Голомяное пламя

by Dmitry Novikov, Дмитрий Новиков

Дмитрий Новиков родился и живет в Карелии. Учился в медицинском институте, служил на Северном флоте. Автор книг "Муха в янтаре", "Вожделение", "В сетях Твоих". Лауреат "Новой Пушкинской премии".
Герой нового романа "Голомяное пламя" отправляется на берега северных озер и Белого моря за настоящим, которое неожиданно оказывается неотъединимо от недавнего прошлого. На фоне мощной северной природы драма отдельного человека здесь и сейчас начинает казаться ничтожно малой, а трагедия народа - непоправимо большой.
"Здесь всё рядом, близко, сцеплено неразрывно друг с другом - белое и черное, пьянство и честность, неистовость и покой. Здесь главная русская свобода, обещанием свободы попранная".

Genres: Fiction, Russia

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Vishy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read some contemporary Russian literature and so picked up Dmitry Novikov's 'A Flame Out at Sea'.

The story told in the book navigates multiple time periods, the early 1910s, the 1930s, the 1970s, the early 2000s. There is also a plot arc which spans the 16th century. The main story is about Grisha who makes trips to the Russian North to connect with his roots, and his grandfather, who inspired him deeply, and their beautiful relationship. Through their stories, the story also describes how the Russian North has transformed across the years, especially through the 20th century, from the pre-Revolution days to the communist era to the contemporary time. The part of the story which happens in the 1930s is heartbreaking. The story is sometimes told through the first person and sometimes through the third person.

The book is a beautiful love letter to the Russian North, to the White Sea, to the salmon, to the Pomor way of life. Dmitry Novikov's prose is gentle and soft and contemplative and his descriptions are beautiful and haunting and are such a pleasure to read. I couldn't stop highlighting my favourite passages from the book – there were so many of them.

I loved 'A Flame Out at Sea'. It is worth reading just for the beautiful, haunting descriptions of the Russian North.

I'll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.

"Ask anyone whether he knows what happiness is. It’s not a quiet pier, when there’s no wind and that is already bliss. Rather, it’s a sharp instant that comes like a bite, when your whole body is suddenly pierced by what feels like pain, but it’s not pain, its joy. And your soul feels a bit lighter, as if the Mother of God up above was smiling, and you caught a glimpse of this smile and realized that it was meant for you and no one else. That tearful moment might be a kiss from your child. Or the sudden vastness of the sea, when you come from behind a rocky cape into the open sea. Or a young, inexperienced, wise night. But for me, happiness will forever be the first salmon that I ever saw, when it leaped out into the sunlight from the dark water, and froze for an instant in the rainbow of spray that flew up into the sky with it. It was nearly the first time that my mother had ever let me walk down to the river alone. I was crawling among the bushes and looking for different bugs and spiders to study them. Then I suddenly heard a splash so loud that it scared me. I looked out from the little promontory and there it was flying up. The day was dim, overcast, but there a heavenly light which shone right down on the fish from the clouds. Ever since then, whenever someone says that God does not exist, for me there is no question : I saw it, I know."

"For me, there is nothing better in life than to go along the White Sea coast in a canoe when the weather is fine. The beauty of this border region is capable of driving you mad if you are weak in spirit. That is why the road leading here is so difficult; so that a person can grow stronger before they reach here. But once you are on the water, you move along without fearing anything. Just look carefully at the sky, the wind, the clouds, it makes your soul open wide. You admire, drink in and absorb the grace of this place – it will later serve you as a reserve to draw on after countless years of a gray existence. The coasts here are rocky, red granite – that is if you are going towards the North, towards Chupa and Keret. But if you are going south, there are fewer bare stones, the coast is even lower, and only rarely, among the swamps, will a smooth opening or a steep promontory stick out. In both places two colors dominate the coasts: red and green. They are not bright colors but saturated, thick, somewhat muted yet strong, speaking directly to one’s soul and lending a sense of calm to the eyes. The sea, if it is blocked by islands, is like a wide, slow-moving and static river that flows off towards an endless distance from which nothing returns. If the islands are far away, they seem to hang in the air, merging with the clouds and confirming their beauty with their lightness. It seems like it would be enough to blow and they would be swept away like a merry procession. But if it is open sea, then this is a feast for the soul. I do not know, I cannot understand why that open, blue, flat expanse awakens all the best emotions in a person. You feel the joy of freedom and pity for those who cannot share that joy with you, as well as a primitive sense of bravery, when you can trust only in God and your own courage."

"When the juice was ready to drink, Grisha’s father would take from a paper bag a sweet roll that he had bought beforehand. The roll had powdered sugar sprinkled on it and was already wonderful in itself. But if Grisha washed it down with the salty tomato juice, it was delectable. At various times in his life, Grisha often looked back on these trips to the shop with his father, on the juice and the roll, and could never understand why he remembered this, what was so special about those things. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly it came to him: perhaps this was the main Russian sentiment: when things turn sweet, but they are followed immediately afterwards by salt. To ensure that you don’t enjoy things much, you don’t grow weak by allowing yourself too much, so that you keep sober. This sentiment, this constant readiness for the salt that follows on sweetness, is instilled in a person starting from childhood. Yet, at the same time, it is so much sharper, more delicious than the two tastes alone, for then they would lose much more than simply being divided in half. Salt and sweetness together, at the same time, one right after the other, inseparable. Plus, the knowledge that it would always be that way – salt following on sweetness – makes you not just stronger and faster, not just twice as much, but far more. It enables you to stand ready, to survive. Salt in turn after sweetness. Salt for sweetness."

Have you read 'A Flame Out at Sea'? What do you think about it?

[Rhoda · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This was my read the world selection for Russia.

Told in stories across multiple times including the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1970s and the early 2000s, the main part of the story is about Grisha who makes a trip to the White Sea in the Russian North to revisit his roots and his grandfather, who he had a special relationship with.

This is very much an ode to nature and landscape and the writing is exceptionally beautiful. While I wouldn’t call it poetic exactly, it’s quiet, calm and meditative. I don’t usually include quotes, but will for an example: “ The weather became heavenly. An awesome blue sky with cirrus clouds, in a pearly color tinted by the high setting sun that was ready to become, right away, the dawning sun, as if it were merely going for a dip in the calm sea.”

The time periods jump around and there is no linear story. In fact there is not much of a storyline period, as it’s almost more just reflections. Whilst the writing is luminous, there is a lot about fishing, canoeing and fish in general which if not of great interest to you, does get a little dull, which was the case for me. Somewhere around a 3.5-3.75 rating for me, so am going with ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a novel about the Russian North, the land of the Pomors, a landscape of lakes and forests, bears and fish. A place in which the protagonist Grisha spent much of his childhood with his grandfather, and to which he is now drawn in a quest for meaning and belonging. It’s a non-linear narrative, moving between different eras, from the ancient monasteries and hermits to the Soviet camps to the present day, exploring the impact of religion, Communism, Stalinism and the new post-Soviet world. Grisha remembers the grandfather who taught him so much about the skills needed to survive in such a harsh land, but this grandfather had a secret which only gradually comes to light and brings into question everything Grisha remembers about him. For at the centre of the novel is a crime which still casts a long shadow. It’s an atmospheric and compelling novel with vivid descriptions of the environment and the life of the local inhabitants, dependent as they are on nature’s bounty, nature which can be as unforgiving as it is bountiful. A single individual is insignificant against such a backdrop and yet each individual is significant to themselves, and the suffering of those who found themselves here is explored with insight and empathy. The episodic and fractured narrative works well to accentuate the fractured lives of those who ended up here. The peaceful, isolated life on the lakes and in the forests is in stark contrast to the cruelty that the Russian North has so often been witness to. The book is slow, measured and contemplative, and I found reading it an immersive experience. Some knowledge of the history of the region helps in appreciating the book, but the essential motif of a man searching for connection is a universal one.

[Jenni]

In an unconscious quest for one's roots, a young man relates his journey to the Pomor region in the Russian North. His life and family background is revealed in chapters set in different places and different times in the past. Some chapters are told from the viewpoint of his grandfather, whose obscure past hides a crime that has stained or at least made ambivalent the connection to place for his descendant. An important theme is a sense of belonging and the disruption of that place-connectedness. The connection to place is mediated in the landscape of the White Sea, in the figure of the salmon and in the act of fishing it, whereas the disconnectedness to place is brought about by a human crime, one which is about betrayal of one's roots.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Flame Out at Sea by Dmitry Novikov took me down some very interesting rabbit-holes!  And that is why I like books from Slavic-Lit specialist Glagoslav Publications, because their books so often take me to places entirely new to me.

However...

Structured in multiple time periods beginning briefly in the present, with sojourns in 1975 and 1913, and then offering what seems to be a quasi religious fragment, the early pages of this novel confused me so much that I decided to read the introduction by literary critic Elena Pogogorelaya. And then I was really mystified.

Fortunately I found a review by Richard Tempest from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, which was much more enlightening.  Armed with this background information from  Professor Tempest's review at the LA Review of Books) and Michael Orthofer's overview of the features of pre- and post revolutionary Russian Literature and its contemporary situation in The Complete Review's Guide to Contemporary World Fiction, I went back to the novel...

There is a throughline.  It's the story of Grisha, whose tales traverse time and space but are always situated in the north, in Karelia near Russia's border with Finland.  It is this representation of regional Russia that makes Novikov's writing distinctive.  Because, as Tempest tells us, Russia’s novelists tended to depict their country as a geographical and demographic sameness. He quotes Erich Auerbach, who fled Nazi Germany to Istanbul where he wrote his magnum opus, a history of western literature from Homer to Woolf, with only limited access to works of literature in translation:

'With the exception of the two principal cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, whose distinctly different characteristics are clearly recognized from literary sources, it is a rare occurrence if a city, hamlet, or province is identified.' And: 'The landowners, civil servants, merchants, clergymen, petty bourgeois, and peasants seem everywhere to be ‘Russian’ in much the same way.' (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946, 1953 in English) by Erich Auerbach, quoted in Tempest's review.)

While we might quibble with Auerbach because he wrote Mimesis so long ago and because from my own reading I would add Siberia as a distinctive setting, we can assume that a contemporary professor such as Tempest quotes him because he has read enough Russian Lit to confirm Aurebach's summation.

So... armed with a rudimentary knowledge of the many politically divided Karelias and their history, and referring at times to Wikipedia's map of the many Karelias which geographically and culturally straddle Finland and Russia....

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/01/10/a...

[tomsyak · Rating 2 out of 5]

Деревенщина 2.0. И какой контраст с творчеством Горчева, с которым Новиков дружил и путешествовал!

[Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Beautiful descriptions of the White Sea and environs, memorable characters, and some Russian mysticism.

One very small item that repeatedly caught my attention was the use of the word row where the word paddle was the better choice when discussing the effort required to move canoes forward. This may simply reflect regional differences in usage. In the U.S. a canoe is paddled by paddler facing forward and using paddles. Rowing is done in boat with oars and oarlocks where the rower sits facing rearward. This is a small thing in an otherwise lovely book