I love a journey story. ‘The Return’ by the same author is also a great journey story but I prefer this one, which I read first in Granta. Often in Russian short stories someone sets out for a destination. It’s common in Chekhov and it affords a great opportunity not just to describe scenery but to bring a place to life in the mind of the protagonist. You feel like you’re there on the journey with them. And there is literally no bigger country than Russia for providing the drug of evocation with snow and steppes, hovels and in the old stories, peasants, wood stoves, sleighs, troikas and so on. In this story we’re following the course of the eponymous river in the aftermath of the Russian civil war. A soldier’s journey forms the first part of the story but most of it is about life in the village when he gets there, as I see now that I’m re-reading it. When he returns he finds dire poverty and although he marries his sweetheart from before the war, their lives in the village are pitifully cold and poor.
First published in English translation in The Return and Other Stories, Harvill, 1999. Available to Granta subscribers to read online here
A Personal Anthology 