Lost Believers
Sometime after Stalin’s death, in the slow warming of Soviet society, a worn woman, Agafia, walks the Siberian taiga. It had been a long winter spent in her family’s rustic hut with her sister, brother, and their aged father, and now summer is dawning on their isolated farmstead. But they are not as isolated as they once were, Agafia soon learns. A team of geologists from Moscow has arrived.
Galina, the lead geologist on the team, has always loved the systematic examination of striated minerals, frozen waves of rock, and soaring mountains that yield up their resources. On this trip, she also comes to love the mysterious helicopter pilot who ferries her across the beautiful land. Together they discover the cabin of four “Old Believers”—Orthodox Christians who rejected reforms proposed centuries earlier, and who fled worldliness by retreating to Siberia in search of the promised land.
Agafia and Galina’s lives intersect in beautiful and distressing ways. The 20th century challenges both of their preconceptions: Agafia is haunted by a world-wise Peter the Great, and Galina is troubled as the costs of her profession come to light. The results are a perfect blend of hope, banality, and devastation.
Irina Zhorov’s debut novel glitters with lustrous prose wound through the novel like abundant veins of precious metals. This is a character-based novel at its finest, with meandering explorations of various lives that manage to be both unhurried and captivating. Zhorov brings life to a time, place, and profession previously neglected in fiction but that now shine in the light of her deft treatment.
