Zuleikha by Yuzel Gakhina

Sometimes it seems she is already dead. The people around her are emaciated, pale, and spend entire days whispering and quietly weeping: so who are they if not the dead? This place--frigid and crowded, the stone walls wet from damp, deep under the ground, without a single ray of sun--what is it if not a burial vault? Only when Zuleikha makes her way to the latrine, a large echoing tin bucket in the corner of the  cell, and feels her cheeks warm with shame is she convinced that, no, she is still alive. The dead do not know shame.

Zuleikha lives with her husband Murtaza and mother-in-law--a domineering woman she thinks of to herself as the Vampire Hag--on a small farm in Tataria, in the south central Soviet Union. She is a devout woman, dedicated to the service of her husband, whom she believes Allah has placed over her, but sometimes she sneaks an offering of candy to the local spirits, to convince them to protect the graves of her daughters, all three of whom died in infancy. Murtaza and the Vampire Hag make her life a hell, but Zuleikha does not know there are darker days to come: when Murtaza is killed by a Red Army officer--because he is a kulak, or peasant landholder, who refuses the collectivization of his farm--Zuleikha, pregnant again, is placed on a train to Siberia, where she will be dekulakized. That is, interned in a distant gulag.

Zuleikha has the scope of a grand historical novel: its subject is not just Zuleikha, whose meekness will be molded into assertiveness and self-determination by the harsh life of the gulag, but the gulag itself, which is a conglomeration of other kulaks and political prisoners from Leningrad, all of whom must come together to form a community in Siberia. The dissident painter, the agronomist, the denounced doctor, each of these takes their role in the gulag, which grows from a clearing in the forest--there aren't even any buildings when they first are dropped off and forced to build shelter to survive the coming winter--to a bustling village in its own right. This happens under the aegis of Ignatov, the officer who killed Zuleikha's husband, and who himself experiences a kind of exile, flung by his superiors to the corner of the country, and who quickly falls in love with the widow of the man he's killed.

Zuleikha has a funny historical perspective on the gulag. On one level, it's clearly a condemnation of the haphazard and zealous way that collectivization and the gulag system tossed thousands into suffering and death, but it's possible to see the ultimate success of the outpost, which becomes a town named Semruk, as a vindication of these systems also: hasn't it turned these people into productive citizens after all? Zuleikha struggles, I think, with the passing of time; seven years pass by in an instant, but when its pace slows it's full of wonderful moments. I liked, for instance, how Murtaza gives Zuleikha a poisoned lump of sugar to feed their livestock if he's taken; the lump sits in her pocket during the long godforsaken train ride like a ticket out of pain. But at the last minute, during a disastrous river crossing, the sugar melts away, showing symbolically that Zuleikha has only one option: to move forward.

Last summer I joined a website called Postcrossing that facilitates the sending of postcards to strangers around the world. I like to ask my would-be pen pals to recommend a book from their country; Zuleikha is the first of these suggestions I've been able to read. I can see why my Russian pen pal was so enamored with it--I don't know if the book is super-popular in Russia, but the fact that it has an English translation is probably a clue--it's the kind of sweeping historical tale that we seem to have mostly forgotten how to write these days. It reminded me of, perhaps, Doctor Zhivago with a little more mass appeal--which is pretty strong praise, I think.