[Pushkin Press; 2026]
Tr. from the Russian and Nenets by Irina Sadovina
On her first day in Siberia on a short-term teaching assignment, a colleague handed Irina Sadovina a novella, telling her that it was written by the region’s most important author. The book was Anna Nerkagi’s White Moss. Sadovina tore through it that night in tears. Here was an Indigenous story about the impossibility of modernity that Sadovina recognized in her own life and in her own people, the Maris. Encountering White Moss would transform Sadovina’s career, leading her to quit academia to translate the book. This tale of desire, aging, grief, and community, out this year with Pushkin Press, has been translated from Russian and Nenets by Sadovina with great care. Brilliantly preserving Nerkagi’s lyricism and honesty, this translation tells the story of how members of a small Nenets community relate to one another when intergenerational cultural transmission is disrupted.
Anna Nerkagi is a fierce, enigmatic figure, both mystic and prophet. Born in 1951 in a reindeer herding camp on the Yamal Peninsula in the Siberian Far North, she is a preeminent Nenets writer and educator writing in Russian. Nerkagi burst onto the scene in 1977 with her first novella, Aniko of the Nogo Clan, in which a young, urbanized Nenets woman returns home to care for her elderly father. Nerkagi has published in fits: Ilir followed soon after Aniko, and White Moss and The Silent were released in quick succession between 1995 and 1996. The twenty-first century has brought the publication of Nerkagi’s poetry, several anthologies, and children’s books. Since 1990, however, Nerkagi’s primary focus has been educating Nenets children, particularly orphans, in modern and traditional Indigenous lifeways at a school she founded.
In the Soviet period, state boarding schools forcibly removed native children from their families. Helicopters would fetch the children from the tundra and fly them out. Nerkagi herself starting going to boarding school at just six years old. As she said in a 2000 interview with Oliver Ready for New Statesman, “it was always being drilled into our heads that our parents were filthy and louse-ridden, that we shouldn’t speak our own language.” White Moss deals, in part, with the fallout of Soviet “modernization” policies. How do different generations, and especially the young and the old, cope with the intrusion of modernity? How do they speak to each other to be understood? And what happens when ties of culture and tradition become burdensome, inexplicable?
White Moss begins with an unhappy wedding. Alyoshka, still pining for Ilne, resents the bride his mother forces him to marry. Ilne, who left her nomadic community for the city seven years ago, has yet to return. Her father, the widower Petko, feels alone and subsumed by grief. Both men exist in a fractured state outside of time, somewhere between Soviet modernity and Nenets social norms. At twenty-six, Alyoshka, behaves more like a teenager, while Petko, convinced there is no longer a place for him in the community, is ready to exit life ahead of schedule. There is Vanu, who tries to help his friend Petko, and Khasawa, who wanders into the story with emaciated reindeer and his own tale of terror. Then there are the women—Alyoshka’s mother, his new bride, and Vanu’s daughter—who, despite being left nameless, guide much of what transpires in White Moss.
Nerkagi’s interwoven narrative moves fluidly. The point of view expertly shifts between paragraphs, offering different outlooks on the same scene. On Alyoshka’s wedding night, after he has left his family tent to avoid his now wife, Nerkagi registers how his mother sits by the dying fire “afraid to look out and not see anyone,” and waits for her son to return. Sentences later, Alyoshka faces the absurdity of his outburst: “And where would he go? What for?” Much of the novella is shaped by the complex tension between mother and son and the roles each expects the other to play in their lives. Alyoshka, acutely aware that “he could not take up his father’s pride in the shape his mother had preserved it,” seeks escape via his feelings for Ilne. His heart is in the city with the girl he fell for at nineteen, and he resents that these feelings are not honored by his community. At times, White Moss feels like a text in which no character is capable of change. (Alyoshka storms out of his tent many, many times.) In his mother’s eyes, Alyoshka is a “person who played games” and who expects her to “crawl around on all fours, cleaning up after [him]” for the rest of his life. She knows what he does not: she is aging. Her hands are growing gnarled, and sooner than later, the flow of care she has extended to him all his life will need to flow back to her.
The stakes are high, for the survival of their family and their Nenets community is on the line. Alyoshka’s mother often turns for guidance and solace to her spirituality, speaking a Word to the Fire. White Moss makes clear that this is a solution of last resort; in earlier days, before Soviet attempts at eradicating Indigenous spiritual practices, she would have turned to a shaman. In the text, the tent’s Fire holds a hallowed place, and a conversation with it requires honesty in approach, lest it mete out further misfortune. Though Alyoshka’s mother asks the Fire to guide her wayward son, she turns over ultimate authority to its power, preserving tradition over his wiles: “If this son of mine wishes death upon you… burn him!”
The question of what children and parents owe to one another is central to the text. When newcomer Khasawa arrives to the camp, he relays the tragic events that have thrust him into a life of poverty. Forced at gunpoint to slaughter more reindeer than prudent to satiate the demands of a Soviet official (“a Black Wolf, a man who brought Death”), Khasawa learns just how important reindeer are to Nenets life. To be “reindeerless,” as Nerkagi writes, is an existential state. Not only is a reindeerless Nenets unable to migrate, they are rendered kinless. Reindeer, then, are “brothers in this life,” and can never be exchanged for money. Despite this new awareness, Khasawa once again culls his herd to sate the expectations of his children, who return home not to mourn the death of their mother, or to help Khasawa, but to ask for money. “It’s your duty, father… Russian parents, they help their children.” He cleans up the bloody snow afterward as if nothing happened.
After his wife’s death and his daughter’s seemingly permanent departure to the city, Petko is unclaimed by kin. He leaves his friend Vanu’s tent, renounces his name and his family, and lives sleeplessly among the reindeer herd, whose calves “appeared one after the other, as though hurrying to see the big world sooner and understand what it was.” For much of the story, Petko does not heed the novella’s beginning, which warns that “no grief, however intense, should stop the flow of life.” It is only after he gives Alyoshka his last Word that this flow resumes: “Today I saw, as though for the first time, how the sun rose, leaning its cheek against the edge of the earth. And I realized: the death of those who are dear is not the death of the sun.” Here, as throughout the novel, Sadovina’s beautiful translation captures Nerkagi’s spare, emotive prose.
Despite its often brutal themes, Nerkagi’s prose sings. This is a novella which surprises on the level of language and plot. Birds are invoked throughout the text: there are “bird-parents” and “bird-brides,” a “bird-disease,” suffered by those who abandon their homeland, but who are unable to stop themselves from flying in circles above it with longing, as well as ravenous “guest-children, raven-children.” In at least two moments, the narrator’s perspective shifts into the first person, as if the author’s voice breaks through the text and transforms it, however briefly, into a sermon on trees and the importance of confession. White Moss preserves Nenets terms in the text, offering a glossary at the novella’s end to help the reader navigate likely unfamiliar terrain. The original’s emotional acuity is alchemized into English. Despite Nerkagi’s preeminent status as a Siberian writer, surprisingly few translations of her work exist. Sadovina, who also translates from Mari, is the first to translate White Moss into English; this excellent translation is even more remarkable when you consider that it is Sadovina’s first.
Sam Karagulin is a writer, translator, and critic. He works as an assistant editor at The Yale Review. He lives in New York with his cat, Blue.
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