Russia: This is not a travel book, but "an attempt to touch on the essence of Russia".
So, at least, we are told (or, perhaps, warned), in an introductory note by its translator. On the evidence of the pages which follow, the essence of Russia is a complex perfume, a symphony of warring notes: poetry, vodka, potatoes; fanaticism, indifference, despair. Mariusz Wilk is a Polish journalist whose work as Russia correspondent for a Paris-based magazine took him, over the years, from the political manoeuvrings of Moscow to the one-room huts of shepherds in the Altay mountains, from mammoth dope-smoking sessions with rock musicians in Leningrad to close encounters with the Mafia in Rostov-on-Don. His search for the soul of Mother Russia, however, took him even further afield - all the way to the Solovetsky Archipelago, a remote group of islands near the Arctic Circle. "On Solovky," he writes by way of explanation, "you can see Russia like the sea in a drop of water."
Islands at the edge of nowhere which are somehow central to the heart of all things Russian. It is, the reader gradually begins to realise, an exceedingly Russian conundrum. Yet here it all is, in historic black and white; in 1429 the first Orthodox monks built a monastery on the largest of the islands, and in 1923 the first group of anarchists and social revolutionaries were shot there. The Soviet Union used Solovky as a testing ground for new ideas and new technologies; the first hydraulic power station, the first labour camp, the latest missiles. The presence of the monastery ensured a centuries-long flow of what Wilk calls "pilgrims, nutters, neophytes and tourists"; the state, meanwhile, has used the island as a dumping-ground for every conceivable shade of dissident, from the inconveniently articulate to the downright weird, since the time of Ivan the Terrible. And in a final undignified irony, the ending of the Cold War and the unravelling of centralised power structures left Solovky, not free, just abandoned to the ravages of rust and rampant alcoholism.
The Journals of a White Sea Wolf aims to do much more than simply tell the story of Solovky - although for the first couple of dozen pages, it looks as if Wilk will have difficulty in doing even that. His method is elliptical, his style leisurely and meandering. A digression on style itself - using the example "I like tomato soup" - will suddenly switch to a detailed discussion of local varieties of fish. Short chapters, Roman numerals and a host of sub-divisions don't help the bewildered reader who, struggling to find a way through the maze of references, descriptions and observations, must skip back and forth to the glossary to check out the Russian terms with which the text is liberally laced. And what a glossary; not a glossary at all, but a series of essays of various lengths on concepts which turn out, of course, to be untranslatable. (As for the struggles of the translator, faced - as she explains in her introductory note - with untangling a host of playful puns from the Polish, let's not even go there).
Into the bargain, Wilk can be arrogant and pretentious. He has barely got going when he has a go at Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose study of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Imperium, is itself something of an icon for Western readers. "Impressive but superficial," says Wilk, among plenty of other things. "A comic book about the Empire." The great Solzhenitsyn also gets a bashing; a well-intentioned but, Wilk hints, tedious old sod. As for pretentious, try the glossary entry on potatoes, which concludes: "To translate kartoshka by potatoes is to take away its magical and life-giving sense, it is to translate/transfer reality itself (in the Latin sense transfero)". It's enough to drive the humble spud-eater back to Bill Bryson, let alone Kapuscinski.
But slowly, gradually, it stops being irritating and starts to make sense. Once you no longer have to look up muzhik or posyolok or shilo, you become dizzy with delight and are content to meander alongside Wilk in a kind of drunken stupor - which was, needless to say, his literary intention all along. And then, what a treat is in store. Not for nothing has this writer been compared to those masters of Mitteleuropa, Claudio Magris and Patrick Leigh Fermor - to which short but stellar list one might add the name of Barry Lopez, for The Journals of a White Sea Wolf is, at one level, a kind of Russian Arctic Dreams. There is immense beauty in the superb central chapter devoted to the burial of Tonya, Wilk's friend on Solovky and also a tour guide, poet, journalist and alcoholic, who jumped from a fifth-floor window in the mainland city of Arkhangel. There is stunning brutality, shocking poverty, black humour. There are deceptively casual musings on the nature of identity and the effects of solitude and the morality, or otherwise, of writing about other people's lives. There are unforgettable images of the Northern landscape; and the book ends with a brief, bizarre voyage to the Arctic "the point where the world meets the beyond" - which strays to the edge of sci-fi. Finally, there is the fact that Wilk still lives on Solovky: the most eloquent fact, maybe, of all.
The Journals of a White Sea Wolf By Mariusz Wilk. Harvill, 229 pp, £15.99
