean.”
As a descendant of Eastern European Jews, I also couldn’t help but question the lines that the novelist put into the Jewish Engineer’s mouth, who says of the victims of the Holocaust: “We have no possibility of arising in the minds of our descendants, for we have no descendants. We, as complete orphans, can only appeal to urbi et orbi, and — if you don’t find it too presumptuous — everyone is responsible for us.”
Elsewhere, the Engineer goes on for several passages trying to land on the right image to describe just how dead “the Jews of prewar Europe” are. “But I’m not a ghost. / I’m a fossil.” And, later, “A substance? But what substance? There is no name for it in any language. Hebrodite? Jewspar?” (The English words are brilliantly coined by Bouis who has translated five earlier books by Lebedev, as well as Bulgakov, Dovlatov, Shostakovich, and so many others.) I find this eloquence misplaced. But I also appreciate Lebedev’s ambition. He has long been compared to Solzhenitsyn, and he has continued the older writer’s work of exhuming Soviet crimes. In trying to include the Holocaust and Jewish stories as a part of the Soviet history of mass graves, Lebedev does what Solzhenitsyn would not do (Solzhenitsyn instead exaggerated the role of the Jews in the perpetration of the Soviet terror). Lebedev connects the dots on how Soviet and then post-Soviet Russians became fascists: by refusing to uncover the sites of Nazi mass murder and bury the Jewish bodies.
In the words of the Engineer: “They had turned into Nazis with a fetish for historical deprivation, for being robbed by others: dishonest, dodgy, and devious. With their paranoid delusions of historical grievance.
Zombies don’t know they are zombies. But ignorance, blindness, doesn’t matter; their past atrocities, compounded by rebellion against the changed times, hang like doom over them.
That was why they shot down the plane.”
[Published by New Vessel Press on January 7, 2024, 240 pages, $17.95 paperback]