Cockrell-Ferre, Carina. “Lousha (Луша)”. In Russian. Garden City Press, London, 2022. ISBN 978-1471-082092; also Kyiv: Drukarskyi dvir Olega Fedorova, 2022, 400 pp. ISBN 978-8082-19-2.
“Lousha” is a debute novel, in Russian, by Carina Cockrell-Ferre. The author is a freelance journalist who lives in the United Kingdom since 1991, but was born and raised in Russia, in the large provincial city of Voronezh. In her historical novel, this toponym is abridged to Vorozh (from vorozhit’, to divinate). The book involves one in an unstable reality often extending into a dreamlike fantasy, a mixture undoubtedly Carrollian in spirit.
The story covers most of the 20th century history. Тhree generations of women are the protagonists: Hanna Wesker, née Fogel; her daughter Alice, later known as Tanya Rechnaya; and Tanya’s daughter Lousha (b. 1959).
Hanna, a daughter of early Jewish immigrants from Russia, grows up in London, studies to be an obstetrician, and in the 1930s becomes enamored by the Soviet propaganda of worker’s paradise. She marries a young Cambridge botanist Christopher Wesker. The Weskers in 1933 move to Stalin’s USSR, to Vorozh. There, Christopher plans to build no less than a new Crystal Palace, a giant modern greenhouse, a garden city for the Soviet workers to enjoy bananas and pineapples. In 1937, the Weskers are arrested along with other naïve Communist sympathizers. Their little daughter Alice is taken into an orphanage and renamed Tanya; her identity is erased, her English language soon replaced by Russian. Alice/Tanya grows up with other such kids in a doomed orphanage where Stalin’s alabaster head presides, sometimes coming alive in a nightmarish reality.
Episodes from the 1930s to 1970s alternate, weaving back and forth. The novel is a page-turner but not an easy reading to follow. Even for one very familiar with the Soviet civilization it is not always easy to separate the real details in Lousha from those of a bad dream. Thus, a whole section of the old Vorozh city being drowned under a constructed reservoir is what really happened many times in Stalin’s USSR—I grew up myself on the shore of such a reservoir on the Ob River in Siberia that covered former villages. At the same time, this powerful image is also a reference to an old Russian folklore motif of Kitezh, a city magically submerged into a lake. In Lousha, however, the would-be drowned city section is abandoned but remarkably continues to exist—visible and accessible to only a few. There, old Hanna survives as a homeless wanderer in the 1970s, after decades spent in far Kazakhstan as she comes back to Vorozh in search of her Alice. In this no-man’s land, where an abandoned orphanage still stands, Hanna finally meets first her granddaughter Lousha—and then Alice/Tanya.
For years before this final reunion, damaged for life by deadly experiences of the orphanage (where she met her husband Nikolai, Lousha’s father), Tanya plunges into alcoholism and delusion. Her psychiatrist, kind Dr. Munk (a direct reference to Edvard Munch, the author of the “Scream”) manages to bring back Tanya’s childhood English identity as Alice; she suddenly recites Twinkle, twinkle, little star—from a Tenniel-illustrated “Alice in Wonderland” book that Hanna read to her back in Cambridge, the book that still exists, hidden in Vorozh. Alas, there will be no final release for Tanya—she sinks into madness and will not even realize that she has been reunited in the end with her vanished mother Hanna and loving daughter Lousha.
A central image of the novel is an old photograph of the Weskers back in Cambridge boating. This is the only physical artifact remaining from the former life as Alice’s parents are arrested and she morphs into Tanya. The photograph survived in her orphanage papers and then was hidden under the floor. We are constantly reminded that for decades in the worker’s paradise one could be easily shot or imprisoned as a spy for possessing such a photo.
There are many more important, detailed subplots and characters I have not mentioned (even without listing hellish Communist executioners such as Gireev who tortures Hanna in a ‘scientifically designed’ deprivation chamber). Among them: Hanna’s grandfather Aaron, a wise Jewish clockmaker; a British aristocratic freewheeling left-winger Camilla who marries an American and ends up the same camp as Hanna; a kind secretive librarian Larisa who gives Lousha her cherished Alice book in Russian; an old Kazakh shaman Korkyt-aga who can, somewhat, see the future, and urges Hanna to go back to Vorozh; a fearless homeless hero Olev, a former officer who dies protecting Hanna (to Lousha he appears as a version of a White Knight); and Hanna’s younger brother Jonah, a RAF pilot who in the very end, as an old man, magically finds Lousha in the new Russia of the 1990s.
“Lousha” reveals many Carrollian details directly and intentionally. ‘Rechnaya/Rechnoy’, the last name of both Tanya and Lousha, means 'of the River’. Alice/Tanya’s orphanage stands on a River Street leading to the Vorozh River, and this surname is just given to all the orphans, an ultimate erasing of identity for everyone. Thus, Tanya Rechnaya marries Nikolay Rechnoy, and their daughter is Lousha Rechnaya. At the same time, it is a reference also to boating images from both Carroll’s Oxford (Isis/Thames) and the novel’s Cambridge where the Weskers’ family photo was made. One can also relate this riverine imagery to the river flowing in Through the Looking Glass carrying Alice and the White Queen.
Some hidden references are near-Carrollian puzzles, for example it seems to me that the eponymous name of Lousha, which is spelled in Cyrillic ЛУША, is graphically just one line away from a ДУША (‘a soul’). This very rare name is a short from Lukerya, an old-fashioned version of the Greek Glikeria, ‘a sweet one’.
Alice books play a central role in the text and are often quoted, directly and clandestinely. A book with “just a dull golden key, and nothing else, on a blue cover”, which Lousha reads in Russian at age 11 (p. 27), is of course Nina Demurova’s famous translation of “Alice’ Adventures in the Wonderland” (Sofia, 1967). Its illustrations by Petar Chuklev inspire Lousha who is a born artist (left-handed, she is tortured into right-handedness in school). Hanna teaches Lousha the prefatory poem (“All in the golden afternoon”) from Wonderland that Lousha amazingly recites in proper English in September 1972 (p. 6). Lousha tells her father Nikolai, who is scared and suspicious of foreign books, about an old English book with Tenniel’s drawings, a book of Alice/Tanya’s childhood brought from England and hidden in Vorozh:
“…there is a foreign book, Alice. Hanna has hidden it first, and when she returned from the camp, she found it. The book is intact, just the spine is molded somewhat but it has such pictures! Even better than in my Russian one. Dad, there are such pictures that I would give everything to be able to draw like that!” (pp. 338-339).
A sudden shamanistic motif with a Kazakh holy (world) tree and rags tied to it is indicating souls or people vividly stands out for me, maybe more than for an average reader, as I have spent years working in Central Asia. This pagan magic offers a survival chance for Hanna, to be saved in Soviet concentration camps by a strange visionary local boy called Manar. The same tree saves both camp prisoners and their guards from wolf packs in the wintry wasteland.
It is also Hanna’s profession of a midwife that saves her—as well as many children she delivers—in concentration camp, in a special section for women with little children—a very difficult reading even for those who know the pages of Varlam Shalamov and Eugenia Ginzburg about Stalin’s camps. Alice’s stories are told by Hanna to the children growing up in the camp in the late 1930s-1940s:
“Over the winter, Hanna told them in portions both books, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. She read them so often to her daughter that she remembered them by heart, and now she retold-“translated” them, adding her own details and descriptions. And she imagined that in one of the little beds, closer to the wall, an invisible Alice was listening too.”(p. 291).
The final parting of Alice and the White Knight, as retold by Hanna to the imprisoned children (p. 294) reflects their parting with their parents, many of whom will be executed:
“The only thing that remained to her was to forget the White Knight, but she knew that she will never forget him. She will recall him always later, his every word, touch, gesture, smile, and eyes. The smell of his scarf and his coat. …She will regret that she did not say so much to him, did not have time, since she thought that the whole life is ahead—but they had to part—"
I hope this novel will soon be available in English. Many details will, probably, elude those less familiar with Russian history and culture, both rapidly eroding today as the erstwhile empire goes down in history. For instance, the central Crystal Palace image reflects not only the Victorian project built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, later moved to Sydenham in the south London suburbs—where it burned down in 1936, after the Weskers moved to the USSR. A knowledgeable reader will recognize this iconic symbol of Western civilization also as a Utopian vision seen by Vera Pavlovna Lopukhova in her Fourth Dream in Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s “What is to be Done?” (1863), the most famous revolutionary novel in Russia.
In a dialogue between Hanna and Anastasia, an old Shakespearean scholar, in the concentration camp, written in English (p. 255), the author asks and answers a single question:
(Hanna): “…this is your country. You must understand it better than me. Why are they doing this? For what purpose?
(Anastasia) This is a very English question. “For what purpose?” I don’t know. Perhaps, there is no deliberate purpose. But one thing is clear to me, the license is given for the boundless release of the lowest in the human nature.”
It is greatly moving to see how all three tragic female protagonists of Lousha derive from Carroll’s Alice, an archetype of a child who, overwhelmed by a whirlwind of circumstances, makes her own decisions, faces risks, and acts largely alone in her dream— a vision but not a fairytale, with hardly any magic helpers and without a happy end. Our memories of golden boating afternoons help us to hope that there is a way out from this nightmare.
Huntington, West Virginia, 30 June 2023
Victor Fet (born in 1955, Novosibirsk) - professor of zoology in Marshall University of West Virginia. The author of a dozen books of poetry and literary anthologies. The translator of Lewis Carroll to Russian and also the author of fantasy “Alice and the Time Machine” (in English and Russian, ”Evertype”, Scotland, 2016).
