[0] Personal commentary
I grew up in the middle of Ukrainian steppes. Or what used to be steppes. Now it’s mainly agricultural monocrop plantations of sunflowers and rapeseed, harvested for producing cooking oils. The excerpts below are from a novel ‘Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta’ by a Ukrainian writer Maik Yohansen. It was both beautiful and painful rediscovering this work for me: I adore the attention, care and experimental-ness with which he wrote about the more-than-human worlds and my dear steppes in particular; the story played with me, winked at me, lead me to unexpected places and enchanted the world for me. But reading it was also painful: Yohansen finished it in 1932, a couple of years before he was persecuted by the soviet regime and eventually shot, becoming one of many artists, intellectuals and writers of Ukrainian Executed Renaissance. The novel unfolds both in the central steppy part of Ukraine and in the forest-steppe region in the north-east. The river Donets, described in the excerpts below, is one where the current war frontline is, where a mass grave with more than 500 Ukrainians was discovered as our army liberated Izyum, the town on this river. With Russia’s war on Ukraine, the history of oppression and slow violence extending itself into my own present – reading, sharing and engaging these kinds of work feels important beyond words.
The seven translated excerpts from the novel were kindly shared with me by Dr. Uilleam Blacker, whose English translation of the book is due to be published later this year. Feel free to read them all or choose whichever one speaks to you. There’s also an image, part of the steppe series that I made earlier this winter, at the bottom of the document.
[1] A journey through steppes and scales
This was what Don Jose Pereira said to his friend, the Irish setter Rodolfo, as they walked together through the steppe. Rodolfo had until then been listening rather distractedly to his elder companion’s lengthy narrative, since the steppe was filled with the scent-portraits of a great many hares, among which there arose suddenly the image of a great bustard, inscribed vividly in three scents, in concrete and relief, like a mezzotint; and there was not a square metre of ground that was not decorated with the tender miniatures of countless quails. Rodolfo reluctantly tore himself away from the cinematographic tableau of these scents and gave an official, albeit loving, wag of his tale. But seeing that Don Jose had not taken his Sauer from his shoulder, he understood that his master’s discourse was rather of a philosophical nature, and that his consciousness had not yet been penetrated by the great exhibition of scents. This did not surprise Rodolfo – he had understood long ago that Don Jose Pereira, his elder companion, was blind to scent to such a degree that the awful, oppressive, poisonous, chemical smell of his ladies did not prevent him from sitting in the same room as them and even kissing their hands. These aromas did not give Don Jose a headache and, indeed, after spending an evening with such a lady, an expression of sweet luxury would usually settle on his face as he sniffed the air.
These were the approximate thoughts of Rodolfo as he plunged through the rainbow colours of scent, and Don Jose Pereira, pleased that Rodolfo was listening to him and in full agreement, continued:
‘You and I, Rodolfo, my red-haired friend, have embarked on a journey that, though it may be slow, will be filled to the brim with smells, images and impressions (‘Full to the brim for some, not so much for others…’, thought Rodolfo sceptically as he heard these words). You must agree that the slower the journey, the more details one notices, and the quicker it is, the fewer details, which gives rise to generalizations, schemes, abstractions and philosophising.
‘The fastest journey, along the straightest line, is the one made by that moss-covered stone that lies on the steep bank of the Donets between two ancient oaks. The earth carries it round the sun and among the planets, and together with the sun and the planets it is hurtling at great speed in the direction of some distant god-knows-what. The depression in which it lies is its soft cabin, and its stone soul is thinking in gigantic, abstract, astronomical, philosophical propositions.
‘And now remember how we flew by aeroplane from Berlin to Moscow, turning our path towards these steppes. The planets were nowhere to be seen and the sun stood like a policeman amid a blue pond in the early springtime preventing the old men from catching carp during spawning season. The sun stood amid the blue pond, and we saw the earth.
‘The earth was like a geographical relief map. This was not the real, warm, bountiful earth, but rather an administrative view of the area showing geological, topographical, economic and agricultural perspectives. Smaller rivers flowed tidily into larger ones, fields were divided according to the six-field rotation system, the forested massifs were laid out as they should be in all the correct places, and people populated the earth at a predictable and consistent volume per square kilometre.
‘When we got on the train that was to heave us ever so slowly from Moscow to Kherson, the earth reared up on both sides of us like two naturalistic stage sets. It switched from being horizontal to vertical, turning from a geographical map into theatrical scenery. It baffled us with sparkling shingle and stones along the railway lines, it drew back the curtain of the pine trees from in front of a small, secluded lake, it led a horse on to the stage and the horse neighed in the meadow; the earth staged mass scenes involving traders and milkmaids at the stations – voices hummed and denarii clinked as they fell to the platform to pay for the milk. But the train kept moving, and the unmoving sets of the landscapes were once more in motion, those vertical plans of the earth.
‘Our journey become slower and more colourful when I got on my bicycle, with my pack on my back, and you, my ginger friend, Rodolfo, ran behind me. Our straight path became crooked and capricious, there were no rails to limit my light wheels, and the earth lay on two levels – vertical and horizontal. Ground squirrels danced by the road and plunged into their burrows, the scent of wild thyme filled the air, a dung beetle solemnly crossed the rails – and I, pointing my wheel in his direction, crushed his beetly life with a tasty splat - sparrows twittered and, like a handful of millet, scattered themselves before the bicycle. A cloud of dust rose in the air: the tyres hissed along the path, my keys, like a metal wellspring, gurgled in my kitbag and a sprig of mugwort, caught up in my spokes, rattled, registering the turning of the wheels.
‘And now we leave the bicycle in the village and leave the path. We move very slowly, all our plans are forgotten, and only embodied bodily life remains. Now my feet, and not wheels, trample the dust and grass, and my vision and hearing and sense of smell are so full of living life that I am simply unable to describe it fully. Slowly, slowly, we move through the steppe.
We wander and sway and grow weightless in the steppes. Slowly and freely we enter the endless freedom of the steppes. By your tense back, your burning eyes, your vigorous tail, I see, my ginger friend Rodolfo, that you have entered most completely into the steppe. Your childhood, your years of rigorous study, your refined education, all this disappears like a dream in the face of the sun-drenched expanses of the steppe. You, subtle and ironic Irishman, you have already become a wild hunter of the fields.
[2] Humming dum
It was the middle of August, and Don Jose Pereira and his friend, the red setter Rodolfo, were travelling through the distant steppes. It was also the middle of the day, and the sun was almost in the middle of the sky. They were making their way towards a geodetic survey tower, beyond which duck country began. That’s what Don Jose’s host, the Kherson villager Sereda, told him. Don Jose and Rodolfo were right in the middle of their hike through the distant steppe.
The steppe was very wide, the steppe was everywhere, it was above them, on all sides, and in front of them. The steppe spread like an enormous disc all around them, in all directions, round and endless. Those who live among mountains and hills, on the high banks of rivers, or in humid damp forests, would not see the steppe as they walked through this endless disc. It was not there. The steppe is that which is not there. There are no mountains, no woods, no lakes. There is nothing but a great, brazen disc, above which shimmers a mystical, sparkling mist. The copper edges of the great universal disc quivered, and vibrating circles span towards the horizon as though speeding on rails. And the traveller had to reach the very middle of the day in the steppe to be able to feel the latter’s million intoxicating voices.
There was a dum in the steppe. The dum hummed from beneath the earth, from among the roots of the dusty, sunburned plants, the dum fell out of the sky, raced against the sound of the grass, tumbled through the mist and the patches of sun, died down in the whisper of last year’s sawdust and then grew again: it glided through the grass, exploded into a wild, monotonous Mongolian symphony, howled and deafened those who heard it; it beat its wings madly against the intractable copper disc; it whistled, screeched, shrieked, and then again, falling still on the low lying ground, the dum scattered among the quiet sounds of the grass, faded, and disappeared into the earth, leaving behind it the dried-up tears of salty black earth.
Pereira and Rodolfo walked as though asleep. Some distance off to their right, several huge figures loitered around some giant haystacks. They were loading wheat onto carts, and Don Jose Pereira, who was not well-versed in political economy, mistook them for the proletariat.
[...]
The friends were now walking along the bottom. Instead of mountains and valleys, the steppe has a top and bottom. At first sight, there is no difference between them, but an old steppe hand will notice immediately that on top the horizon is wider and the grasses are different from those on the bottom. The grass on the bottom is slightly greener, and it dries out later in the year.
[3] Entering the steppe
The sun scorched the steppe, rained fiery droplets onto the long barrel of the Sauer, held its breath, entered Don Jose’s soul and squeezed burning droplets from his dark skin. He was burning up and burning out under the sun. He felt as though everything that had kept him alive until that moment was burning up, his thoughts, the familiar structures of his worldview and his habits all burned and disintegrated. He forgot everything he knew. The sun scorched his memory. He forgot who he was and where he came from and why had had come to this place. He had long ago entered the steppe, and now the steppe had entered him. He felt as though all that he had been before was escaping from him with lightning speed down the blinding barrels of his gun and across the horizon. His ‘I’ flashed on the horizon, it was a fly thousands of versts away from him at the edgeend of the endless path of the two, mirror-like barrels.He dropped his rifle, and his ‘I’ sank behind the horizon.
A new sort of blood, drunken and more bitter than wormwood, flowed through his veins and flooded his head. He felt clearly that he had been burned to ashes and was born anew. He was no longer Don Jose Pereira, intellectual and tyrant-fighter, but Danko Kharytonovych Pererva, man of the steppe and member of the Steppe Regional Executive Committee.
[4] Changing river, changing forest, a dense mesh of sounds
Look, our boat is gliding round the thirteenth bend in the river, and now the entire landscape will change completely, as though some stage director had switched on the forest lamps instead of the steppe ones.
The water becomes dark, quiet, and deep. The water becomes four times wider, but three quarters of it is darkened by the shadow of the tree-covered mountains. If you were to close your eyes at the thirteenth bend, you would, when you opened them, feel as though you had been transported together with the boat to a different clime, thirty degrees to the north. It is cold and damp here. The sycamores and oaks come to the dark river’s edge and drape their ragged sleeves across the water. The boat passes the final inlet and black poplars appear on the left bank. A heavy cloud docks above the great river and drops its anchors over the forest.
The mountain has obscured half the world to us, and this is only the first and smallest mountain. The second is higher, the third higher still, and the fourth even higher than that – thus the mountains rise with each river bend.
You see that the forest is tranquil and quiet. The wolves are asleep in their lairs far from the river and come down to the water at night to drink. There are no people, but there are wild goats in the very deepest parts of the forest.
And you hear in the silence a watery sound, a note, the trill of a woodwind instrument in an orchestra. Now it is quiet, now it chirrups somewhere far away, as though some bird is flitting from one mountain to another, trailing behind it a ribbon of watery, slightly hoarse, indistinct and misty sounds.
This bird, with its wooden throat, is the first flute of the Switzerland of the Steppes. It is in fact the sound of the wooden bells hung around the necks of cows so that any lost animal can be easily found.
Now look above the forest, you can see, above the treetops, that at the very peak of the mountain there hang transparent, vertical columns of smoke, as though a dozen Abels have simultaneously lit their fires in the heavenly forest.
They waver slightly whenever a breeze passes, and then straighten themselves out again. They look as though someone had stretched out long, narrow fishing nets to dry and had fasted one end to the clouds and the other to the forest.
Those, my Alceste, are mosquitoes, and they are not hovering over the forest, but rather over us. It is impossible for us to orientate ourselves in relation to the air, and what is floating right above our own noses often seems to us to be floating somewhere above the distant forest.
In the history of hunting there are many examples of hunters grabbing their rifles and shooting at flies, mistaking them for ducks flying above the bushes.
You will have noticed some time ago that between the watery trills there is another, higher, cleaner, more drawn-out sound.
This is the second flute, the piccolo of the Switzerland of the Steppes. And you can see who is playing that flute.
Don’t those swallows that are flying above the mountain seem somehow larger than they should be? And wouldn’t you say that their wings don’t quite have that sickle moon shape that they should have? Ah, there goes one of those swallows now: her wings are shaped more like a half moon and they remind one of sun shining through smoke. The wings are pale orange and the feathers are pale blue at the ends.
This is indeed a piccolo. This is merops apiaster, which, they say, is the only remnant of this region’s tropical fauna, from the time before the great wandering of the earth’s icecaps.
Folks call these birds bee-eaters because they love more than anything to hunt bees.
But now a far more colourful gem darts along the riverbank – he had been sitting among the reeds when our boat startled him. This is a kingfisher, as the English call him, though we call him a syniovud – a blue fisherman.
And the farther the boat sails into the depths of the forest, the denser and richer the sounds become. The wooden bells and cries of the bee-eaters are joined by a metal tympany, sharp and harsh – this is the sound of the heron. Then one hears the clarinet-cockerels of the orchestra: the wild, high-pitched screech of hawks and falcons. And underneath all of this, like the evening chirruping of crickets, is a dense mesh of sounds produced by all sorts of smaller, singing birds.
[5] The first one to notice
Meanwhile, on the surface of the living earth, remarkable, profound changes on a most unimaginable scale had begun. In the damp, high grass next to the mallard lake, a dissonant, grating sound could be heard, despite the fact that only three bushes away a crowd of people was thrashing around looking for Don Jose Pereira. This was a corncrake, who was the first to react to these seismic changes. Its scraping cries were long and terrifying, its yellow eye sought out among the grassroots a blue dung beetle, which was sniffing its way towards a fresh pile of horse manure that the faithful horse Volodka had gifted to the forest. That beetle also felt the change that had occurred in nature. The beetle breathed deeply, drawing fresh air into his powerful trachea, breathed again, and again, and understood that it was time to stop walking and start flying towards the sweet scent of the horse’s gift. Brrzz! The blue dung beetle took flight, but he promptly bumped into an aspen branch and tumbled to the ground in a bad temper. Rising on its long, yellow legs, the corncrake interrupted its melancholic cacophony and ate the beetle, crushing its blue shell like a nut. The corncrake then felt like taking a drink, but something had happened in nature and he once again took up his grating cry from the grass beside the mallard lake.
[6] Beginnings coming into being
In the mallard lake a certain beginning was coming into being. Everything was quietly overgrown with sedge, which, like sheafs of wheat, stood up in bunches. Among the sedge, abundant duckweed lived quietly and floated eternally. Willow bushes hung over the balmy banks, half covering the little lake so that it looked like a watery eye, half closed under thick, green eyelashes. The eye nevertheless peered through the clear, watery opening in the middle of the pond, and the pond reflected the sky, and in the iris of that eye there grew iris and rushes and reeds.
The mallards slept near this pond, their heads tucked under their wings. The most delicate sun-wind, so slow and gentle like the hands of a watch, pushed their feathery bodies from among the reeds towards the open water; in their dreams, the mallards sleepily and instinctively resisted the current with their feet and, without waking up, steered themselves back among the sedge.
The old drake, who was moulting and bothered by lice, was the first to wake up. The old warrior stretched out his head on his wiry neck, which already bore its white winter ring, and breathed in the air. He understood that it was not the lice that had woken him. Some strange changes could be felt in the air, in nature, and he could no longer sleep. He flapped his wings and hissed. Nearby, a young female mallard, his latest lover and a faithful student of his ancient wisdom, quacked in response.
[7] Mist
Neither Doctor Leonardo, nor beautiful Alceste, nor the kind woodcutter could yet feel the secret change that was coursing through nature. They once again ascended the steep path to the kind forester’s chalet, and, in that same clearing where the lovers had once lost one another, they now had to stop and rest. The lower part of the clearing was still bathed in sunlight, but the upper part was already sunk in damp shadow. There, beautiful Alceste picked out a tree stump to sit on, but, before she reached the spot, she saw something remarkable down below at the foot of the hill.
[...]
Meanwhile, nature cast down on them, like a pear tree shedding its blossom, sign after sign that evening had come; the sun dropped below the earth. Among the rye, a hare awakened. Taking no chances, he immediately took fright and fled; having run half a kilometre, however, he suddenly became conscious of how wonderful life in the rye smelled, and he returned to his grazing.
The fog, like a silent catfish, crept soundless across the land, swallowing all the rivers, streams and lakes, and on the mallard lake the ducks became restless. They began to stretch and beat their wings more frequently; a young female duck anxiously called out to her fellow birds in the neighbouring lakes and waited for their reply. At the fringe of the forest a fox emerged, creeping from its burrow and sniffing intently the warm scents that floated on the air. Finally, having identified the scent of a dead sheep from among the chaotic chorus of ground squirrel, frog, dog, human, cow, horse and hare, he made his choice and made off in the direction of that particular delicacy. ‘That is the evening mist!’ said Doctor Leonardo as he reached the damp shadows and also became aware of the great change in nature. Half of the bridge across the Donets was still there, but the other half was gone – what was there, however, was a shimmering white cloud that had already swallowed up the roadside willows and had drunk up half the water in the great Donets.