The Mushroom that Grew at the Steps to our World: Irina Poljanskaja and the Writing of Ecological Crisis
Jane
Costlow
I take as my point of departure for this paper two short works by
the contemporary writer Irina Poljanskaja: &Chachek;istaja
zona (first published 1991) and Rynok (1990).
In both these stories Poljanskaja addresses with extraordinary force
and subtlety the Faustian bargains of the modern world, turning her
attention to the killing legacies of nuclear science and technology
gone wild. In &Chachek;istaja zona the narrator's tale
begins in a hospital ward, where she is about to be operated on for an
undisclosed illness; it ends with a remarkable flash-back to her
childhood in a &shachek;ara&shachek;ka near &Chachek;eljabinsk, where
her father—we come to understand—worked on the Soviet
nuclear bomb. In Rynok another female narrator enacts a
Dantesque journey through a provincial market; the plastic, too
beautiful tomatoes that the peasant women offer become emblems of more
systematic kinds of dissemblance and deception.
My intention for this paper is to present a reading of both
works, focusing on Poljanskaja's ecological
concerns,
and on her perceptive understanding of the ways in which the legacies
of Soviet technological modernity inhere, as she puts it in
&Chachek;istaja zona, in the bones [of the
fathers'] children.
Nothing is lost without
trace,
her narrator insists; this becomes a kind of
credo—both artistic and ethical—for these two works of
fiction.
While the focus of this paper will be these two stories
(with some attention to biographical and socio-historical factors), I
also intend briefly to consider contemporary American ecological
writing, which presents interesting parallels to Poljanskaja's work.
At one point in &Chachek;istaja zona the narrator
listens with nearly physical disgust to èstradnye pesni which
celebrate a sentimental identification of women and
nature.
Her narrative suggests that we live in a world
in which such simple metaphors have become highly problematic. I would
like in particular to consider her perspective here in the company of
Bill McKibben (The End of Nature) and Terry Tempest
Williams (Refuge), two contemporary American writers who
similarly consider the ravages of environmental (in Williams' case,
nuclear) degradation, and the danger to us of sentimental metaphors
about the natural world.