9. ‘The Journals of a White Sea Wolf’ [Wilczy notes] by Mariusz Wilk [1998]
translated by Danusia Stok, London, Harvill, 2003.
Surprisingly (or not), the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 would hardly bring about the end of Polish-Siberian literature. To the contrary, the new political reality enabled Polish writers to explore Siberia in ways that were previously unobtainable, with great benefit for literature. This resulted in a wave of non-fiction books about Siberia (and Russian province, in general), from Ryszard Kapusciński’s The Empire (1993) and Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Biała gorączka (2009), to Michał Książek’s Jakuck (2013) and, more recently, Michał Milczarek’s Donikąd (2022) or Jędrzej Morawiecki’s Szuga, to name just a few.
Perhaps the most outstanding and original of these is the Siberian writing of Mariusz Wilk as it, in many ways, reverses the paradigm of Polish-Siberian literature. For one thing, Russia’s remote North as the place of living was not, as for most of his predecessors, a forced situation but a fully deliberate destination of choice. And unlike with most contemporary reporters, this was not a temporary situation: Wilk moved to the Solovetsky Islands in 1995, and eventually went on to spend almost 20 years in different, mostly Northern locations, before he was declared a persona non grata by the Russian regime in 2015.
This prolonged and self-imposed stay is central to Wilk’s literary (and existential) project. Its main goal was to ‘see Russia through the eyes of a Russian man and only then translate it into your own language [...]’, ‘live it in order to understand it’. In his new home on the White Sea, Wilk engages with the locals and shares the hardships of life in the remote North, immersing himself in old-Russian literature as he eventually becomes one of the locals. (At one point, perhaps the only thing that differentiates him from the rest of the community is his writing. But it’s a big difference.)
The choice of Solovki was not accidental. For Wilk, the islands – with its ancient monastic tradition but also history of the region’s (managed by the monks) colonization and, in the 20th century, a history of the Soviet labour camp (the first in the USSR) – become a Russia in miniature. Its distance from the centres of Russian political and cultural life allows him to see Russia better, or as Wilk repeats after Joseph de Maistre, to see better the spectacle which is Russia, something that has continued to fascinate him in this and several other books he went to write during these two decades.
Wilk’s writing is also unique in the way it debunks many Polish stereotypes concerning Russia (and writing about Russia). Whether it’s a sociological reportage from the banya or an insightful look at Russian alcoholism (which, as he claims, had reached apocalyptic dimensions in Solovki) – this writing never uses the condescending tone which is sometimes typical of writing about Russia. There are no easy answers, diagnoses or recipes here. Perhaps the only answer is the vast, immense and imposing Northern landscape that Wilk masterfully depicts – and which oftentimes seems to be the only proper measure of this reality.
However, Wilk’s greatest achievement in his Journals is perhaps that of forging a completely new language, an artificial and artistic dialect that amalgamates Polish with old-Russian, underscoring the oft forgotten underlying shared substratum of the Slavic languages and cultures. While this language rarely reaches the ideal set by the author himself (forging a language that is mutually comprehensible so as to not require a translation), it’s certainly a fascinating experiment and one that is central to Wilk’s entire existential project: living a life that is organically immersed in the local culture and nature, something brilliantly reflected in his cycle of books.