Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse

Yuri Rytkheu was born in 1930 in Uelen, a village that sits on a barrier spit of land on the tip of the far northeastern Chukchi peninsula, just over sixty miles from Alaska. He died in 2008, and was one of Russia’s foremost Indigenous authors. He came of age around the time that the Soviet Union took control of the Chukchi Peninsula in 1923 and was amongst the first generation of Indigenous children schooled in the promises of socialism.

I have read and reviewed his other two books, <i>A Dream in Polar Fog</i> and <i>The Chukchi Bible</i>, both of which I highly recommend. They are all very different.

Rytkheu wrote this short short fable in 1975. Milkweed Editions published this English translation by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse in 2020. A young woman called Nau lives alone on the edge of an Arctic sea, where she falls in love with a whale. The whale, Reu, returns her adoration, and transforms into a man’s body to live with her. On a rocky spit of land by the sea, Nau gives birth to whale babies; they must live in the water, leaving Nau to worry for them, listening for their breath at night. Nau gives birth to human children, who learn to hunt from their father. They kill reindeer on the tundra and walruses on ice floes. They see their brother-whales, spouting in the deep. Reu and Nau grow old. Before Reu dies, he tells his children, “every whale is your brother. To be a brother does not require that you look the same. Kinship means much more than that.”

Nau lives to an old age, though nobody knows exactly how old, insisting that all people are her descendants, and that she created language because of her yearning to speak with Reu.

Though touching on a variety of genres, the beauty of the story is in the detailled descriptions of the landscape, the moss, lichen, and cloudberries that are so much a part of the permafrost tundra.
Rytkheu brings the rich heritage of the Chukchi people, their storytelling tradition and ecological knowledge to western literature.

His other two books are quite different as I said above. His first, A Dream In The Polar Fog, more of an adventure story, and his last, The Chukchi Bible, more cycnical, more political, reflecting a less enamored view of Soviet realities in the North.

This is the most beautiful of the three though, Rytkheu, thanks to his wonderful translator Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, bringing his world to ours.
It is a svelte novel with a far-ranging message, beseeching that we cease imagining ourselves as masters of the oceans before all our seas become “bereft of any sign of life.”

My GoodReads score 4 / 5