Publisher's Synopsis
In this second volume Kazakov presents more of his engaging character-cameos and North Russian scenic compositions. His pristine settings are once again living presences described with the touch of a "psychologist of nature," to quote one of his admirers, the poet Andrei Voznesensky. This was a region whose inhabitants even as late as the second half of the 20th century were still largely unaffected by the complexities of modernity: folk for whom the arena of their daily activities was the primordial one of their surroundings; that is, an immediately-sensed universe extending from the near and at first glance ordinary, outwards to the heavens of the northern lights and the very stars. It is, or was until recently, still possible beside the White Sea and its adjacent forests and tundra to daily observe country people living in that sort of integration with nature, accepting without question the ocean, the land, and the seasons as the determining powers in their lives and be hardly aware of any other; it was certainly possible a generation ago in Kazakov's time, even in a nation which for years had been frenetically industrializing, and whose relation with its environment was relentlessly exploitative. But in the cities as well, including that modernizing hothouse which was the Soviet Union's Moscow, some sense of that unity with nature still lingers in these stories, and not merely because references to climate are inescapable in Russian writing. For Kazakov simply saw no opposition between urbanized, technologically evolving humans, and the rest of that universe we call "natural." An intercity bus or elektrichka or silver-bellied aeroplane was to him as remarkable, but not more so, as any outgrowths produced by other organisms or by inorganic matter. If his tales of hunting on land and whaling in Arctic waters predominate, if they define his milieu and have established his reputation among those who have discovered his writing, it was because to his retrospective imagination the hunt and its associated culture was in his time a uniquely genuine though departing instance of that very integration with nature, by the way it partook in nature's immemorial cycle of life and death that in turn sustains life again.
