In October 1919, a man walks out of the forest north of the Siberian town of Yazyk. He is suspect, traveling alone and without papers during the upheaval of the Russian Revolution. He says he is not a criminal but an escaped political prisoner who has journeyed through the unforgiving taiga that bands the land just south of the tundra. His arrival in town, which is occupied by Czechoslovakian soldiers, is tinder for a conflagration of epic proportion in James Meek’s singularly haunting novel, “The People’s Act of Love.”
Kyrill Ivanovich Samarin was raised in indulgent privilege and drawn to the revolution through a love affair with a fellow university student. It was Katya, in 1910, who introduced him to the depersonalizing rhetoric of the uprising and who led him to the mind-set that actions must first and ultimately serve the revolutionary cause.
Russia is still caught in the struggle between czarist and communist forces when Balashov, leader of a local religious sect, first meets Samarin on the outskirts of the town. Samarin eventually confesses that he has traveled south on foot, an escapee from the White Garden work camp. He had made his escape in the company of another prisoner, the Mohican. But the Mohican had brought him along only as a cow, as walking provisions to be slaughtered when all other rations gave out. Samarin has eluded the Mohican, but he says pursuit is inevitable and that the cunning criminal poses an imminent danger to Yazyk.
Balashov is part of a skoptsy sect, a group seeking to establish paradise on Earth through voluntary castration. Though occupying Czech soldiers don’t specifically know the sect’s beliefs, the lack of children and the sect’s circumspect behavior has made them suspicious of the townspeople.
These soldiers don’t need much to feed their unease. The members of the Czechoslovak Legion had left Prague in 1914, 171 strong, to fight under an Austrian flag. By 1919, they were reduced to “a hundred men with 945 toes between them, the balance lost to frostbite, and 980 fingers; 199 eyes; 198 feet; 196 hands; stomachs scored by microbes; one in ten syphilitic, one in ten consumptive, and most tasting the first foul tang of scurvy.” Now fighting for White Russian forces, they want nothing more than to return home, but they are held in place by their commander, the homicidal Capt. Matula.
Part of this heady mix, perhaps at the center, are two of the novel’s more solidly pragmatic characters: widow Anna Petrovna and her one-time lover, Legion Lt. Josef Mutz.
Meek’s vibrant writing evokes images of a desperate landscape. This is not simply a matter of physical challenge due to cold, hunger and the privations of war. The larger challenge lies in the psychic battles that loom between the larger characters. Tensions increase because the reader shares Mutz’s intuition that the explanations some of the characters give for their actions seem plausible, but that nothing about the developing situation is quite as it seems.
Samarin is captured by Czech forces and hauled into court. He is accused of having a hand in the death of an aboriginal shaman who had been held by the Czechs. He casts the blame on the Mohican, and paints a convincing picture of life in the work camp and of himself as a victim. His talent wins him at least a short-term reprieve from a bullet to the brain. It also focuses the attention of Anna Petrovna on him.
“The People’s History of Love” is a story in which irresistible forces batter against immovable walls. Its larger characters have grand visions. Bala-
shov is seeking a paradise on Earth through religion, Samarin through politics. Matula’s paradise doesn’t lie in a future utopia but in the control and power he has amassed through fear. As much as these characters share in terms of their single- minded focus, their competing visions cannot all stand. As the novel rolls forward, lies and secrets come to light. There can be nothing other than violence when the ideological showdown arrives.
On a smaller and more humanly recognizable scale are the challenges facing Mutz and the woman he still loves, Petrovna. Neither have an interest in creating a new world. They are, with admirable pragmatism in a world gone mad, simply trying to live.
The people’s act of love, in the context of this novel, is an act of supreme personal sacrifice offered to pave the way for a purer future. It is an act of destroying oneself in a way that makes it easier for others to create a new order from the ashes. It may be a work of selfless idealism. It could just as easily be the conclusions derived from a lunatic’s vision.
Meek doesn’t seek to provide answers. He is simply telling a sprawling story, subtly entwining the lives of many to allow the reader to draw his or her conclusions. His characters are easily large enough to inhabit this barren landscape, and the novel is uniquely lovely, not simply because it brings together historically accurate, repellant elements, but because of the way it exposes a variety of human motivations and desires.
And last, but hardly least, it is a memorable work because the telling is so nuanced and surprising that the first instinct on turning the last page of the novel is to return to the first.
Freelance writer Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
The People’s Act of Love”
By James Meek
Canongate, 400 pages, $24
