Voluntary Seclusion: The Life of a Lonely Old Woman in a Deserted Village

Abstract

T he heroine of this narrative is an old woman with a remarkably unflinching spirit. I met her for the first time several years ago and since then, whenever I visit that area, I go to see her. She lives in a deserted village without electricity or radio, far removed from any town or hamlet. This remoteness has nothing to do with longitude or latitude: she lives neither in the taiga nor in Siberia but in one of the regions of central Russia. Her house is located almost within the thirty-kilometer zone of a nuclear power station; a busy flight path goes over her kitchen garden; and close by there is a railway hub, situated exactly half-way between Leningrad and Moscow. Nonetheless, one can say that she lives in a remote, forlorn place at the edge of the earth. In a country where everything obeys the center (and this is true not only for Moscow but also for each and every descending administrative center-the provincial center, the regional center, the headquarters of a kolkhoz or sovkhoz), toward the periphery power loses its grip. Wherever this happens, administrative gaps emerge. Some of these peripheral locations are completely free of the authorities' control-vlast' does not reach that far. These lands are barely visible from the center; they drop, in a manner, from its field of view. These administrative gaps result in the formation of niches with their own time and space. And it is only in such a niche where the phenomenon of contemporary Russian life in seclusion is possible. My heroine lives at the edge of a province, at the edge of a region, at the edge of a sovkhoz's territory; that is, thrice removed from the center, and that is why the place where she lives not only is spatially unique, but the reckoning of time here is also different. Here, we are in the thirties and forties with their way of life preserved; and although the chimes of the Kremlin tower reach every nook of the entire country, they are not heard here, they do not reach here. How does one get to my heroine?