17 September 2026
by Robert Chandler
White Moss, by Anna Nerkagi, tr. Irina Sadovina, Pushkin Press, London, 1 January 2026, Paperback, 192pp, ISBN 9781805333159
Anna Nerkagi is a Nenets, a member of an indigenous nomadic people, numbering around 50,000, in northwestern Siberia. The Nenets’ way of life – now threatened by global warming and oil and gas extraction – is centered on reindeer herding. Like most peoples that follow their traditional ways, the Nenets have a great reverence for the word – a reverence that can be sensed in every chapter of White Moss.
The story itself is simple. The novella begins with Alyoshka, aged 26, sullenly submitting to an arranged marriage. He is still blindly in love with Ilne, his childhood sweetheart, who left the community several years earlier for the big city. The community, however, sees it as necessary that Alyoshka should marry: “No grief, however intense, should stop the flow of life, just as a boulder thrown into a river would not turn its current.” Alyoshka does not accept this; for several years, he refuses to make love to his young wife. The novella ends with his gradual recognition that he has been acting selfishly and cruelly. Hearing his wife and mother working cheerfully together, he senses that he has been cutting himself off from the flow of life. “They did their hard work like two hands, skilfully and deftly. […] he would often hear them laughing as one, as though two springs were flowing next to each other, merging into a river: one brighter, the other muffled.”
Another important figure is an old man named Khasawa, who speaks his Word – his life-song – at some length. Here he describes his descent into alcoholism. “The devil had entered my soul, and it was fun to be with him. When I would come to my senses, I would see the sun, but I tried not to look at it. I would find my daughter in a heap of fur and could not wake her; she, too, was drunk. I would start the fire on my own and shiver next to it like a freezing dog. The warmth of the fire could not warm me. I had come to know a different fire: a black fire that did not warm but burned the soul.” Khasawa’s account of his recovery is no less convincing. Feeling pity for his mute daughter, realizing that he is leaving her almost without food, he begins to “repair his sick wings.” First, he sells sledges made years before by his father – “not ordinary ones but real, thin-legged, made of light wood and filled with the indescribable inspiration of a human being and an axe.” Then, having learned “the real value of life and joy,” he begins to make a living through making and selling such sledges himself. He ends his Word with the moral, “Live, but take care: don’t stumble over yourself!”
This is not a comic novel, but Nerkagi is capable of devastating wit. Vanu, another old man, makes a long and fruitless journey to ask for help from the representative of the Soviet authorities: “Vanu stopped the sledge near the house, long like a barn, where the current Soviet lived. He was not even Russian. Dug up by someone somewhere. He came from some kind of warm land, and here he was constantly cold, which was why he warmed himself up every day with a bottle. The percentage of alcohol in its contents corresponded to the temperature of his native land. Towards the end of the day he would get overheated and fall down where he stood. More often than not, he’d fall into his bed.”
Khasawa’s and Alyoshka’s stories both end on a note of uncertain hope. Nerkagi herself clearly believes that her people still have a future. After moving to the city of Tyumen, publishing her first books and joining the Union of Soviet Writers in 1978, she chose to return to her homeland. In 1990, she founded the Tundra School for Nenets children, which she still runs; many of her children are orphans. Her most recent publications are anthologies of Nenets proverbs, riddles and sayings.
Nerkagi wrote White Moss in Russian, not in Nenets. Her translator, Irina Sadovina, does not know Nenets. Nevertheless, between them, they take us into the heart of a deeply foreign world. The English is plain and transparent; the glossary of Nenets terms contains only nine words. The few similes are perfectly judged: “only deep in the bushes, now and again, the swift stitch of a wild grouse’s footprint ran steady like a seam made by a skilled woman.” Alyoshka, for his part, compares happiness to a sly fox: “as soon as you see it, before you can reach for the gun, its tail has already flashed behind a nearby bush.”
Such flashes of imagery do much to bring life to the book. Still more important, though, is Nerkagi’s and Sadovina’s ability to convey the Nenets’ reverence for the Word. Old Petko, the widowed father of Ilne, is described as replying to a simple question with “obvious shyness, as though he was afraid that a single word would take up unearned space in the tent.” In White Moss, too, there is no unearned word. This helps to evoke the space and silence that permeate this Arctic world, and it gives weight to the crucial moments when the characters speak their Word – their life-story or some heartfelt appeal – to one another or to the Fire that is as central to their lives as their reindeer.
I was actually a bit disappointed by this book. Although there is some effective imagery, I found it was a bit burdened by the need to convey the Nenets cosmology in a way which turned some of the characters into ideal types rather than convincing individuals. I found the ultimate message of collectivism over individualism a bit depressing!