The novel this week is Deathless by Catherynne Valente, a retelling of the Russian folktale of Koschei the Deathless set against the background of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.
Marya Morevna is a girl in Leningrad, who doesn't fit in because she's experienced magic and seen the world naked. She is spirited away by Koschei the Deathless, Tsar of Life, who celebrates life by surrounding himself with both excessive pleasure and pain. He takes Marya away from communism and showers her in luxury but takes her will from her. There's a never ending war against the Tsar of Death that is always going poorly, because Death always wins and when Koschei's soldiers are killed, they join the ranks of the other side. Mayra enjoys the luxury and attention at first, but is worn down by the endless war, so when Ivan, a human who's destined to come tempt her back to Leningrad, shows up, she goes with him back to the human world to try to see what she could have been if she had never known magic. This takes her right into the siege of Leningrad.
There's a lot to talk about here, so there are things that I'm not going to talk about in detail even though they could have their own lengthy discussions. First, there's the unhealthy relationships Marya has with both Koschei and Ivan. They're both toxic with uneven power dynamics and emotional manipulation. I don't believe anyone in this story loves each other, but rather they love the idea of each other. Although the characters romanticize these relationships, the narrative makes it clear that this is pretty messed up. This is so rare to find, and I appreciate it.
Secondly, there's the issue of cultural appropriation (which has been rearing its ugly head at me with alarming frequency over the last few weeks.) Valente isn't Russian (her husband and his family are, but she isn't), so she's tapping into these iconic characters of a culture that's not her own and morphing them quite a bit. I didn't know she wasn't Russian until I was finished, and I'm not familiar with these folktales, so I really enjoyed it. The reviews I've read since finishing, however were split, even amongst Russian readers. Some people laud her as capturing the Russian spirit, while other people are horribly offended. I can't speak to any of this since I don't know enough about it and no one needs my opinion about it, but if you're looking at reading this book, be aware that this issue is there.
What I really want to talk about is the language, because this book is absolutely beautiful. (I cried during the siege of Leningrad, and although almost anything sets me off lately, it's been a while since the waterworks were caused by a book.) I talked last week about what structures of language make a story's tone identifiable as a fairy tale, and I want to dive into that today because this whole book is written in that style.
There are quite a few things that crop up in this story. First, let's talk about repetition. So many times in Deathless, things will happen three times, changing only a little bit between happenings. Marya watches a bird fall out of a tree, turn into a man, and then knock on the door to marry one of her sisters. A second and third bird then come to marry her other two sisters and the passage is repeated almost verbatim each time. Through very subtle differences (the type of bird, what the guy is wearing, how her sisters kiss him, and what kind of hat he buys her) we see the passage of time as Russia changes and the idea of what a proper husband looks like changes. It also makes it feel like a story that could be remembered and repeated, something that could stick around through an oral tradition. Even though the passage is a couple pages long with plenty of description each time a bird shows up, by the third go around you know the beats. It's like the counting songs I sing to my baby.
It gives the story a sense of inevitability. The next round is going to happen almost exactly as it did last time. Or as Ivan says late in the book after he's told Marya two thirds of a story, "Of course you know what I will say next, Marousha. You know this is a story, and you know how stories transpire." Which is a common thing in fairy tales. You pretty much know what will happen. The secrets aren't well kept. Since this whole book was a prolonged fairy tale, we get a lot of that. Long before they happen, we know Koschei will come for her and then Ivan will come for her, we know she'll go with them, and we know she'll be in Leningrad for the siege. In fact, you know all the historical beats this will hit if you paid attention in World History in tenth grade.
This sense of inevitability makes it so that cause and effect are treated differently than they are in other narratives. Marya is destined to go with Ivan, and even though she doesn't really want to, she does anyway, because she knows she's going to. This weird kind of internal logic comes out in most fairy tales. Hansel and Gretel find a house made of candy so (of course) they decide to eat it. The shepherd's daughter tells the lindworm that she'll take off a layer of her clothes if he takes off a layer of his skin so (of course) he takes off a layer of his skin. The other half of this is that magic happens and no one bats an eye. Hansel and Gretel find a house that is (of course) made of candy. The king tells the shepherd's daughter that she'll marry his lindworm son, and she's like, "of course your son's a lindworm." Fairy tales abide by their own internal logic that doesn't match so well with reality.
So, weirdly, despite the wonky cause and effect, the flat characters, the deus ex machinae, and the dropped plot points that pervade fairy tales, these stories convey a sense of "this happened and it happened like this and don't question it because it's not worth it." It's counterintuitive. If I was going to convince someone that something happened, I'd want everything to make sense and feel real. But true stories don't always make sense, so this ends up working.
Going back to the backstory fairy tales of last week, it makes sense that they worked so well because they said, "This is what happened," and because they brought us to a conclusion we already knew: how the characters reacted in the present.
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Next week: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
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